schools, and bringing up their children in their own religion. Julian the Apostate, indeed, closed the imperial schools to Christian teachers and professors, and forbade Christians to read and study the pagan classics and philosophy; but even he respected the rights of parents, and never encouraged, so far as we know, the kidnapping of Christian children and educating them in paganism. That is a refinement which belongs to modern secularism, and never could have obtained even in pagan Rome; for society under pagan, as it ever has been under Christian Rome, was based on the sacredness and inviolability of the rights of the family, or of parental authority.

The progressive ideas so-called of the age have reversed the order asserted by both pagan and Christian tradition. The state takes the first place, the family is resolved into individuals, and the rights of God are rejected as a relic of effete superstition. No religion is allowed that claims to bind the conscience of the state; the family holds from civil society, and the child belongs to the state. Neither God nor the parent has any right to the child, except as a concession from the civil authority. This excludes all right of the parent, and all right of the church, as representing the rights of God, to interfere with the education of the child. The state is the supreme owner of the child, and may take the child by force from the parents, and, if a Catholic child, from the church, and send it to what school it pleases, and bring it up in what religion or no-religion it chooses. This is called civil and religious liberty, that is, the liberation of the state from religion, from all law above itself, or which it does not create and enjoin. It is very much as somebody sung of the proclamation of quiet in Warsaw, when the Russians had suppressed the Polish insurrection in 1831: "They make a solitude, and call it peace." It denies all authority, and calls it liberty.

Some zealous non-Catholic advocates of reformatories, houses of refuge, houses of juvenile delinquents, &c., in their congresses, I am informed, proposed to urge upon the civil authorities to take forcibly the unoffending children of poor and vicious parents not likely to bring them up properly, even against the assent of their parents, and to place them in state institutions, where they will be instructed. in the religion or no-religion of the persons selected to manage them; but in all cases, except when they are sent to institutions under Catholic control, they are likely, as ex

perience proves, to grow up worse members of society than they would have done had they not been taken from their parents. Non-Catholic reformatory institutions, whether state or sectarian, are never successful reformers either of the young or the old, of individuals or of society, in morals or politics. The intention of non-Catholic reformers may be good, their sentiments benevolent, and their liberality large, but their institutions seem always to lack the blessing of God, and their subjects, when they come out, are, as a rule, covetous and dishonest, infidels or fanatics, without any true or fixed principles. Then it is a great mistake to suppose that the class from which these are taken, is the most dangerous class in our cities. Drunkenness is a vice and a sin, but it is not confined to the lower class, nor is it more hurtful to the soul, or destructive to society, than pride and covetousness. There is not less virtue in the so-called lower classes than in the so-called upper classes; and the children of those we call the poor and vicious, are not worse brought up than the children of the rich and fashionable. The really alarming feature of our society is the constant growth of corruption and wickedness, of vice and crime, in high places. The extravagance of shoddy and petroleum, the frauds of bank presidents, cashiers, and tellers, of railroad directors and managers, the failure of banks, especially of savings banks, to say nothing of the corruptions in congress, state legislatures, and municipal governments, are a thousand times more threatening to the state, to society, than intemperance, thieving, robbery, and murder, so appall ing among what are called "the dangerous classes" of our cities and towns.

If we make the state supreme in morals and education, nothing is to be said against taking away the children whose parents, whether rich or poor, educated or uneducated, fashionable or unfashionable, seem to the police to be incompetent to bring up their children in virtuous habits, and sending them to a protectory or a house of refuge; but if we accept the rule given by Christian tradition, we can send none without the consent of their parents, who have not committed some offence punishable by law, nor even then send them, without the same consent, to institutions in which ample provision is not made for their being trained in the religion of their parents. But we are insisting on rights which, we have said, are no longer recognized, except by Catholics. The modern spirit absorbs all rights in the

rights of the state. It secularizes all rights, in order tosecularize all education, and aims to secularize all education in order to get rid of all religion that does not hold from the state, or, as we Americans say, from the peo-ple. Its design, with the leaders of public opinion, is to get rid of religion and train up children and youth in pure secularism, only another name for atheism; for what else is the assertion of the supremacy of the state, of the secular, or of the human order, but the denial of God; since, to deny the supreme dominion of God, or the supreme dominion of "the Word made flesh," is as much atheism as the deniai of the being of God? The establishment in England makes a feeble stand against secularism, but ineffectually; because it itself holds from the secular, the queen, lords, and commons, and has itself only a secular authority. The conservative Protestant party in Prussia oppose the complete secularization of education; but ineffectually, for the same reason. The Evangelical church of Prussia is a creature of the state, created by Frederic William III., and depends on the crown for its very existence; and it has on its own principles no ground on which it can make a logical stand against the destructive policy of Bismarck.

In our own country the demand is for unsectarian education, which means, on the one hand, a purely secular education, and on the other, an anti-Catholic and decidedly Protestant education, even for the children of Catholics. Governor Dix, in his message to the legislature of New York, recommends the discontinuance of all appropriations from the public funds for the aid or support of sectarian schools, or any other than state institutions. This looks fair enough on its face, but it is really directed against Catholics, and Catholics alone; because all educational, correctional, and eleemosynary establishments, under the immediate control of the state and supported by it, are just as much sectarian institutions as those placed avowedly under the control of some particular Protestant sect, because the American public, when not purely secular, is unmistakably sectarian, that is, Protestant. The public schools are either godless or sectarian, though controlled by no one particular Frotestant sect. They are not schools that Catholics, though taxed for their support, can use, unless willing to expose their children to the loss of their Catholic faith and morals; because they teach things the Catholic Church condemns, and fail to teach, or to permit us to teach, in them what she requires all her children to be taught.

The state is free to make provision for the education of all the children in the land or not, as it sees proper: so much is within its province, as supreme in temporals; but it has no right to tax the whole people, or use funds belonging to the whole people, to establish and sustain schools which only part, though by far the larger part, of the people, can use with a good conscience. If it acknowledges the law of justice, it must respect the conscience of the minority, as well as the conscience of the majority; and then, if it decides to make provision at the public expense for the education of all the children within its territory, it must provide schools for the minority as well as for the majority. The majority, including secularists and Protestants of all denominations, are, it would seem, satisfied with the system as it is; let them have it; nobody wishes to interfere with them; but as the Catholic minority are deprived of their rights by it, the state should divide the public schools, and give Catholics their proportion, to be, in all that concerns the selection of instructors, the education given, discipline maintained, under their exclusive control and management; which means, we grant, under the control of the Catholic pastors, who represent for Catholics the rights of God, which include, eminenter, the rights both of parents and society, since he is sole first cause, and causa causarum. This would only place the Catholic minority, as to the rights of conscience, equally sacred and inviolable for all before the state, on the same footing with the majority. The secularists and Protestants would have their consciences or no-consciences respected; and the rights of God and of parents, so far as regards the Catholic minority, would be acknowledged without lesion to the rights of the state or of society.

But this, though just and equal, would not be satisfactory to the secularists and the majority of Protestants, for it would deprive them of their strongest reason for supporting the system of what they call non-sectarian schools; that is, schools from which all positive or concrete religion is excluded. The secularists support the system, because they would get rid of all religion, obliterate from the minds and hearts of the people all traces of Christian tradition, or, in their own language. "superstition;" the Protestants maintain the system, because they hold it to be anti-Catholic, the most effectual means that can be adopted to detach the children of Catholic parents from the Catholic faith and

worship, and to prevent the church from gaining a permanent footing in this country, and from extending her influence over any considerable portion of the native-born American people. The division of the public schools, and the assignment to Catholics of their pro rata portion, would operate to the defeat of the cherished plans and purposes of both sections of the non-Catholic majority; and having the power, we may be sure that they will never consent to the division. That it would be just, and is demanded by the equal rights on which our republic is founded, and which it boasts of maintaining, counts with them for nothing. Equality, in the vocabulary of the ruling majority, means. their superiority, and their right to have their will govern. Is not the supremacy of the majority, or that the majority must govern, asserted by the democratic principle? Is not the democratic principle asserted by the progressive spirit of the age? And does not Mr. Ward Beecher's Christian Union assure us that "the progressive spirit of the age is providential, divine, and that the pope in resisting it is as foolish as he would be, should he attempt to arrest and roll back the solar system"?

The majority of our non-Catholic countrymen, if free to follow their natural sense of justice, would, no doubt, give to us our portion of the public schools; but the people cannot act without their leaders, and, in the present case, their leaders are restrained by no considerations of right or justice. This is necessarily the case with secularists, whose only measure of right is might; which Lord Arundel of Wardour shows when applied to government, resolves itself into the rule of force, as was proved in the old French revolution, and has been proved again in the late Paris commune, and by the liberals in Italy, Spain, Germany, and wherever they have power. Their fixed purpose is to eliminate religion-to which belong all such ideas as right, justice, duty-from society, from the human mind, and from law and government; and whatever may be the instincts of the people, their liberal leaders will never favor or suffer them to favor, as far as they can control them, a measure whose direct tendency is to defeat that fixed purpose. When Catholics were few and weak in the country, and noapprehensions were felt that the church could ever become a power here, the liberals were willing to encourage and even favor them, as a sort of battering-ram against Protestantism, supposed by them to be the chief defence of religion against