THE CATHOLIC OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
The Catholic, like the church, is one and the same in all ages and all times. As she came forth from the hands of her Architect finished, complete, and perfect in every particular of solid structure and exquisite adornment, in like manner the individual member, if he be faithful to her tradition, practice, and direction, is, with the allowance of human infirmity, perfect and complete in one age as well as another, without regard to local circumstances of civil government, education, exterior refinement, occupation, complexion, or race.
Religion in its interior nature and intention has reference to the life to come. The life to come is the complement of the present; as the religion of the Catholic Church is perfect, the future life which grows from the seeds planted in time must necessarily be absolute perfection and unending satisfaction. The temporal fruit must likewise become true material well-being, if its growth and perfection be not interrupted by adventitious causes.
The assertion of the absolute perfection of the Catholic religion, with reference to time as well as eternity, is made with precisely the same significance with which we assert the perfection of God. It is made simply and boldly, without hesitation, qualification, or reserve, and it will be the basis of our argument, and the starting-place for the views and opinions we propose to put forth. It is intended for Catholic eyes. The defence of the proposition is no part of our concern.
When they who deny or dispute it shall have vanquished a single one of the great champions of our faith from Athanasius to Archbishop Kenrick, from Cyril of Alexandria to Archbishop Spaulding of Baltimore, picked up the glove which Dr. Brownson has flung down upon the field of controversy, replied to Wiseman, refuted Manning, and silenced Newman, it will be time enough for us to begin to consider the measures necessary for making good the position we have chosen.
Placing ourselves distinctly upon the proposition, we invite attention to certain relations which the Catholic of to-day holds toward his race, his country, his age, and the particular order and condition denominated progress, and the spirit of the nineteenth century.
It becomes necessary under these aspects to consider him as a dutiful subject of the head of the church, and a loyal citizen of an independent state; as a freeman, and one bound by supreme authority; as recognizing and obeying reason, and, in the free exercise of that royal faculty of the soul, surrendering certain prerogatives of private judgment to infallibility; as subject and at the same time sovereign, both obeying and commanding; submissive to the laws and acknowledging the supremacy of a higher law, which he is prepared to vindicate with property, liberty, and life, if the two come in conflict upon any vital point in which he or the church is concerned, in the nineteenth century, precisely as he did in the first, the second, or the third century.
The most obvious, interesting, and important view of the Catholic in his relations to the century is that of voter. Suffrage, or the privilege of voting for our rulers, and indirectly making the laws by which we are to be governed, is not a natural right. It is an acquired privilege, and only becomes a right when conveyed and acknowledged by competent authority. Once obtained, it cannot be abrogated, and can only be lost by revolution, the fruit of gross political misconduct, or by voluntary neglect and disuse.
The right of suffrage bestows special prerogatives upon its possessors. It superadds legislative and magisterial functions to the obligations of private obedience; it communicates grace and dignity to the manly character, imposes definite and heavy responsibilities upon each individual, requires the humblest citizen to participate in the dignity of the highest offices, and holds the most exalted personages to a distinct accountability to the people. It permits every Catholic to share actively in the plans, policy, and beneficent enterprises of the church, and enables him in some sense to take part in the divine government of the universe, physical and moral.
It is a specific and precious gift bestowed on Catholics in this age and country, and we are compelled to stand in the full blaze of the light of the nineteenth century, which is rolling out its illuminated scroll before our dazzled eyes and almost bewildered understandings, charged with the manifold blessings or curses which must flow from the use or abuse of this momentous, one might almost say holy and hierarchical function.
An offer and promise are as distinctly made to the Catholics of this age as they were to the chosen people when released from the Egyptian bondage. A land of promise, a land flowing with milk and honey, is spread out before them, and offered for their acceptance.
The means placed at their disposal for securing this rich possession are not the sword, or wars of extermination waged against the enemies of their religion, but instead, the mild and peaceful influence of the ballot, directed by instructed Catholic conscience and enlightened Catholic intelligence.
A careful consideration of this subject is particularly important at the present epoch and century.
The nineteenth century is interesting to us because it is ours; because it is the expression and exponent of much that has been dark and obscure in the past, because it is the most fruitful and bountiful in material resources and advantages of any of which we possess authentic knowledge, because it shines glorious amidst the centuries by its own intrinsic light, and by the light derived from modern discoveries, investigations, and interpretations thrown back upon the past, and by it reflected in turn upon the present. It is especially important to us as Catholics, inasmuch as it seems to be a critical era in the religious history of the human race, and to have been selected by Providence as a new point of departure in many important particulars of his dealings with mankind.
The radical questions of the relations between the supernatural and the natural, faith and reason, Rome and the world, justice and injustice; between the material and transitory, and the immaterial and permanent; between that which is unchangeable in principle and those things which are progressive in action; between church and state, God and man, are sharply defined, boldly stated, pushed to their ultimate, logical, and practical extremes, and presented with all the arguments, inducements, promises, and threatenings of the most learned and eloquent advocates of the opposing causes to each individual Catholic for his election.
The issue is as distinctly placed before his mind as it was in the case of our first parents in Eden, of Europe in the religious revolution of the sixteenth century, of England in the days of Henry VIII. and his anti-Catholic successors.
It is a question of instant and pressing importance, which demands an immediate and definite answer. It must be met and answered by the Catholic of to-day, since to him are committed the obligation and business of perpetuating and regenerating society, purifying legislation, enforcing the administration of the laws, and setting an example of private and public virtue, justice, moderation, and forbearance. He has been furnished with an omnipotent weapon with which to accomplish this great work, and he is provided with an unerring guide to direct him in the administration of these important trusts. We do not hesitate to affirm that in performing our duties as citizens, electors, and public officers, we should always and under all circumstances act simply as Catholics; that we should be governed and directed by the immutable principles of our religion, and should take dogmatic faith and the conclusions drawn from it, as expressed and defined in Catholic philosophy, theology, and morality, as the only rule of our private, public, and political conduct. Those things which are condemned by Catholic justice, we should condemn; those things which are affirmed, we should affirm.
There can be no circumstance, condition, or relation in which the Catholic is left without his guide, and there is absolutely no excuse if he fail in the performance of this duty, upon which rests the future prosperity of civilized society.
While insisting on the dignity and obligations of suffrage, it may perhaps be necessary to observe that the church prescribes no specific form of government. Government itself is required under some form, for the reason that we are created and fulfil our allotted destiny under the operation of an organic law which we have the power, and under certain circumstances the disposition, to violate.
We have no power to annul or abrogate the organic law, and its violation in virtue of its own nature, and our responsibility entails specific penalties in time, and, as it is eternal in its origin and action, eternity. The superiority of the human race, and the merit and honor of obedience, reside in the power of choice, and the ability which we possess to decide our temporal and eternal destiny, and renew and perfect, or reject and obliterate our relations with the Creator. A happy, prosperous, and peaceful temporal condition is not guaranteed, nor is it essential to true well-being but these most desirable concomitants of earthly existence necessarily accompany and flow from the enforcement of the requirements of the organic law upon our own conduct and that of others less disposed to obey them.
All human government rests upon this basis, whether of patriarch, prophet, priest, king, chieftain, pope, bishop, emperor, or people in organized assembly.
The principle underlying every form of government is that of command and obedience, because the government of the universe is one of law. Both command and obedience are of the same nature and alike honorable, because there can be but one source of law, and that is God; and he in his humanity obeyed the laws of his own creation in his divinity, and personally fulfilled the obligations of his own imposition. Who is he who despises obedience, when the Son of Man became obedient to the death of the cross?
All legislation in harmony with the organic law is theocratic and divine; all in violation or opposition, precisely in the measure and degree of departure, unjust, cruel, tyrannical, false, vain, unstable, and weak, and not entitled to respect or obedience.
Since justice and our honor and dignity require that we should obey God, and not man, we are compelled by every reasonable motive to ascertain his will. He does not communicate personally and orally with creatures.
Unless we have the means of ascertaining with certainty what his wishes are on a given subject, whether of the private practice of virtue or the administration of a public duty, we are left to the direction of opinions, interests, and passions more or less superficially instructed and enlightened, and tend inevitably toward barbarism, despotism, and social and political disorganization. The Catholic Church is the medium and channel through which the will of God is expressed. The chain of communication, composed of the triple strand of revelation, inspiration, and faith, stretches underneath the billows of eternity to the shore of time, from the throne of God to the chair of Peter. The finger of the pope, like the needle in the compass, invariably points to the pole of eternal truth, and the mind of the sovereign pontiff is as certain to reflect the mind and will of God as the mirror at one end of a submarine cable to indicate the electric signal made at the other.
The will of God is expressed as plainly through the church as it was through Moses and the tables of the law. It is distinct, definite, intelligible, and precise, and we are bound to execute the will thus expressed, and act in the light of the intelligence thus supplied.
All legislation which has stood the test of time has flowed from the divinely-inspired fountain of natural justice, illuminated by her wisdom, corrected by her experience, interpreted by her theology and philosophy. All tyranny, injustice, force, cruelty, violence, and oppression follow as the result of violation of the organic law as interpreted by the church, or from systems of legislation in opposition to, or abrogation of, her eternal principles.
While immunity from temporal suffering is nowhere promised, it is nevertheless true that the greater portion of evils and sorrows are capable of prevention or relief.
Wealth can be deprived of its satiety, poverty of its sting, labor of its pain, ease of its slothfulness, learning of its pride, power of its arrogance, ignorance of its stupidity.
But though we expect no natural Utopia or earthly paradise, we are no less bound to oppose and correct vices, sorrows, evils, dangers, and oppressions, as they spring, ever fierce and relentless, with their countless heads, whether personal, social, national, or legislative.
The Catholic armed with his vote becomes the champion of faith, law, order, social and political morality, and Christian civilization, no less—in fact, a greater degree, for our present enemies are more dangerous—than his ancestor who hung a wallet over his leathern jerkin, and, shouldering his halberd, followed the lord of the manor to Palestine; than he who aided the Catholic Ferdinand and Isabella to drive the Moor from the soil of Christian Spain, or, under John Sobieski, rolled back the tide of Mohammedan invasion from the European shores of the Mediterranean.
He goes forth furnished with this weapon, which, faithfully and honorably employed, must become invincible, arrest the swollen current of corruption, crime, and lawlessness which threatens to sweep away religion, morality, and liberty, insure the preëminence of law, order, and republican institutions, preserve and perfect the results of material and natural science, put an end to poverty in its abject and hopeless forms, and banish suffering from unrelieved want, and develop and complete a system of jurisprudence which shall sustain what the world has not yet seen, a pure republic of equal rights, exact justice, and assured temporal prosperity, presided over, influenced, and informed by true religion.
The great and undeniably wonderful and valuable fruits of human genius and materialistic science, may be utilized to meet the ends of ideal justice, and true individual and national prosperity and happiness.
With the means of instant intelligent communication and rapid transportation, it is not an impossibility to hope that the head of the church may again become the acknowledged head of the reunited family of Christian nations; the arbiter and judge between princes and peoples, between government and government, the exponent of the supreme justice and highest law, in all important questions affecting the rights, the interests, and the welfare of communities and individuals.
Under such a system, force would give place to reason; the nations would learn war no more, and a general disarmament could be safely imposed. The door of the temple of the demon god of war, which has stood open since Cain imbrued his fratricidal hands in the blood of Abel, would be closed for ever.
"Yea, truth and justice then,
Will down return to men,
Orbed in a rainbow; and, like glories wearing,
Mercy will sit between,
Throned in celestial sheen,
With radiant feet the tissued clouds down-steering,
And heaven, as at some festival,
Will open wide the gates of her high palace hall."
Although we are far from expecting a result grand, glorious, and wonderful, realizing in the highest degree the promise made to the human race if faithful to the object of their creation, still we do not hesitate to assert that it is within the power of the ballot, wielded by Catholic hands and directed by Catholic conscience, to accomplish as much and more.
It is no more than the church has a right to expect from her subjects; it is no more than they owe her and themselves; it would be a triumph worthy of the nineteenth century, and worthy of a fallen race deemed worthy to be redeemed by the blood of a God.
The two great questions of marriage and education present themselves in a discussion of the relations which the Catholic sustains toward civil society, as elements of prime and indispensable importance. There can be no permanent Christian society, no civilized and enduring government, which are not perpetuated by Catholic marriage, elevated, instructed, and disciplined by Catholic education. The great civilizations which have arisen and flourished independently, vitalized by the tradition of primitive revelation, are wanting or have forfeited the characteristics of true civilization. Many have perished; others have reached their term, and the hour of their destruction is at hand. The ancient and most remarkable social, civil, and religious polity of India is withering under the remorseless touch of English rule, and China is destined to succumb to steam, machinery, railroads, and sewing-machines.
Nothing but the pure gold of Catholicity can withstand the material flame which burns brightest and hottest in the nineteenth century, and it may only survive stripped of every earthly and human quality, attribute, and advantage.
It is not in our power at this time to follow the line of reflection suggested by the great unchristian and anti-christian civilizations, the Indian, the Persian, the Chinese, and the Mohammedan; but we must confine ourselves to the proposition which their history, brilliant, startling, and splendid though it be, and, to superficial human views, does not in any degree invalidate, that true civilization rests for its foundation upon Catholic marriage and Catholic education.
In contradistinction from suffrage, which is an acquired privilege, marriage is a natural right. Its regulation and control belong exclusively to the church, and are particularly her care and prerogative under the supernatural order.
Marriage is the sacrament of nature, as well as one of grace, and the church insists upon her rightful control, because she depends upon this sacrament not only for perpetuity on earth, but for her eternal representation. She regulates the conditions of marriage and witnesses the contract in whose fulfilment she has such a vital interest, and she becomes the arbiter between the contracting parties in the subsequent stages of their career. She claims its offspring at their birth, and immediately impresses upon them the seal of her proprietorship in baptism; she accompanies them throughout their lives, and dismisses them with unction and benediction; she follows them into the unseen world, and does not relax her grasp till they attain their fruition and become in turn protectors and benefactors of the mother who has given them both natural and supernatural birth. Marriage is the crystal fountain on earth whence flows the perennial living stream which fertilizes and makes glad the plains of heaven.
The Catholic view, or Christian idea of marriage, implies by necessity the Catholic view of all the relations and obligations growing out of it: the education of the young, the custody of foundlings and orphans, and all measures of correction and reformation applicable to youthful offenders and disturbers of the peace of society.
The same view would consign to her care the permanent infants of society, the idiotic, those defective in important organs or senses, the insane, the criminal, the sick poor, and the helpless and wretched of every class. The church is capable, through her orders and congregations of men and women, of undertaking these trusts. There is in this work occupation for all who have not definite vocations, and for the aid and assistance of those who have. It is a species of labor which has never been efficiently and completely performed, and can only be accomplished by those who undertake it under the direction of religion from the motive of heroic and supernatural charity. No compensation, no hope of human reward or praise, can procure such service, tenderness, and succor as that which the unpaid and nameless religious bestows upon the poor and nameless cast-away, for the sake of the humanity of Christ.
The function of education is most closely connected with the authority claimed and exercised over marriage. The custodian of the tree has certainly the right to the fruit of the tree, and to protect it from wayfarers and robbers.
The control and prevention of poverty is an example of the profound science of political economy which is manifested by the church. No state can flourish where hopeless poverty becomes an institution.
A godless system of education, or, what is the same thing, an uncatholic system, is the more refined and elegant but not less certain method of modern times of offering our children to Moloch, and causing our sons to pass through the fire. The right which the church exerts over education does not in any manner impair or contravene the legitimate authority of parents; but, on the contrary, strengthens and supports it, since it is an assertion of the principle of authority and the final obligations toward God due from both parents and children. It asserts the rights of parents and the right which children have to Christian education. Every human creature born into the world has the inalienable right of knowing and obeying the truth, and seeking to attain its own eternal happiness.
While parents have rights over their children, children, in turn, have rights as respects their parents, and the chief of these is Christian education.
The church asserts and defends these principles, and she flatly contradicts the assumption on the part of the state of the prerogative of education, and determinedly opposes the effort to bring up the youth of the country for purely secular and temporal purposes. The state is in its nature godless and material, and, in accordance with its nature, seeks only material ends. No state or nation as such has a supernatural destiny; its rewards and punishments are temporary and finite, and its views, policy, and conduct short-sighted, corrupt, and selfish. While the state has rights, she has them only in virtue and by permission of the superior authority, and that authority can only be expressed through the church, that is, through the organic law infallibly announced and unchangeably asserted, regardless of temporal consequences. The church yields, however, to temporal conditions as far as she can without departing from her organic principle. She resembles a mighty tree tossed by the winds, and apparently yielding to the tempest from whatever quarter it comes, but never giving up its roots, firmly fixed in the ground, and stretching their fibres far out under the surface of things. If she could be moved from her position, torn up by the roots, rifted from her organic basis on the rock of Peter, she would cease to be the church, become a human and fallible institution, and entitled to no more consideration than any other human organization or voluntary society. The hostile and opposing forces recognize distinctly the value and importance to us of the two fundamental institutions, marriage and education. Their efforts are particularly directed at the present time, and in this country, to corrupt and undermine the one and usurp complete control over the other. The attitude of the church on these questions is the cause of nearly all the opposition she encounters, of the secret and open attacks she suffers, and of most of the great persecutions she has experienced. She is attacked in respect to marriage by sensuality, and in regard to education by the arrogance of the state, and the jealousy which human power always manifests of the divine authority.
The order, regularity, charity, and chastity required in marriage by the church—and of which she is the emblem—are repudiated by the world.
This repudiation is manifested by sensuality in its protean forms, from platonic love and sentimental and religious melancholy, all through the descending scale of folly, vice, and crime to the lowest depths, whither the mind refuses to follow and where demons veil their faces, and by legislation the result of this opposition, such as is expressed in the laxity of divorce laws, and a public sentiment which sanctions and countenances divorce and the marriage of divorced parties. It is more or less boldly or covertly expressed in almost the whole range of anti-catholic and uncatholic literature, and in the increasing license of conversation, manners, and amusements. Marriage has lost its dignity and sanctity by being divested of its sacramental character, and its manifest and natural duties and obligations are shunned, despised, and disregarded by a large proportion of those living in outward regard for decorum and morality. The spirit of the nineteenth century, unchastened by Catholicity, by whatever sounding title it may be called—progress, liberty, emancipation of the intellect, dignity of the race, independence of science—is a spirit of gross, cruel, and irrational sensuality, which tends directly and inevitably toward ignorance, bondage, anarchy, and barbarism, and consequent stupidity.
Stupidity may, perhaps, be considered the lowest hell of a creature originally constituted active and intellectual.
It is directly against these elements, whose consequences she distinctly foresees, that the church opposes her laws of marriage, and the absolute supernatural chastity of her priests and religious.
It is not that she forbids marriage, as she is sometimes accused, that she offers to certain persons the privilege of electing a superior state and beginning on earth the life of heaven, but in order to provide herself with angels and ministers of grace to do her will, accomplish her work, perform her innumerable acts of spiritual and corporeal mercy, and be literally the godfathers and godmothers to the orphaned human race, while they obtain for themselves and others countless riches of merit. The spirit which we reprobate substitutes lust for love, philanthropy for charity. By subtracting charity from marriage, it virtually divorces the married, and leads directly to the destruction of the species. The children whom it permits to survive it educates for material and temporal objects alone, and the most noble destiny it has to offer is death on the field of battle; its highest reward, a short-lived, temporal honor, and a brief posthumous reputation. The pursuits of honor, of science, literature and art, are noble, and in some degree satisfying. They are, when true and real, Catholic in their nature, and the growth of Catholic soil. Whenever—as in pre-Christian times—they become detached from original revelation, or, in modern, divorced from or hostile to Catholic inspiration, they incline toward cruelty, false science or incomplete science, and in literature and art to decay. The inevitable tendency of incomplete science, that is, imperfect from a radical defect, like a defective formula in mathematics, is to error, obscurity, and confusion. The absence of the supernatural element is the radical defect in all uncatholic natural and metaphysical science; and every superstructure erected upon it, however splendid in appearance, is built upon the sand.
The reason why civil marriage, state religion and education, natural society, and material science do not become more rapidly corrupt, and manifest more speedily their inherent defects, is on account of the vast amount of latent Catholicity which they retain, and without which they could not survive a single day.
It is the tendency of the natural to consume the supernatural, in its efforts to attain its destiny, and, unless fed by new infusions of the divine element, to sink lower and lower toward the abyss.
It is the function of the supernatural society, that is, the church through her ministry and sacraments, to furnish continual supplies of this divine element, to antagonize the decomposition which followed close upon the steps of the terrible twin brethren, sin and death, when they entered the world; renew the almost exhausted life of the soul, and enable it to rise higher and higher, till it is absorbed once more into the source of life eternal, from whence it sprang.
The more respectable and conservative of the uncatholic institutions, which retain most of the latent Catholicity not yet expended in three centuries of separation from the parent fountain, preserve many Catholic ideas, customs, and forms of speech and action.
Such publications as the New-Englander, the Princeton, Mercersburg, and North British Reviews, advocate to a great extent the Christian doctrines of marriage and education, and the superiority of religion in all temporal and secular affairs, and deprecate, without the power to remedy or arrest, the evils which they acknowledge to exist.
The advanced portion of the opposing forces, they who have expended their latent Catholicity, denied the faith and impugned the truth, and sunk to the lowest level compatible with life, do not seek to defend their position by any hollow appeals to religion or conscience, but boldly deny all authority excepting their own depraved wills.
Red-republicanism, Fourierism, communism, free love, Mormonism, the Oneida community, the false sciences of mesmerism and phrenology, spiritism and sentimental philanthropy, are exemplary expressions of the forms which sensuality and the denial of authority assume in their retrograde metamorphoses.
The woman's rights movement is the most subtle, dangerous, and treacherous of the later manifestations of the evil spirit of the nineteenth century.
It is more threatening to the public peace than the abolition agitation was at its commencement, and is fostered and fomented by the same or kindred influences, and under some one or other of its forms and phases comprehends every falsehood, error, delusion, and heresy, from the original lie uttered in Eden to the last invented and promulgated by the Satanic press. It has a certain, irresistible tendency to vitiate suffrage, degrade legislation, disturb society, abolish religion, superinduce crime, disease, insanity, idiocy, physical decay, deformity, suicide and early death, abrogate matrimony and extinguish the race.
Every count in this terrible charge is capable of being sustained by the most abundant evidence in history, analogy, facts of daily experience, the declarations of religion, and evidences of the legal and medical sciences.
It is absolutely anti-catholic and unchristian, and could not exist, much less flourish, in an age not far gone on the road to ruin.
It is the Catholic Church, and she alone, which guarantees the rights, freedom, and honor of women. She raises them to a participation in her ministry and apostleship, and pledges herself and all the power of heaven to the protection of the humblest as well as the most exalted of the sex, in her rights and dignity as woman, wife, and mother. She has suffered persecution and dismemberment rather than yield an iota of the vested rights of helpless woman; she has decreed the immaculate conception, the most perfect testimony of the exalted function of maternity and the crowning human glory of the sex, and raised one of their number to be queen of heaven, the crowning superhuman glory.
All that woman can claim is accorded to her by the church, and asserted as her indefeasible right. The only security for woman, her only refuge from the artifice of men and the undeniable oppression of society, is in the church, and the legislation deduced from the original organic law; in the inviolability of the marriage contract, and the sacramental character of marriage.
The difficult and vexed question of mixed education obtrudes itself upon our attention at every step of a discussion like the one in which we are engaged. It is not our purpose to enter upon its details at present. The chief pastors in solemn council assembled will undoubtedly decide upon the line of conduct most expedient for us to follow. While asserting the absolute dependence of natural science for its truth and perpetuity upon divine illumination, we do not intend to disparage human learning and the pursuits of philosophy and science. Philosophy on the intellectual and natural sciences is the most elevating and ennobling of human employments. As truth is simple in its nature and essence, every truth discovered, learned, and elaborated tends to draw the soul toward God. There is and can be no quarrel or discrepancy between revelation and science. The truths of revelation and the truths of science tend infallibly toward mutual illustration and final unity. It is only the effect of false science or imperfect science to divert the mind from God, the origin of truth, or truth itself, and enter upon the path which leads to error, doubt, ignorance, and darkness.
The supremacy asserted for the church in matters of education implies the additional and cognate function of the censorship of ideas, and the right to examine and approve or disapprove all books, publications, writings, and utterances intended for public instruction, enlightenment, or entertainment, and the supervision of places of amusement.
This is the principle upon which the church has acted in handing over to the civil authority for punishment criminals in the order of ideas.
It is the principle upon which every civilized government acts in emergencies, and it was asserted rigorously and unsparingly North and South during the recent revolution. It is the principle upon which a father would act in expelling summarily and ignominiously from his house a person detected in corrupting the minds, manners, and morals of his children. It is in fact nothing more than the principle of self-preservation, which is the first law of nature. It is not necessary to raise the question whether this principle has been abused by individuals for mistaken or corrupt objects. It is safe to say that it has been. The admission in no way invalidates the right and obligation involved. There are few good things which men have not abused.
Crimes, cruelties, oppressions and persecutions (especially in the order of ideas) are laid at the door of the Catholic Church, which are the fruit of human passion, avarice, ambition, and resentment, and that strange and devilish infatuation of cruelty which sometimes seizes upon a whole community, and which is analogous to the destructive and suicidal insanities of individuals. The church, however, in her official and organic character, has never abused this principle or any other, whether of discipline or policy. These moral and political catastrophes are wholly independent of Catholicity, are in direct violation of religion, and in disobedience to the commands and entreaties of the church.
Government and legislation informed, directed, and guided by Catholic justice is the most humane, benignant, equal, just, merciful, and forbearing of any that can possibly exist, and the temporal government of the head of the church is to-day the best in the world.
These subjects bring us back to the question of suffrage, and to the Catholic as voter. It is necessary that we should have just laws, primarily and immediately in regard to education and marriage, and that they should have the sanction of sound public opinion, without which the best laws are inoperative.
These laws must grow out of the Catholic conscience of the community, if they are to grow at all.
The labor of strengthening these foundations of society belongs to the Catholic voter, and to him we must look for future safety, peace, and permanence. Every principle of justice is assailed, every bulwark is undermined.
Social eminence, literary ability, exalted political station, and so-called religion combine to give public sanction to unblushing and monstrous adultery, and brand the scarlet letter upon a soul already crimson with guilt as it trembles on the verge of eternity.
Every species and form of vice, crime, and corruption are paraded and presented under disguises, more or less specious or flimsy, of science, literature, religion, or art.
The old are divested of gravity and reserve, and the young have lost the freshness, the sweetness, the innocence, the candor, and the bloom which should belong to youth.
The burlesque is invoked with horrid incantation to degrade the reason, paralyze the understanding, and brutalize the imagination, and oriental lasciviousness to apply the torch of passion to the intellectual and moral ruins.
Current literature is penetrated with the spirit of licentiousness, from the pretentious quarterly to the arrogant and flippant daily newspaper, and the weekly and monthly publications are mostly heathen or maudlin. They express and inculcate, on the one hand, stoical, cold, and polished pride of mere intellect, or, on the other, empty and wretched sentimentality. Some employ the skill of the engraver to caricature the institutions and offices of our religion, and others to exhibit the grossest forms of vice and the most distressing scenes of crime and suffering.
The illustrated press has become to us what the amphitheatre was to the Romans when men were slain, women were outraged, and Christians given to the lions to please a degenerate populace.
It is obvious, then, if what we have said be true, that there is a great work for the Catholic voter to perform.
The Constitution and Declaration of Independence guarantee life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The Catholic values his life that he may devote it to the service of the church, and, if required, offer it for her safety and honor; liberty, to be and remain Catholic, enjoy freedom in the exercise of his religion, and transmit this priceless inheritance unimpaired to his descendants; the pursuit of happiness, that he may attain the happiness of heaven!
The Catholic voter meditates no invasion of vested rights. The constitution and government of the United States have the approval of the holy see. The Catholic is satisfied with the laws of his country, and only dissatisfied with local legislation, which contravenes the implied pledges of the constitution and the common law, based upon the canon law.
He demands nothing that natural justice and the legitimate interpretation of the constitution do not guarantee him. Freedom in religion entitles him to protection against open and secret attacks upon what he holds most dear, under the guise of state education, and which are invariably made in every system of uncatholic or infidel education. The great majority of English-speaking Catholics have had a personal and national experience of the bitter fruit of systems of education divorced from the control of the church, and in the French revolution they recognize the results of infidel science, literature, and sentiment practically applied to the reformation of society. France gave the world a terrible illustration of the violent, frantic creed and futile efforts which humanity makes when it would be sufficient for itself and become its own redeemer. France almost expired. Her Catholicity alone saved her. The Goths and Vandals entered Paris, but were compelled to retire. They entered ancient Rome, and remained.
With these truths, lessons, and experiences before his mind, the Catholic anxiously considers the subject of public education, and is resolved when the question is adjudicated to sustain the decision of the church. If he cannot peacefully enact legitimate, equal, and just regulations, he will consent to bear, as he has done before, a double burden; but he, for his part, will make sure that his children are taught to discriminate between the specious and false assertions which are put forth as history and history itself, between human philanthropy and divine charity, between communism and the communion of saints, between spiritism and those things which are spiritual, between pure, noble, and lovely sentiments and a rotting sentimentalism, between the false and the true, injustice and justice, the human and the divine.
By an extraordinary example of divine justice, and the operation of the law of compensation, the men and their descendants who uprooted Catholicity in England and Ireland; who extinguished, as far as they were able, Catholic literature and tradition; who destroyed the venerable seats of learning and charity, sacked the monasteries and despoiled the abbeys, were compelled to prepare a home for Catholics, and establish a political order most acceptable to them, and capable under Catholic auspices of attaining the highest degree of temporal happiness and prosperity.
The men who composed the Protector's famous Ironsides levelled the New England forests and subdued the savage, and now in every city, village, and hamlet of this fair land the cross which they tore down again rises aloft, the first to kindle in the saluting beams of the morning sun, the last to detain his parting lingering rays, and thousands of happy, prosperous people the descendants of those whom Cromwell's dragoons trampled under their bloody hoofs, assemble around that altar and assist at that mass which he could not abide.
The grim old regicide who sleeps his last sleep on the green behind Centre church, in New Haven, if he could rise from his grave some pleasant Sunday morning, would believe that time and old ocean had both been rolled away, and that he was in merry, happy Catholic England of five hundred years ago.
The past has been vindicated; wrongs have been righted.
The uncompromising defence of the rights of Queen Catharine is justified. The Goddess of Reason, in the person of a prostitute, enthroned on the high altar of Notre Dame, has given place to a Catholic lady, wife, mother, and queen, who reigns enthroned in the hearts of her people, the type of every royal, womanly, and Christian virtue.
Absolute Cæsarism itself, touched by Catholic justice, has voluntarily conceded constitutional government, and the successor of him who was both the child and the victim of the revolution, who dragged Pius VII. from the chair of Peter to a French prison, upholds the chief of the apostles as he sits to-day enthroned prince and patriarch and apostle of the assembled and united episcopate of the world.
It is time for Catholics to cease complaining. The church is vindicated. They are vindicated. Reason, science, and religion are united in a species of intellectual trinity, capable of presiding over and directing all human, temporal, and eternal destinies. All that remains is for the individual Catholic, the Catholic voter, to play well his part in the drama whose acts are realities, whose curtain will never fall, and where the only change of scene will be when the vault of the heavens parts in twain and the splendor of the eternal world bursts upon his enraptured vision.
It is in the power of the Catholic voter of the nineteenth century to achieve a consummation such as perhaps saints and prophets have dreamed, but never seen. It is your part, Catholic freemen and electors, to perpetuate the latest and most perfect effort in the human science of government—the constitution of our glorious and beloved country; to check the current of corruption in literature, manners, and politics.
It is in your power to arrest the progress of demoralizing and disintegrating legislation on the subject of marriage and suffrage, and to provide the means for the permanent endowment of colleges, seminaries, and universities. It is in your power to elect able, honest, and virtuous men to office, and to reunite the principles of government with the principles of religion.
Will you respond to the offer which is made you in this country and the nineteenth century, and perfect and complete what may not unlikely be the last opportunity for achieving temporal prosperity in harmony with Catholic justice?
DION AND THE SIBYLS.
A CLASSIC, CHRISTIAN NOVEL.
BY MILES GERALD KEON, COLONIAL SECRETARY, BERMUDA, AUTHOR OF "HARDING THE MONEY-SPINNER," ETC.