Dr. Bellows is the well-known pastor of All Souls' Church, and editor of the Liberal Christian in this city, a distinguished Unitarian minister, with some religious instincts and respectable literary pretensions. As a student in college and the Divinity School, Cambridge, Massachusetts, he was full of promise, and a great favorite of the late Hon. Edward Everett, himself originally a Unitarian minister and pastor of Brattle Street Church, Boston. The Hon. E. P. Hurlbut was formerly one of the judges of the Supreme Court of this state, a lawyer by profession, with a passably clear head and a logical mind, who knows, if not the truth, at least what he means, and neither fears nor hesitates to say it. His pamphlet, as far as it goes, expresses, we doubt not, his honest thought, but his thought is the thought of a secularist, who admits no order above the secular, and holds that no religion not subordinate to and under the control of the civil power, should be tolerated. Both he and Dr. Bellows are from instinct and education hearty haters of the Catholic Church; but while he is content to war against her from the point of view of pure secularism or no-religion, that is, atheism, the reverend doctor seeks to clothe his hatred in a Christian garb and to war against Christ in the name of Christ.
Dr. Bellows, as a Liberal Christian, and though a Protestant hardly allowed by his more rigid Protestant countrymen to bear the Christian name, has a double battle to fight: one, against the Evangelical movement, at the head of which is Mr. Justice Strong, of the Supreme Court, to amend the constitution of the United States so as to make orthodox Protestantism the official religion of the republic, which would exclude him and his Unitarian, Universalist, and Quaker brethren; and the other, against the admission of the equal rights of Catholics with Protestants before the American state. Catholics greatly trouble him, and he hardly knows what to do with them. According to the letter of the constitution of the Union and of the several states, unless New Hampshire be an exception, they are American citizens, standing in all respects on a footing of perfect equality with any other class of citizens, and have as much right to take part in public affairs, and to seek to manage them in the interests of their religion, as Protestants have to take part in them in the interests of Protestantism; but this is very wrong, and against the spirit of the constitution; for the nation is a Protestant nation, the country was originally settled by and belongs to Protestantism, and Catholics ought to understand that they are really here only by sufferance, that they do not in reality stand in relation to public questions on a footing of equality with Protestants, and have really no right to exert any influence in regard to the public policy of the country not in accordance with the convictions of the Protestant majority. He tells us, in the discourse before us and more distinctly still in the columns of the Liberal Christian, not to aspire as citizens to equality with Protestants as if we had as much right to the government as they have, and warns us that if we do we shall be resisted even unto blood.
The occasion of his outpouring of wrath against Catholics is that they have protested against being taxed for the support of a system of sectarian or godless schools, to which they are forbidden in conscience to send their children, and have demanded as their right either that the tax be remitted, or that their proportion of the public schools be set off to them, to be, as to education and discipline, under Catholic control. Dr. Bellows allows that the Catholic demand is just, and that by making it a question at the polls they may finally obtain it; but this is not to his mind, for it would defeat the pet scheme of Protestants for preventing the growth of Catholicity in the country, by detaching, through the influence of the public schools, their children from the faith of their parents. Yet as long as any religion, even the reading of the Bible, is insisted on in the public schools, what solid argument can be urged against the demand of Catholics, or what is to prevent Catholic citizens from making it a political question and withholding their votes from the party that refuses to respect their rights of conscience and to do them justice? Dr. Bellows says that we cannot legally be prevented from doing so, but, if we do so, it will be the worse for us; for if we carry our religion to the polls the Protestant people will, as they should, rise up against us and overwhelm us by their immense majority, perhaps even exterminate us.
To prevent the possibility of collision, the reverend doctor proposes a complete divorce of church and state. He proposes to defeat the Evangelicals on the one hand, and the Catholics on the other, by separating totally religion and politics. Thus he says:
"It is the vast importance of keeping the political and the religious movements and action of the people apart, and in their own independent spheres, that makes wise citizens, alike on religious and on civil grounds, look with alarm and jealousy on any endeavors, on the part either of Protestants or Catholics, to secure any special attention or support, any partial or separate legislation or subsidies, from either the national or the state governments. I have already told you that Protestants, representing the great sects in this country, are now laboring, by movable conventions, to mould public opinion in a way to give finally a theological character to the constitution. In a much more pardonable spirit, because in accordance with their historical antecedents, their hereditary temper, and their ecclesiastical logic, the Roman Catholics in this country are, in many states, and every great city of the Union, using the tremendous power they possess as the make-weight of parties, to turn the public treasure in a strong current into their own channels, and thus secure an illegitimate support as a religious body. It is not too much to guess that more than half of the ecclesiastical wealth of the Roman Catholic Church in America, against the wishes and convictions of a Protestant country, has been voted to it in lands and grants by municipalities and legislatures trading for Irish votes. The Catholic Church thus has a factitious prosperity and progress. It is largely sustained by Protestants—not on grounds of charity and toleration, or from a sense of its usefulness (that were well privately done), but from low and unworthy political motives in both the great parties of the country. Now that Roman Catholics themselves should take advantage of their solidarity as a people and a church, and of the power of their priesthood, with all uninformed and some enlightened communicants, to turn the political will into a machine for grinding their ecclesiastical grist, is not unnatural, nor wholly unpardonable. But it is fearfully dangerous to them and to us. Their success—due to the sense of the Protestant strength which thinks it can afford to blink their machinations, or to the preoccupation of the public mind with the emulative business pursuits of the time, or to the confidence which the American people seem to feel in the final and secure divorce of church and state—their unchecked success encourages them to bolder and more bold demands, and accustoms the people to more careless and more perilous acquiescence in their claims. The principle of authority in religion, which has so many temperamental adherents in all countries; the inherent love of pomp and show in worship, strongest in the least educated; a natural weariness of sectarian divisions, commonest among lazy thinkers and stupid consciences—all these play into the hands of the Romanists, and they are making hay while the sun shines.
"There are no reviews, no newspapers in this country, so bold and unqualified; none so unscrupulous and so intensely zealous and partisan; none so fearless and outspoken as the Catholic journals. They profess to despise Protestant opposition; they deride the feeble tactics of other Christian sects; they are more ultramontane, more Roman, more Papal, than French, German, Austrian, Bavarian, Italian believers; they avow their purpose to make this a Roman Catholic country, and they hope to live on the Protestant enemy while they are converting him. They often put their religious faith above their political obligation, and, as bishops and priests, make it a duty to the church for their members to vote as Catholics rather than as American citizens. Not what favors the peace, prosperity, and union of the nation, but what favors their church, is the supreme question for them at every election; and American politicians, for their predatory purposes, have taught them this, and are their leaders in it.
"Now, as an American citizen, I say nothing against the equality of the rights of the Roman Catholics and the Protestants; both may lawfully strive, in their unpolitical spheres, for the mastery, and the law may not favor or disfavor either; nor can anything be done to prevent Roman Catholics from using their votes as Roman Catholics, if they please. It is against the spirit, but not against the letter of the constitution. At any rate, it cannot be helped; only, it may compel Protestants to form parties and vote as Protestants against Roman Catholic interests, which would be a deplorable necessity, and lead, sooner or later, through religious parties in politics, to religious wars. The way to avoid such a horrible possibility—alas, such a threatening probability for the next generation—is at once to look with the utmost carefulness and the utmost disfavor upon every effort on the part of either Protestants or Catholics to mix up sectarian or theological or religious questions with national and state and city politics.
"Every appeal of a sect, a denominational church, or sectarian charity of any description, to the general government, or state or city governments, for subsidies or favors, should be at once discountenanced and forbidden by public opinion, and made impossible by positive statute. The Protestant sects in this country should hasten to remove from their record any advantages whatsoever guaranteed to them by civil law to any partiality or sectarian distinction. The most important privilege they enjoy by law in most of the states is the right of keeping the Bible in the public schools. It is a privilege associated with the tenderest and most sacred symbol of the Protestant faith—the Bible. To exclude it from the public schools is to the religious affections of Protestants like Abraham's sacrifice of his only son. When it was first proposed, I felt horror-stricken, and instinctively opposed it; but I have thought long and anxiously upon the subject, and have, from pure logical necessity and consistency, been obliged to change—nay, reverse my opinion. Duty to the unsectarian character of our civil institutions demands that this exclusion should be made. It will not be any disclaimer of the importance of the Bible in the education of American youth, but only a concession that we cannot carry on the religious with the secular education of American children, at the public expense and in the public schools. So long as Protestant Christians insist, merely in the strength of their great majority, upon maintaining the Bible in the public schools, they justify Roman Catholics in demanding that the public money for education shall be distributed to sects in proportion to the number of children they educate. This goes far to break up the common-school system of this country, and, if carried out, must ultimately tend to dissolve the Union, which morally depends upon the community of feeling and the homogeneity of culture produced by an unsectarian system of common schools."—Church and State, pp. 16-19.
But this proposed remedy will prove worse than the disease. The state divorced from the church, wholly separated from religion, is separated from morality; and the state separated from morality, that is, from the moral order, from natural justice inseparable from religion, cannot stand, and ought not to stand, for it is incapable of performing a single one of its proper functions. The church, representing the spiritual, and therefore the superior, order, is by its own nature and constitution as independent of the state as the soul is of the body; and the state separated from the church, or from religion and morality, is like the body separated from the soul, dead, a putrid or putrefying corpse. Exclude your Protestant Bible and all direct and indirect religious instruction from your public schools, and you would not render them a whit less objectionable to us than they are now, for we object not less to purely secular schools than we do to sectarian schools. We hold that children should be trained up in the way they should go, so that when old they will not depart from it; and the way in which they should go is not the way of pure secularism, but the way enjoined by God our Maker through his church. God has in this life joined soul and body, the spiritual and the secular, together, and what God has joined together we dare not put asunder. There is only one of two things that can satisfy us: either cease to tax us for the support of the public schools, and leave the education of our children to us, or give us our proportion of the public schools in which to educate them in our own religion. We protest against the gross injustice of being taxed to educate the children of non-Catholics, and being obliged in addition to support schools for our own children at our own expense, or peril their souls.
We do not think Dr. Bellows is aware of what he demands when he demands the complete divorce of church and state, or the total separation of religion and politics. The state divorced from the church is a godless state, and politics totally separated from religion is simply political atheism, and political atheism is simply power without justice, force without law; for there is no law without God, the supreme and universal Lawgiver. Man has no original and underived legislative power, and one man has in and of himself no authority over another; for all men by the law of nature are equal, and have equal rights, and among equals no one has the right to govern. All governments based on political atheism, or the assumption that politics are independent of religion, rest on no foundation, are usurpations, tyrannies, without right, and can govern, if at all, only by might or sheer force. To declare the government divorced from religion is to declare it emancipated from the law of God, from all moral obligation, and free to do whatever it pleases. It has no duties, and under it there are and can be no rights; for rights and duties are in the moral order and inseparable from religion, since the law of God is the basis of all rights and duties, the foundation and guarantee of all morality. The state, divorced from religion, would be bound to recognize and protect no rights of God or man, not even those natural and inalienable rights of all men, "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." This is going further in the direction of absolutism than go the doctor's dear friends the Turks, whom he so warmly eulogizes in his letters from the East, for even they hold the sultan is bound by the Koran, and forbidden to do anything it prohibits.
Dr. Bellows, doubtless, has no intention of divorcing the state from morality, and does not see that his proposition implies it. He probably holds that morality is separable from religion, for with him religion is simply sentiment or opinion; but in this he falls into the common mistake of all Liberal Christians, and of many Protestants who regard Liberal Christians as no Christians at all. Morality and religion are inseparable, for morality is only the practical application in the several departments of life of the principles of religion. Without religion morality has no foundation, nothing on which to rest, is a baseless fabric, an unreality. Deny God, and you deny the moral law and the whole moral order, all right, all duty, all human accountability. The separation of all political questions from all religious questions, which the reverend doctor demands, is their separation from all moral questions, and is the emancipation of the state from all right and all duty, or the assertion of its unrestricted power to do whatever it pleases, in total disregard of all moral and religious considerations. Is this the doctrine of a Christian?
This surely is not the relation of church and state in America, and derives no support from the American order of thought. With us, the state is instituted chiefly for the protection of the natural rights of man, as we call them, but really the rights of God, since they are anterior to civil society, are superior to it, and not derived or derivable from it. These rights it is the duty of civil society to protect and defend. Any acts of the political sovereign, be that sovereign king or kaiser, nobility or people, contrary to these antecedent and superior rights are tyrannical and unjust, are violences, not laws, and the common-law courts will not enforce them, because contrary to the law of justice and forbidden by it. The American state disclaims all authority over the religion of its citizens, but at the same time acknowledges its obligation to respect in its own action, and to protect and defend from external violence, the religion which its citizens or any class of its citizens choose to adopt or adhere to for themselves. It by no means asserts its independence of religion or its right to treat it with indifference, but acknowledges its obligation to protect its citizens in the free and peaceable possession and enjoyment of the religion they prefer. It goes further, and affords religion the protection and assistance of the law in the possession and management of her temporalities, her churches and temples, lands and tenements, funds and revenues for the support of public worship, and various charitable or eleemosynary institutions. All the protection and assistance the benefit of which every Protestant denomination fully enjoys, and even the Catholic Church in principle, though not always in fact, would be denied, if the divorce Dr. Bellows demands were granted, and religion, having no rights politicians are bound to respect, would become the prey of lawless and godless power, and religious liberty would be utterly annihilated, as well as civil liberty itself, which depends on it.
The chief pretence with Dr. Bellows for urging the complete divorce of church and state, is that Catholics demand and receive subsidies from the state and city for their schools and several charitable institutions. Some such subsidies have been granted, we admit, but in far less proportion to Catholics than they to Protestants or non-Catholics. The public schools are supported at the public expense, by the school fund, and a public tax, of which Catholics pay their share, and these schools are simply sectarian or godless schools, for the sole benefit of non-Catholics. The subsidies conceded to a few of our schools do by no means place them on an equality with those of non-Catholics. We by no means receive our share of the subsidies conceded. The aids granted to our hospitals, orphan asylums, and reformatories are less liberal than those to similar non-Catholic institutions. So long as the state subsidizes any institutions of the sort, we claim to receive our proportion of them as our right. If the state grant none to non-Catholics, we shall demand none for ourselves. We demand equality, but we ask no special privileges or favors. The outcry of the sectarian and secular press against us on this score is wholly unauthorized, is cruel, false, and unjust. It is part and parcel of that general system of falsification by which it is hoped to inflame popular passion and prejudice against Catholics and their church.