But whence come these rights? and how can they bind the state, and prescribe its duty? We hold these rights by virtue, of our manhood, it is said; they are inherent in it, and constitute it. But my rights bind you, and yours bind me, and yet you and I are equal; our manhoods are equal. How, then, can the manhood of either bind or morally oblige the other? Of things equal one cannot be superior to another. They are in our nature as men, it is said again, or, simply, we hold them from nature. They are said to be natural rights and inalienable, and what is natural must be in or from nature. Nature is taken in two senses; as the physical order or the physical laws constitutive of the physical universe, and as the moral law under which all creatures endowed with reason and free-will are placed by the Creator, and which is cognizable by natural reason or the reason common to all men. In the first sense, these rights are not inherent in our nature as men, nor from nature, or in nature; for they are not physical. Physical rights are a contradiction in terms. They can be inherent in our nature only in the second sense, and in our moral nature only, and consequently are held under the law which founds and sustains moral nature, or the moral order as distinct from the physical order.
But the moral law, the so-called law of nature, droit naturel, which founds and sustains the moral order, the order of right, of justice, is not a law founded or prescribed by nature, but the law for the moral government of nature, under which all moral natures are placed by the Author of nature as supreme law-giver. The law of nature is God's law; and whatever rights it founds or are held from it are his rights, and ours only because they are his. My rights, in relation to you, are your duties, what God prescribes as the law of your conduct to me; and your rights are, in relation to me, my duties to you, what God prescribes as the rule of my conduct to you. But what God prescribes he has the right to prescribe, and therefore can command me to respect no rights in you, and you to respect no rights in me, that are not his; and being his, civil society is bound by them, and cannot alienate them or deny them without violating his law, and robbing him of his rights. Hence, he who does an injury to another wrongs not him only, but wrongs his Maker, his Sovereign, and his Judge.
Take any of the rights enumerated as inalienable in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. Among these is the right to life. This right all men and civil society itself are bound to treat as sacred and inviolable. But all men are created equal, and under the law of nature have equal rights. But how can equals bind one another? By mutual compact. But whence the obligation of the compact? Why am I obliged to keep my word? Certainly not by the word itself; but because I should deprive him of his right to whom I have pledged it. But I have given my word to assist in committing a murder. Am I bound to keep it? Not at all. Why not? Because I have pledged myself to commit a crime, to do a wrong or unjust act. Evidently, then, compacts or pledged words do not create justice, they presuppose it; and it is only in virtue of the law of justice that compacts are obligatory, and no compacts not conformable to that law can bind. Why, then, am I bound to respect your life? It is not you who can bind me; for you and I are equals, and neither in his own name can bind the other. To take your life would be an unjust act; that is, I should rob justice of its right to your life. The right to life is then the right of justice. But justice is not an abstraction; it is not a mental conception, but a reality, and therefore God; and hence the right for you or me to live is the right of him who hath made us and whose we are, with all that we are, all that we have, and all that we can do. Hence, the right to life is inalienable even by myself, and suicide is not only a crime against society, but a sin against God; for God owns it as his right, and therefore he has the right to command all men to hold it in every man sacred and inviolable, and never to be taken by other men or even civil society, but at his order. So of all the other rights of man.
If the rights of man are the rights of God in and over man as his creature, as they undeniably are, they lie in the spiritual order, are spiritual, not temporal. The American state, then, in recognizing the independence, superiority, and inviolability of the rights of man, does recognize, in principle, the independence, superiority, and inviolability of the spiritual order, and its own subordination to it, and obligation to consult it and conform to it. It then recognizes the church divinely appointed and commissioned by God with plenary authority to represent it, and apply the law of God to the government of the people as the state no less than to the people as individuals. This follows as a necessary consequence. If God has made a supernatural revelation, we are bound by the natural law to believe it; and if he has instituted a church to represent the spiritual, or concreted the spiritual in a visible organism, with plenary authority to teach his word to all men and nations, and to declare and apply his law in the government of human affairs, we are bound to accept and obey her the moment the fact is brought sufficiently to our knowledge. This shows that the true church, if such church there be, is sacred and inviolable, and that what she declares to be the law of God is his law, which binds every conscience; and all sovereigns and subjects, states and citizens are alike bound to obey her. He who refuses to obey her refuses to obey God; he who spurns her spurns God; he who despises her despises God; and he who despoils her of any of her rights or possessions despoils God. Kings and the great of the earth, statesmen and courtiers, demagogues and politicians are apt to forget this, and because God does not instantly punish their sacrilege with a visible and material punishment, conclude that they may outrage her to their heart's content with impunity. But the punishment is sure to follow in due course, and so far as it concerns states, dynasties, and society, in the shape of moral weakness, imbecility, corruption, and death.
That the American state is true to the order it acknowledges, and never usurps any spiritual functions, we do not pretend. The American state copies in but too many instances the bad legislation of Europe. It from the outset showed the original vice of the American people; for while they very justly subjected the state to the law of God, they could subject it to that law only as they understood it, and their understanding of it was in many respects faulty, which was no wonder, since they had no infallible, no authoritative, in fact, no representative at all of the spiritual order, and knew the law of God only so far as taught it by natural reason, and spelled out by their imperfect light from an imperfect and mutilated text of the written word. They had a good major proposition, namely, the spiritual order duly represented is supreme, and should govern all men collectively and individually, as states and as citizens; but their minor was bad. But we with our reading of the Bible do duly represent that order. Therefore, etc. Now, we willingly admit that a people reverencing and reading the Bible as the word of God, will in most respects have a far truer and more adequate knowledge of the law of God than those who have neither church nor Bible, and only their reason and the mutilated, perverted, and even travestied traditions of the primitive revelation retained and transmitted by Gentilism, and therefore that Protestantism as understood by the American colonists is much better for society than the liberalism asserted by the movement party either here or in Europe; but its knowledge will still be defective, and leave many painful gaps on many important points; and the state, having no better knowledge, will almost inevitably misconceive what on various matters the law of God actually prescribes or forbids.
The American state, misled by public opinion, usurps the functions of the church in some very grave matters. It assumes the control of marriage and education, therefore of all family relations, of the family itself, and of ideas, intelligence, opinions, which we have seen are functions of the church, and both are included in the two sacraments of marriage and orders. It also fails to recognize the freedom and independence of the spiritual order in refusing to recognize the church as a corporation, a moral person, as capable of possessing property as any natural or private person, and therefore denies to the spiritual order the inalienable right of property. The American state denies to the church all possessory rights unless incorporated by itself. This is all wrong; but if no better, it is no worse than what is assumed by the state in every European nation; and the most that can be said is, that in these matters the state forgets the Christian commonwealth for the pagan, as is done everywhere else.
But except in these instances, the American state is, we believe, true to the Christian principle on which it is based, as true, that is, as it can be in a mixed community of Catholics, Jews, and Protestants. The state has no spiritual competency, and cannot decide either for itself or for its citizens which is or is not the church that authoritatively represents the spiritual order. The responsibility of that decision it does and must leave to its citizens, who must decide for themselves, and answer to God for the rectitude of their decision. Their decision is law for the state, and it must respect and obey it in the case alike of majorities and minorities; for it recognizes the equal rights of all its citizens, and cannot discriminate between them. The church that represents for the state the spiritual order is the church adopted by its citizens; and as they adopt different churches, it can recognize and enforce, through the civil courts, the canons and decrees of each only on its own members, and on them only so far as they do not infringe on the equal rights of the others. This is not all the state would do or ought to do in a perfect Christian society, but it is all that it can do where these different churches exist, and exist for it with equal rights. It can only recognize them, and protect and vindicate the rights of each only in relation to those citizens who acknowledge its authority. This recognizes and protects the Catholic Church in her entire freedom and independence and in teaching her faith, and in governing and disciplining Catholics according to her own canons and decrees, which, unless we are greatly misinformed, is more than the state does for her, in any old Catholic nation in the world.
This is not tolerance or indifference; it only means that the state does not arrogate to itself the right to decide which is the true church, and holds itself bound to respect and protect equally the church or churches acknowledged as such by its citizens. The doctrine that a man is free before God to be of any religion, or of no religion as he pleases, or the liberty of conscience, as understood by the so-called liberals throughout the world, and which was condemned by Gregory XVI. of immortal memory, in his encyclical of August 15th, 1832, receives no countenance from the American state, and is repugnant to its fundamental constitution. Heretical and schismatic sects have, indeed, no rights; for they have no authority from God to represent the spiritual order, and their existence is, no doubt, repugnant to the real interests of society as well as destructive to souls; but in a community where they exist along with the true church, the state must respect and protect in them the rights of the spiritual order, not indeed because they claim to be the church, but because they are held to be such by its citizens, and all its citizens have equal rights in the civil order, and the equal right to have their conscience, if they have a conscience, respected and protected. The church of God exacts nothing more of it in this respect than to be protected in her freedom to combat and vanquish the adherents of false churches or false religions with her own spiritual weapons. More she might exact of the state in perfect Christian society; but this is all that she can exact in an imperfect and divided Christian society, as is the case in nearly all modern nations.
This is the American system. Is it practicable in the old Catholic nations of Europe? Would it be a gain to religion, if suffered to be introduced there? Would the government, if it were accepted by the church, understand it as implying its obligation to respect and protect all churches equally as representing the spiritual order, or as asserting its freedom to govern and oppress all at will, the true church as the false? There is danger of the latter, because European society is not based on the Christian principle of the independence and inviolability of the rights of man, that is, the rights of God, but on the pagan principle of the state, that all rights, even the rights of the church, and society emanate from the state, and are revocable at its will. Hence the reason why the church has found concordats with the secular powers so necessary. In the sense of the secular authority, these concordats are acts of incorporation, and surrendering them by the church would be the surrender of its charter by a corporation. It would be to abandon all her goods to the state, leave her without a legal status, and with no rights which the state holds itself bound to recognize, protect, or enforce through its courts, any more than she had under the persecuting Roman emperors. This would be the farthest remove possible from the American system. Before the American system could be introduced into European states in the respect that it affords freedom and protection to the church in the discharge of her spiritual functions, the whole structure of European society would need to be reconstructed on the Christian foundation, or the basis of the inherent rights and supremacy of the spiritual order, instead of its present pagan or Græco-Roman basis of the supremacy of the city or state.
Undoubtedly, the liberals, or movement party, are, and have been, for nearly a century, struggling by all the means in their power, fair or foul, to overthrow European society, and reconstruct it after what they suppose to be the American model, but in reality on a basis, if possible, more pagan and less Christian than its present basis. They assert the absolute supremacy of the state in all things; only, instead of saying with Louis XIV., "L'état, c'est moi," they say "L'état, c'est le peuple," but they make the people, as the state, as absolute as any king or kaiser-state ever pretended to be. The church would, in their reconstructed society, not have secured to her the rights that she holds under our system, by the fact that it is based on the equal and antecedent rights of all citizens, really the rights of God, which limit the power of state, of the people in a democratic state, and prescribe both its province and its duty.