“The free exercise and enjoyment of religious profession and worship, without discrimination or preference, shall for ever be allowed in this State to all mankind.”—Art. 1, sec. 3.
Now, it is known that the “free exercise” of the Catholic religion is not “free” in most of our state institutions; and in most of them there is “preference and discrimination” in favor of “Evangelical” clergymen and against the Catholic Church. The writer could prove by affidavits that in the very city of New York there is religious persecution in some of the state institutions, if the general scope of his remarks permitted him to go into many details. Where is the Catholic priest living near a state institution but knows that there is “discrimination” made against him?
S. Thomas says (Summa Contra Gentiles, l. 4, c. xi.): “Nam viventia sunt quæ seipsa movent ad agendum; illa vero quæ non nisi exteriora movere possunt omnino sunt vita carentia.” This, however, is rather a description of a vital phenomenon than a definition of life itself. Fichte says: “Life is the tendency to individuation;” which, like most of the phrases of the German pantheists, means nothing or anything you please.
According to Richerand, “Life is a collection of phenomena which succeed each other during a limited time in an organized body”; but this applies equally to the succession of phenomena which takes place in the body after death. Herbert Spencer defines life to be “the co-ordination of actions”; but what is anything but a co-ordination of acting forces, consequently of actions? This definition is as applicable to sulphuric acid as to life.
It may be well to quote the testimony of two Englishmen on this subject.
Buckle, in his History of Civilization, vol. i. page 158, says: “Thus, for instance, the miserable and impudent falsehoods which a large class of English writers formerly directed against the morals and private character of the French and—to their shame be it said—even against the chastity of Frenchwomen, tended not a little to embitter the angry feelings then existing between the two first countries of Europe: irritating the English against French vices, irritating the French against English calumnies. In the same way, there was a time when every honest Englishman firmly believed that he could beat ten Frenchmen—a class of beings whom he held in sovereign contempt, as a lean and stunted race, who drank claret instead of brandy, who lived entirely off frogs; miserable infidels, who heard Mass every Sunday, who bowed down before idols, and who even worshipped the Pope.”
“I did not know,” says John Stuart Mill, in his Autobiography, “the way in which, among the ordinary English, the absence of interest in things of an unselfish kind, except occasionally in a special thing here and there, and the habit of not speaking to others, nor much even to themselves, about the things in which they do feel interest, cause both their feelings and their intellectual faculties to remain undeveloped, or to develop themselves only in some single and very limited direction, reducing them, considered as spiritual beings, to a kind of negative existence.”
“O thou, whom chance or will brings to the soil,
Where fair Armida doth the sceptre guide,
Thou canst not fly; of arms thyself despoil,
And let thy hands with iron chains be tied.”
—Fairfax's Translation.
The Question of Anglican Orders Discussed. By E. E. Estcourt, Canon of S. Chad's Cathedral, Birmingham. 1873.