IV
6. GOD, THE CENTER AND PERIPHERY OF OUR RELIGIOUS BELIEF; CHRISTIANITY; ITS LAW
The natural religion is that imperious instinct that leads man to pay homage to his Creator.9
Man’s relationships with God are, like those of son to father, of a moral nature. As God is the pure source of our life and our faculties, of our hopes and joys, in exchange for those assets we give him the only offering that can please him, the homage of our hearts.
But natural religion has not been enough for man because, lacking as it is in certainty, life, and sanction, it has not satisfied the needs of his conscience; and it has been necessary for positive religions that base their authority on historic facts to come and proclaim the laws that must rule those intimate relations between man and his Creator.
The best of all positive religions is Christianity, because it is nothing more than the revelation of the moral instincts of humanity.
The Gospel is the law of God because it is the moral law of conscience
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and of reason. Christianity brought to the world fraternity, equality, and liberty, and redeemed the human race by restoring its rights. Christianity is in its essence a civilizing and progressive force.
The world was immersed in darkness and the word of Christ illuminated it, and out of chaos grew a world. Mankind was a corpse, and it received life and resurrection with his spirit.
The Gospel is the law of love, and as the Apostle James says, the perfect law, which is the law of liberty. Christianity must be the religion of democracies.
Examine everything and choose what is good, says the Gospel; and thus it has proclaimed the independence of reason and of the freedom of conscience, because freedom lies mainly in the right to examine and to choose.
All religions imply worship. Worship is the visible part or the outer manifestation of religion, just as the word is the necessary element of thought.
Religion is a tacit pact between God and the human conscience; it forms a spiritual bond that joins the creature with its Maker. Man should therefore direct his thoughts to God as he sees fit. God is the only judge of the actions of his conscience, and no earthly authority may appropriate that divine prerogative, and will never be able to do so, because conscience is free.
If freedom of conscience is suppressed, the voice and the hands shall exercise, automatically, one might say, the practices of worship; but the heart will deny it and will guard freedom in its inviolable sanctuary.
If freedom of conscience is the individual’s right, then freedom of worship is a right of religious communities.
If freedom of conscience is recognized, it would be contradictory not to then recognize freedom of worship, which is nothing more than the immediate application of the former.
The profession of beliefs and of worship will be free only when no obstacle whatsoever is placed in preaching the doctrine of the former, or on the practice of the latter, and when the individuals of any religious communion have the same civil and political rights as other citizens.
Religious society is independent of civil society; the former directs its hope to another world, the latter concentrates it here on Earth; the mission of the former is spiritual, that of the latter temporal. The tyrants
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have forged chains from religion for man, whence the impure alliance of power and the altar has come forth.
It is not the government’s responsibility to regulate beliefs, placing itself between God and the human conscience: but to protect the principles that preserve society and safeguard social morals.
If any religion or worship were to publicly or directly, in deed or writing, offend social morals and disturb order, it will be the duty of the government to take action to suppress its excesses.
The government’s jurisdiction in terms of religion should limit itself to ensuring that they do not offend each other or sow social discord.
The state, as a political body, cannot have a religion, because as it is not an individual person it lacks its own conscience.
The dogma of the dominant religion is also unjust and an attack on equality because it pronounces social excommunication on those who do not profess its creed, and deprives them of their natural rights without exempting them from social burdens.
The principle of freedom of conscience could never be reconciled with the dogma of the state religion.
If freedom of conscience is recognized, no religion may be declared dominant, or sponsored by the state; all religions must be respected and protected equally, as long as their morals are pure and their worship does not infringe on social order.
The word tolerance, in terms of religion and worship, indicates only the absence of liberty and contains an insult to the rights of mankind. What is inhibited or evil is tolerated; a right is recognized and proclaimed. The human spirit is a free essence; freedom is an indestructible element of its nature and a gift from God.
The priest is the minister of worship; the priesthood is a public burden. The mission of the priest is to moralize, to preach brotherhood—charity, that is, the law of peace and love, the law of God.
The priest who stirs up passions and provokes vengeance from the pulpit of the Holy Spirit is impious and sacrilegious.
Love your neighbor as yourself; love your enemies, says Christ; this is the word of the priest.
The priest must preach tolerance, not persecution of indifference and impiety. Force makes hypocrites, not believers, and ignites fanaticism and war.
“How will they have faith in the word of the priest if he himself does
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not obey the law? He who says, ‘I know him,’ but disobeys his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him.”10
“We do not demand blind obedience, says Saint Paul; we teach, we prove, we persuade: Fides suadenda non imperanda, reiterates Saint Bernard.”11
The mission of the priest is exclusively spiritual, because in mixing mundane passions and interests he compromises and blemishes the sanctity of his ministry and brings upon himself scorn and hatred in place of love and veneration.
The vicars and ministers of Christ must not take any temporal employment or authority whatsoever; Regnum meum non est de hoc mundo, our divine master said, and he showed thus the limits of the Church’s authority.
The clergy, as members of the state, are under its jurisdiction and cannot form a privileged body distinct from society. Like all other citizens, they must be bound by the same burdens and obligations, the same civil and penal laws, and the same authorities. All men are equal; only merit and virtue can engender supremacy.12 …
X
12. ORGANIZATION OF THE FATHERLAND ON DEMOCRATIC FOUNDATIONS
Equality and liberty are the two central axes, or rather, the two poles of the world of democracy.
Democracy arises from a necessary fact, namely, the equality of the classes, and marches steadily toward the conquest of the broadest kingdom of liberty, of individual, civil, and political freedom.
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Democracy is not a form of government, but the very essence of all republican governments, or instituted by all for the good of the community or the society.
Democracy is the rule of liberty based on the equality of the classes.
All modern political associations seek to establish the equality of the classes, and it can be assured, in observing the progressive movement of the European and American nations, “that the gradual development of equality of conditions is a providential fact; it