defend all vested rights not repugnant to natural justice, but there is nothing in it that requires or even permits me to defend on principle either despotism or slavery. But we, also, have been too slow to insist on what is a very necessary policy. It is only since we published our criticism on M. Montalembert's Essay, that we have appreciated the necessity of political freedom to the maintenance, in our age, of true religious freedom. We thought little of this doctrine when M. Montalembert put it forth, but in this we were wrong. The subsequent developments in France. prove it, and we are now fully convinced that the only security, although that will not always be a perfect security, for the liberty of the Church, is the general liberty of the citizen. The mutual relation of the Church and the state, recognized and sustained in the Middle Ages, no longer subsists, and cannot be restored; Concordats, necessary in their day, and still useful in some parts of Europe, are only a temporary expedient, and, for the most part, remain a dead letter, or serve merely to bind the Church without practically binding the state. There is no reliance to be placed on princes as protectors of the freedom of religion or the rights of the Church. They are and will be governed by their views of state policy, regardless of their obligations to the Holy See. The only attitude that is safe for the Church to assume before the state, or that comports with her interests and dignity, is that of independence. This attitude, however, she can assert and maintain only in free states, where the freedom of religion is the recognized right of the citizen, and not simply an agreement between the Church and the state. The Church in this country is free, not by any grant or concession of the sovereign power, not by a special law declaring her free, but by virtue of the freedom of the citizen, or rather, the equal rights of all citizens before the state. All men are recognized as equal by our laws, and one has no rights that another has not. My Church is my conscience, and to follow my conscience, when not opposed to the equal right of another to follow his conscience, is my right, and recognized as such by the state. The Church then is free, because her freedom is included in my right as a man and an American citizen. Any encroachment by the state on her freedom is not merely a violation of its religious obligations, or of a Concordat it has

accepted, but is an encroachment upon my right as a citizen, and not only upon mine, but upon that of every other citizen, whether Catholic or non-Catholic. It is a denial of my right of conscience to believe and profess the religion I choose, and at the same time the denial, in principle, of the same right to others; and, therefore, all others are naturally drawn by all their devotion to principle and all their regard for their own rights, whose turn to be attacked may come next, to my defence. This places, we grant, the Church and the several sects, truth and error, on the same footing before the state; but this is no objection, for it is only on the condition of claiming no more in the political order for the Church than we are prepared to assert for all religions not contra bonos mores, that we can gain, in the modern world, any tolerable security for her freedom. To ask more would be to get less. This is the order which prevails in the United States, an order which asserts the incompetency of the state in spirituals, and secures the religious freedom of each, by securing the freedom of all in the civil and political rights of the citizen, which the state is instituted to recognize and defend.

But it is obvious that this order, which is now so desirable, is impracticable in a state where the equality of all men is not recognized, and where the citizen has no rights but the will of the political sovereign. Hence the necessity in our modern world of establishing political freedom as the condition of the freedom of religion. In a despotic country the freedom of religion, which is only another name for the freedom of conscience, is not a political right, a right of the subject against the sovereign; and when the sovereign chooses to deny it, there is no public law to which appeal can be made against him,-no public right which he acknowledges himself bound by the very tenure of his power to maintain, and the violation of which absolves his subjects from their allegiance, that can be pleaded. It is only in what are called free states, only where liberty is the established order, that there is or can be any general liberty into the category of which religious liberty can enter. There is more truth in the coupling together, in the popular harangues of the day, of religious and civil liberty, than is commonly imagined. Political liberty, as with us, affords a practical basis to religious liberty, and gives means and

scope for its defence; while religious liberty in turn consolidates and protects political liberty. In a word, they are each the condition of the other.

We do not pretend that political freedom, as with us, is always an adequate protection for the full freedom of the Church, but we do pretend that it is the best practicable. Prejudice or passion may now and then even here attempt to make an exception unfavorable to Catholics; may seek to form a Know-Nothing party for excluding us from the acknowledged political rights of American citizens; may even excite the mob to certain local and transitory acts of violence against us; but in these cases, if the hostility is directed against us purely on the ground of our Catholicity, the pretext is that we ourselves are not entitled to equality before the state, because we are opposed in principle to the equality in the political order of non-Catholics with Catholics, and would, if we had the power, exclude them from the enjoyment of that religious freedom we claim for ourselves. Yet, however much violence may be done to our feelings as Catholics, there is, with the exception of Belgium and the Pontifical States, no country in the world where the Catholic conscience is less oppressed than in our American Confederacy of Republics. Even the legislation attempted by Know-Nothings in several of the States is less unfavorable to the Church than that which is to be found in most countries under nominally Catholic sovereigns, and no instance of interference by our courts in the internal discipline of the Church, like that of the Council of State in the case of the Bishop of Moulins, can be cited in our whole history since we became an independent nation. The movements stirred up against us effect very little to our prejudice. The public law, public right, the constitution, the general spirit of freedom and love of fair play, and the sincere attachment of the great majority of the American people to religious liberty, and liberty for all who will concede it to others, are on our side, may always be appealed to in our defence, and seldom do appeals to them prove ineffectual.

To the state of things which obtains here the public opinion of the world has already come, and to it Catholics, whether they like it or dislike it, will in all countries be ultimately obliged to conform. Any efforts to resist it will only tend to exclude us from its advantages. We cannot

in our day have liberty for good without liberty for evil,— liberty for truth without liberty for error. We cannot secure liberty for our Church as an exclusive liberty. Such is the state of public opinion, such is the temper of the times, such the dispositions of the government and people in nearly all countries, that it is worse than idle to attempt it. The freedom of the Church must henceforth, in most countries, be enjoyed in common with the freedom of the sects, without any special recognition or favor from the state. This we regard as a "fixed fact," and to this there is, to our knowledge, nothing in the history, in the principles, in the discipline, or in the canons of the Church that prevents her from conforming. All things, says St. Paul, are lawful for me, but all things are not expedient. The Church existed in all her integrity before Constantine, under the Pagan Emperors of Rome, and would, no doubt, at any period during the first three centuries, have deemed it much to have been placed on an equal footing before the state with the old Pagan religion. Constantine was looked upon as the deliverer of the Church, but Constantine never suppressed the old religion in favor of the new, and his edicts go no farther than to place both religions on the same footing before the state. If a different policy was subsequently pursued, or if a different order obtained, it was not because it was essential to the Church, or because her own inherent constitution made it obligatory, but because in the circumstances it was expedient, because, prior to the Barbarian Conquest, it was to some extent imposed by Roman Imperialism, and because, after that Conquest, in the breaking up of the old civilized world, it became necessary, in order to save society and religion from downright barbarism. But nothing imposes upon the Church the necessity of maintaining an exclusive freedom, or of continuing, where liberty is the established order, her old connection with the state.

It seems to us, therefore, the duty of Catholics, in all cases where we are in some measure free, and where liberty is not impracticable, to labor in such way and manner as best suits our several localities to secure political freedom, and to obtain in the general freedom of the citizen before the state a basis for the practical maintenance of the liberty of our religion. The loss of political liberty invariably carries with it the loss of the freedom and full independ

ence of the Church. The Church is always the first and greatest victim of despotism. In France the nation has lost its freedom, and although the sovereign is a Catholic, infidelity and the sects alone are free. The Church is deprived, in principle, of her freedom, and there is no public right, no law of the empire to which appeal can be made in her behalf. The press, gagged in politics, is free to vent, and daily does vent, the vilest blasphemies against her, but no voice is free through it to speak out in defence of her violated rights. So it is, and so it will always be, wherever religious liberty is not recognized and guarantied in the general liberty of the subject.

The Church can enjoy freedom and make progress in the Modern World only by throwing herself upon the rights of the individual, and claiming her liberty, not as her own, but as that of the free Catholic citizen,-only by taking her chance with the sects, receiving no favor and subjected to no disadvantage from the State. It seems to us, as we have elsewhere said, that she must throw herself back on her resources as a spiritual kingdom, and, relying on her Heavenly Spouse, make her appeal to the intellect and the heart of the age, and, without any extrinsic support, make progress by her sole power to convince reason and win love. In our judgment this is for her a gain, not a loss. It is what we would wish for her, for we have full confidence in her intrinsic excellence to win the heart and to lead the intelligence of all ages.

We regard it as certain that no reliance can be placed on princes as her protectors; they are and will be governed by their own views of State policy, regardless of their obligations to the Holy See, and they will grant their protection to the Church only at the price of her freedom and independence. The sooner, then, circumstances permit the Church to cut herself loose from her old bonds to the State, and to free herself from all dependence on politics, the bet

We need but look to the ricketty Catholic States on this Continent to be convinced of it. Religion will never revive in Mexico so long as it retains its present connection with that miserable caricature of a republic. No honest man can do otherwise than execrate the policy pursued towards the Church by General Commonfort's Government; it is marked by sacrilege and robbery; but no intelligent NEW YORK SERIES.-VOL. II. NO. III. 27