Everywhere civil governments are aware of this, and act accordingly. I see the deepest injustice prevailing towards the governments of our day. It is false that they are indifferent to the welfare and progress of nations. It is false that they only look to stability and tyranny. They may doubtless feel personal passions, old errors; but whatever their form, they are all, from motives of prudence or duty, seriously impressed with the necessity of respecting the rights and ameliorating the condition of men. And those most opposed to liberal appearances make every day, in their laws and practice, a multitude of changes favourable to justice and liberty.
I say, too, that European governments, amidst the storms of the last sixty years, have conducted themselves, taking all into account, with great moderation. Their dignity incessantly insulted, their existence attacked, they have not given way, either during the struggle or after the victory, to those excesses of passion or power with which the history of the world has been so long filled. They may be shewn to have been neither foreseeing nor able in their methods, whether of resistance or concession to the new-born spirit; but it is unjust to set them down as its intractable adversaries. In the formidable strife of our day between governments and revolutions, history will surely not impute to the former the most insolent contempt of justice and liberty. And if the spirit of revolution were as moderate in its pretensions and acts, as governments have shown themselves disposed to be towards the spirit of progress, the great problem of the conciliation of order and liberty, in civil society, would be near its solution.
The government of religious society, or to speak with greater accuracy and freedom, the Catholic Church, has an analogous problem to solve; the more important because if the state of the minds of men is closely watched, it is seen that it is in the religious order that the idea of liberty is strongest and most deeply rooted. The right of conscience before God appears and is, in fact, very superior to that of conscience before men. If there be, in the life of the soul, one portion in which the intervention of force is more than elsewhere unrighteous and odious, it is clearly when the relation of the soul with her Creator and Judge is in question, and when the question for her is of eternity and salvation. Here, moreover, is a feeling which we have all experienced, a principle to which we have all paid homage. Christians or philosophers, Catholics or Protestants, we have all had and still have, even amidst the most civilized nations, need to invoke in our turn religious liberty, as that which, of all the cries for liberty, most surely arouses in the heart the idea of a sacred right and necessity, that which excites the most lively susceptibility and most general sympathy.