The more respectable and conservative of the uncatholic institutions, which retain most of the latent Catholicity not yet expended in three centuries of separation from the parent fountain, preserve many Catholic ideas, customs, and forms of speech and action.
Such publications as the New-Englander, the Princeton, Mercersburg, and North British Reviews, advocate to a great extent the Christian doctrines of marriage and education, and the superiority of religion in all temporal and secular affairs, and deprecate, without the power to remedy or arrest, the evils which they acknowledge to exist.
The advanced portion of the opposing forces, they who have expended their latent Catholicity, denied the faith and impugned the truth, and sunk to the lowest level compatible with life, do not seek to defend their position by any hollow appeals to religion or conscience, but boldly deny all authority excepting their own depraved wills.
Red-republicanism, Fourierism, communism, free love, Mormonism, the Oneida community, the false sciences of mesmerism and phrenology, spiritism and sentimental philanthropy, are exemplary expressions of the forms which sensuality and the denial of authority assume in their retrograde metamorphoses.
The woman's rights movement is the most subtle, dangerous, and treacherous of the later manifestations of the evil spirit of the nineteenth century.
It is more threatening to the public peace than the abolition agitation was at its commencement, and is fostered and fomented by the same or kindred influences, and under some one or other of its forms and phases comprehends every falsehood, error, delusion, and heresy, from the original lie uttered in Eden to the last invented and promulgated by the Satanic press. It has a certain, irresistible tendency to vitiate suffrage, degrade legislation, disturb society, abolish religion, superinduce crime, disease, insanity, idiocy, physical decay, deformity, suicide and early death, abrogate matrimony and extinguish the race.
Every count in this terrible charge is capable of being sustained by the most abundant evidence in history, analogy, facts of daily experience, the declarations of religion, and evidences of the legal and medical sciences.
It is absolutely anti-catholic and unchristian, and could not exist, much less flourish, in an age not far gone on the road to ruin.
It is the Catholic Church, and she alone, which guarantees the rights, freedom, and honor of women. She raises them to a participation in her ministry and apostleship, and pledges herself and all the power of heaven to the protection of the humblest as well as the most exalted of the sex, in her rights and dignity as woman, wife, and mother. She has suffered persecution and dismemberment rather than yield an iota of the vested rights of helpless woman; she has decreed the immaculate conception, the most perfect testimony of the exalted function of maternity and the crowning human glory of the sex, and raised one of their number to be queen of heaven, the crowning superhuman glory.
All that woman can claim is accorded to her by the church, and asserted as her indefeasible right. The only security for woman, her only refuge from the artifice of men and the undeniable oppression of society, is in the church, and the legislation deduced from the original organic law; in the inviolability of the marriage contract, and the sacramental character of marriage.