ence I owe her, calls upon me to rally to her side, and to resist what she denounces as the tyranny and sacrilege of the civil power; and the civil power, by virtue of my allegiance to it, calls upon me to rally to its standard, and aid it in maintaining what it calls its rights against ecclesiastical usurpation. Here is a case of conscience. Which am I in conscience bound to obey? Now, when a Catholic has a case of conscience, to whom does he go, to whom is he bound to go, for its solution? To the minister of state, or to the priest of the Church? Are questions of conscience spiritual or temporal? Do they pertain to the temporal jurisdiction or to the spiritual?

F. To the spiritual, of course.

B. Very well. I go, then, with my case of conscience to my parish priest. He either cannot or will not solve it, or does not solve it to suit me; appeal may then be made to the bishop; and from the Bishop to the chair of St. Peter, to the Sovereign Pontiff, the ultimate appeal in all questions of the sort. The Pope will decide, because, by the very terms of the supposition, he, as the supreme Head and Ruler of the Church, under God, has already decided, that my duty is to obey the Church, and support her against the encroaching temporal authority. He had decided the case in the outset by commanding me to resist the temporal authority. In the case, as it goes up to him by appeal, you as a Catholic cannot deny his right to decide, and therefore his decision here binds me in conscience. But his right to decide on the appeal is only the right to declare what is the law in the case, the very right he exercised when he issued his command, and if I have no right in the one case to appeal from his decision, I have none in the other. As I have no right, as must be conceded, to appeal from the decision on appeal, I had none to appeal from his command in

the outset.

F. So it would seem, I grant.

B. Then the Church is herself the judge for all the faithful in the case, and it is hers to define her own powers, the extent of her jurisdiction, and, in thus defining her own jurisdiction, the extent of the spiritual order, to define the powers and extent of the temporal order. You began, my young friend, by putting the cart before the horse. You said you honored the Church in her place, and the clergy in their own sphere. You would have spoken more like a Christian, if you had said, I honor and obey the state in its own place, and I respect and obey the ministers of state so long as they keep within their own sphere;

but when they come out of it, and intermeddle with spiritual matters, I will neither honor nor obey them; for I must obey God rather than man.

M. I am no Catholic, but I have always maintained that a consistent Catholic must assert the independence and supremacy of the spiritual order, and, begging F's pardon, I must regard him either as insincere in his professions of temporal independence, and making them merely for Buncombe, or as wholly ignorant of the first principles of his religion, nay, of all religion, if religion. One may see what his principles lead to in the history of the German Protestant Churches, and of the Anglican Church, the handiwork of Henry the Eighth and his saintly daughter Elizabeth. One or the other order must be supreme; and if we shrink from claiming supremacy for the spiritual order, we must concede it to the temporal, and thus subject conscience to the civil magistrate, and convert the Church into a mere police establishment, and ministers of religion into a part of the constabulary force of the state. If religion is any thing at all but mere state craft, it is the supreme law, to which men in the temporal order, as well as in the spiritual, must conform.

R. But, if we allow religion to be supreme, and identify it with the Catholic faith and worship, what security have we that the Catholic Church will not abuse her power, and bring us into a hopeless spiritual bondage?

F. That is precisely the difficulty I foresaw, and I consequently claimed for myself and all men the right when it abused its powers to resist it?

G. All very well; but you as a Catholic can have no right to decide for yourself when she does or does not abuse her powers; for that would be private judgment, which your Church does not allow. You cannot allow the state to decide, for that would be the monstrous absurdity of raising the temporal order above the spiritual, against which our Puritan fathers so earnestly protested, and which gave rise to their dissent from the Anglican Establishment. I see no way of solving the difficulty but by rejecting all distinction between the two orders, or rather, by restricting the powers of the state to a very few matters, and recognizing no Church authority at all. I am a democrat in my politics, and a liberalist in my religion.

B. Of which you have more reason to be ashamed than to boast. You gain nothing, except the exchange of faith for unbelief or indifference, and order for anarchy. And then, what

you choose to allow or disallow alters nothing of what God has established. You can deny Christianity if you choose, but that does not make it false, or you wise in denying it; you can say there shall be no Church authority, but if God has established the Catholic Church with the authority she claims, what you say will not alter the fact, and though that authority may crush you, you will not be able to crush it. It is idle for men to talk as you do, as if they had the sovereign disposal of all things. Remember the world is not of your making, and that its government is not committed to your hands. God reigns and will reign, whether it suits you or not.

As to the difficulty you raise, it only demonstrates the folly of my very clever young friends. Never make impossible suppositions, or suppositions which are intrinsically absurd. The Church, if a human institution, may abuse her powers, and you can have no guaranty against her doing so ; but no Catholic concedes that she is a human institution, or attempts to defend her as such, unless he is a fool. The very supposition of the Church is the supposition that she is an institution specially created and protected by Almighty God to teach us what he commands us to believe and do, and his whole Divine nature is pledged that she shall do this infallibly. This pledge is guaranty enough, and there is no room to reserve to ourselves the right to resist her in case she should abuse her trust or get out of her place. She cannot abuse her trust, because God will not suffer her to do it. You deny the Catholicity you profess, if you maintain the contrary, or allow it to be supposable. F. But this is no answer to those not Catholics.

B. I have, at present, nothing to do with them, and I have no disposition to go out of my way to attempt to satisfy those who are incapable of being satisfied. I have no means of satisfying those who believe my Church a mere human institution, except by convincing them that she is not a human institution, but the very Church of God. I cannot expect, and I shall not try, to make her acceptable to those who it is assumed are to continue to be her enemies. I cannot make the same thing be and not be at the same time.

Your whole difficulty, however, grows out of the fact, that you mistake the division line between the spiritual order and the temporal. You include in the temporal order the whole moral law, or law of God, in so far as it is the measure of our secular life. Here is your fundamental error. No man, no body of men, no community, no state, no nation, has the right

to do wrong, and every one is bound to do right.

The meas

ure of right in all orders, and the sole measure of right, is the law of God, and to teach and judge of that law is a purely spiritual function, not a function of the temporal order, and therefore it belongs universally to the spiritual authority, and not at all to the temporal. I do not claim temporal jurisdiction for the Church, and she leaves the temporal order free in all that is purely temporal; but she does not recognize in it any spiritual competency, and therefore does not acknowledge its right to teach and judge of the law of God, that is, the moral law, in any sphere. Within the limits of that law the temporal order may do what it pleases, and the faithful are bound by their duty to God to obey it; but the acts of the temporal order which transgress those limits trench upon the spiritual order, and are therefore illegal; and if they require us to act in violation of the moral law, that is, the law of God, we are not only not bound, but even forbidden, to obey them; for we must obey God rather than men. The Church, as the keeper and expounder of that law, does not administer temporal affairs, but she does claim and possess the right to define the moral law which must govern them and the authorities administering them. She is, under God, and by his special appointment, the teacher and supreme judge of all morality, and therefore of the morality of seculars, and of their morality in secular affairs as well as in any others. Whatever pertains to morals comes, by its nature, within the jurisdiction of the spiritual order.

What you are to remember is, that you are to be moral, that is, to obey the law of God in all your acts, to whatever department they belong, and that the state, the civil or temporal order, has no competency as a moral teacher, has no authority at all to decide what the law of God does or does not command, even in regard to secular matters. It has no spiritual function whatever, and is bound to receive the law of God from the spiritual authority, and to take care and transgress no one of its precepts. Your error is in supposing that the temporal order is itself the teacher and judge of the law of God, in so far as that law extends to secular life. This is a monstrous error; for it completely sunders religion and morality, confines religion to the service of the temple, and subjects the whole moral order to the temporal authority, the very thing the enemies of religion are always attempting to do, and which I am sorry to find one who calls himself a Catholic ready to aid them to do.

50

ART. VI. LITERARY NOTICES AND CRITICISMS.

1.- Speech of Hon. Daniel Webster on Mr. Clay's Resolutions in the Senate of the United States, March 7, 1850. Washington: Gideon & Co. 1850. 8vo. pp. 64.

2. Slavery and the Union. A Lecture delivered in the Tabernacle, New York. By the Rev. J. W. CUMMINGS, D. D. New York Freeman's Journal, May 25, 1850.

3.

Review of Mr. Webster's Speech on Slavery. By WENDELL PHILLIPS. Boston: American A. S. Society. 1850.

4.- Letter of Hon. Horace Mann, M. C., to his Constituents. Boston Atlas, May 6, 1850.

a man abun

and is

We

MR. WENDELL PHILLIPS's Review of Mr. Webster's Speech we have not done ourselves the honor to read. Mr. Phillips is himself a man of very respectable talents and attainments, dantly able to distinguish himself without resorting to eccentricity of movement, or wild and savage fanaticism of conduct, therefore utterly inexcusable for taking the course he does. have introduced his pamphlet, published by the American Antislavery Society, solely as an occasion to assure that Society and its friends, that we make it a point of conscience never to read any of its publications, and to request it and them to spare themselves the trouble of sending us any Abolition publication whatever. We know already all we wish to know of the Abolitionists, and we should be sorry to be compelled to think more unfavorably of them than we now do. They are a class of persons who do not improve upon acquaintance, and we learned enough of them in former years to be certain that the less we know of them, the higher shall we esteem them.

Of the Hon. Horace Mann's Letter to his Constituents we have little to say. Mr. Mann is a member of Congress from the Eighth Congressional District of this Commonwealth; he bears at home the character of a philanthropist, and is said to have won some withered laurels in a controversy with the Boston schoolmasters a few years since, when he was Secretary of our Board of Education. He has some skill in the construction of sentences, is able to give passable lessons in orthography, and perhaps in the rudiments of English Grammar; but we have never understood that he was remarkable as a logician, a lawyer, or a statesman. He had some reputation as a Lyceum-lecturer, but we do not find that he has added to it by his speeches in Congress. He is a man we would not treat unkindly, nay, whom we would treat with great tenderness, and therefore we shall offer no comments on his Letter to his Constituents.