A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week 214

The people are not God, the people do not have infallible reason and virtues without flaw, the will of the people or the spirit of the people is not the rule which decides what is just or unjust. But the people make up the slowly prepared and fashioned body of common humanity, the living patrimony of the common gifts and the common promises made to God’s creature – which are most profound and more essential than all the additional privileges and the social distinctions – and of the equal dignity and equal weakness of all as members of the human race. It is on the condition of existing in communion with the people that all efforts bear fruit in temporal history, and that the inspirational leadership which the people need keeps both its strength and its legitimacy. Awakened to a consciousness of himself by the movement of civilization, the man of common humanity knows today that his day has dawned, if only he triumphs over totalitarian corruption and is not devoured by it; and he knows that the idea of a caste, of a class or a race hereditarily constituted as ruling and dominant must give way to the notion of a community of free men, equal in rights and in labor, and to the notion of an elite and of labor which stems from the people without cutting itself off from them, and which would truly be the flower and luxury of vital energies.

– from the chapter “Evangelical Inspiration and the Secular Conscience” in Christianity and Democracy by Jacques Maritain, translated by Doric C. Anson (1944 edition)