第99章

The human race has its life in God, and tends to realize in all orders the Divine Word or Logos, which is Ionic itself, and the principle of all conciliation, of the dialectic union of all opposites or extremes.Mankind will be logical; and the worst of all tyrannies is that which forbids them to draw from their principles their last logical consequences, or that prohibits them the free explication and application of the Divine Idea, in which consists their life, their progress.Such tyranny strikes at the very existence of society, and wars against the reality of things.It is supremely sophistical, and its success is death;for the universe in its constitution is supremely logical, and man, individually and socially, is rational.God is the author and type of all created things; and all creatures, each in its order, imitate or copies the Divine Being, who is intrinsically Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, principle, medium, and end.The Son or Word is the medium, which unites the two extremes, whence God is living God a real, active, living Being--living, concrete, not abstract or dead unity, like the unity of old Xenophanes, Plotinus, and Proclus.In the Holy Trinity is the principle and prototype of all society, and what is called the solidarity of the race is only the outward expression, or copy in the external order, of what theologians term the circumsession of the three Divine Persons of the Godhead.

Now, human society, when it copies the Divine essence and nature either in the distinction of persons alone, or in the unity alone, is sophistical, and wants the principle of all life and reality.It sins against God.and must fail of its end.The English system, which is based on antagonistic elements, on opposites, without the middle term that conciliates them, unites them, and makes them dialectically one, copies the Divine model in its distinctions alone, which, considered alone, are opposites or contraries.It denies, if Englishmen could but see it, the unity of God.The French, or imperial system, which excludes the extremes, instead of uniting them, denies all opposites, instead of conciliating them--denies the distinctions in the model, and copies only the unity, which is the supreme sophism called pantheism.The English constitution has no middle term, and the French no extremes, and each in its way denies the Divine Trinity, the original basis and type of the syllogism.The human race can be contented with neither, for neither allows it free scope for its inherent life and activity.The English system tends to pure individualism;the French to pure socialism or despotism, each endeavoring to suppress an element of the one living and indissoluble TRUTH.

This is not fancy, is not fine-spun speculation, or cold and lifeless abstraction, but the highest theological and philosophical truth, without which there were no reason, no man, no society; for God is the first principle of all being, all existence, all science, all life, and it is in Him that we live and move and have our being.God is at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of all things--the universal principle, medium, and end; and no truth can be denied without His existence being directly or indirectly impugned.In a deeper sense than is commonly understood is it true that nisi Dominus aedificaverit domum, in vanum laboraverunt qui aedificant eam.The English constitution is composed of contradictory elements, incapable of reconciliation, and each element is perpetually struggling with the others for the mastery.For a long time the king labored, intrigued, and fought to free himself from the thraldom in which he was held by the feudal barons; in the aristocracy and people united and humbled the crown; and now the people are at work seeking to sap both the crown and the nobles.The state is constituted to nobody's satisfaction; and though all may unite in boasting its excellences, all are at work trying to alter or amend it.The work of constituting the state with the English is ever beginning, never ending.Hence the eternal clamor for parliamentary reform.

Great Britain and other European states may sweep away all that remains of feudalism, include the whole territorial people with the equal rights of all in the state or political people, concede to birth and wealth no political rights, but they will by so doing only establish either imperial centralism, as has been done in France, or democratic centralism, clamored for, conspired for, and fought for by the revolutionists of Europe.The special merit of the American system is not in its democracy alone, as too many at home and abroad imagine; but along with its democracy in the division of the powers of government, between a General government and particular State governments, which are not antagonistic governments, for they act on different matters, and neither is nor can be subordinated to the other.

Now, this division of power, which decentralizes the government without creating mutually hostile forces, can hardly be introduced into any European state.There may be a union of states in Great Britain, in Germany, in Italy, perhaps in Spain, and Austria is laboring hard to effect it in her heterogeneous empire; but the union possible in any of them is that of a Bund or confederation, like the Swiss or German Bund, similar to what the secessionists in the United States so recently attempted and have so signally failed to establish.An intelligent Confederate officer remarked that their Confederacy had not been in operation three months before it became evident that the principle on which it was founded, if not rejected, would insure its defeat.