CHURCH AND STATE.[21]

CHURCH AND STATE.[21]

Il Signor Cantù is one of the ablest men and most distinguished contemporary authors of Italy. He is a layman, and has usually been reckoned among the better class of so-called liberal Catholics, and certainly is a warm friend of liberty, civil and religious, a sincere and earnest Italian patriot, thoroughly devoted to the holy see, and a firm and fearless defender of the rights, freedom, independence, and authority of the spiritual order in its relation to the temporal.

We know not where to look for a truer, fuller, more loyal, or more judicious treatment in so brief a compass of the great and absorbing question in regard to the relation of church and state, than in his article from the Rivista Universale, the title of which we give at the foot of the page. He is an erudite rather than a philosopher, a historian rather than a theologian; yet his article is equally remarkable for its learning, its history, its philosophy, its theology, and its canon law, and, with slight reservation, as to his interpretation of the bull Unam Sanctam of Boniface VIII. and some views hinted rather than expressed as to the origin and nature of the magisterium exercised by the popes over sovereigns in the middle ages, we believe it as true and as exact as it is learned and profound, full and conclusive, and we recommend its careful study to all who would master the question it treats.

For ourselves, we have treated the question of church and state so often, so fully, and so recently, in its principle and in its several aspects, especially in relation to our own government, that we know not that we have any thing to add to what we have already said, and we might dispense ourselves from its further discussion by simply referring to the articles, Independence of the Church, October, 1866; Church and State, April, 1867; Rome and the World, October of the same year; and to our more recent articles on The Future of Protestantism and Catholicity, especially the third and fourth, January, February, March, and April, of the present year; and also to the article on The School Question, in the very last number before the present. We can do, and we shall attempt, in the present article, to do, little more than bring together and present as a whole what is scattered through these several articles, and offer respectfully and even timidly such suggestions as we think will not be presumptuous in regard to the means, in the present emergency, of realizing more perfectly at home and abroad the ideal of Christian society.

We assume in the outset that there really exist in human society two distinct orders, the spiritual and the temporal, each with its own distinctive functions, laws, and sphere of action. In Christian society, the representative of the spiritual order is the church, and the representative of the temporal is the state. In the rudest stages of society the elements of the two orders exist, but are not clearly apprehended as distinct orders, nor as having each its distinct and proper representative. It is only in Christian society, or society enlightened by the Gospel, that the two orders are duly distinguished, and each in its own representative is placed in its normal relation with the other.

The type, indeed the reason, of this distinction of two orders in society is in the double nature of man, or the fact that man exists only as soul and body, and needs to be cared for in each. The church, representing the spiritual, has charge of the souls of men, and looks after their minds, ideas, intelligence, motives, consciences, and consequently has the supervision of education, morals, literature, science, and art. The state, representing the temporal, has charge of men's bodies, and looks after the material wants and interests of individuals and society. We take this illustration from the fathers and mediæval doctors. It is perfect. The analogy of church and state in the moral order, with the soul and body in the physical order, commends itself to the common sense of every one, and carries in itself the evidence of its justness, especially when it is seen to correspond strictly in the moral order, to the distinction of soul and body in the physical order. We shall take, then, the relation of soul and body as the type throughout of the ideal relation of church and state.

Man lives not as body alone, nor as soul alone, but as the union of the two, in reciprocal commerce. Soul and body are distinct, but not separate. Each has its own distinctive properties and functions, and neither can replace the other; but their separation is death, the death of the body only, not of the soul indeed, for that is immortal. The body is material, and, separated from the soul, is dust and ashes, mere slime of the earth, from which it was formed. It is the same in the moral order with society, which is not state alone, nor church alone, but the union of the two in reciprocal commerce. The two are distinct, each has its distinctive nature, laws, and functions, and neither can perform the functions of the other, or take the other's place. But though distinct, they cannot in the normal state of society be separated. The separation of the state from the church is in the moral order what the separation of the body from the soul is in the physical order. It is death, the death of the state, not indeed of the church; for she, like the soul, nay, like God himself, is immortal. The separation of the state from the church destroys its moral life, and leaves society to become a mass of moral rottenness and corruption. Hence, the holy father includes the proposition to separate church and state, in his syllabus of condemned propositions.

The soul is defined by the church as the forma corporis, the informing or vital principle of the body. The church in the moral order is forma civitatis, the informing, the vital principle of the state or civil society, which has no moral life of its own, since all moral life, by its very term, proceeds from the spiritual order. There is in the physical order no existence, but from God through the medium of his creative act; so is there no moral life in society, but from the spiritual order which is founded by God as supreme law-giver, and represented by the church, the guardian and judge alike of the natural law and the revealed law.

The soul is the nobler and superior part of man, and it belongs to it, not to make away with the body, or to assume its functions, but to exercise the magisterium over it, to direct and govern it according to the law of God; not to the body to assume the mastery over the soul, and to bring the law of the mind into captivity to law in the members. So is the church, as representing the spiritual order, and charged with the care of souls, the nobler and superior part of society, and to her belongs the magisterium of entire human society; and it is for her in the moral order to direct and control civil society, by judicially declaring, and applying to its action, the law of God, of which she is, as we have just said, the guardian and judge, and to which it is bound by the Supreme Law-Giver to subordinate its entire official conduct.

We note here that this view condemns alike the absorption of the state in the church, and the absorption of the church in the state, and requires each to remain distinct from the other, each with its own organization, organs, faculties, and sphere of action. It favors, therefore, neither what is called theocracy, or clerocracy, rather, to which Calvinistic Protestantism is strongly inclined, nor the supremacy of the state, to which the age tends, and which was assumed in all the states of Gentile antiquity, whence came the persecution of Christians by the pagan emperors. We note farther, that the church does not make the law; she only promulgates, declares, and applies it, and is herself as much bound by it as is the state itself. The law itself is prescribed for the government of all men and nations, by God himself as supreme law-giver, or the end or final cause of creation, and binds equally states and individuals, churchmen and statesmen, sovereigns and subjects.

Such, as we have learned it, is the Catholic doctrine of the relation of church and state, and such is the relation that in the divine order really exists between the two orders, and which the church has always and everywhere labored with all her zeal and energy to introduce and maintain in society. It is her ideal of catholic or truly Christian society, but which has never yet been perfectly realized, though an approach to its realization, the author thinks, was made under the Christian Roman emperors. The chronic condition of the two orders in society, instead of union and coöperation, or reciprocal commerce, has been that of mutual distrust or undisguised hostility. During the first three centuries, the relation between them was that of open antagonism, and the blood of Christians made the greater part of the world then known hallowed ground, and the Christians, as Lactantius remarks, conquered the world, not by slaughtering, but by being slaughtered. The pagan sovereign of Rome claimed, and was held to unite both powers in himself, and was at once imperator, pontifix maximus, and divus, or god. The state, even after the conversion of the empire and of the barbarians that overturned it and seated themselves on its ruins, never fully disclaimed the spiritual faculties conceded it by Græco-Roman or Italo-Greek civilization.

All through the middle ages, Kenelm Digby's ages of faith, when it is pretended the church had every thing her own way, and the haughty power of her supreme pontiffs and their tyranny over such meek and lamb-like temporal princes as Henry IV., Frederick Barbarossa, and Frederick II. of Germany, Philip Augustus of France, Henry II. and John Lackland of England, have been the theme of many a school-boy declamation against her, and adduced by grave statesmen as an excuse for depriving Catholics of their liberty, confiscating their goods, and cutting their throats—all through those ages, we say, she enjoyed not a moment's peace, hardly a truce, and was obliged to sustain an unceasing struggle with the civil authority against its encroachments on the spiritual order, and for her own independence and freedom of action as the church of God. In this struggle, the struggle of mind against matter, of moral power against physical force, the church was far from being, at least to human eyes, always victorious, and she experienced more than one disastrous defeat. In the sixteenth century, Cæsar carried away from her the north of Europe, as he had long since carried away the whole east, and forced her, in the nations that professed to recognize her as representing the spiritual order, to make him such large concessions as left her little more than the shadow of independence; and the people and their rulers are now almost everywhere conspiring to take away even that shadow, and to render her completely subject to the state, or representative of the temporal order.

There is no opinion more firmly fixed in the minds of the people of to-day, at least according to the journals, than that the union of church and state is execrable and ought not to be suffered to exist. The words cannot be pronounced without sending a thrill of horror through society, and calling forth the most vigorous and indignant protest from every self-appointed defender of modern civilization, progress, liberty, equality, and fraternity. What is called the "Liberal party," sometimes "the movement party," but what we call "the revolution," has everywhere for its primum mobile, its impulse and its motive, the dissolution of what remains of the union of church and state, the total separation of the state from the church and its assertion as the supreme and only legitimate authority in society, to which all orders and classes of men, and all matters, whether temporal or spiritual, must be subjected. The great words of the party, as pronounced by its apostles and chiefs, are "people-king," "people-priest," "people-God." There is no denying the fact. Science, or what passes for science, denies the double nature of man, the distinction between soul and body, and makes the soul the product of material organization, or a mere function of the body; and the more popular philosophy suppresses the spiritual order in society, and therefore rejects its pretended representative; and the progress of intelligence suppresses God, and leaves for society only political atheism pure and simple, as is evident from the savage war-whoop set up throughout the civilized world against the syllabus of condemned propositions published by our holy father, December, 1864. This syllabus touched the deep wound of modern society, probed it to the quick, and hence the writhings and contortions, the groans and screechings it occasioned. May God grant that it touched to heal, exposed the wound only to apply the remedy.

But the remedy—what is it, where shall we seek it, and how shall it be applied? The question is delicate as well as grave, let it be answered as it may. The principles of the church are inflexible and unalterable, and must be preserved inviolate; and even the susceptibilities of both statesmen and churchmen, in regard to changes in old customs and usages, even when not unchangeable in their nature, are to be gently treated. The church is not less bound by the law of God than is the state; for she does not, as we have said, make the law, she only administers it. Undoubtedly, she has in a secondary sense legislative authority or power to enact canons or rules and regulations for preserving, carrying out, and applying the law, as the court adopts its own rules and regulations, or as does the executive authority, even in a government like ours, for executing the law enacted by the legislative power. These may no doubt be changed from time to time by the church as she judges necessary, proper, or expedient in order the better to meet the changing circumstances in relation to which she is obliged to act. But even in these respects, changes must be made in strict conformity to law; and although they may be so made and leave the law intact, and affect only the modes or forms of its administration, they are not without a certain danger. The faithful may mistake them for changes or innovations in the law itself, and enemies may represent them as such, and sophistically adduce them against the church as disproving her immutability and infallibility.

There have been, and no doubt are still, abuses in the church growing out of its human side, which need changes in discipline to reform them; but these abuses have always been exaggerated by the best and holiest men in the church, and the necessity of a change in discipline or ecclesiastical law, as distinguished from the law of God, is seldom, if ever, created by them. When evils exist that menace both faith and society, it is not the church that is in fault, but the world that refuses to conform to the law as she declares and applies it. It was not abuses in the church that were the chief cause of the revolt, the heresy, and schism of the reformers in the sixteenth century; for they were far less then than they had been one, two, three, or even four centuries previous. The worst abuses and greatest scandals which had previously obtained had already been corrected, and Leo X. had assembled the Fifth Council of the Lateran for the purpose of restoring discipline and rendering it still more effective. The evil originated in the temporal order as represented by the state, and grew out of secular changes and abuses. It was so then, it is so now, always was and always will be so. Why, then, demand changes or reform in the church, which cannot reach them? The church causes none of the evils at any time complained of, and offers no obstacle to their removal, or the redress of social grievances. It is for the temporal to yield to the spiritual, not for the spiritual to yield to the temporal. Very true; and yet the church may condescend to the world in its weakness for the sake of elevating it to harmony with her own ideal. God, when he would take away sin, and save the souls he had created and which he loved, did not stand aloof, or, so to speak, on his dignity, and bid the sinner cease sinning and obey him, without stretching forth his hand to help him; but made himself man, humbled himself, took the form of a servant, and came to the world lying in wickedness and festering in iniquity, took it by the hand, and sweetly and gently led the sinner away from sin to virtue and holiness.

For four hundred years, the church has sought to maintain peace and concord between herself and the state by concordats, as the wisest and best expedient she found practicable. But concordats, however useful or necessary, do not realize the ideal of Christian society. They do not effect the true union of church and state, and cannot be needed where that union exists. They imply not the union, but the separation of church and state, and are neither necessary nor admissible, except where the state claims to be separate from and independent of the church. They are a compromise in which the church concedes the exercise of certain rights to the state in consideration of its pledge to secure her in the free and peaceable exercise of the rest, and to render her the material force in the execution of her spiritual canons, which she may need but does not herself possess. They are defensible only as necessary expedients, to save the church and the state from falling into the relation of direct and open antagonism.

Yet even as expedients concordats have been at best only partially successful, and now seem on the point of failing altogether. While the church faithfully observes their stipulations so far as they bind her, the state seldom observes them in the respect that they bind it, and violates them as often as they interfere with its own ambitious projects or policy. The church has concordats with the greater part of the European states, and yet while in certain respects they trammel her freedom, they afford her little or no protection. The state everywhere claims the right to violate or abrogate them at will, without consulting her, the other party to the contract. It has done so in Spain, in Italy, and in Austria; and if France at present observes the concordat of 1801, she does it only in the sense of the "organic articles," never inserted in it, but added by the First Consul on his authority alone, and always protested against by the supreme pontiff and vicar of Christ; and there is no foreseeing what the present or a new ministry may do. Even if the governments were disposed to observe them, their people would not suffer them to do so, as we see in Spain and Austria. Times have changed, and the governments no longer govern the people, but the people, or the demagogues who lead them, now govern the governments. The European governments sustain their power, even their existence, only by the physical force of five millions of armed soldiers.

There is evidently, then, little reliance to be placed on the governments; for they are liable, any day, to be changed or overthrown. The strongest of them hope to sustain themselves and keep the revolution in check only by concessions, as we see in the extension of suffrage in England, and the adoption of parliamentary government, under a constitutional monarch, in Austria, France, North Germany, and elsewhere. But as yet the concessions of the governments have nowhere strengthened them or weakened the revolution. One concession becomes the precedent for another, and one demand satisfied only leads to another and a greater demand, while it diminishes the power of the government to resist. What is more, the closer the union of the church with the government the more helpless it becomes, and the greater the hostility it incurs. The primum mobile of the movement party, as we now find it, is not the love of honest liberty, or a liberty compatible with stable government, or the establishment of a democratic or republican constitution; and it is not hostile to the church only because she exerts her power to sustain the governments it would reform or revolutionize, but rather, because it regards them as upholding the church, which they detest and would annihilate. The primum mobile is hatred of the church. This is the reason why, even when the governments are well disposed, as sometimes they are, the people will not suffer them to observe faithfully their engagements to the church.

Here was the mistake of the brilliant but unhappy De la Mennais. He called upon the church to cut herself loose from her entangling alliance with the state, and throw herself back on the people; which would have been not bad counsel, if the people were hostile to her only because they supposed her allied with despotic governments, or if they were less hostile to her than the governments themselves. But such is not the fact at present. The people are to-day controlled by Catholics who care little for any world but the present, by Protestants, rationalists, Jews, infidels, and humanitarians; and to act on the Lamennaisian counsel would seem very much like abandoning weak, timid, and too exacting friends, to throw one's self into the arms of powerful and implacable enemies. When, in the beginning of his reign, the holy father adopted some popular measures, he was universally applauded, but he did not win those who applauded him to the church; and his measures were applauded by the outside world only because believed to be such as would tend to undermine his own authority, and pave the way for the downfall of Catholicity. The movement party applauded, because they thought they could use him as an instrument for the destruction of the church. In the French Revolution of February, 1848, originating in deep-seated and inveterate hostility to the church, the ready acceptance of the republic, the next day after its proclamation, by the French bishops and clergy, did not for a moment conciliate the hostility in which the revolution had its origin. They were applauded indeed, but only in the hope of making use of them to democratize, or secularize, and therefore to destroy the church as the authoritative representative of the spiritual order. The bishops and priests, all but a very small minority, showed that they understood and appreciated the applause they received, by abandoning the revolution at the earliest practicable moment, and lending their support to the movement for the Establishment of imperialism; for they felt that they could more safely rely on the emperor than on the republic.

These facts and the reminiscences of the old French Revolution, have created in the great majority of intelligent and earnest Catholics, wisely or unwisely, we say not, a profound distrust of the movement party, which professes to be the party of liberty, and which carries in its train, if not the numerical majority, at least the active, energetic, and leading minds of their respective nations, those that form public opinion and give its direction, and make them honestly believe that Catholic interests, which are not separable from the interests of society, will be best protected and promoted by the church's standing by the governments and aiding them in their repressive measures. Perhaps they are right. The church, of course, cannot abandon society; but in times like ours, it is not easy to say on which side lie the interests of society. Is it certain that they lie on either side, either with the governments as they are, or with the party opposed to them? At present the church neither directs the governments nor controls the popular or so-called liberal movement; and we confess it is difficult to say from which she and society have most to dread. Governments without her direction want morality, and can govern only by force; and popular movements not inspired or controlled by her are blind and lawless, and tend only to anarchy, and the destruction of liberty as well as of order, of morality as well as of religion as a directing and governing power. We distrust both.

For ourselves personally, we are partial to our own American system, which, unless we are blinded by our national prejudices, comes nearer to the realization of the true union as well as distinction of church and state than has heretofore or elsewhere been effected; and we own we should like to see it, if practicable there, introduced—by lawful means only—into the nations of Europe. The American system may not be practicable in Europe; but, if so, we think it would be an improvement. Foreigners do not generally, nor even do all Americans themselves fully understand the relation of church and state, as it really subsists in the fundamental constitution of American society. Abroad and at home there is a strong disposition to interpret it by the theory of European liberalism, and both they who defend and they who oppose the union of church and state, regard it as based on their total separation. But the reverse of this, as we understand it, is the fact. American society is based on the principle of their union; and union, while it implies distinction, denies separation. Modern infidelity or secularism is, no doubt, at work here as elsewhere to effect their separation; but as yet the two orders are distinct, each with its distinct organization, sphere of action, representative, and functions, but not separate. Here the rights of neither are held to be grants from the other. The rights of the church are not franchises or concessions from the state, but are recognized by the state as held under a higher law than its own, and therefore rights prior to and above itself, which it is bound by the law constituting it to respect, obey, and, whenever necessary, to use its physical force to protect and vindicate.

The original settlers of the Anglo-American colonies were not infidels, but, for the most part, sincerely religious and Christian in their way, and in organizing society aimed not simply to escape the oppression of conscience, of which they had been the victims in the mother country, but to found a truly Christian commonwealth; and such commonwealth they actually founded, as perfect as was possible with their imperfect and often erroneous views of Christianity. The colonies of New England inclined, no doubt, to a theocracy, and tended to absorb the state in the church; in the Southern colonies, the tendency was, as in England, to establish the supremacy of the civil order, and to make the church a function of the state. These two opposite tendencies meeting in the formation of American society, to a great extent, counterbalanced each other, and resulted in the assertion of the supremacy of the Christian idea, or the union and distinction under the law of God, of the two orders. In principle, at least, each order exists in American society in its normal relation to the other; and also in its integrity, with its own distinctive nature, laws, and functions, and therefore the temporal in its proper subordination to the spiritual.

This subordination is, indeed, not always observed in practice, nor always even theoretically admitted. Many Americans, at first thought, when it is broadly stated, will indignantly deny it. We shall find even Catholics who do not accept it, and gravely tell us that their religion has nothing to do with their politics; that is, their politics are independent of their religion; that is, again, politics are independent of God, and there is no God in the political order; as if a man could be an atheist in the state, and a devout Catholic in the church. But too many Catholics, at home and abroad, act as if this were indeed possible, and very reasonable, nay, their duty; and hence the political world is given over to the violence and corruption in which Satan finds a rich harvest. But let the state pass some act that openly and undisguisedly attacks the rights, the freedom, or independence of the church, in a practical way, it will be hard to find a single Catholic, in this country at least, who would not denounce it as an outrage on his conscience, which shows that the assertion of the separation of politics from religion so thoughtlessly made, really means only the distinction, not the separation of the two orders, or that politics are independent, so long as they do not run counter to the freedom and independence of religion, or fail to respect and protect the rights of the church. Inexactness of expression, and bad logic do not necessarily indicate unsound faith.

Most non-Catholics will deny that the American state is founded on the recognition of the independence and superiority of the spiritual order, and therefore, of the church, and the confession of its own subordination to the spiritual, not only in the order of logic, as Il Signor Cantù maintains, but also in the order of authority; yet a little reflection ought to satisfy every one that such is the fact, and if it does not, it will be owing to a misconception of what is spiritual. The basis of the American state or constitution, the real, unwritten, providential constitution, we mean, is what are called the natural and inalienable rights of man; and we know no American citizen who does not hold that these rights are prior to civil society, above it, and held independently of it; or that does not maintain that the great end for which civil society is instituted is to protect, defend, and vindicate, if need be, with its whole physical force, these sacred and inviolable rights for each and every citizen, however high, however low. This is our American boast, our American conception of political justice, glory. These rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, are the higher, the supreme law for civil society, which the state, however constituted, is bound to recognize and obey. They deny the absolutism of the state, define its sphere, restrict its power, and prescribe its duty.

But whence come these rights? and how can they bind the state, and prescribe its duty? We hold these rights by virtue, of our manhood, it is said; they are inherent in it, and constitute it. But my rights bind you, and yours bind me, and yet you and I are equal; our manhoods are equal. How, then, can the manhood of either bind or morally oblige the other? Of things equal one cannot be superior to another. They are in our nature as men, it is said again, or, simply, we hold them from nature. They are said to be natural rights and inalienable, and what is natural must be in or from nature. Nature is taken in two senses; as the physical order or the physical laws constitutive of the physical universe, and as the moral law under which all creatures endowed with reason and free-will are placed by the Creator, and which is cognizable by natural reason or the reason common to all men. In the first sense, these rights are not inherent in our nature as men, nor from nature, or in nature; for they are not physical. Physical rights are a contradiction in terms. They can be inherent in our nature only in the second sense, and in our moral nature only, and consequently are held under the law which founds and sustains moral nature, or the moral order as distinct from the physical order.

But the moral law, the so-called law of nature, droit naturel, which founds and sustains the moral order, the order of right, of justice, is not a law founded or prescribed by nature, but the law for the moral government of nature, under which all moral natures are placed by the Author of nature as supreme law-giver. The law of nature is God's law; and whatever rights it founds or are held from it are his rights, and ours only because they are his. My rights, in relation to you, are your duties, what God prescribes as the law of your conduct to me; and your rights are, in relation to me, my duties to you, what God prescribes as the rule of my conduct to you. But what God prescribes he has the right to prescribe, and therefore can command me to respect no rights in you, and you to respect no rights in me, that are not his; and being his, civil society is bound by them, and cannot alienate them or deny them without violating his law, and robbing him of his rights. Hence, he who does an injury to another wrongs not him only, but wrongs his Maker, his Sovereign, and his Judge.

Take any of the rights enumerated as inalienable in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. Among these is the right to life. This right all men and civil society itself are bound to treat as sacred and inviolable. But all men are created equal, and under the law of nature have equal rights. But how can equals bind one another? By mutual compact. But whence the obligation of the compact? Why am I obliged to keep my word? Certainly not by the word itself; but because I should deprive him of his right to whom I have pledged it. But I have given my word to assist in committing a murder. Am I bound to keep it? Not at all. Why not? Because I have pledged myself to commit a crime, to do a wrong or unjust act. Evidently, then, compacts or pledged words do not create justice, they presuppose it; and it is only in virtue of the law of justice that compacts are obligatory, and no compacts not conformable to that law can bind. Why, then, am I bound to respect your life? It is not you who can bind me; for you and I are equals, and neither in his own name can bind the other. To take your life would be an unjust act; that is, I should rob justice of its right to your life. The right to life is then the right of justice. But justice is not an abstraction; it is not a mental conception, but a reality, and therefore God; and hence the right for you or me to live is the right of him who hath made us and whose we are, with all that we are, all that we have, and all that we can do. Hence, the right to life is inalienable even by myself, and suicide is not only a crime against society, but a sin against God; for God owns it as his right, and therefore he has the right to command all men to hold it in every man sacred and inviolable, and never to be taken by other men or even civil society, but at his order. So of all the other rights of man.

If the rights of man are the rights of God in and over man as his creature, as they undeniably are, they lie in the spiritual order, are spiritual, not temporal. The American state, then, in recognizing the independence, superiority, and inviolability of the rights of man, does recognize, in principle, the independence, superiority, and inviolability of the spiritual order, and its own subordination to it, and obligation to consult it and conform to it. It then recognizes the church divinely appointed and commissioned by God with plenary authority to represent it, and apply the law of God to the government of the people as the state no less than to the people as individuals. This follows as a necessary consequence. If God has made a supernatural revelation, we are bound by the natural law to believe it; and if he has instituted a church to represent the spiritual, or concreted the spiritual in a visible organism, with plenary authority to teach his word to all men and nations, and to declare and apply his law in the government of human affairs, we are bound to accept and obey her the moment the fact is brought sufficiently to our knowledge. This shows that the true church, if such church there be, is sacred and inviolable, and that what she declares to be the law of God is his law, which binds every conscience; and all sovereigns and subjects, states and citizens are alike bound to obey her. He who refuses to obey her refuses to obey God; he who spurns her spurns God; he who despises her despises God; and he who despoils her of any of her rights or possessions despoils God. Kings and the great of the earth, statesmen and courtiers, demagogues and politicians are apt to forget this, and because God does not instantly punish their sacrilege with a visible and material punishment, conclude that they may outrage her to their heart's content with impunity. But the punishment is sure to follow in due course, and so far as it concerns states, dynasties, and society, in the shape of moral weakness, imbecility, corruption, and death.

That the American state is true to the order it acknowledges, and never usurps any spiritual functions, we do not pretend. The American state copies in but too many instances the bad legislation of Europe. It from the outset showed the original vice of the American people; for while they very justly subjected the state to the law of God, they could subject it to that law only as they understood it, and their understanding of it was in many respects faulty, which was no wonder, since they had no infallible, no authoritative, in fact, no representative at all of the spiritual order, and knew the law of God only so far as taught it by natural reason, and spelled out by their imperfect light from an imperfect and mutilated text of the written word. They had a good major proposition, namely, the spiritual order duly represented is supreme, and should govern all men collectively and individually, as states and as citizens; but their minor was bad. But we with our reading of the Bible do duly represent that order. Therefore, etc. Now, we willingly admit that a people reverencing and reading the Bible as the word of God, will in most respects have a far truer and more adequate knowledge of the law of God than those who have neither church nor Bible, and only their reason and the mutilated, perverted, and even travestied traditions of the primitive revelation retained and transmitted by Gentilism, and therefore that Protestantism as understood by the American colonists is much better for society than the liberalism asserted by the movement party either here or in Europe; but its knowledge will still be defective, and leave many painful gaps on many important points; and the state, having no better knowledge, will almost inevitably misconceive what on various matters the law of God actually prescribes or forbids.

The American state, misled by public opinion, usurps the functions of the church in some very grave matters. It assumes the control of marriage and education, therefore of all family relations, of the family itself, and of ideas, intelligence, opinions, which we have seen are functions of the church, and both are included in the two sacraments of marriage and orders. It also fails to recognize the freedom and independence of the spiritual order in refusing to recognize the church as a corporation, a moral person, as capable of possessing property as any natural or private person, and therefore denies to the spiritual order the inalienable right of property. The American state denies to the church all possessory rights unless incorporated by itself. This is all wrong; but if no better, it is no worse than what is assumed by the state in every European nation; and the most that can be said is, that in these matters the state forgets the Christian commonwealth for the pagan, as is done everywhere else.

But except in these instances, the American state is, we believe, true to the Christian principle on which it is based, as true, that is, as it can be in a mixed community of Catholics, Jews, and Protestants. The state has no spiritual competency, and cannot decide either for itself or for its citizens which is or is not the church that authoritatively represents the spiritual order. The responsibility of that decision it does and must leave to its citizens, who must decide for themselves, and answer to God for the rectitude of their decision. Their decision is law for the state, and it must respect and obey it in the case alike of majorities and minorities; for it recognizes the equal rights of all its citizens, and cannot discriminate between them. The church that represents for the state the spiritual order is the church adopted by its citizens; and as they adopt different churches, it can recognize and enforce, through the civil courts, the canons and decrees of each only on its own members, and on them only so far as they do not infringe on the equal rights of the others. This is not all the state would do or ought to do in a perfect Christian society, but it is all that it can do where these different churches exist, and exist for it with equal rights. It can only recognize them, and protect and vindicate the rights of each only in relation to those citizens who acknowledge its authority. This recognizes and protects the Catholic Church in her entire freedom and independence and in teaching her faith, and in governing and disciplining Catholics according to her own canons and decrees, which, unless we are greatly misinformed, is more than the state does for her, in any old Catholic nation in the world.

This is not tolerance or indifference; it only means that the state does not arrogate to itself the right to decide which is the true church, and holds itself bound to respect and protect equally the church or churches acknowledged as such by its citizens. The doctrine that a man is free before God to be of any religion, or of no religion as he pleases, or the liberty of conscience, as understood by the so-called liberals throughout the world, and which was condemned by Gregory XVI. of immortal memory, in his encyclical of August 15th, 1832, receives no countenance from the American state, and is repugnant to its fundamental constitution. Heretical and schismatic sects have, indeed, no rights; for they have no authority from God to represent the spiritual order, and their existence is, no doubt, repugnant to the real interests of society as well as destructive to souls; but in a community where they exist along with the true church, the state must respect and protect in them the rights of the spiritual order, not indeed because they claim to be the church, but because they are held to be such by its citizens, and all its citizens have equal rights in the civil order, and the equal right to have their conscience, if they have a conscience, respected and protected. The church of God exacts nothing more of it in this respect than to be protected in her freedom to combat and vanquish the adherents of false churches or false religions with her own spiritual weapons. More she might exact of the state in perfect Christian society; but this is all that she can exact in an imperfect and divided Christian society, as is the case in nearly all modern nations.

This is the American system. Is it practicable in the old Catholic nations of Europe? Would it be a gain to religion, if suffered to be introduced there? Would the government, if it were accepted by the church, understand it as implying its obligation to respect and protect all churches equally as representing the spiritual order, or as asserting its freedom to govern and oppress all at will, the true church as the false? There is danger of the latter, because European society is not based on the Christian principle of the independence and inviolability of the rights of man, that is, the rights of God, but on the pagan principle of the state, that all rights, even the rights of the church, and society emanate from the state, and are revocable at its will. Hence the reason why the church has found concordats with the secular powers so necessary. In the sense of the secular authority, these concordats are acts of incorporation, and surrendering them by the church would be the surrender of its charter by a corporation. It would be to abandon all her goods to the state, leave her without a legal status, and with no rights which the state holds itself bound to recognize, protect, or enforce through its courts, any more than she had under the persecuting Roman emperors. This would be the farthest remove possible from the American system. Before the American system could be introduced into European states in the respect that it affords freedom and protection to the church in the discharge of her spiritual functions, the whole structure of European society would need to be reconstructed on the Christian foundation, or the basis of the inherent rights and supremacy of the spiritual order, instead of its present pagan or Græco-Roman basis of the supremacy of the city or state.

Undoubtedly, the liberals, or movement party, are, and have been, for nearly a century, struggling by all the means in their power, fair or foul, to overthrow European society, and reconstruct it after what they suppose to be the American model, but in reality on a basis, if possible, more pagan and less Christian than its present basis. They assert the absolute supremacy of the state in all things; only, instead of saying with Louis XIV., "L'état, c'est moi," they say "L'état, c'est le peuple," but they make the people, as the state, as absolute as any king or kaiser-state ever pretended to be. The church would, in their reconstructed society, not have secured to her the rights that she holds under our system, by the fact that it is based on the equal and antecedent rights of all citizens, really the rights of God, which limit the power of state, of the people in a democratic state, and prescribe both its province and its duty.

Even with us, the American system has its enemies, and perhaps only a minority of the people understand it as we do, and some of the courts are beginning to render decisions which, if in one part, they sustain it, in another part flatly contradict it. The Supreme Court of Ohio, in the recent case of the School Board of Cincinnati, has decided very properly that the board could not exclude religion; but, on the other hand, it maintains that a majority of the people in any locality may introduce what religion they please, and teach it to the children of the minority as well as to their own, which is manifestly wrong; for it gives the majority of the people the power to establish their own religion, and exclude that of the minority when, in matters of religion, that is, in matters of conscience, votes do not count. My conscience, though in a minority of one, is as sacred and inviolable as it would be if all the rest of the community were with me. As in the Polish Diet, a single veto suffices to arrest the whole action of the state. The American democracy is not what it was in 1776. It was then Christian after a Protestant fashion; it is now infected with European liberalism, or popular absolutism; and if we had to introduce the American system now, we should not be able to do it.

There are serious difficulties on both sides. The church cannot confide in the revolution, and the governments cannot or will not protect her, save at the expense of her independence and freedom of action. They, if we may believe any thing the journals say, threaten her with their vengeance, if she dares to make and publish such or such a dogmatic decision, or to define on certain points which they think touch them, what her faith is and always has been. This is a manifest invasion of her right to teach the word of God in its integrity, and simply tells her, with the sword suspended over her head, that she shall teach only what is agreeable to them, whether in God's word or not. This insolence, this arrogant assumption, applauded by the universal sectarian and secular press, if submitted to, would make the church the mere tool of the secular authority, and destroy all confidence in her teaching.

We know not how these difficulties on either side are to be overcome. The church cannot continue to be shorn of her freedom by the secular governments, and made to conform to their ambitious or timid politics, without losing more and more her hold on the European populations. Nor can she side with the revolution without perilling the interests of society from which her own cannot be separated. We see no way out of the dilemma but for her, trusting in the divine protection, to assert simply and energetically her independence of both parties alike, and confide in the faithful, as she did in the martyr ages, and as she does now in every heathen land.

We do not assume the propriety or necessity of trying to introduce the American system into the old world, nor do we urge the church to break either with the governments or with the people; but we may, we hope, be permitted to say that what seems to us to be needed is, for the church to assert her independence of both so far as either attempts to control her in the free discharge of her functions as the church of God; and we think the faithful should be prepared for the consequences of such assertion, whatever they may prove to be. The church cannot fulfil her mission, which is not confined to the Catholic nations of Europe, but embraces the whole world, if she is thus denied her independence and crippled in her freedom of action. If the assertion of her independence in face of the temporal order deprives her of her legal status, and places her out of the protection of the civil law, it perhaps will, in the end, prove to be no serious calamity, or at least a less evil than her present cramped and crippled condition. She has held that position heretofore, and, aided by Him whose spouse she is, and who hath purchased her with his precious blood, she in that very condition conquered and subdued the world against the hostility of the most powerful empire that ever existed. What she has done once, she is no less able to do again. The worst that the state can do is to strip her of her temporalities, and forbid her to preach in the name of Jesus. The worst the revolution can do is the same, and in its fury to massacre bishops and priests, monks and nuns, men and women, because they choose to obey God rather than men.

Well, all this has been more than once. We have seen it in Ireland, where the church was despoiled of her revenues, the people of their churches, schools, colleges, and religious houses, and only not of the use of the graveyard; where Catholic worship was prohibited under pain of death, and armed soldiers hunted and shot down as a wild beast the priest who ventured to say mass in a private house, in a remote morass, or a cave in the mountain, and the faithful were slaughtered as sheep by fiery zealots or the graceless myrmidons of power; where not only the church was despoiled and left naked and destitute, but her children were also despoiled of their estates and reduced to poverty, while laws were devised with satanic ingenuity and enforced with savage ferocity to degrade and debase them, and to prevent them from escaping from their poverty or their enforced secular ignorance. Yet we have seen the faith in spite of all live and gain on its enemies, the church survive and even prosper; and only the last year, when offered freely a government subsidy for her clergy and her services, we have seen the noble Irish hierarchy, without a dissenting voice, refuse it, and prefer to rely on the voluntary offerings of the faithful to coming under any obligation to the temporal power.

In this country the people were, in the outset, as hostile to the church as they could be anywhere or in any age, and they are not even yet converted, very generally, into warm and eager friends; yet without any public provision, relying solely on the alms of the faithful at home and abroad, principally at home, the missionaries of the cross have been sustained, the widow's handful of meal and cruse of oil have not failed; and yet we have founded and sustained schools, colleges, universities, erected convents for men and for women, and are erecting throughout the whole country churches, the finest in it, and some of which may be regarded as architectural ornaments; and nearly all this has been achieved within a single lifetime.

Men who sit at their ease in Zion, and find their most engrossing occupation in solving an antiquarian problem, or disserting on some heathen relic just dug up, though the world is breaking up and falling to pieces around them, may be frightened at the prospect of being deprived of comforts they are used to; but let governments and peoples do their worst, they cannot do worse than heathen Rome did, worse than France did in the revolution of 1789, or England has been doing in Ireland for three hundred years. Fear! What is there to fear? If God be for us, who can be against us? The danger seems great, no doubt, to many; but let Catholics have the courage of their faith, and they will no longer fear him who can kill the body, and after that hath no more power. The danger before men of Christian courage will disappear as the morning mist before the rising sun. Can a Catholic fear poverty, want, labor, suffering, torture, or death in His cause who for our sakes became poor, and had not where to lay his head; who took the form of a servant, and obeyed unto death, even the death of the cross? Know we not that Catholic faith and Catholic charity can weary out the most cruel and envenomed persecutors, and in the end gain the victory over them? If the church finds it necessary, then, in order to maintain her independence, to incur the hostility of kings or peoples, and the loss of her goods, there need be no fear; God will not forsake her, and the charity of the faithful never faileth.