What shall we say of Austria? Thanks to "liberalism," it has disappeared, and is now a dualism in its government and tri-parliamentary in its system.
The licentiousness of the press helps to destroy everything stable in governments. Journals without principle, honor, or religion, filled with scandals, edited by adventurers, whose only object is to make money and serve faithfully their owners, issue their thousands of copies daily to corrupt the public mind. Evil spreads more rapidly than good, and consequently the influence of the religious press is weak compared to that of the revolutionary papers, subsidized by the agents of secret societies or by the unprincipled men of wealth, who readily purchase the aid of corrupted minds to help on their ambition.
THE POSITION OF THE CHURCH UNDER THE LIBERAL SYSTEM.
Governments have therefore ceased to be Christian, and have become "liberal," that is, infidel. According to liberalism, religion is the private affair of each individual. Civil society should recognize no dogma, no worship, no God. We know well that this principle, from its very intrinsic absurdity, cannot be practically carried out. For instance, God will be recognized when it is necessary to swear fidelity to a constitution, and the external forms of religion will be invoked at the opening of a new railroad or a session of parliament. But in principle the liberal state ignores all positive religious belief. Its only dogma is that a law passed by a majority of voters remains a law until the next majority abrogates it. This system is called "separation of church and state," or "a free church in a free state." Then follow broken concordats--in France and Bavaria, broken by organic articles; in Baden, Piedmont, Austria, and Spain, destroyed by the will of the prince and cabinet ministers. Then follows a usurped educational system, in which the rights of the family and church are disregarded. In all of these states, more or less, there is a public persecution of the church; a repression of her rights; enthrallment of her ministers; invasion of her privileges. God is in heaven, consequently the church should confine herself to the sanctuary; that is to say, God does not trouble himself about the conduct of nations, politics, legislation, or science. These are all neutral affairs, over which his authority does not extend, and therefore the church has nothing to do with public life. So say the liberals. They take from God and give it to Cæsar, the modern civil divinity, all that is his, except one thing which it is impossible for them to take from him, and that is conscience. They endeavor to estrange conscience from God more and more by education, by the press, and by public opinion manufactured by the leaders of the secret societies. Hence all the talk about "liberty of conscience." For the same end, they talk of toleration, but they mean simply indifference, which hence becomes the shibboleth of the party which the church unceasingly opposes.