They who at the present day attack the Prince of Rome, and yet profess to venerate the Pope, and to be sincere Catholics, are either guilty of flagrant contradiction, or are hypocrites.
They who profess to reduce the problem to the realization of a free Church in a free State are either influenced by a fatal timidity, or destitute of every spark of moral conviction.
The separation of Church and State is good as a weapon of defence against the corruptions of a Church no longer worthy the name. It is—like all the programmes of mere liberty—an implicit declaration that the institution against which we are compelled to invoke either our individual or collective rights is corrupt, and destined to perish.
Individual or collective rights may be justly invoked against the authority of a religious institution as a remedial measure in a period of transition; just as it may occasionally be necessary to isolate a special locality for a given time, in order to protect others from infection. But the cause must be explicitly declared. By declaring it, you educate the country to look beyond the temporary measure,—to look forward to a return to a normal state of things, and to study the positive organic principle destined to govern that normal state. By keeping silence, you accustom the mass to disjoin the moral from the political, theory from practice, the ideal from the real, heaven from earth.
When once all belief in the past synthesis shall be extinct, and faith in the new synthesis established, the State itself will be elected into a Church; it will incarnate in itself a religious principle, and become the representative of the moral law in the various manifestations of life.
So long as it is separate from the State, the Church will always conspire to reconquer power over it in the interest of the past dogma. If separated from all collective and avowed faith by a negative policy, such as that adopted by the atheistic and indifferent French Parliament, the State will fall a prey to the anarchical doctrine of the sovereignty of the individual, and the worship of interest; it will sink into egotism and the adoration of the accomplished fact, and hence, inevitably, into despotism, as a remedy for the evils of anarchy.
For an example of this among modern nations, we have only to look at France.
III.
On the other hand, in opposition to the Papacy, but itself a source of no less corruption, stands materialism.
Materialism, the philosophy of all expiring epochs and peoples in decay, is, historically speaking, an old phenomenon, inseparable from the death of a religious dogma. It is the reaction of those superficial intellects which, incapable of taking a comprehensive view of the life of humanity, and tracing and deducing its essential characteristics from tradition, deny the religious ideal itself, instead of simply affirming the death of one of its incarnations.