What is life in mortal man but the movement of all his powers in quest of an object which gives them happiness? Well, then, Christianity lays hold of these human powers, and, in order to transform them, it infuses into them a new principle, which is grace—that is, the virtue of God uniting itself to the soul; it places a higher end before them—the possession of God in his own essence, an infinite object of knowledge and of love; it enables them, indeed, to bring forth works not possible to our frail nature without a divine illumination which enlightens the intelligence, and without a holy inspiration which strengthens and assists the will. It is a completely new man grafted on the root of the natural man. It is a new way of living, wherein, under the influence of a supernatural and divine principle, our feelings become purified by finding their source in God, our knowledge enlarges, because it penetrates even into the mysteries of the divine essence, and our love becomes limitless as God himself, the only true good, whom we love in himself, and in his creatures, the reflex of himself.
We know well that rationalistic philosophy, when it hears us speak of a divine life, of union with God by a higher principle than nature, shrugs its shoulders, and with superb self-complacency rings the changes on the words illusion, mysticism, extravagance. But what matter? Has it ever, like us, had any experience of this second life of the soul, so as to understand its reality and its grandeur? Its God, silent and solitary, exists only for reason. He will never issue from his eternal repose. He will not meddle with his creatures to constitute their happiness. This is not the God to satisfy our nature, thirsting for the infinite. He is not the God of Christianity whom we have learned to know and to love.
But to return to the church. Manhood is not the work of a day. Thirty years at the least pass away before the human being arrives at maturity, passing successively through the stages of infancy, boyhood, and youth. What care, what pains, and what active solicitude are needed for his education! A mother, a father, a master, devote themselves to it by turns. Fortunate if, after all, these efforts are crowned with success! Is it to be said that it costs less time and labor to bring a soul to spiritual maturity, to raise it to the perfection of this divine life? A day, a year—will they suffice to enlighten the intelligence with truths it must believe, to instruct it in obligations it must fulfil, but, above all, to form in it a habit of all those virtues it is bound to practise? Or is its education so different from the natural education that it can dispense with an instructor? Will the child, unaided, raise itself to God—we mean to the highest degree of moral perfection, of Christian sanctity? It would be folly to suppose it. It needs, therefore, a master; some one charged with the duty of teaching it truth, of forming it in virtue. Who is this instructor? Is it any other than that one to whom Jesus Christ, the divine but invisible Master, once said, “As my Father has sent me, I send you. Go then, teach all nations; teaching them to observe my whole law.” This instructor is the church, represented by her pastors, the lawful successors of the apostles.
This principle must be borne in mind, this indisputable truth of revealed doctrine. We shall see the consequences of it presently. We assert that the church, and the church alone, has received from Jesus Christ the power of forming the supernatural man—the Christian in the full force of that term. No one else can pretend to it. Not the state, with its power; not private individuals, with their knowledge, however great; not even the father or mother of the family, great as is the authority over their children’s souls with which God has invested them. And wherefore? Because the church alone possesses the means indispensable for a Christian education.
These means are of three kinds. In the name of God, the church gives truth to the understanding; she imposes a law on the will; and she dispenses grace, without which the Christian would lack power to believe the truth and to fulfil the law. Withdraw these things, and Christian education ceases to exist. You deliver up the understanding to human opinions; therein it loses faith. The will becomes a law to itself; that is to say, it has no other law to guide it than its own caprices and passions; and then, the moral force disappearing, man in the face of duty is oftener than not powerless to fulfil it. Now, who is it whom God has charged with the duty of preserving amongst men, and of communicating to every generation the treasure of revealed truths? Who is it who represents on earth the divine power, and has the right of enlightening consciences on the subjects of justice and injustice, of right and wrong? Whom, in short, has Jesus Christ appointed minister of his sacraments to distribute to souls the supernatural succors of grace? The church, and the church alone. To her have all generations of mankind been entrusted throughout the progress of the ages, in order that she may bring them forth to spiritual life, and form in them Jesus Christ, the divine model whom Christian education ought to reproduce in every one of us. It is, then, true that the formation of the supernatural man, of the Christian, is the proper ministry of the church; that this ministry constitutes a part of her essential functions; that it is, in a sense, her whole mission on earth; so much so, that she could not abdicate it without betraying her trust, without abandoning the object of her mission, and overthrowing the whole work of Christianity.
This is a fundamental principle which no sincere Catholic could think of rejecting, so solidly is it based on revelation, and so conformable is it to the principles of faith. There remains, consequently, only to deduce from it its consequences, and to point out how the whole claim of power over the instruction and education of Christian youth which the church asserts flows from it as a necessary and logical deduction. Now the church herself having been careful to determine the rights which belong to her, it is her word we shall take for our guide, it is her doctrine we propose to defend. It is clearly annunciated in the Encyclical Quanta Cura, and in the Syllabus, the most authentic exposition of the mind of the church on all the disputed questions of the day, as it is the most assailed.
II.—POSITION OF THE QUESTION.
For nearly three centuries the government of France has labored with indefatigable persistency and energy to concentrate in its hands all the social powers, and to constitute itself, as it were, the universal motive-cause in the state. Autonomy of provinces, communal franchises, individual or collective precedence in certain great public services, all have successively disappeared before the continual encroachments of the central power. Thus the state is no longer a living organism of its own life, at once manifold and ordered. It has become a huge mechanism, whose thousands of wheels, inert and powerless of themselves, move only at the impulse of the centre of the motive forces. To make of society a kind of human machine may be the ideal of a certain materialist and socialist school. It has never been the idea of Christianity. We Christians have too much regard for our personal dignity, we know too well the limits of the functions of the civil power, thus to abdicate all spontaneity, all precedence of our own, and to consent to become nothing but mere parts of a machine, when we can be, and ought to be, activities full of life and movement.
In the matter of education especially, what errors have not been committed, of what usurpations has not the civil power incurred the guilt? By the creation of an official, pattern university, monopolizing instruction, and subject exclusively to the direction of the government, all the authorities to whom belonged formerly the instruction and education of youth have been suppressed at one blow. There is no longer any right recognized, any action suffered, but that of the state, master both of school and pay. Everything by the state, everything for the state, this through long weary years has been the undiscussable maxim against which Catholic consciences, little disposed to sacrifice their right to the usurped power of the government, struggled in vain.
At last, thanks to the persistent protest of those consciences, so long despised; the principle has lost its pretended obviousness, and the fact itself has received its first check—sure prelude of its approaching disappearance. The moment seems to have arrived when those who have the right ought to claim their legitimate share in the exercise of a function eminently social. Now all have a right here. The government has its rights; as responsible for the good and evil which befall society; for the evil, to check and prevent it; for the good, to help in effecting it. The church has her rights, because she is the great moral power in society, and there is question here, pre-eminently, of a moral function. The family has its rights, for it is its fruit which has to be reared and instructed. Individuals, even, have their rights—the right of devotion and sacrifice in behalf of a holy work, and of a ministry which, more than any other, stands in need of those graces.