most sacred symbol of the Protestant faith-the Bible. To exclude it from the public schools is to the religious affections of Protestants like Abraham's sacrifice of his only son. When it was first proposed, I felt horror-stricken, and instinctively opposed it; but I have thought long and anxiously upon the subject, and have, from pure logical necessity and consistency, been obliged to change-nay, reverse my opinion. Duty to the unsectarian character of our civil institutions demands that this exclusion should be made. It will not be any disclaimer of the im. portance of the Bible in the education of American youth, but only a concession that we cannot carry on the religious with the secular education of American children, at the public expense and in the public schools. So long as Protestant Christians insist, merely in the strength of their great majority, upon maintaining the Bible in the public schools, they justify Roman Catholics in demanding that the public money for education shall be distributed to sects in proportion to the number of children they educate. This goes far to break up the common-school system of this country, and, if carried out, must ultimately tend to dis solve the Union, which morally depends upon the community of feeling and the homogeneity of culture produced by an unsectarian system of common schools."-Church and State, pp. 16-19.

But this proposed remedy will prove worse than the disease. The state divorced from the church, wholly separated from religion, is separated from morality; and the state separated from morality, that is, from the moral order, from natural justice inseparable from religion, cannot stand, and ought not to stand, for it is incapable of performing a single one of its proper functions. The church, representing the spiritual, and therefore the superior, order, is by its own. nature and constitution as independent of the state as the soul is of the body; and the state separated from the church, or from religion and morality, is like the body separated from the soul, dead, a putrid or putrefying corpse. Exclude your Protestant Bible and all direct and indirect religious instruction from your public schools, and you would not render them a whit less objectionable to us than they are now, for we object not less to purely secular schools than we do to sectarian schools. We hold that children should be trained up in the way they should go, so that when old they will not depart from it; and the way in which they should go is not the way of pure secularism, but the way enjoined by God our Maker through his church. God has in this life joined soul and body, the spiritual and the secular, together, and what God has joined together we dare not put asunder. There is only one of two things that can satisfy us: either

cease to tax us for the support of the public schools, and leave the education of our children to us, or give us our proportion of the public schools in which to educate them in our own religion. We protest against the gross injustice of being taxed to educate the children of non-Catholics, and being obliged in addition to support schools for our own children at our own expense, or peril their souls.

We do not think Dr. Bellows is aware of what he demands when he demands the complete divorce of church and state, or the total separation of religion and politics. The state divorced from the church is a godles state, and politics totally separated from religion is simply political atheism, and political atheism is simply power without justice, force without law; for there is no law without God, the supreme and universal lawgiver. Man has no original and underived legislative power, and one man has in and of himself no authority over another; for all men by the law of nature are equal, and have equal rights, and among equals no one has the right to govern. All governments based on political atheism, or the assumption that politics are independent of religion, rest on no foundation, are usurpations, tyrannies, without right, and can govern, if at all, only by might or sheer force. To declare the government divorced from religion is to declare it emancipated from the law of God, from all moral obligation, and free to do whatever it pleases. It has no duties, and under it there are and can be no rights; for rights and duties are in the moral order and inseparable from religion, since the law of God is the basis. of all rights and duties, the foundation and guaranty of all morality. The state, divorced from religion, would be bound to recognize and protect no rights of God or man, not even those natural and inalienable rights of all men, "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." This is going further in the direction of absolutism than go the doctor's dear friends the Turks, whom he so warmly eulogizes in his letters from the East, for even they hold the sultan is bound, by the Koran, and forbidden to do any thing it prohibits.

Dr. Bellows, doubtless, has no intention of divorcing the state from morality, and does not see that his proposition implies it. He probably holds that morality is separable from religion, for with him religion is simply sentiment or opinion; but in this he falls into the common mistake of all liberal Christians, and of many Protestants who regard liberal Christians as no Christians at all. Morality and religion:

are inseparable, for morality is only the practical application in the several departments of life of the principles of relig ion. Without religion morality has no foundation, nothing on which to rest, is a baseless fabric, an unreality. Deny God, and you deny the moral law and the whole moral order, all right, all duty, all human accountability. The separation of all political questions from all religious questions, which the reverend doctor demands, is their separation from all moral questions, and is the emancipation of the state from all right and all duty, or the assertion of its unrestricted power to do whatever it pleases, in total disregard of all moral and religious considerations. Is this the doctrine of a Christian?

This surely is not the relation of church and state in America, and derives no support from the American order of thought. With us, the state is instituted chiefly for the protection of the natural rights of man, as we call them, but really the rights of God, since they are anterior to civil society, are superior to it, and not derived or derivable from. it. These rights it is the duty of civil society to protect and defend. Any acts of the political sovereign, be that sovereign king or kaiser, nobility or people, contrary to these antecedent and superior rights are tyrannical and unjust, are violences, not laws, and the common-law courts will not enforce them, because contrary to the law of justice and forbidden by it. The American state disclaims all authority over the religion of its citizens, but at the same time acknowledges its obligation to respect in its own action, and to protect and defend from external violence, the religion which its citizens or any class of its citizens choose to adopt or adhere to for themselves. It by no means asserts its independence of religion or its right to treat it with indifference, but acknowledges its obligation to protect its citizens in the free and peaceable possession and enjoyment of the religion they prefer. It goes further, and affords religion the protection and assistance of the law in the possession and management of her temporalities, her churches and temples, lands and tenements, funds and revenues for the support of public worship, and various charitable or eleemosynary institutions. All the protection and assistance the benefit of which every Protestant denomination fully enjoys, and even the Catholic Church in principle, though not always in fact, would be denied, if the divorce Dr. Bellows demands were granted, and religion, having no rights politicians are

bound to respect, would become the prey of lawless and godless power, and religious liberty would be utterly anni hilated, as well as civil liberty itself, which depends on it.

The chief pretence with Dr. Bellows for urging the com plete divorce of church and state, is that Catholics demand and receive subsidies from the state and city for their schools and several charitable institutions. Some such subsidies have been granted, we admit, but in far less proportion to Catholics than they have to Protestants or non-Catholics. The public schools are supported at the public expense, by the school fund, and a public tax, of which Catholics pay their share, and these schools are simply sectarian or godless schools, for the sole benefit of non-Catholics. The subsidies conceded to a few of our schools do by no means place them on an equality with those of non-Catholics. We by no means receive our share of the subsidies conceded. The aids granted to our hospitals, orphan asylums, and reformatories are less liberal than those to similar non-Catholic institutions. So long as the state subsidizes any institutions of the sort, we claim to receive our proportion of them as our right. If the state grant none to non-Catholics, we shall demand none for ourselves. We demand equality, but we ask no special privileges or favors. The outcry of the sectarian and secular press against us on this score is wholly unauthorized, is cruel, false, and unjust. It is part and parcel of that general system of falsification by which it is hoped to inflame popular passion and prejudice against Catholics and their church.

Underlying the whole of the doctrine of this discourse is the assumption of the supremacy of the secular order, or that every American citizen is bound to subordinate his religion to his politics, or divest himself of it whenever he acts on a political question. This, which is assumed and partially disguised in Dr. Bellows, is openly and frankly asserted and boldly maintained in Judge Hurlbut's pamphlet. The judge talks much about theology, theocracy, &c., subjects of which he knows less than he supposes, and of course talks a great deal of nonsense, as unbelievers generally do; but he is quite clear and decided that the state should have the power to suppress any church or religious institution that is based on a theory or principle different from its own. The theory of the American government is democratic, and the government ought to have the power to suppress or exclude every church that is not democratically constituted.

Religion should conform to politics, not politics to religion. The political law is above the religious, and, of course, man is above God. In order to be able to carry out his theory, the learned judge proposes an important amendment to the constitution of the United States, which shall on the one hand prohibit the several states from ever establishing any religion by law; and, on the other, shall authorize congress to enact such laws as it may deem necessary to control or prevent the establishment or continuance of any foreign hierarchical power in this country founded on principles or dogmas antagonistic to republican institutions. He says:

"The following amendment is proposed to Article I. of the amendments to the Constitution of the United States. The words in italics are

proposed to be added to the present article :

"ART. I. Neither Congress nor any state shall make any laws respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. But Congress may enact such laws as it shall deem necessary to control or prevent the establishment or continuance of any foreign hierarchical power in this country founded on principles or dogmas antago nistic to republican institutions.

"It is assumed that there is nothing in the constitution, as it stands, which forbids a state from establishing a religion, and that no power is conferred on Congress by the constitution to forbid a foreign hierarchical establishment in the United States. If such a power be needed, then the proposed amendment is also necessary."-Secular View, p. 5.

This proposed amendment, like iniquity, lies unto itself, for while it prohibits congress and the several states from making any law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, it gives to congress full power to control or prevent the establishment or the continuance that is, to prohibit-the free exercise by Catholics of their religion, under the flimsy pretence that it is a foreign hierarchy founded on anti-republican principles. The hierarchy is an essential part of our religion, and any denial of its freedom is the denial of the free exercise of his religion to every Catholic, and of the very principle of religious liberty itself, which the constitution guaranties.

We of course deny that the Catholic hierarchy is a foreign hierarchy or anti-republican, for what is Catholic is universal, and what is universal is never and nowhere a foreigner; but yet, because its supreme pontiff does not reside personally in America, and its power does not emanate from the Ameri