4th. Subject to the condition of being able to guarantee pure faith, irreproachable manners, and competent knowledge, entire liberty is left to private individuals, ecclesiastics and laity, seculars and religious, to devote themselves to the ministry of teaching and education of youth, to form associations for this object, to found academies and universities wherein the sciences are taught, and which govern themselves by their internal discipline, the choice of masters, and the regulation of the studies, programmes, examens, etc. The church only reserves to herself, in their case, her right of superintendence in the matters of morality and the integrity of the faith.
5th. The church not only does not refuse the co-operation of the state in education, but, on the contrary, she solicits it, whenever private enterprise and her own resources do not suffice to enable her to extend instruction as much as she would wish and as the welfare of peoples demands. She then appeals to the communes, to the provinces, to the nation, in order that everywhere the co-operation of the two powers may effect the foundation of schools, the increase of the number of masters, and may come to the aid of the indigent parents. But even in these schools established with the concurrence of the civil power, if the state may superintend the administration of material interests, the right of direction and superintendence of teaching remains with the church.
6th. Lastly, the power, nevertheless, which the church exercises over public instruction does not hinder governments, if they deem it expedient, from establishing schools where professors chosen by them may give a special training to young people who devote themselves to administrative and military careers. The administration and the army belong, in fact, exclusively to the jurisdiction of governments. It is but just, therefore, that they should be able to give to those who are to belong to them the especial knowledge required for their employment. Only, here, the civil or military authority contracts the same obligations as those which bind the consciences of individuals, to wit, to watch that there be nothing in those schools contrary to religion and to good morals.
Such is the whole doctrine of the Catholic Church with regard to the education of youth in Christian states. Is there not in this organization an ideal which one may justly long to see realized, since it would be the solution of a certain number of problems which strangely perplex our insecurely founded and badly balanced modern communities? Two authorities, each having a distinct object, but united and being mutually the complement one of the other, have the guardianship of human interests—interests of time and interests of eternity. One, the civil authority, has for its direct domain, temporal affairs. The other, the religious authority, commands and directs in all that concerns the supernatural life. The latter, having the responsibility of guiding man from his birth up to his entrance into eternity, educates him, instructs him, and transforms him into a perfect man, into a Christian worthy by his virtues of the destiny which awaits him. The former benefits generations thus formed, and out of these elements, so well prepared to fulfil all the duties of the present life, it constitutes social communities as so many provisional countries, where justice and charity, loyally practised, present an image of the true and final country—Heaven. Thus, the two powers lend to one another a mutual support; the civil power, by securing to the spiritual power a complete liberty of action; and the spiritual power, in its turn, by forming for the state honest and perfect citizens. Thus peace and concord reign throughout the entire society, interests harmonize, justice is loved, order exists everywhere from the highest to the lowest step of the social ladder, and every one, content with his position here on earth, because his hopes are on high, is more intent on making himself better than on overthrowing existing institutions that he may raise himself on their ruins.
Where is to be found, once more we demand, an ideal more grand and more true than this conception of Christian society? The middle ages were not far from realizing it. Unhappily, a work so well begun at the inspiration of the church, first legists, courtiers of the civil power, afterwards Protestantism and its direct off-shoot, rationalism, were fain to interrupt it, and gradually to throw us back into a state of things which threatens to become worse than paganism or barbarism. There is yet time to return to truth, to right and order, which are impossible to be found except in a society based on Christian principles. But will peoples and legislators have a sufficiently clear perception of their duty and their interest to stay themselves at once on the incline down which they are gliding, and dragging us with them, towards a dark and tempest-threatening future?
IV.—CONDUCT OF THE CHURCH IN NON-CHRISTIAN COMMUNITIES.
In the eyes of the Catholic Church, Christianity is the divine afflatus, breathing upon human society to give it a soul and infuse life. Without her there can be in it no true nor prolific life, and every social organization which is not inspired by Christianity is, of necessity, defective and abnormal. The church cannot regard such an organization as a benefit, much less as a progress beyond Christian communities.[177] She deplores it, on the contrary, and she endeavors to persuade people that it would be better for them to submit absolutely to religion, and to take it as the guide and regulator of their social interests. Never has the church concealed her desire, not to lord it over, but to direct communities, to penetrate them with her spirit, to recover the salutary influence over them which is their due, and which they cannot reject without serious injury. The church has never made any mystery of this ambition. Her enemies themselves are witnesses to it, even when they permit themselves, as they too often do, to travesty and calumniate her motives in order to render them odious.
Lamentable, however, as may appear to her to be the inferior position which is allotted to her in modern communities, she does not abandon herself to useless regrets. Without renouncing her inalienable rights, she sets out from a fact which it is not in her power to change, and exhausts her ingenuity in making the best she can of it for the good of souls. The little liberty and influence left to her, she employs to fulfil her ministry; her zeal is inventive to supply by redoubled vigilance the want of her ordinary means in the spiritual government. Must not the work of God be accomplished on earth, in spite of the difficulties, in spite of the impediments of all kinds devised by hell?
Such, then, is the principle which regulates the conduct of the church in states where her authority is disowned. To take into consideration circumstances, established facts; to do nothing brusquely, but using whatever power still remains to her, to exert every effort to ameliorate the situation, to make herself more useful to the faithful and to society. Let us see how she applies this rule to education in non-Christian communities.
We find first the communities wherein the constitution proclaims the liberty of all worships, and their equality before the law. Here, the Catholic Church has ceased to be the religion of the state, which no longer lives in her spirit, no longer accepts her direction in matters of religion and morality, but prefers independence to all the advantages of a union with which it thinks it can dispense. How will the church act in this novel position? In the name of liberty, and of the equal protection accorded to every worship, she demands, first of all, the right of recruiting her ministers, and that of training them according to her own laws; the establishment of large and small seminaries, as well as their administration by the bishops exclusively. This is the first need to satisfy. It is her right, included in her claim to existence.