in which I have shown myself intolerant. Nor am I aware that in matters which are mine, and of which I have the disposal, I have been thus far in my life remarkable for my rigidness, or want of liberality. The tendency to push matters to extremes has never been one of my besetting sins, and I have always been ready to accept any compromise that seemed expedient, if it involved no compromise of principle or dereliction from the truth. But I confess I am not and never was one of those who could say, "Good Lord," and "Good Devil," not knowing into whose hands I might fall. As to ultra Catholicity, I do not understand it. You might as well call a man ultra orthodox, as if one could be orthodox, and at the same time more or less than orthodox. Orthodoxy is a definite quantity, and one has it, or has it not. It is not a creation of mine, nor of yours, and all that either of us has to do is to accept it as prescribed to us by the Church. You can either hold it or not hold it, but you cannot both hold it and not hold it at the same time. You are bound to go as far as your religion requires you to go, or you sin by defect; and if you go beyond what it permits, you sin by excess. The medium is not something arbitrary, left to your will and caprice or to mine; it is determined by the truth itself. If I go beyond the truth, I certainly go too far, and you, if you go not as far as the truth, go not far enough. As you concede that I do not go beyond Catholic truth itself, it strikes me that, instead of charging me with the sin of ultraism, you would do much better to humble yourself and do penance for your short-comings.

F. All this looks plausible, I grant, and yet I see no need of being so very strict. There is no need of exaggeration.

B. All exaggeration is wrong, and to be condemned; but as long as one is within the bounds of truth, I do not see how he can be guilty of exaggeration. Then I do not understand what you mean when you say that there is no need of being so very strict. I must be as strict as truth and virtue, or I fall into error and sin. You doubtless remember that the early Christians were so very strict as to choose rather to undergo the most cruel tortures, to suffer death in its most frightful shapes, than to offer a single grain of incense to Jupiter or to the statues of Cæsar. Do you think they were foolish, ultra, more strict than their religion required them to be, and that they might, with credit to their religion, and without sin in themselves, have offered incense as the pagan magistrate commanded?

M. That was all very well in the Martyrs, and we honor them for it; but what your young friends contend is, that it is not necessary to place ourselves in opposition to our age, and to shut ourselves out from all communion with our kind, because they do not happen to be of our way of thinking.

B. I was not aware before that Catholicity, the Catholic Church, the Immaculate Spouse of God, the Mother of all the faithful, is a way of thinking. "Blessed is the man who hath not walked in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stood in the way of sinners, nor sat in the chair of pestilence" (Ps. i. 1); but I do not remember that a blessing is any where pronounced upon those who follow the counsels of the ungodly, or hold communion with the workers of iniquity. "What participation hath justice with injustice? or what fellowship hath light with darkness? or what concord hath Christ with Belial? And what part hath the faithful with the unbeliever?" (2 Cor. vi. 14, 15.) In matters not of religion the faithful may, no doubt, have intercourse with such heretics as are tolerated, and they are certainly not required or permitted to oppose the age in any respect in which the age is right. But we cannot conform to the age wherein the age is wrong without sin, for that is precisely what is meant by sinful conformity to the world. That would bring us into bondage to the world, into bondage to sin, from which it is the design of our religion to free us. This setting up the age as a standard is by no means Catholic, and to fall in with the children of this age in their worship of it is as much idolatry as that which the early Christians resisted unto death.

F. You mistake our meaning. We do not advocate full conformity to the age; all we mean is, that, as the age manifestly tends to popular institutions, to the extension of popular liberty, it is an exaggeration of Catholic doctrine to contend that we should resist this tendency, fight against the people, and exert ourselves to uphold old abuses and despotic rulers.

B. My young friend certainly does not sin by an excess of clearness and precision in his ideas. If he would take a little pains to distribute things according to their categories, and to keep those things distinct in his reasoning which are distinct in their nature, I cannot believe that it would do him any serious harm. Catholic truth does not, of course, require us to uphold abuses or despotic rulers. In asserting things are abuses, and rulers despots, you assert your right as a Catholic to resist them, and, within the limits of prudence and charity, your duty to resist them. All that is clear enough. But before

you can pronounce a ruler a despot in the bad sense of the word, you must prove that he is not a legitimate ruler, that he is a usurper, a tyrant, an oppressor; and before you can call things abuses, you must know that they are not legitimate uses.

0. But it must always be right to favor the democratic tendency, to support popular institutions, and to struggle even unto death for liberty. What more glorious than to die fighting bravely for liberty, equality, fraternity?

B. Our company is too small, my young friend, to make it worth our while to get into the heroics. You can leave "Cambyses' vein" till you come before the crowd. It demands very little expenditure of thought to move a large audience; wind is the chief thing requisite for that. But in a small company, where each one present is cool, declamation is out of place. There it is necessary, if you would produce a favorable impression, to have clear and precise ideas, and to clothe them in appropriate language. When you address only a dozen, you speak to a dozen critics. When you address five thousand, all individuality is merged in the crowd, and you speak not even to one. Save your big words, liberty, equality, fraternity, till you have the mob before you. I heard those words, and screamed them in a tolerably strong voice, from the very top of my lungs, long before you were born. They were as popular in my boyhood as they are in yours, and they who screamed them then had as little love or understanding of them as have those who are loudest and foremost in vociferating them now. To tell you the honest truth, those big words are rather stale, and in very bad taste. You must wait till a new crop of fools is produced, before you can commend yourself by using them. Liberty, understood as the liberty of reason, of justice, of truth, is always a good, always to be defended, always to be asserted at all hazards; but understood as the liberty of passion, of man's inferior nature, it is any thing but good; it is only another name for slavery, for neither the individual nor the community is, or in the nature of things can be, free, save in governing and restraining the passions, as I never cease repeating to you, and as all young men, and, I am sorry to say, some old men, are always prone to forget. Liberty is in justice, and so is equality. Of each, justice is the measure. What is just is equal, and he who is subjected to no unjust restraint is free. And fraternity is only in the Catholic communion.

0. But you evade the question of democracy, and do not tell us whether it is or is not always right to fall in with the democratic tendency.

B. I have the example of the early Christians before me, and I have read the lives of many martyrs, who would not have been doomed to death for their religion, but who would have been permitted to live, and even have been loaded with honors, if they would only sacrifice to Cæsar, that is, to the state, or temporal authority, to which they owed civil allegiance. I am persuaded, nay, I know, they did well, and I would rather be crowned with them, than enjoy the pleasures of the senses for a season, and be sent to hell at last. I never sacrifice to the temporal authority. I obey it for God's sake, in all things it commands, which are not of sin, which are not incompatible with my love and duty to God. Beyond that, I have only one answer to give it, "We ought to obey God rather than men." Where democracy is the law I obey it, not because it is democracy, but because it is the law; and I hold that I am bound to sustain popular institutions, simply for the reason that I am bound, and to the extent and only to the extent that I am bound, to sustain the laws of my country. Where monarchy or aristocracy is the law, I say precisely the same of it, as I very plainly intimated in our former conversation.

0. But suppose the people in an undemocratic state, in a monarchy or an aristocracy, should come to the belief that their condition would be essentially improved by changing the existing form of government, and adopting the democratic, would they not have a right to do so, and ought not every one, as a friend to liberty, to wish them success, aid them in the attempt to do so, and sympathize with them if defeated.

B. That depends on the sense in which you understand the word people, and on the fact whether their belief is well or ill founded. If you mean by people the state, they have, undoubtedly, the right to make such changes in the form of their civil polity, not suicidal, as may seem to them good; but I am not bound to wish them success, or to aid them in effecting such changes, or to regret their defeat, if the changes are foolish, uncalled for, and likely to be productive only of evil. If you mean by people the people not as the state, but as subjects of the state, they have no such right, for they are, in that sense, bound to obey the law.

R. Then you deny popular sovereignty, - that the people are sovereign.

B. That, again, depends on the sense in which you take the word people. If by people you mean the state, I do not deny their sovereignty, under God; for I admit that the state is

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sovereign, and, within the limits of the moral law, may do what it pleases. If you mean by people, not the people as the state, but the people as subjects of the state, I deny their sovereignty; for it would be a contradiction in terms to assert it. They who are held to obey the law, in the sense in which they are held to obedience, are not free to abrogate or change the law. You cannot very logically assume democracy, and from your assumption conclude it.

F. Here is where I complain of you. You admit, indeed, that you are bound to uphold a democratic government where it is the law, but only because it is the law, not because it is the inherent right of every people.

B. That is to say, you complain of me, not because I refuse to obey Cæsar where he has legitimate authority to command, but because I will not sacrifice to him as God. Decidedly, my young Catholic friend, you would have been in little danger of martyrdom, had you lived even in the reign of Nero, Decius, Maximianus, or Diocletian.

F. You are too severe. We live in a democratic country, and you know that the great charge against our Church is, that she is hostile to democracy; and the interests of our Church herself require us to refute that charge, by showing that she is favorable to democracy.

B. The great charge against the Church in the time of the pagan Emperors was, that she was hostile to the heathen gods. Suppose some liberal-minded Catholic had risen up and said to his brethren, We live in an idolatrous country, and the great charge against our Church is, that she is hostile to idolatry; her interests therefore require us to refute this charge by burning incense to Cæsar. What would the old Saints have replied to him, do you think?

M. The cases are not parallel. Democracy is lawful, but idolatry is never lawful.

B. Precisely. Idolatry can never be tolerated, because it is never lawful; but we may conform to democracy because it is lawful. Certainly, where it is the law democracy is lawful, and there the Church commands us to sustain it; but where it is not the law, but monarchy or aristocracy is, there democracy is not lawful, and to undertake to show that there our Church favors it would be to attempt to show a falsehood, and to prove that our religion favors sedition and rebellion, and that by becoming Catholics we are emancipated from the civil law, no great recommendation of Catholicity to