the end of our existence, and therefore it is necessary that we be on our guard against its seductions. But the chief motive that leads souls hungering and thirsting for perfection to retire to the desert or the monastery is not that they may fly its temptations, or the enemies of their virtue, for they find greater temptations to struggle against and fiercer enemies to combat in solitude than in the thronged city; it is love of sacrifice, and the longing to take part with our Lord in his great work of expiation that moves them. Simply to get rid of the world, to turn the back on society, or to get away from the duties and cares of the world, is no proper motive for retirement from the world, and the church permits not her children to do it and enter a religious order so long as they have duties to their family or their country to perform. Nothing could better prove that the church does not suffer us to contemn or neglect the natural or temporal order, or regard as of slight importance the proper discharge of our duties to our families, our country, or natural society. The same thing is proved by the fact that the process for canonization cannot go on in a case where the individual has not fulfilled all his natural duties, growing out of his state or relations in society. Gratia supponit

naturam.

In consequence of his tendency to an exclusive asceticism, a tendency which he owed to the unsettled times in which he lived, and the reaction of his own mind against the liberalism he had at one time favored, Donoso Cortés countenanced, to some extent, political absolutism; and had great influence in leading even eminent Catholics to denounce constitutionalism, legislative assemblies, publicity, and free political discussion, as if these things were uncatholic, and inseparable from the political atheism of the age. There was a moment when the writer of this article himself, under the charm of his eloquence, and the force of the arguments he drew from the individual and social crimes committed in the name of liberty and progress, was almost converted to his side of the question, and supported popular institutions only because they were the law in his own country. But without pretending that the church enjoins any particular form of civil policy, or maintaining the infallibility or impeccability of the people, either collectively or individually, a calmer study of history, and the recent experience of our own country, have restored me to my early faith in popular forms of government, or democracy as organized under our

American system, which, though it has its dangers and attendant evils, is, wherever practicable, the form of govern. ment that, upon the whole, best conforms to those great catholic principles on which the church herself is founded.

But the people cannot govern well, any more than kings or kaisers, unless trained to the exercise of power, and subjected to moral and religious discipline. It is precisely here that the work of Donoso Cortés has its value. The reaction which has for a century or two been going on against that mixture of civil and ecclesiastical government which grew up after the downfall of the Roman empire in the West, and which was not only natural but necessary, since the clergy had nearly all the learning, science, and cultivation of the times, and to which modern society is so deeply indebted for its civilization, has carried modern statesmen to an opposite extreme, and resulted in almost universal political atheism. The separation of church and state in our age means not merely the separation of the church and state as corporations or governments, which the popes have always insisted. on, but the separation of political principles from theological principles, and the subjection of the church and ecclesiastical affairs to the state. Where monarchy, in its proper sense, obtains, the king or emperor, and where democracy, save in its American sense, is asserted, the people takes the place of God, at least in the political order. Statolatry is is almost as prevalent in our days as idolatry was with the ancient Greeks and Romans.

Even in our own country, it may be remarked that the general sympathy is with anti-Christian-especially anti-papal insurrections and revolutions. We should witness little sympathy with the Cretans and Christians of the Turkish empire, if they were not understood to be schismatics, who reject the authority of the pope in spirituals as well as in temporals. Yet, prior to the treaty of Paris in 1856, the Greek prelates were, under the Turkish sovereignty, the temporal lords of their people, and the design of that treaty, so far as relates to the eastern Christians, was to deprive them of the last remains of temporal independence, and to complete the conquest of Mahomet II. The complete subjection of religion to the state is called religious liberty, the emancipation of conscience. Our American press applauds the Italian ministry for laying down the law for the Italian bishops, restoring their sees, from which the state exiled them, and prescribing them their bounds, beyond which

they must not pass. The Italian state does not, as with us, recognize the freedom and independence of the spiritual order, but at best only tolerates it. It asserts not only the freedom and independence of the state in face of the church, but its supremacy, its right to govern the church, or at least to define the limits within which it may exist and operate. This is what our age understands by the separation of church and state. If it foregoes, at any time or place, the authority to govern the church, it still holds that it has the right to govern churchmen the same as any other class of persons; that the civil law is the supreme law of the land; and that religion, when it happens to conflict with it, must give way to it. The law of the state is the supreme law. This is everywhere the doctrine of European liberals, and the doctrine they reduce to practice wherever they have the power, and hence the reason why the church visits them with her censures. Many devout believers think the separation of church and state must mean this, and can mean nothing else, and therefore that the union of church and state must mean a return to the old mixture of civil and ec

clesiastical government of the middle ages. Hence a Donoso Cortés and a Baron Ricasoli are on this point in singular accord. Our American press, which takes its cue principally from European liberals, takes the same view, and understands both the separation and the union of church and state in the same sense.

Yet the American solution of the mutual relations of church and state is a living proof, a practical demonstration that they are wrong. Here the state does not tolerate the church, nor the church either enslave or tolerate the state, because the state recognizes the freedom of conscience, and its independence of all secular control. My church is my conscience, and my conscience being free here, my church is free, and for me and all Catholics, in the free exercise of her full spiritual authority. Here it is not the state that bounds conscience, but conscience that bounds the state. The state here is bound by its own constitution to respect and protect the rights of the citizen. Among these rights, the most precious is the right of conscience-the right to the free exercise of my religion. This right does not decide what the civil law shall be, but it does decide what it shall not be. Any law abridging my right of conscience-that is, the freedom of my church-is unconstitutional, and, so far, null and void. This, which is my right, is equally the

right of every other citizen, whether his conscience-that is, his church-agrees with mine or not. The Catholic and the Protestant stand on the same footing before the law, and the conscience of each is free before the state, and a limit beyond which the civil law cannot extend its jurisdiction. Here, then, is a separation of church and state that does not enslave the church, and a union of church and state that does not enslave the state, or interfere with its free and independent action in its own proper sphere. The church maintains her independence and her superiority as representing the spiritual order, for she governs those who are within, not those who are without, and the state acts in harmony, not in conflict with her, because it confines its action -where it has power-to things temporal.

The only restriction, on any side, is, that the citizen must so assert his own right of conscience as not to abridge the equal right of conscience in his fellow-citizen who differs from him. Of course the freedom of conscience cannot be made a pretext for disturbing the public peace, or outraging public decency, nor can it be suffered to be worn as a cloak to cover dissoluteness of manners or the transgression of the universal moral law; when it is so made or worn it ceases to be the right of conscience, ceases to be conscience at all, and the state has authority to intervene and protect the public peace and public decency. It may, therefore, suppress the Mormon concubinage, and require the Latter Day Saints to conform to the marriage law as recognized by the whole civilized world, alike in the interests of religion and of civilization. But beyond this the state cannot go, at least with us.

It may be doubted whether this American system is practicable in any but a republican country-under a government based on equal rights, not on privilege, whether the privilege of the one, the few, or the many. Democracy, as Europeans understand it, is not based on equal rights, but is only the system of privilege, if I may so speak, expanded. It recognizes no equal rights, because it recognizes no rights of the individual at all before the state. It is the pagan republic which asserts the universal and absolute supremacy of the state. The American democracy is Christian, not pagan, and asserts, for every citizen, even the meanest, equal rights, which the state must treat as sacred and inviolable. It is because our system is based on equal rights, not on privilege--on rights held not from the state, but which

the state is bound to recognize and protect, that American democracy, instead of subjecting religion to the state, secures its freedom and independence.

Donoso Cortés can no more understand this than can the European democrat, because he has no conception of the equal rights of all men before the state; or rather, because he has no conception of the rights of man. Man, he says, has no rights; he has only duties. This is true, when we speak of man in relation to his Maker. The thing made has no right to say to the maker, "Why hast thou made me thus?" Man has only duties before God, because he owes to him all he is, has, or can do, and he finds beatitude in discharging his duties to God, because God is good, the good in itself, and would not be God and could not be creator if he were not. But that man has no rights in relation to society, to the state, or to his fellow man, is not true. Otherwise there could be no justice between man and man, between the individual and society, or the citizen and the state, and no injustice, for there is no injustice where no right is violated. Denying or misconceiving the rights of man, and conceiving the state as based on privilege, not on equal rights, the Spaniard is unable to conceive it possible to assert the freedom and independence of the state, without denying the freedom and independence of the church.

But, if republican institutions based on equal rights are necessary to secure the freedom and independence of the church, the freedom and independence of the church, on the other hand, are no less necessary to the maintenance of such institutions. I say, of the church, rather than of religion, because I choose to speak of things in the concrete rather than in the abstract, and because it is only as concreted in the church that the freedom and independence of religion can be assailed, or that religion has power to protect or give seeurity to institutions based on equal rights. The church is concrete religion. Whether there is more than one church, or which of the thousand and one claimants is the true church, is not now the question. The answer of the Catholic is not doubtful. At present I am treating the question of equal rights, and asking no more for the church before the state than for the several sects. Of course, I recognize none of the sects as the church, but I am free to say that I regard even the lowest of them as better for society than any form of downright infidelity. There is something in