The United States government has never denied the due spiritual authority of the Head of the Church—has never done aught to infringe his just prerogatives. There has never been enacted here an original or formal protest against the rights of the Apostolic See.
This people have never thrown off the claims of the Catholic religion, and they have not rejected it. The nation is not under the ban of a misguided defiance of the right spiritual authority.
In no sense, therefore, has this nation as a nation compromised itself as against those fundamental principles of unity and liberty of which the Catholic Church is, in the spiritual order, the true and only representative. As from her and her alone it can receive the perpetual impulse of a free, progressive, national development, so in yielding to her influence is it guilty of no inconstancy to its organtic law, of no infidelity to its historic past. The destiny which it is destined to accomplish in the political depends upon the position which it voluntarily assumes in the moral order, and this in turn upon the source from which it drinks in the springs of its religious life.
It needs but to be true to its origin, its constitution, its equity, and its ancestral virtues to become and to remain the foremost of the nations of the earth. But truth to these necessitates fidelity to her from whom visibly and directly not only they, but all that is noble and elevating in art or arms or civilization has originated, and in whom they have found an impregnable defender—the Catholic Church, the Communion of the Apostolic See.
Translated From The Historisch-politische Blaetter.
Schaff's Church History.
In the year 1854 appeared a work of great merit, entitled A History of the Apostolic Church, together with a General Introduction to Church History, from the pen of Philip Schaff, a professor in the Lutheran Seminary at Mercersburg, and a literary colleague of Dr. Nevin, called "the American proto-martyr of the suffering church." At that time, Professor Schaff, who is a native of Graubündten, in Switzerland, was making a long stay in Europe. In the same year he published two other works—St. Augustine, Berlin, 1854, pp. 129, a brochure or precursor of the present large work, and America—the Political, Social, and Ecclesiastico-Religious Condition of the United States, which is a continuous eulogy of his adopted country. That Dr. Schaff has for thirteen years zealously prosecuted the study of ecclesiastical history, the unusual size of the work before us sufficiently evinces. It is dated from the Bible House in New York, January, 1867, and dedicated to the teachers and friends of the author, August Tholuck, Julius Müller of Halle, J. A. Dorner of Berlin, and J. P. Lange of Bonn.
From the preface and dedication we learn that Schaff studied exegesis in Tübingen under Dr. Schmid, history under Dr. Bauer, and attended the lectures on systematic theology of Dr. Dorner. At this time he resided in Halle, "under the hospitable roof" of Tholuck, and by him and Julius Müller he was encouraged to choose an academical career. Since his residence in North America he has twice visited Europe, in 1854 and in 1865. His friends frequently wished him to obtain a professor's chair in Germany, but he could not determine to separate himself from a land in which since his twenty-fifth year he had found a second home, and desired his days to close in the "noble mediatorship between the Evangelical Christianity of the German and English languages." His book shows that he has defended in America, not altogether unworthily, the German theology—"the true, liberal, catholic, and evangelical theology."