The rabbi says, "First the state, then the church," which is as absurd as to say, "First man, then God." The state represents simply a human authority, while the church, or the synagogue even, represents—the first for the Catholic, the second for the Jew—the sovereignty of God, or the divine authority in human affairs, and the rabbi in his doctrine is false alike to Moses and to Christ, and as little of an orthodox Jew as he is of a Christian believer. Yet he agrees perfectly with Judge Hurlbut and Dr. Bellows in asserting the supremacy of the state or secular order, and the subordination of the spiritual order. We do not know whether the rabbi means to approve or censure the assumption, by Peter the Great, of the headship of the Russian Church and his government of it by the sword; but Peter only acted on the principle, "First the state, then the church," and the slavery of the Russian Church to the state is only an inevitable consequence of that principle or maxim. The Russian Church, governed by the Holy Synod, itself governed by the Czar, presents a lively image of the abject position religion would be compelled to hold in every country if the doctrine of the total separation of church and state, and the independence and supremacy of the state, advocated by one or another of the three men we are criticising, were to prevail and to be embodied in the civil code.
But let this pass. It is clear that the rabbi, and therefore the Jews, so far as he represents them, are to be included in the great conspiracy against the liberty and equality of Catholics, or religious liberty recognized and guaranteed by the American states. Catholics are to be put down and their church suppressed by the strong arm of power. To prepare the American people for this proposed revolution in the American system, this suppression of religious liberty, a system of gross misrepresentation of Catholic faith and practice, of misstatements, calumnious charges, and downright lying respecting the church, is resorted to and persisted in as it was by the reformers in the sixteenth century. "Lie, lie stoutly," Voltaire said, though it was said long before him; "something will stick." We do not like to say this, but truth will not permit us to soften our statement or to use milder terms. There is nothing too harsh or too false for the anti-Catholic press and the anti-Catholic preachers and lecturers to say of our holy religion, and nothing can be more unlike the Catholic Church than their pretended representations of her—too unlike, indeed, even to be called caricatures, for they catch not one of her features. Even when the anti-Catholic writers and speakers tell facts about Catholics or in the history of the church, they so tell them as to distort the truth and to produce the effect of falsehood, or draw inferences from them wholly unwarranted. We must, then, be excused if we sometimes call the systematic misrepresentation of our religion, our church, and ourselves by its true and expressive name, even though it may seem harsh and impolite. The batteries they discharge against the church are not to be silenced by bouquets of roses.
The public has become too well informed as to Catholic doctrines and usages to permit the repetition, with much effect, of many of the old charges and calumnies. Only the very ignorant can be made to believe that the church is the Babylonian sorceress who makes the nations drunk with the wine of her fornications; that she is "the mystery of iniquity"; that the Pope is "the man of sin," or Antichrist; that our nunneries are brothels, and their vaults are filled with the skeletons of murdered infants, of which Luther discoursed to his friends with so much unction in his Tischreden over his pot of beer. These things are a little out of date, and do not gain the ready credence they once did. The age is all for liberty, for progress, for enlightenment; so the anti-Catholic tactics change to suit the times. James I. of England, as did the politicians of France opposed to the Ligue, charged the church with being hostile to monarchy and the divine right of kings. The charge now is that she is opposed to republicanism, and denies the divine right of the people, or, more strictly, of the demagogues. She is said to be a spiritual despotism, the foster-mother of ignorance and superstition, the enemy of science and of progress, of intelligence and liberty, individual and social, civil and religious. Her religious houses are dens of cruelty and tyranny, and if she is permitted to continue and spread her peculiar institutions over this country, American democracy will be destroyed, and American liberty be but a memory, etc., etc.
The cry is not now, the truth is in danger, the Gospel is in danger, religion is in danger, but the republic is in danger, democracy is in danger, liberty is in danger. The church, the moment she gets the power, will, it is argued, abolish our political system, establish a monarchy, abolish religious liberty, and cut the throats of all heretics and infidels, or send them to the stake to be consumed in a fire of green wood, as Calvin did Michael Servetus. And there are not wanting fools enough to believe it or dishonest men enough to pretend to believe it when they do not, though it is evident that the republic is likely to pass away, if things go on in the political world as they are now going, and be succeeded by anarchy or a military despotism long before the majority of the people will cease to war against the church as anti-democratic. But the point to be noted here is that all these charges assume the supremacy of the secular order, and allege not that the church is false, is not the church of God, but that she is hostile to democracy or democratic institutions; in other words, that she does not conform to popular opinion, for democracy is nothing but popular opinion erected into law. Now, as we do not believe that popular opinion, inconstant as the wind, is infallible, or that the secular order is supreme, we are not sure that it would be a fatal objection to the church even if what is alleged against her were well founded. The arguments against the church of this sort are drawn from too low a level to command any intelligent respect, and they are all based on a false assumption. Politics are not higher than religion; the state is not above the church; the secular order is not above the spiritual; and it is only atheism that can assert the contrary. To a terrible extent, the supremacy of the secular is the doctrine of our age and country; but Catholics hold it to be both false and dangerous, as incompatible with the liberty and independence of religion, with natural morality, and even with the existence of natural society, as it is with the sovereignty of God. It is the doctrine of the European revolutionists and communists, and is sapping the life and threatening the very existence of our American republicanism—has already reduced our government to be little else than an agency for promoting the private interests of business men, bankers, manufacturers, and railroad corporations. Our elections are becoming a wretched farce, for the monopolists govern the government, let what party may succeed at the polls. The State governments cannot control them, and the General Government just as little.
We will not so dishonor the church or insult religion as to undertake to refute these popular charges against her, and to prove that her authority is not incompatible with the existence and salutary working of republican government. The charges are addressed to ignorance and prejudice; we take higher ground, and maintain that civil society can no more dispense with the church, than the body with the soul. The secular is insufficient for itself, and needs the informing life and vigor of the spiritual. The political history of France since 1682, especially since 1789, proves it to all men who are capable of tracing effects to their causes. There is no form of government more in need of the church than the republican, founded on the modern doctrine of popular sovereignty, and the maxim, the majority must rule. The habit of regarding power as emanating from the mass, as derived from low to high, tends itself to debase the mind, to destroy that respect for law, and that reverence for authority, without which no government performs in a peaceable and orderly way its legitimate functions. The American people see nothing divine, nothing sacred and inviolable, in their government; they regard law as an emanation of their own will, as their own creation, and what creator can feel himself bound to reverence and obey his own creature? We need the church to consecrate the government, to give the law a spiritual sanction, to create in us habits of reverence, of submission, and docility, and to impress us with the conviction that civil obedience is a moral duty, and that we must be loyal to legitimate authority for conscience' sake. We need the church to teach us that in obeying the laws not repugnant to the divine law, we are obeying not men, which is slavery, but God, which is freedom, and the very principle of all freedom. We need her to create in us high and holy aspirations, to produce in us those high and disinterested virtues, without which civil government is impotent for good, and powerful only for evil. No man who believes not in the sovereignty of truth, in the supremacy of right, and feels it not his duty to obey it at all hazards, has the temper demanded in a republic, and only the church can create it.
A government built on interest, however enlightened, on sentiment, however charming, or public opinion, however just, is a house built on the sand. It rests on nothing fixed and permanent, is without stability or efficiency, and tends always to fall and bury the people in its ruins. We see this in our own political history. It would be difficult to find a government more corrupt than ours, that taxes the people more heavily, or that does less for the public good, the advantages we had at the start being taken into the account. The good that has been done, the great things accomplished, have been accomplished by the people in spite of the government, and our record as a nation can hardly put that of Prussia or Russia to shame.
We do not choose to dwell on this aspect of the case, although much more might be said. We love our country, have been bred to love republicanism, and have the success of the American experiment at heart. The evils which the liberals charge to the union of church and state, and hold the church responsible for, spring, as every impartial and intelligent student of history knows, not from the union but from the separation of church and state, and the unremitting efforts of the civil power to usurp the functions of the spiritual power, and to make the church the accomplice of its policy. The terrible struggles of the pope and emperor in the middle ages had this cause and no other. The pope simply sought to maintain against the emperor the freedom and independence of the church, the kingdom of God on earth, that is, true religious liberty. It is to the partial, in some countries the complete, triumph of the secular over the spiritual, that we must attribute the unsettled, disorderly, and revolutionary state of contemporary society throughout the civilized world, the hatred or contempt of authority both divine and human, the depression of religion, the decline of intellectual greatness, the substitution of opinion for faith, a sickly sentimentalism for a manly and robust piety, free-loveism or divorce ad libitum for Christian marriage, and the general abasement of character.
The evils are very real, but the more perfect divorce of the state from the church would not cure or lessen, but only aggravate and intensify them; nay, would to all human foresight render them incurable. The state without religion or moral obligation is impotent to redress social evils or to elevate society, and Protestantism, which holds from the people, and depends for its very breath of life on popular opinion, is no less impotent than the state. Protestantism, having retained some elements of religion from the church, may, we readily concede, do something to retard the fall of a nation that accepts it, but when a Protestant nation has once fallen, become morally and politically corrupt, rotten to the core, it has no power to restore it; for it has no principle of life to infuse into it above and beyond that which it already has. Resting on human authority, holding from the nation or people, its life is only the national life itself; and, of course, when the national life grows weak, its own life grows weak, and when the national life is extinct, its own life becomes extinct with it. Cut off from the church of God, and therefore from Him who is "the way, the truth, and the life," it cannot draw new supplies of life from the Fountain of Life itself, with which to revive and reinvigorate the fallen nation.
This is wherefore there is no hope for our republic under Protestantism. There has been a sad falling-off in the virtue, the honesty, the integrity, the chastity, and public spirit of our people in the last fifty years. The old habits formed under Catholic discipline and influences are wearing out, if not worn out; intellectual culture may be more general, though even that may be questioned, but it is less generous, thorough, and profound; meeting-houses may be increased in greater proportion than the population itself, but theology is less studied—is less intellectual, less scientific, and is more superficial; and religion has less hold on the conscience, and less influence on life, public, private, or domestic; and we may say, generally, that in all save what belongs to the material order, our republic has a downward tendency. Now, since Protestantism has nothing more or higher than the republic, and no recuperative power, how, then, can it possibly arrest this downward tendency and turn it upward, and save the nation? Archimedes wanted something whereon to stand outside of the world in order to move it. This Protestantism has not, for it rests on the world, and has nothing above the world or outside of it, and in fact is only the world itself. To every one who understands the great law of mechanic force, which has its analogue in the great principle of moral or spiritual dynamics, it is clear that the hope of the republic is not and cannot be in Protestantism, and there is just as little in the civil order, for that, divorced from the church and without any moral obligation, is precisely that which needs saving. The union of the various Protestant sects in one organic body, if it were possible, would avail nothing; for the whole would be only the sum of the parts, and the parts having no supermundane life, the whole could have none.
Hence we say that whatever hope there is for our republic is in the growth and predominance of the Catholic Church in the minds and hearts of the American people; and there is a well-grounded hope for it only in the prospect that she may before it is too late become the church of the great majority. The church has what Archimedes wanted, and Protestantism has not—the whereon to stand outside and above the world. She lives a life which is not derived from the life of the world, and is in communion with the Source of life itself, whence she may be constantly drawing fresh supplies, and infusing into the nation a life above the national life in its best estate, and which, infused into the nation, becomes for it a recuperative energy, and enables it to arrest its downward tendency, and to ascend to a new and higher life. It is not without a reason, then, founded in the nature of things, that we tell our countrymen that Protestantism may ruin the republic, but cannot save it, any more than it can the soul of the individual; and that, instead of crying out against the church like madmen, as hostile to the republic, they should rather turn their eyes toward her as their only source of help, and learn that she can and will save the republic, if they will only allow her to do it.