Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1844 edition. Excerpt: ... men that would circumvent God. When the overthrow of religious unity had destroyed the bond of the elder political union, Hugo Grotius gave to self-destroying Europe an universal and composing law for all her nations; but. as Frederick Schlegel justly says, the former il was an irremediable loss." The position of the Abbe de la Mennais must be admitted, that " the school of doubt has produced nothing but cold dissertations, without life, on all the great objects of meditation. It is only in the school of Catholicism that we find a system of political science capable of inspiring eloquence. The reason is, that here morality is the whole of policy; here Providence is the great governor of the revolutions of men. God is the foundation of society, religion the bond; laws have authority, duties their sanction; men learn the reason of obedience, and the rule of freedom." " The Christian principle of government permits, in the first place, that all historical grounds should be ascertained, as also the imperfection in its law; and therein it is essentially opposed to the revolutionary struggle, which always begins with ignorance of historic grounds and historic axioms, and which in its inmost ways is at all times anti-historic. Besides this, there always is in every Christian system of rule a formal and acknowledged principle of justice; and, moreover, the Christian philosophy, and the views of human life which proceed from it, are much more favourable to true freedom, in the highest sense of the word, when we understand the spiritual, intellectual, and inward freedom which must always precede that which is the outward and civil, if this last is to be productive; according to the sentence, ' He only is free whom the Son makes free;' to...
