So also, according to this tract, our Catholic children should be taught in the schools that Voltaire became an infidel because he had been a Catholic and was trained at a Jesuit college. It will nowhere appear in the lesson that he became an infidel because he rebelled against the teachings of his church, and renounced the maxims of his Jesuit tutors. When he so zealously defended his thesis in vindication of Julian the Apostate, his own apostasy was foretold by his master. His death was the answer to his life. In his agony he called for a priest; but three-score years of blasphemy had won to him the avenging disciples who then encircled his bed like a wall of fire; and no priest could reach the dying enemy of Christ!
This tract would also teach our children in the schools that it was the teachings of the "Romish Church" which drove revolutionary France from the altars of God. It would not be explained to them how that revolutionary rage was but the outburst of a volcano of passion which had smouldered during ages of long suffering under the rule of kings and nobles; and that the instincts of the people remained so true, that in the very same generation they returned, like the people of Israel, to the worship of God; and rushed to the altars of their fathers with tears of repentance and joy. They did not become Protestants! How has it been with the descendants of the godly men of Plymouth Rock? Quietly and with exquisite decorum they have settled down into deists, pantheists, freethinkers, free-lovers, spiritualists, and philosophers! Will they go back to Puritanism?
"Facilis descensus Averni!"
The tract tells our children that Gibbon left the Protestant Church for the Catholic, and finally landed in infidelity. Why did he not go back to Protestantism?
The tract also tells our children that this is a Protestant country; which means that all its glories are Protestant, and that the Catholic, with Italy and Spain before his eyes, should be thankful that he is tolerated here. Are our children to learn this lesson at the schools? Now, in the first place, if Bishop Coxe and other Protestant witnesses are reliable,[Footnote 47] our Bible House friends may as well begin to prepare their nerves to see our great country become Catholic, at least as much of it as will remain Christian at all. Perhaps they will then value the wisdom and liberality of that admonitory sentence in the article of The Educational Monthly which reads thus:
[Footnote 47: See page 61 of this number.]
"We are quite sure that if the Catholics were the majority in the United States, and were to attempt such an injustice," (as that involved in this school question.) "our Protestant brethren would cry out against it, and appeal to the wise and liberal examples of Prussia and England, France and Austria! Now, is it not always as unwise as it is unjust to make a minority taste the bitterness of oppression? Men governed by the law of divine charity will bear it meekly and seek to return good for evil; but all men are not docile; and majorities change rapidly and often, in this fleeting world! Is it not wiser and more politic, even in mere regard to social interests, that all institutions intended for the welfare of the people should be firmly based upon exact and equal justice? This would place them under the protection of fixed habit, which in a nation is as strong as nature; and it would save them from the mutations of society. The strong of one generation may be the weak of the next; and we see this occurring with political parties within the brief spaces of presidential terms. Hence we wisely inculcate moderation and of retribution."
In the next place, although the present majority of the American people are non-Catholic, we deny that they are Protestants, as a nation, in a political sense. The institutions of the country are neither Catholic nor Protestant. They recognize no one faith more than another. Christian morality is accepted as the basis of public and private duties by common consent; that is all. Religious liberty was not born of the theocracy of New England. Hancock and Adams, under the lead of Jefferson, departed very far from the instincts of Calvinism and the traditions of Plymouth Rock when they laid the foundations of this government; and this is one of the things which we certainly intend to have our children taught. We do not intend that they shall be "poor boys at the feast," humbly thankful for such crumbs as our Bible House friends may magnanimously bestow upon the "Romish aliens;" but they shall be told to hold up their heads, with the full consciousness that they are American citizens, the peers of all others, and in no way disqualified, by the doctrines or morals of their church, to perform every duty as faithfully and as ably as any other men of any other creed. They shall not be terrified with the "raw head and bloody bones" of "degraded Italy," "besotted Spain," and the other terrible examples of the destroying influence of their old mother church. We shall teach them not to trust any morality which does not rest upon a clear faith; and we shall show them how that faith commands obedience to lawful authority, purity of motive in all public acts, and universal charity for all men.
Some of our readers may be surprised that we have devoted so much space to this tract. Our motive should be apparent. We said, in the beginning of this article, that this tract sounds like the voice of one of the two classes of opponents who are arrayed against us on this question; and that in itself it affords a perfect illustration of our main argument, which is this, clearly stated in the following paragraph from the article in The Educational Monthly:
"And more than this, Catholics know by painful experience that history cannot be compiled, travels written, poetry, oratory, or romance inflicted upon a credulous public, without the stereotyped assaults upon the doctrines, discipline, and historical life of their church. From Walter Scott to Peter Parley, and from Hume, Gibbon, and Macaulay to the mechanical compilers of cheap school literature, it is the same story told a thousand times oftener than it is refuted; so that the English language, for the last two centuries, may be said without exaggeration to have waged war against the Catholic Church. Indeed, so far as European history is considered, the difficulty must always be insurmountable; since it would always be impossible for the Catholic and Protestant to accept the same history of the Reformation or of the Papal See, or the political, social, and moral events resulting from or in any degree connected with those two great centres and controlling causes. Who could write a political history of Christendom for the last three hundred years and omit all mention of Luther and the pope? And how is any school compendium of such history to be devised for the use of the Catholic and Protestant child alike?"