With these truths, lessons, and experiences before his mind, the Catholic anxiously considers the subject of public education, and is resolved when the question is adjudicated to sustain the decision of the church. If he cannot peacefully enact legitimate, equal, and just regulations, he will consent to bear, as he has done before, a double burden; but he, for his part, will make sure that his children are taught to discriminate between the specious and false assertions which are put forth as history and history itself, between human philanthropy and divine charity, between communism and the communion of saints, between spiritism and those things which are spiritual, between pure, noble, and lovely sentiments and a rotting sentimentalism, between the false and the true, injustice and justice, the human and the divine.
By an extraordinary example of divine justice, and the operation of the law of compensation, the men and their descendants who uprooted Catholicity in England and Ireland; who extinguished, as far as they were able, Catholic literature and tradition; who destroyed the venerable seats of learning and charity, sacked the monasteries and despoiled the abbeys, were compelled to prepare a home for Catholics, and establish a political order most acceptable to them, and capable under Catholic auspices of attaining the highest degree of temporal happiness and prosperity.
The men who composed the Protector's famous Ironsides levelled the New England forests and subdued the savage, and now in every city, village, and hamlet of this fair land the cross which they tore down again rises aloft, the first to kindle in the saluting beams of the morning sun, the last to detain his parting lingering rays, and thousands of happy, prosperous people the descendants of those whom Cromwell's dragoons trampled under their bloody hoofs, assemble around that altar and assist at that mass which he could not abide.
The grim old regicide who sleeps his last sleep on the green behind Centre church, in New Haven, if he could rise from his grave some pleasant Sunday morning, would believe that time and old ocean had both been rolled away, and that he was in merry, happy Catholic England of five hundred years ago.
The past has been vindicated; wrongs have been righted.
The uncompromising defence of the rights of Queen Catharine is justified. The Goddess of Reason, in the person of a prostitute, enthroned on the high altar of Notre Dame, has given place to a Catholic lady, wife, mother, and queen, who reigns enthroned in the hearts of her people, the type of every royal, womanly, and Christian virtue.
Absolute Cæsarism itself, touched by Catholic justice, has voluntarily conceded constitutional government, and the successor of him who was both the child and the victim of the revolution, who dragged Pius VII. from the chair of Peter to a French prison, upholds the chief of the apostles as he sits to-day enthroned prince and patriarch and apostle of the assembled and united episcopate of the world.
It is time for Catholics to cease complaining. The church is vindicated. They are vindicated. Reason, science, and religion are united in a species of intellectual trinity, capable of presiding over and directing all human, temporal, and eternal destinies. All that remains is for the individual Catholic, the Catholic voter, to play well his part in the drama whose acts are realities, whose curtain will never fall, and where the only change of scene will be when the vault of the heavens parts in twain and the splendor of the eternal world bursts upon his enraptured vision.
It is in the power of the Catholic voter of the nineteenth century to achieve a consummation such as perhaps saints and prophets have dreamed, but never seen. It is your part, Catholic freemen and electors, to perpetuate the latest and most perfect effort in the human science of government—the constitution of our glorious and beloved country; to check the current of corruption in literature, manners, and politics.
It is in your power to arrest the progress of demoralizing and disintegrating legislation on the subject of marriage and suffrage, and to provide the means for the permanent endowment of colleges, seminaries, and universities. It is in your power to elect able, honest, and virtuous men to office, and to reunite the principles of government with the principles of religion.