Had those minds been, I will not say
intelligently Catholic but radically Christian, they would have felt
that this liberty was simply liberty to be damned, and this progress
not an advance towards the true good of man, but a lapse into endless
and heathen wanderings. For Christianity, in its essence and origin,
was an urgent summons to repent and come out of just such a worldly
life as modern liberty and progress hold up as an ideal to the
nations. In the Roman empire, as in the promised land of liberalism,
each man sought to get and to enjoy as much as he could, and supported
a ponderous government neutral as to religion and moral traditions,
but favourable to the accumulation of riches; so that a certain
enlightenment and cosmopolitanism were made possible, and private
passions and tastes could be gratified without encountering
persecution or public obloquy, though not without a general relaxation
of society and a vulgarising of arts and manners. That something so
self-indulgent and worldly as this ideal of liberalism could have been
thought compatible with Christianity, the first initiation into which,
in baptism, involves renouncing the world, might well astonish us,
had we not been rendered deaf to moral discords by the very din which
from our birth they have been making in our ears.
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