You and all Protestants claim infallible authority for the Bible read and interpreted by each individual for himself, or, rather, by each sect for itself. Unless this interpretation is by an infallible authority, which it confessedly is not, you have in the Bible practically only a fallible authority, yet claim to have an infallible authority; and hence you claim and seek to enforce in the name of the Bible your own very fallible and contradictory opinions or theories. You are guilty, then, of precisely the offence you charge against Catholics, that of claiming infallibility for a fallible authority, and of which it is possible Catholics are not guilty, and, if the Pope be infallible, not only are not, but cannot be guilty. You have, as I have said—even conceding, as I do, the Bible in its true meaning to be infallible—practically no infallible authority. You have no infallible authority to determine and declare the law of God contained in the Bible. You have not the law itself, but only your view of it, which is only a human view, and therefore fallible. To subject men to a mere human view or to a mere human authority, I need not say, is intolerable despotism; and hence your Protestantism is incompatible either with civil or religious liberty, for all men
are born equal, and no man or body of men has, except by divine appointment or delegation, any dominion over another.
Hence, as you and I both know, there is no solid basis or security for liberty under Protestantism. If Protestants grow indifferent and do not attempt to govern in the name of the Bible, there may be license, anarchy, a moral and political chaos; but if they are in earnest, and attempt to enforce the authority of the Bible as they understand it, they only enforce their own view of it, and, consequently, can establish only a spiritual despotism either in church or state. In Geneva, Scotland, in every state in Europe that became Protestant, in Virginia, in Massachusetts, in Connecticut, the dominant sect, you know, in early times established an odious tyranny, and would tolerate no opinion hostile to its own. Owing to certain reminiscences of principles inculcated in pre-Reformation times, and to the growing indifference of Protestants to their religion at the time our republic was instituted, and still more to the dissensions among Protestants themselves, civil and religious liberty were recognized here in the United States, but it had and has no basis and no guarantee, except in parchment constitutions, not worth the parchment on which they are engrossed, and which the people may alter at will; and even now the Evangelical sects are trying to unite their forces to abolish religious liberty, without which civil liberty is an empty name. The founder of Methodism was no friend to civil liberty, and he proved himself the bitter enemy of religious liberty by creating, or doing more than any other man to create, the shameful Gordon riots in England in 1780. Let the Methodists become, as they bid fair to become, the dominant sect
in the country, and able to command a majority of the votes of the American people, and both civil and spiritual despotism will be fastened on the country, for Methodism has only a human authority.
The sort of security Protestantism gives to religious liberty may be seen in the proceedings of the general government against the Mormons. It does not interfere with their religion: it pretends it only enforces against them the laws of the Union—laws, by the way, made expressly against them. All the government needs to suppress any religion or religious denomination it does not like is to pass laws prohibiting some of its practices on the plea that they are contrary to morality or the public good, and then take care to execute them. Queen Elizabeth held religious liberty sacred, and abhorred the very thought of persecuting Catholics. She only executed the laws against them. She enacted a law enjoining an oath of supremacy, and making it high treason to refuse to take it, and which she knew every Catholic was obliged in conscience to refuse to take; and then she could hang, draw, and quarter them, not as Catholics, but as traitors. Her judges only executed the laws of the realm against them. I have, as you well know, no sympathy with the Mormons, and I detest their peculiar doctrines and practices, but the principle on which the government proceeds against them would justify it, or any sect that could control it, in suppressing the church, and all Protestant sects even but itself.
Laws in favor of liberty amount to nothing, for all laws may be repealed. The Bible is no safeguard. Under it and by its supposed authority, Catholics have suffered the most cruel persecutions; even when not deprived of life, they have been deprived
of the common rights of men by Protestant governments led on by Protestant ministers. Thus the Bible commands the extirpation of idolaters. But Protestants, by their private judgment, declared Catholics to be idolaters, and hence in the name of the Bible took from them their churches, their schools, colleges, and universities, confiscated their goods, and imprisoned them, exiled them, or cut their throats. The pretence of legislating only in regard to morality avails nothing for religious liberty; for morality depends on dogma, and is only the practical application of the great principles of religion to individual, domestic, social, and political life. You cannot touch a moral question without touching a religious question, for religion and morality are inseparable; your only possible security for liberty is in having a divinely instituted authority that is infallible in faith and morals, competent to tell the state as well as individuals how far it may go, and where it must stop.
You object, finally, my dear Philo, that the assertion of the infallibility of the Pope is incompatible with the assertion of the sovereignty of the people and the independence of secular government. The people and all secular governments, you have conceded, are subject to the law of God. Neither the people nor secular governments are independent of the divine law, and have only the authority it gives them, and the freedom and independence it allows them. How can they lose any right or authority they have or can have by having the divine law, under which they hold, infallibly declared and applied? It is singular, my old schoolfellow, that so acute, subtle, and so able a lawyer as I know you to be, should have the misfortune, as a theologian, to object to the very thing
you really wish to maintain, and which can alone save you from the evils you seek to avoid. Now, what it is necessary to know in order to determine the rights and powers of government, is to know precisely what in relation to government the law of God—including both the natural law and the revealed law, which are really only two parts of one and the same divine law—ordains, what it prescribes, and what it forbids. This knowledge can only in part be derived through natural reason, because the law is in part supernatural, and can be known only by faith: it cannot be derived with certainty from the Scriptures interpreted by our own fallible judgment or by any human authority: it can be obtained infallibly from the teaching and decisions of an infallible Pope, if really infallible. The infallible Pope will give to the people all the sovereignty they have under the law of God, and maintain for civil government all the rights and powers, all the freedom and independence of action, the law of God gives it. What more do you want? What more dare you assert for civil government or for popular sovereignty? Would you put the people in the place of God, and raise the secular order above the spiritual, man above God? Certainly not, at least not avowedly either to yourself or to others. Then, how can you pretend the Papal infallibility is incompatible with the sovereignty of the people and the independence of civil government? Do you want the line unsettled, and the law of God
left undefined, and remitted, as you remit the Bible, to the private judgment of each people or each government, to be interpreted by each for itself, and as it sees proper? But that were to make the divine law practically of no effect, and to leave each people and each government without any law but what it chooses to be to itself. It practically emancipates the secular order from the law of God, and asserts complete civil absolutism.