declared and applied by the infallible chief of the spiritual power, the church does not interfere with it, or censure its enactments or administration. The pope speaks only when that law is violated and the rights of God are usurped, and he speaks then, not by reason of the temporality, but by reason of the spirituality, and judges "not the fief, but the sin." At least, so says the great pontiff Innocent III., in his letter to Philip Augustus. Sin in all cases comes within the jurisdiction of the spiritual authority, and all enactments or acts of a sovereign prince or state, forbidden by the law of God, are sins, and therefore, as such, are cognizable by the pope. It is only for such acts, that is, sins against God, that the pope admonishes a sovereign, and, if need be, punishes him.

That the pope has, as vicar of Christ, what is called the deposing power, we hold to be indubitable; but the conditions of its exercise hardly exist in the present state of the world; and we do not see how the pope could exercise it, were he, as he is not, disposed to revive it. He could not

exercise it in a country like ours, for there is in such a country no one to depose. He might, indeed, lay the republic under an interdict, but that would only punish Catholics; non-Catholics would not heed it, or suffer any deprivation in consequence. The power can have practical effect only in a Catholic nation, where the prince professes, and is bound to profess and maintain, the Catholic religion to which the civil law is held to conform. For the pope to depose the heretical or infidel sovereign of an heretical or an infidel nation, deprive him of his dignity, and absolve his subjects from their allegiance, would avail nothing. Neither the sovereign nor his subjects would heed the papal deposition. The power can be exercised only in Catholic nations whose governments are Catholic and form constituent parts of Christendom; and, strictly speaking, there is no longer a Christendom, and there are now no Catholic states or governments. The pope deposed Elizabeth, the bastard daughter of Henry VIII., and absolved her subjects from their allegiance, because she was a member of the Catholic Church and had been crowned as a Catholic sovereign; but the English Catholics were more English than Catholic, and chose to fight for the queen who deprived them of every one of their rights and sent them to Tyburn to be hung, drawn, and quartered for their religion, rather than to join the pope in recovering their own freedom and that of their

religion. Yet the pope never absolves Catholics in heretical or infidel nations, under heretical or infidel princes, from their allegiance, for he never absolved them from their allegiance to the pagan Cæsars; he simply commands them not to do any thing the law of God forbids, and to submit without a murmur to the injustice they are obliged to suffer in consequence, and to look for their reward to their heavenly Father. No, you must bring back a state of things similar to that which existed in the middle ages, or the power in question must lie in abeyance.

The bishop of Cleveland calls upon the Catholics of hisdiocese to be united and to insist on their rights at the polls, and, as far as in their power, to defend them by their votes. Nothing is more just than that Catholics should do so, or than that they should refuse to vote for any man who will not pledge himself to use all his influence, if elected, against the law, for instance, which taxes Catholics for the support of schools which their church condenins, and to which they cannot, without violating their conscience, send their children. The state might as well tax them for the support of a religion they abhor. Such a law denies the freedom of religion, violates the equal rights of citizens before the state, and is manifestly unjust and unconstitutional. But whether we can do any thing to redress the wrong by our votes, is another question. Catholics outnumber any one of the sects in the Union, but they are a feeble minority as against all combined. If we enter as Catholic party into the elections, we can effect any thing only where parties are so equally divided that we hold the balance between them, and it becomes an object of importance with each to secure our votes. Such a state of parties exists at present in no state in the Union; and if it did, on political questions, the two leading parties would unite to oppose and defeat Catholics on the school question. The right reverend bishop will permit us to doubt the efficacy, at present, of the policy he recommends. The old party, founded by Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, and which had some respect for equal rights and religious liberty, although it had not much religion, is virtually defunct; and we know no party at present in the country that has in its principles or its measures the slightest regard for equal rights, or the faintest conception of what liberty in any proper sense of the word really means. It is useless to shut our eyes to this fact. We count for less in elections than we did a dozen years ago, when our numbers. were fewer.

The party now in power represents fairly enough the dominant tone and sentiment of the country, and is a decidedly anti-Catholic party. It is ruled by General Grant; and General Grant, without a spark of religion, and eaten up by nepotism, is ruled chiefly by the Methodists, the most unprincipled, unscrupulous, and bitterly anti-Catholic sect to which Protestantism has ever given birth. All the Evangelical sects, so called, are allied with it, and, so far as Catholics and Catholic rights are concerned, form with it but one body. The only sect in the country that to some extent stand aloof from the alliance are the Baptists, who have not absolutely forgotten the religious liberty they asserted when they were persecuted by the "Standing Order," or Congregationalists of New England. With all deference, then, we must say that we do not see any chance to obtain, through any possible political action, the rights guarantied to us in nearly every state in the Union. We are in fact politically null, and cannot help ourselves. It is enough to know that we, as Catholics, oppose a measure or policy, to fasten it on the country. Protestants will even make large sacrifices of their own possessions, out of hatred to Catholics and fear of the pope. Even Catholics, if elected to office, are less able to serve our interests than are fair-minded Protestants, for they are pretty sure, in the first place, to be liberal Catholics who place their politics before their religion; and, in the second place, if not, they are afraid, as well as unable, to defend boldly and energetically Catholic rights, because they do not represent Catholic constituencies, have been elected, not for their Catholicity, but in spite of it, and have an overwhelming and unsympathizing majority against them. We may be too faint-hearted, but we confess that we see little for us to do but to insist on our rights in the most energetic terms we can use, to study to keep our religion, as far as possible, out of the political arena, and to be careful to provoke no political contests in which parties will divide as Catholics and Protestants,-submit to the wrongs we are unable to redress, and wait patiently till, in God's own time, the people turn once more to the church, and beg and implore her to save them from themselves, from the anarchy and despotism to which in their blind folly they are hastening.

But, however this may be, there can be no question that, as the bishop says, the war raging is between the church and political atheism. We asserted and endeavored to show

it in the revolutionary epoch of 1848, and even at an earlier date; but we could make but a very few of our Catholic friends see it, and found still fewer of them willing to accept the line on which we proposed to fight out the battle. We saw then and we see now no ground on which we could or can successfully combat political atheism, but that of the supremacy of the spiritual order, and of the pope as its divinely constituted representative, or vicar of Christ, in the government of human affairs. So we assured those of our Catholic brethren who disapproved our course as imprudent, as too bold and hazardous, and as going too far. The opposition was too strong for us, layman as we were, to insist, and we withdrew from the fight. But we retained our conviction, and the syllabus and the definitions of the Council of the Vatican have only served to confirm it, and to give us the right and the courage to renew the fight on the line which our friends, not our enemies, induced us to suspend. Yet if we were right in the position we took up, the credit is due not to us, to our learning, ability, wisdom, or sagacity, but to the late bishop of Boston, of immortal memory, who was our instructor; and to the learned, able, and energetic priests who surrounded him, and who took unwearied pains to instruct us in the principles as well as the specific dogmas of the Catholic faith.

The germ of political atheism was already concealed in the four articles of the Gallican clergy, especially in the denial that the power of the keys extends to kings, save as simply private individuals. For this withdrew their crowns, their official conduct, and therefore, in principle, the whole civil authority, the state and all its acts, from the supervision and authority of the spiritual order, and therefore from the sovereignty of God; which is precisely what we understand by political atheism. The Gallican theory, always the theory of courts and courtiers, and in recent times of the larger portion of the lay community, whether professedly Catholic or non-Catholic, is based on the assumption of an original dualism, that the natural law and the revealed law are two distinct, coördinate, and mutually independent laws, founding two distinct and mutually independent orders. assumes that the state holds from the natural law, and is supreme in the natural order, therefore in all questions touching natural society and natural morality; and that the church holds from the revealed law, and is supreme only in matters appertaining to the revealed order, or the mysteries

It

and dogmas of faith, and the sacraments and their administration. But as that which is natural is prior to that which is spiritual, the state is prior to the church, it defines for itself and for her the extent and limits of each, and therefore determines the sphere of the church's free and independent action-and, in practice, restricts her sphere to another world and forbids her to meddle with the affairs of this world, as we see in the acts of Cavour and his successors in the Italian government. The law of nature being understood to be independent of the revealed law, it required very little refinement to assert, first in practice and then in theory, that the state, holding under it, is independent of the spiritual order, then not subject to the dominion of Christ, and therefore not subject to the dominion of God: which is downright political atheism.

Concede the Gallican dualism, as we were required to do, and we know no method by which political atheism can be logically refuted. But the assumption of that dualism is the virtual denial of Christianity, not less so than the assumption of the Magian and Manichean dualism, revived in Calvinism, which makes evil positive, and therefore must assign it a positive principle opposed to the principle of good. The natural law and the revealed are distinguished, we grant, yet not as two separate and mutually independent laws, but as two parts or sections of one and the same divine law; and hence we find in the syllabus, as already intimated, that the total separation of church and state, and their mutual independence as coördinate powers, is condemned, and can be held by no Catholic. The natural law, as far as it goes, is as strictly and as truly the law of God as is the revealed law, which if called the new law, it is only in relation to the Mosaic law, but is really older than that law, as St. Paul to the Galatians assures us, for it was the law from the beginning, in reference to which man was originally created. The natural law is called natural, not because enjoined by nature and not immediately by God himself, for nature being creature and dependent cannot legislate, except by a figure of speech; but because it includes those prescriptions of the universal law of God which are cognizable by natural reason. The works of God form a dialectic whole, and the natural law or the moral law is only the initial section of the one divine law, which finds its fulfilment in regeneration and glorification, as we showed in our article on Synthetic Theology.* We shall not find this

*Vol. III., pp. 536 et seq.