common than to
find a thousand selfishnesses co-existing and interfering with a
dominant unselfishness, lessening or totally destroying its fruitfulness
for good. A man who is unselfish enough to devote his fortune to charity
will not necessarily be free from faults which may more than undo the
good he proposes.

The same hastiness of thought which moved him to a wholesale,
indiscriminate condemnation of metaphysics, led him to conclude that
because hitherto no happy adjustment of the relations between Church and
State had been devised, there could be no remedy save in their total
severance. Doubtless such a severance would be better, if Gallicanism
were the only alternative; or if the Church's liberty and efficiency
were to be seriously curtailed. A superficial glance might fancy a
fundamental discrepancy in this matter, as well as in the questions of
toleration, and of the freedom of the press, between the official
teaching of Gregory XVI. and Pius IX., and that of Leo XIII. But a
closer inspection shows no alteration of principle, and only a
recognition of altered circumstances, either necessitating a connivance
at inevitable evils, or totally changing the aspect of the question. But
De Lamennais should have learnt from his own teaching that liberty does
not mean the independence of isolation, but the full enjoyment of all
the means necessary for perfect self-development; that it does not mean
the weakness of dissociation, but the strength of a perfectly organized
association for mutual help and protection. And this holds good, not for
individuals alone, but for societies, and for Church and State. Aiming
at one common end, the perfection of humanity, they cannot but gain by
association and lose by dissociation. Each is weaker even, in its own
sphere, apart from the other. It is an unreal abstraction that splits
man into two beings--a body and a soul; that draws a clean,
hard-and-fast line between his temporal and eternal welfare; that
commits the former interest to one society, the latter to another,
absolutely distinct and unconnected. But all this holds true only in the
hypothesis of a nation of Christians or Theists.

When a large fraction of the community has ceased to believe in
Christianity and the Church, the demands of justice and reason are
different. It may well be allowed that, to determine the exact relation
of the Catholic Church and Christian State, and the law of their
organization into one complex