PARTICIPATION OF CATHOLICISM IN SOCIAL EVOLUTION 513 



whicli expelled M. Millerand for tlie ofience of holding views not 

 in harmony with those of the Central Committee of the party ; 

 the freethinkers who organised the monstrous delation system 

 in the French army, who spied on every action of those to whose 

 houses they were invited, who watched over the prayer of the 

 child and the church-going of the mother and father, who took 

 advantage of this right of every man to commune with his God 

 and to educate his children as he thinks fit, Ln order to ruin and 

 blast that man's career ; the freethinkers who boast of driving 

 thousands of men and women into exile for no other crime than 

 that of wearing the garb of a monk or a ntm ; who threaten, by 

 the recent Law of Separation, to confiscate all the churches of 

 France and to sell them to be used as music-halls ; how admirably 

 are these freethinkers adapted to reorganise society without 

 infringiog on the right of free thought \^ 



We prefer to turn from the short-sighted views of these con- 

 troversiahsts to the more serene judgment of the founder of the 

 Positivist school himself : " It is to the Positivist school, properly 

 so called," wrote Auguste Comte, " however strange such a 

 claim may appear, that the right appertains of pronouncing a 

 final and equitable judgment on the Cathohc Church, and of 

 appreciating in a worthy manner, on the basis of a sound general 

 theory, its indispensable and real participation in the funda- 

 mental evolution of humanity." ^ And he continues, further 

 on, with regard to this participation of Catholicism in the 

 evolution of humanity : 



" The eminently social genius of Catholicism has manifested itself more 

 especially in the constitution of a purely moral power distinct from, and 

 independent of, the political power in the narrow sense of the word, and 

 in the iatroduotion of moraUty into poUtics. Up tUl that time the former 

 had always been, on the contrary, essentially subordinated to the latter." 3 



1 Of course, we do not by any means imply that Professor Durkheim 

 is in the remotest way connected with this anti-clerical poUcy in Prance. 



2 Gours de Philosophie positive, v. 262. 



3 Ibid., 263. 



33 



