2.         THE GERM OF THE REVOLUTION

            This fundamental tendency to rebel can, at a certain moment, receive the consent of the free will. Fallen man sins thus, violating one or more of the Commandments. But his rebellion can go further and reach the point of a more or less unconfessed hatred for the very moral order as a whole. This hatred, which is essentially revolutionary, can generate doctrinal errors and even lead to the conscious and explicit profession of principles contrary to Moral Law and revealed doctrine as such, which constitutes a sin against the Holy Ghost.

            When this hatred began to direct the deepest tendencies of Western history, the Revolution began. Its process unfolds today, and its doctrinal errors bear the vigorous imprint of this hatred, which is the most active cause of the great apostasy of our days. By its nature, this hatred cannot be reduced simply to a doctrinal system: It is disorderly passion exacerbated to an extremely high degree.

            Such an affirmation, which applies to this particular Revolution, does not imp~ that there is always a disordered passion at the root of every error. Nor does it deny that frequently it was an error that unleashed in a given soul, or even in a given social group, the disorder of the passions. We merely affirm that the revolutionary process, considered as a whole and also in its principal episodes, had as its most active and profound germ the unruliness of the passions.