Louis Veuillot: The Liberal Illusion [1866]

[Stone]

The Liberal Illusion

Chapter XXII

Nevertheless, so long as one single man of perfect faith remains, he will be free from the universal yoke, and he will hold in his hands his own destiny and that of the world. The world will then exist solely for the sanctification of that one last man. And were that last man to apostatize, too, were he, likewise, to say to Antichrist, not that he was right in persecuting the Church, but simply that he was justified in withholding the use of his power to enable God to reign through the Church, the apostate would be thereby pronouncing his own doom and that of the whole world as well. For inasmuch as the Earth no longer paid to divine truth its due of homage and adoration, God would take away from it His sun, and in default of the counterpoise of obedience and prayer, its blasphemy would cease to mount heavenward, it would perish instantly. Of its own accord it would drop back into the abyss.

But the last word of the Church militant will not be one of apostasy. I picture to myself the last Christian standing before the supreme Antichrist, at the end of those terrible days, when the insolence of man will stupidly rejoice at having seen the stars fall from Heaven. They will drag him in bound, amid the jeers of that scum of Cain and Judas which will still go by the name of the human race — and it will, in fact, still be the human race, the human race arrived at the zenith of science, sunk to the nadir of moral degradation.

The angels will salute the only star that has not fallen, and Antichrist will gaze upon the only man alive who refuses to adore the lie and say that Evil is Good. He will still hope to seduce him; he will ask this Christian how he wishes to be treated. What think you that Christian will answer, and what other answer can he make except: “Like a king”? Last of the faithful, last priest, it is he who is indeed King. His is all the heritage of Abraham, his all the heritage of the Christ. In his shackled hands, he holds the keys to unlock eternal life; he can confer baptism, he can give absolution, he can administer the Eucharist; the one he faces can give nothing but death. He is King! And I defy even Antichrist, for all his power, to treat him otherwise than as king, because in fine the very dungeon is for him an empire and the gibbet itself a throne.

To whoever asks them the same question, Catholics should give that same answer. Modern liberalism wants the Church’s children to confer consecration on its unhallowed self and so it speaks to them as the Saracen king spoke to Louis of France: “If you wish your life spared, make me a knight.” 

The saintly prisoner replied: “Make yourself a Christian.”