This work of disintegration has made rapid progress since the eighteenth century in virtue of the law of accelerated movement. The French Revolution, like the Protestant revolt, was essentially a work of disintegration. The successors of the Masonic Jacobins of 1790 openly proclaim their set purpose of completing the work begun by the _grands ancêtres_ of bloody memory. “The Revolution,” wrote Renan (in the preface to _Questions contemporaines_), “has disintegrated everything, broken up all organizations, excepting only the Catholic Church. The clergy alone have remained organized outside the State. As the cities, in the days of the ruin of the Roman Empire, chose bishops for their representatives, so in our provinces the bishops will soon be the only leaders left in a dismantled society.” The object of the Separation Law was to accomplish the disintegration of the Church, the only organized body, outside the State, which the Revolution failed to disintegrate, because Pius VI rejected, _in toto_, the civil constitution of the clergy. These noble French priests were drowned, guillotined, proscribed, and imprisoned by tens of thousands, but the Church in France maintained the principle of life strong within her, and on the third day she rose again. What violence failed to accomplish a century ago, the Third Republic hoped to compass by guile and fraud, labelled liberty and legality. The true purpose of the Law of Separation was to break up the Church into an ever-increasing number of viviparous _Associations cultuelles_, independent of all ecclesiastical control. The successor of Pius VI, Ithuriel-like, has pierced the thin disguise of the toad lurking in the purlieus of Eden.[28] Instead of a divided demoralized clergy, the Masonic Jacobins are confronted by the serried ranks of an invincible phalanx. “At the end of the fourth century,” writes Guizot, “it was the Church with its magistrates, its institutions, and its power that vigorously resisted the internal dissolution of the empire and of the barbarians, and became the bond, the medium, and the principle of civilization between the Roman and the barbarian worlds” (_History of Civilization_). Now, as in the fourth century, we are menaced with social dissolution. The barbarians are at our gates, nay, in our midst, and not in France alone, by any means. A ferocious, self-seeking atheistic materialism is disrupting Christendom. And let us not be deceived. Societies are never saved and regenerated except by their generating principle; and the generating principle of Western civilization is Christianity. Therefore, I repeat, that society will be compelled, in self-defence, to restore Christianity or slavery, in some form; State Socialism perhaps--or perish. _21st November, 1906._ APPENDIX PAGE 29 SÉANCE DU 28 DECEMBRE, 1906. Au _Sénat Journal Officiel_, page 1236.