The Catholic World, Vol. 05, April 1867 to September 1867

by Various

The only restriction, on any side, is, that the citizen must so assert his own right of conscience as not to abridge the equal right of conscience in his fellow-citizen who differs from him. Of course the freedom of conscience cannot be made a pretext for disturbing the public peace, or outraging public decency, nor can it be suffered to be worn as a cloak to cover dissoluteness of manners or the transgression of the universal moral law; when it is so made or worn it ceases to be the right of conscience, ceases to be conscience at all, and the state has authority to intervene and protect the public peace and public decency. It may, therefore, suppress the Mormon concubinage, and require the Latter Day Saints to conform to the marriage law as recognized by the whole civilized world, alike in the interests of religion and of civilization. But beyond this the state cannot go, at least with us.

It may be doubted whether this American system is practicable in any but a republican country—under a government based on equal rights, not on privilege, whether the privilege of the one, the few, or the many. Democracy, as Europeans understand it, is not based on equal rights, but is only the system of privilege, if I may so speak, expanded. It recognizes no equal rights, because it recognizes no rights of the individual at all before the state. It is the pagan republic which asserts the universal and absolute supremacy of the state. The American democracy is Christian, not pagan, and asserts, for every citizen, even the meanest, equal rights, which the state must treated as sacred and inviolable. It is because our system is based on equal rights, not on privilege—on rights held not from the state, but which the state is bound to recognize and protect, that American democracy, instead of subjecting religion to the state, secures its freedom and independence.

Donoso Cortes can no more understand this than can the European democrat, because he has no conception of the equal rights of all men before the state; or rather, because he has no conception of the rights of man. Man, he says, has no rights; he has only duties. This is true, when we speak of man in relation to his Maker. The thing made has no right to say to the maker, "Why hast thou made me thus?" Man has only duties before God, because he owes to him all he is, has, or can do, and he finds beatitude in discharging his duties to God, because God is good, the good in itself, and would not be God and could not be creator if be were not. But that man has no rights in relation to society, to the state, or to his fellow man, is not true. Otherwise there could be no justice between man and man, between the individual and society, or the citizen and the state, and no injustice, for there is no injustice where no right is violated. Denying or misconceiving the rights of man, and conceiving the state as based on privilege, not on equal rights, the Spaniard is unable to conceive it possible to assert the freedom and independence of the state, without denying the freedom and independence of the church.

But, if republican institutions based on equal rights are necessary to secure the freedom and independence of the church, the freedom and independence of the church, on the other hand, are no less necessary to the maintenance of such institutions. I say, of the church, rather than of religion, because I choose to speak of things in the concrete rather than in the abstract, and because it is only as concreted in the church that the freedom and independence of religion can be assailed, or that religion has power to protect or give security to institutions based on equal rights. The church is concrete religion. Whether there is more than one church, or which of the thousand and one claimants is the true church, is not now the question. The answer of the Catholic is not doubtful. At present I am treating the question of equal rights, and asking no more for the church before the state than for the several sects. Of course, I recognize none of the sects as the church, but I am free to say that I regard even the lowest of them as better for society than any form of downright infidelity. There is something in common between Catholics and the sects that confess Christ as the Son of God, incarnate for our redemption and salvation, which there is not, and cannot be, between us and those who confess not Christ at all. But this is a digression.

Equal rights must have a foundation, something on which to stand. They cannot stand on the state or civil society, for that would deny them to be rights at all, and reduce them to simple privileges granted by the state and revocable at its will. This is precisely the error of the European liberals, who invariably confound right with privilege. All European society has been, and still is to a great extent, based on privilege, not right. Thus in England you have the rights—more properly, the privileges or franchises—of Englishman, but no rights of man which parliament is bound to recognize and protect as such. There is no right or freedom of conscience which the state must respect as sacred and inviolable; there is only toleration, more or less general. In the new kingdom of Italy there are the privileges and franchises of Italians, and, within certain limits, toleration for the church. Her bishops may exercise their spiritual functions so long as they do not incur the displeasure of the state. The supremacy of the state is asserted, and the ecclesiastical administration is at the mercy of the civil. It is so in every European state, because in none of them is the state based on equal rights. The United States are the only state in the world that is so based. Our political system is based on right, not privilege, and the equal rights of all men.

The state with us rests on equal rights of all men; but on what do the equal rights themselves rest? What supports or upholds them? The state covers or represents the whole temporal order, and they, therefore, have not, and cannot have, their basis or support in that order. Besides the temporal there is no order but the spiritual, covered or represented by the church. The equal rights, then, which are with us the basis of the state, depend themselves on the church or spiritual order for their support. Take away that order or remove the church, or even suppress the freedom and independence of the church, and you leave them without any support at all. The absolutism of the state follows, then, as a necessary consequence, and might usurps the place of right. Hence political principles must find their support in theology, and the separation of church and state in the sense of separating political from theological principles is as hostile to the state as to the church, and to liberty as to religion. It is not easy to controvert this conclusion, if we consider whence our rights are derived, and on what they depend for their reality and support. These rights, which we do not derive from the state or civil society, and hold independently of it, among which the Declaration of Independence enumerates "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," which it asserts to be "inalienable," whence do we hold them but from God, our Creator? This is what is meant when they are called the natural rights of man. They are called natural rights, because rights held under the natural law, but the natural law in the sense of the jurists and theologians, not in the sense of the physicists or natural philosophers—a moral law addressed to reason and free-will, and binding upon all men, whatever their state or position; not a physical law, like that by which clouds are formed, seeds germinate, or heavy bodies tend to the centre of the earth; for it is a law that does not execute itself and is not executed at all without the action of the reason and will of society. It is necessarily a law prescribed by the Author of nature, and is called the natural law, the law of natural justice, or the moral law, in distinction from the revealed or supernatural law, because promulgated by the supreme Lawgiver through natural reason, or the reason common to all men, which is itself in intimate relation with the Divine Reason.

These natural equal rights are the law for the state or civil authority, and every law of the state that violates them violates natural justice, and is by that fact null and void; is, as St. Augustine says, and St. Thomas after him, "Violence rather than law," and can never be binding on the civil courts, though human courts not unfrequently enforce such laws. Not being derived from the state or civil society, these rights are evidently not in the temporal order, or the same order with the state, and therefore must have, as we have seen, their basis in the spiritual order, that is, in theology, or have no basis at all.

The existence of God as the creator and upholder of nature, I do not here undertake to prove; for that has been done in the papers on The Problems of the Age, which have appeared in this magazine. I am not arguing against atheism in general, but only against what is called political atheism, or the doctrine that theology, and therefore the church, has nothing to do with politics. The state, with us, is based on the equal rights, not equal privileges, of all men; and if these equal rights have no real and solid basis beyond and independent of civil society, the state itself has no real basis, and is a chateau d'Espagne, or a mere castle in the air. Hence political atheism is not only the exclusion of the church from politics, but the denial of the state itself, and the substitution for it of mere physical force. Political atheism cannot be asserted without atheism in general, without, in fact, denying all existence, and, therefore, of necessity, all right. Political atheism is, then, alike destructive of religion and politics, church and state, of authority and liberty. Deny all right independent of the state, and the citizen can have no right not derived from the state, which denies all liberty; deny all right independent of the state, the state itself can have no right to govern, unless the state itself be God, which would be statolatry, alike absurd and blasphemous.