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Cornall Unlveralty Ubrary 
 BX1396.2 .B87 
 
 Conversations on Uberalism and the Chur 
 
 olln 
 
 3 1924 029 380 734 
 
Cornell Catholic 
 Union Library. 
 
 CONVERSATIONS 
 
 ON 
 
 LIBERALISM AND THE CHUECH. 
 
 O. A. BEOWNSON, L. L. D. 
 
 NEW YORK : 
 D. & J. SADLIKR & CO., 31 BARCLAY STREET. 
 
 BOSTON:— P. H. BEADY, 149 TREMONT STREET. 
 HONTUEAL : — COB. MOTRE DAME AND ST. FRAXCIS XAVIKK iOS. 
 
A, l^2~Lf^ 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 
 ». ft J. SADLIER & CO, 
 
 issr. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 This little volume must speak for itself. The 
 Conversations turn on questions of the day and 
 the hour, and taken as a whole they form a 
 passable defence of the Church against the 
 objections urged in the name of Liberalism 
 and Progress, or so-called Modern Civilization. 
 They are not purely imaginary, but such as I 
 have really had time and again with the enemies 
 of the Church, who object to her principally on 
 political and social grounds. 
 
 The form of the work has been adopted foi 
 my own convenience and that of the reader, and 
 I hope will not be found objectionable. The 
 doctrme is, I believe, rigidly orthodox. I have 
 sought neither to offend the world nor to con- 
 
IV PREFACE. 
 
 ciliate it. I do not believe in making conces- 
 sions of what is not mine to concede. I have 
 explained the teachings of the Church where they 
 conflict with the spirit of the age, but I have 
 not sought to conform them to that spirit. The 
 Church was instituted by our Lord to govern 
 the world according to the Divine Reason and 
 Will, not to be governed by it. These Conversa- 
 tions are respectfully dedicated to all who have 
 or seek after Christian Truth, by 
 
 The Authob. 
 
 EuzABEiB, K. J., April, 18C9. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAOK, 
 
 PREFACE 3 
 
 CHAPTER I., 7 
 
 CHAPTER II., . . . • . ,20 
 
 CHAPTER III., .'..,. 33 
 
 CHAPTER IV., 52 
 
 CHAFTER V 65 
 
 CHAPTER VI., 73 
 
 CITAl'TER Vn. 89 
 
 CHAPTER vm 104 
 
 CHAPTER IX., 119 
 
 CHAPTER X., 132 
 
 CHAFFER XI., 149 
 
 CHAPTER Xn. IGO 
 
 CHAPTER Xm., 173 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 DuEiNG the intense heat of the summer days of 
 1868, I was ordered by my physicians to try the 
 virtues of a newly-discovered mineral spring, in a 
 distant State, which was beginning to acquire 
 considerable reputation. The mmiber of visitors 
 was not large, for it had not yet become a 
 fashionable watering-place, and few, except such 
 as were reaUy in pui'suit of health, or at least 
 desirous of recruitiug their exhausted energies, 
 visited it. They were chiefly overworked lawyers, 
 merchants, traders, editors, and ministers of re- 
 ligion, who required relaxation from labor and 
 rest, with freedom from their ordinary cares a::id 
 anxieties. 
 
 I belonged to none of those classes. I had no 
 profession, no occupation, and, witTi a moderate 
 but competent estate ioherited from my grand- 
 
8 CONVERSATIONS ON 
 
 fatlier, I was free to follow my own tastes and 
 pleasures. I was past middle age, unmarried, 
 and had no near relatives dependent on me for 
 support or protection. I was as free as a man 
 can be ia this world ; had originally an excellent 
 constitution, which I had not always respected, 
 and was now suffering from early imprudences 
 and ills incident to idleness and good living. My 
 real complaint was, that I had nothing to do, or to 
 take up my attention ; so, as I said, my physicians 
 ordered me to try the waters of the new Spa. I 
 cannot say much for the waters, but the journey 
 I was forced to make, the change of scenery, the 
 ■pxiie mountain air, and the intellectual and intel- 
 ligent company I fotmd had their effect, and, after 
 an absence of a few months, I returned to my 
 home completely renovated in body, and with 
 my mind engaged with a subject not unlikely to 
 occupy it the rest of my hfe. 
 
 While at the spring, around which had sprung 
 up a small village called Springdale, consisting of 
 &h. unfinished meeting-hoiise, one or two boarding- 
 houses, and a large hotel, I formed the acquaint- 
 ance of several gentlemen whose conversation 
 interested me much. Among them were two who 
 particularly attracted my attention. One, many 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH. 9 
 
 years the elder, was apparently a minister or a 
 priest, Avith a quiet and unobtrusive manner, 
 evidently a man of foreign birth, and education, 
 but speaking English as it it had been his native 
 tongue. He must have been at least threescore 
 and ten, but his form was erect and his . eye 
 undimmed, his natural strength unabated, and 
 his voice unbroken, sweet, melodious, and sym- 
 pathetic. He had for me a singular attraction, 
 and I felt prepossessed in his favor at first sight. 
 The other was an active, energetic man, under 
 middle age, well made, with dark hair, heavy 
 brows, and sharp, restless, black eyes. His man- 
 ner was not rude, but brisk and a httle imperious, 
 and he spoke always in a bold, confident tone, 
 from which no appeal might be taken. He gave 
 always his opinion promptly and imhesitatingly 
 on any and every subject that came up, and 
 seemed to have left no subject in law, pohtios, 
 theology, literature, science, or art on which he 
 was not competent to pass a final judgment. It 
 is hardly necessary to add that he was the chief 
 editor of a leading metropoUtan journal. 
 
 The two gentlemen were much together, and 
 seemed to take no httle interest in each other, 
 although I could not discover tliat any topic was 
 ever broached between them on which they did 
 
10 CONVEKSATIONS ON 
 
 not disagree very essentially. Their conversa- 
 tion, or rather their discussion, attracted me as a 
 hstener, at first as drawing off my thoughts from 
 myself, and afterwards by the interest it awakened 
 in the subjects on which it chiefly turned, and I 
 seldom failed to hear it. Other guests seemed as 
 much attracted as myself, and whenever we saw 
 them seated under the shade of the old maple- 
 trees left standing near our hotel, we formed a 
 ring around them, and sat and Hstened in silence. 
 
 The editor was a man of our times, animated 
 by the spirit of the age, and a firm believer in our 
 glorious nineteenth century. " The great objec- 
 tion, Father," said he one day to the priest, as I. 
 soon learned he was, "to the Church, is her 
 unprogressive character. She fails to keep re- 
 ligion up with the times, refuses to advance with 
 modern society, and the world goes on without 
 her." 
 
 ""Whither?" quietly asked the priest. 
 
 " Whither? Why, on its progressive march." 
 
 " Do you mean that the Church herself is not 
 progressive, or that she opposes progress in indi- 
 viduals and society?" 
 
 "Both. The Church is stationary, remains 
 what she was in the Dark Ages, does her best to 
 keep society back where it was a thousand years 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH. 11 
 
 ago, and to prevent tlie human race from taking 
 a step forward." 
 
 " There is, I suppose, no doubt of that ?' 
 
 " Not the least." 
 
 "Is it not possi]ple for the Church to remain 
 immovable herself, and yet be very progressive 
 in her influence on individuals and society gen- 
 eraUy?" 
 
 " To aid progress the Church must be herself 
 progressive." 
 
 "You see, then, neither argument nor wit in 
 Dr. Johnson's reply to the learned butcher who 
 gave it as his opinion that to criticize a great 
 poet, one should himseK be a great poet : ' Non- 
 sense, sir! as well say he who kills fat oxen 
 should himself be fat.' I have always thought 
 differently. Progress is motion ; and if I have 
 not forgotten what my professor of mechanics 
 taught me, there is no motion possible without 
 something at rest. Motion requires a mover, 
 and the mover cannot move unless it is itself 
 immovable. A man cannot make any progress 
 if he stands on a movable foundation, as you 
 may see ia the case of the poor fellow in the 
 treadmill. Archimedes, in order to move the 
 world, demanded a whereon to rest the fulcrum 
 of his lever outside of the world he proposed to 
 
12 CON^TaESATIONS ON 
 
 move. The Clmxcli, if herself movable or pro- 
 gressive, could not aid either social or individual 
 progress; she •would simply change with the 
 changes going on around her, and could neither 
 aid nor control them." 
 
 " But, Reverend Father, you overlook tlie fact 
 that it is precisely in herself that progress is most 
 needed. She teaches the same dogmas and 
 claims the same authority over the mind, the 
 heart, and the conscience in this enlightened age, 
 and in this free repubhc, that she did in the 
 barbarous ages under feudalism, and what she 
 teaches and claims ceases to be in harmony with 
 men's convictions, or their sense of their own 
 rights and dignity." 
 
 " The Church, then, you thiak, in order to be 
 able to serve the world, should not govern it, but 
 suffer herself to be governed by it, and take care 
 to teach it only what it already believes and 
 holds ? This is a very good principle, no doubt, 
 for a journahst, who seeks only a wide circulation 
 for his journal, but do you think our Lord acted 
 on it ? Did he find the convictions of the world 
 he came to redeem and save in harmony with 
 his doctrines and claims ? If so, how came the 
 Jews to reject him and crucify him between 
 two thieves? Did the Apostles teach only such 
 
IIBERAUSM AND THE CHURCH. 13 
 
 doctrines and put forth only such claims as were 
 in harmony with the sentiments and convictions 
 of their age? Why, then, did their age make 
 martyrs of them? How much would our Lord 
 and his Apostles or Christians during the martyr 
 ages have done to advance the world, think you, 
 if they had only echoed its opinions, approved its 
 superstitions, and suffered themselves to be dic- 
 tated to and governed by it ? Would you have 
 the Church conform to the world and be a time- 
 server? For my part, I have always held the 
 Church to be instituted to teacli and govern all 
 men and nations in all things spiritual, and not 
 to be taught and governed by them." 
 
 " That is precisely my objection. The Church 
 places herself above the people, assumes to be 
 wiser than they, claims the right to govern them, 
 and therefore denies their sovereignty." 
 
 "Their sovereignty in spirituals, certaiuly, in 
 temporals, as against the inherent sovereignty of 
 kings or nobilities, not at all. But you are losing 
 sight of your objection. You objected to the 
 Church that she is not progressive, teaches 
 now the same doctrines and makes the same 
 claims that she taught and made in the Dark 
 Ages. Be it so. Axe those doctrines false and 
 unfounded? If so, you should have objected 
 
14 CONVERSATIONS ON 
 
 their falsity and invalidity. If true and just, how 
 can she depart from them without departing from 
 truth and justice? Your objection is not well 
 taken, unless you hold that truth and justice 
 are variable, and change from age to age and 
 from nation to nation, or as men's views of them 
 change." 
 
 " Your Church is undemocratic, and places 
 herself above the people, allows the people no 
 voice in her administration, or in determining 
 the doctrines to be taught." 
 
 "All in good time, my dear Mr. Editor. Just 
 at present, pray tell me if truth is variable — one 
 thing to-day and another to-morrow ?" 
 
 " Truth, like everything else, is progressive." 
 
 " Do you mean that the truth itself is pro- 
 gressive, or that our knowledge of it is pro- 
 gressive ?" 
 
 " Progress is the law of the universe." 
 
 " Of the created universe, in relation to the 
 end for which it exists, be it so ; but do you 
 pretend that the Creator of the universe is pro- 
 gressive ?" 
 
 " Why not ?" 
 
 " Because he is Being in its plentitude, and 
 could not be Creator if he were not. Progress 
 is going from imperfection towards perfection, 
 
UBERALISM AND THE CHUKCH. 1'} 
 
 and is predicable only of an existence that 
 depends on another for its being, aud that has 
 not yet actualized all the possibilities of its 
 nature. God is independent, needs only him- 
 self, is eternally perfect, is, as say the theologians, 
 most pur% act, ia whose nature there are and 
 can be no potentialities or unactualized possibil- 
 ities, consequently in him there is no room for 
 progress. To suppose him progressive, is to 
 suppose him a creature, imperfect, dependent, 
 movable ; and to suppose him, or to suppose 
 truth movable or progressive, is to fall into the 
 error of those whom Plato calls the ancestors of 
 the Greeks, who held that all things are ia a per- 
 petual flux and reflux, and that there is nothing 
 fixed or stable. We should thus deny progress 
 in the very act of asserting it." 
 
 " How so ?" 
 
 "If all things are in a perpetual flux and 
 reflux, there is for things neither beginning nor 
 end, and without both no progress is possible. 
 Progress is proceeding, morally as well as physi- 
 cally, from a starting-point to an end or goal. 
 It means literally stepping forward, that is, 
 action from a fixed poiat to a fixed point ; 
 remove the points, and no progress is conceiv- 
 able. Before you can pronounce a man pro- 
 
16 CONVEKSATIONS ON 
 
 gressive, you must know that lie has a beginning 
 as well as an end ; so truth must have a begin- 
 ning and an end, ia order to be progressive. You 
 must say the same of God. Will you say now 
 that God is progressive ?" 
 
 " I pretend not that. He is without variable- 
 ness, or shadow of turning. But truth is not God." 
 
 "What is it then?" 
 
 " Nobody can say. We only know what it is 
 in relation to us, or what seems to us to be true. 
 We never know the absolute ; our knowledge 
 stops with the relative. Things may be true to 
 you, and not to me, in one age or country, and 
 not in another. I have no doubt that the 
 doctrines and claims of the Church were very 
 admissible in the Dark Ages, and that they then 
 served the cause of progress, of religion, of civil- 
 ization. They were then in harmony with the 
 age, and were true and useful ; but that does not 
 imply that they are either now." 
 
 " Beware, my dear friend, of the treadmill. It 
 is painful to be compelled to stand on the wheel, 
 to keep stepping from morning to evening and 
 never get a step forward. But will you teU me 
 what doctrines or claims of the Church were true 
 and useful in the Dark Ages that are false and 
 hurtful now?" 
 
I,IBER.VLISM AND THE CHUECH. 1 
 
 " We need not descend to particulars. There 
 is no doubt that the Church, for several cen- 
 turies after the faU of the Roman Empire of the 
 West, was a powerful and beneficent institution, 
 and exerted a happy influence in promoting 
 civilization. She saved from utter destruction 
 the arts, the literature, and the sciences of 
 the old Gr£eco-Roman world ; she softened the 
 manners, and infused the sentiments of human- 
 ity into the hearts of the rude Barbarians that 
 issued forth from the forests of Germany and 
 seated themselves on the ruins of the Empire, 
 by preaching to them the doctrine of brotherly 
 love, by presenting them as the model of all 
 excellence the meek and lowly Jesus, going 
 about doing good when he had not where to lay 
 his head, and dying on the cross for the redemp- 
 tion of his enemies, whom with his latest breath 
 he forgave and prayed for. But having done 
 that work, she is now only in the way of further 
 progress." 
 
 " The preservation of the arts, literature, and 
 sciences of the old Grteco-Eoman world could 
 do nothing to advance civihzation beyond the 
 point reached by Greece and Rome, and therefore 
 can hardly be said to have done anything for 
 progress. Was it by what she retained of the 
 
18 CONVEESATIONS JN 
 
 old civilization that she tamed and humanized 
 the Barbarians, or by what she added of her 
 own ? You say what she added by her doctrine 
 of brotherly love, or the brotherhood of the race, 
 and the example of the meek and lowly Jesus, 
 presented as the model of excellence. Well, are 
 these things less true and useful now than they 
 were then ? Or is there any doctrine the Church 
 teaches, or any claim she puts forth to govern 
 or discipline her own children, true and useful 
 in relation to past ages or nations, that is not 
 equally so now ?" 
 
 "Whether the Church was or was not rela- 
 tively true and useful in those ages that knew no 
 better than to beUeve her dogmas, practise her 
 worship, and submit to her despotic authority, it 
 is certain that she is hostile to aU modern civil- 
 ization, and the chief obstacle to progress, or the 
 organization of society according to the laws of 
 nature." 
 
 Here I thought the able editor rather evaded 
 than met the home question of the venerable 
 priest. Though all the listeners were against 
 the priest and on the side of the metropolitan 
 editor, their looks indicated that they wished 
 him to state specifically and distinctly what in 
 
IJBERALISM AND THE CHURCH. IJ) 
 
 the Charch was true and useM at one time that 
 can be false and hurtful at another. They all 
 beHeved that the Church had corrupted the faith, 
 *>nd buried it beneath a mass of unmeaning cere- 
 monies, degrading superstitions, and human or 
 Satanic inventions, but they could not concede 
 that truth itself is variable, or that the good 
 effected was effected by anytliing not always and 
 everywhere true and usefuL 
 
20 CONVERSATIONS ON 
 
 CHAPTEE 11. 
 
 "You say, my dear Editor," replied the priest, 
 "that the Church is hostile to modera ciyiliza- 
 tion, and au obstacle to iadividual and social 
 progress. One thiag at a time, if you please. I 
 presume that you will agree with me that before 
 we can decide what favors or retards progress, 
 we must determine what is or is not progi'ess. 
 Will you teU. me what you understand by prog- 
 ress ?" 
 
 " Progress is leaving the dead past and moving 
 forward towards the hving future. It is a con- 
 tinual melioration or advance from the imperfect 
 towards the perfect. It is the continual enlarge- 
 ment of the quantity of our beiag, or the realiza- 
 tion of the possibilities of our nature." 
 
 "I would strike out from your definition the 
 enlargement of the quantity of our being, because 
 our beiug is not iu ourselves, but iu God, in 
 whom 'we live and move and are,' and therefore 
 can neither be increased nor diminished, since 
 God is being in its plenitude, and self-existent. 
 The literal or etymological meaning of the word 
 is, as I before said, ' a stepping forward.' When 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHUECII. 21 
 
 taken in a figurative sense, as we are now taking 
 it, you very well define it to be an advance from 
 the imperfect towards tlie perfect. But before 
 we can assert progress, whether of the individual 
 or of society, we must know that the perfect of 
 each really exists, though not yet attained to, or 
 that there really is an end in which the progress 
 terminates because, when it is attained, the per- 
 fect is reached; and before we can say this or 
 that favors or retards progress, we must know 
 what this end or this perfect is, or, in other 
 words, in what the perfection of society and the 
 individual man consists." 
 
 " The perfection consists in the complete reali- 
 zation of the possibUities of nature." 
 
 "But how am I to determine what are the 
 possibiHties of my individual and social nature, 
 or whether I am reahzing them or not ? Progress 
 implies imperfection, incompleteness, for what is 
 perfect, complete, is not and cannot be progress- 
 ive, since there are in it no unrealized possibil- 
 ities. Imperfection imphes perfection, which is 
 its complement or fulfilment. If there is no 
 perfect, there can be no imperfect. How am I to 
 determine what this perfect is, or what is the 
 true end of man and society, so as to be able to 
 assert what is or is not progress ?" 
 
22 CONVEBSATIONS ON 
 
 " It is not necessary to determine what it is. 
 One lias but to follow nature, for nature points 
 directly to it." 
 
 " You mean that nature of itseH goes instinct- 
 ively, by the force of its own inherent laws, to 
 its end?" 
 
 " Such is my meaning." 
 
 " What is the use, then, of intelligence and 
 moral effort? and wherein is there, then, any 
 specific difference between man and the ele- 
 mental forces of nature, between gratitude and 
 gravitation, between virtue and vice, a moral act 
 and an immoral act ? Man would then act only 
 as the winds and waves, storms and tempests, or 
 as the thunderbolt that rives the oak — at best 
 only as the beasts that perish. Call you this 
 asserting the rights and dignity of man?" 
 
 " No ; I recognize in man a moral nature." 
 
 " Eight. But a moral nature acts for an end — 
 propter finem, not simply to an' end — ad finem, 
 and therefore from intelligence and will, or 
 reason. Then we must know the end, for we 
 cannot wiU what we do not apprehend. Now 
 the Church, my worthy young friend, teaches us 
 what is this end, the true and last end of man, 
 and also what is the end of society — points out 
 the way we must go to attain to either, furnishes 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHUKCH. • 23 
 
 the means needed to gain it, and urges us by 
 motives terrible as bell and as sweet and attrac- 
 tive as heaven to struggle for it. How, then, can 
 you say that she is an obstacle to progress ?" 
 
 " She may not oppose what she calls progress, 
 but she opposes what this age understands by 
 progress." 
 
 " That is possible. There are many things in 
 which she and this age do not agree. But does 
 she oppose anything that you call progress ?" 
 
 " She opposes popular education, the diffusion 
 of inteUigence among the people, is hostile to 
 popular liberty, upholds tyrants and tyranny, and 
 resists everywhere with all her power the introduc- 
 tion and establishment of popular government." 
 
 "May it not be that you mean one thing by 
 these terms, and she another ?" 
 
 " She opposes the emancipation of the people 
 from ignorance and superstition, and their in- 
 struction in their rights and the means of assert- 
 ing and maintaining them." 
 
 " Does the Church oppose the emancipation of 
 the people from what she holds to be ignorance 
 and superstition, or their instruction in what she 
 acknowledges to be their rights and dignity?" 
 
 "You asked me to say. in what respect she 
 opposes what I call progress. I call progress the 
 
24 CONVEESATIONS ON 
 
 eiJightenmerLt of the people, their emancipation 
 by the diffusion of intelligence from ignorance 
 and superstition, and their instruction in respect 
 to their rights." 
 
 "Why not add to rights, duties'^ Men have 
 duties us well as rights. Is that a true instruction 
 which teaches men their rights, but says nothing 
 as to their duties ?" 
 
 "Men's duties grow out of their rights, and if 
 duly instructed as to their rights, they can hardly 
 remain ignorant of their duties." 
 
 " It would, perhaps, be more just to say men's 
 rights grow out of their duties, but neither form 
 of expression is exact. Men's duties grow out 
 of their several relations, and their rights are 
 simply their freedom to discharge their duties, or 
 to act according to these relations, without any 
 let or hindrance. Man has relations to hips 
 Creator, to his neighbor or society, and to the 
 external world. Out of these relations grow 
 three classes of duties — duties to God, duties to 
 our neighbor, and duties to the state or civil 
 society that has charge of material interests, 
 that is, religious, social, and political duties. In 
 regard to these three classes of duties and their 
 correlative rights, which cover the whole field of 
 human activity, it shows great ignorance or 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHUBCH. 25 
 
 great untruthfulness to pretend that the Church 
 opposes the instruction or enUghtenment of the 
 people. Has she not the Sacrament of Orders, 
 and does she not educate and ordain a numerous 
 class, as numerous a class as possible, of priests, 
 one, and thtit not the least, of whose functions is 
 to teach aU ranks and conditions of men, even 
 the poor of this world, whom the great neglect 
 and the rich oppress, these three classes of rights 
 and duties'? Does she not found or encourage 
 the founding of schools, academies, colleges, 
 universities, for the education of the youth of all 
 classes in the several sciences and the liberal 
 arts, or general and special secular learning? 
 Has she not religious orders and congregations 
 of both sexes whose special vocation it is to 
 teach your sons and daughters? Has she not 
 founded nearly aU the great universities of 
 Europe, such as Oxford, Cambridge, Paris, 
 Bologna, Padua, Salamanca, Alcala?" 
 
 "Yet she opposes all efforts to emancipate 
 the people from superstition, and in her schools 
 and colleges she teaches ignorance, and repulses 
 science." 
 
 " That she opposes the emancipation of the 
 people from superstition, is a mistake. I am a 
 priest, received my education partly in Spain 
 
26 OONVEESATIONS ON 
 
 and partly in Eome ; I liave travelled over most 
 European countries, and over nearly every State 
 in the American Union, and wherever I have 
 been, whether in schools or seminaries, I have 
 found her making it the duty of her priests and 
 professors to do their best to free the people 
 from all superstitious notions and practices. 
 Tou cannot take up a single one of her cate- 
 chisms for the instruction of children and youth 
 that does not teach them to avoid superstition 
 and all approach to it." 
 
 " That is all very well ; but her own doctrines 
 and practices are superstitious. What else is the 
 doctrine that a little water sprinkled or poured 
 on the head of an infant, and a few magical 
 words mumbled by the priest at the same time, 
 can regenerate the soul, and translate it into the 
 kingdom of Christ?" 
 
 "Nothing instituted or commanded by our 
 Lord can be superstition. He instituted the 
 Sacrament of Baptism, commanded his Apostles 
 to go and teach aU nations, baptizing them in 
 the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of 
 the Holy Ghost, and has declared that unless a 
 man be born again of loater and the Holy Ghost, 
 he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. The 
 Church neither believes nor teaches that the 
 
LIBEBALISM AND THE CHURCH. 27 
 
 water or the words regenerate : they are only 
 the outward or visible sacrament, through which 
 the regenerating grace of the Holy Ghost is 
 communicated." 
 
 " The Church seeks to keep the people in 
 ignorance,"t>n the principle that ignorance is the 
 mother of devotion." 
 
 "I have already shown you the contrary. 
 But of what does she seek to keep the people 
 ignorant? Is it of theology, the queen of the 
 sciences? Is it of philosophy, of ethics, pohtics? 
 Is it of astronomy, mathematics, mechanics, 
 chemistry, electricity, cosmology, zoology, biol- 
 ogy, physiology, philology, geology, botany, 
 geography, history natural, civil, or ecclesias- 
 tical ? I am aware of no prohibition against the 
 study of any of these sciences. The Church may 
 not accept all the inductions or theories that 
 many scientists are too prone to put forth as 
 science, but she opposes no well-authenticated 
 facts, and no well-established science. Indeed, 
 my dear Editor, the Church is so far from hold- 
 ing that ignorance is the mother of devotion, 
 that she regards it as her worst enemy, and never 
 ceases to combat it with aU her energy." 
 
 " She is hostile to liberty, -and opposes every 
 effort made to advance it," 
 
28 CONVERSATIONS ON 
 
 "The word liberty is much used, and much 
 abused. It is taken in many senses, and not 
 seldom in no definite sense at all. Men differ 
 widely among themselves as to what is or is not 
 true liberty, and no less as to the proper means 
 of gaining or of preserving it. In some of the 
 senses ia which the word is taken the Church 
 certainly opposes it, ia others she approves and 
 defends it. She opposes liberty ia the sense of 
 license or freedom from all law or authority ; for 
 she holds, what all experience teaches, that 
 liberty in any good sense cannot exist without 
 law to define and protect it, and that law is 
 inconceivable without a law-giver, and nuU with- 
 out authority that has the right to enact and 
 enforce it. But, on the other hand, she has 
 always condemned tyranny and oppression, and 
 at times gone so far as to excommunicate and 
 depose the tyrant, and to absolve his subjects 
 from their oath of allegiance. Nearly all her 
 doctors agree in teaching that the tyranny of the 
 prince absolves the subject, though they uni- 
 formly condemn sedition, conspiracy, insurrec- 
 tion, or rebellion against the state as grievous 
 sias as well as political crimes. The Church 
 loves, blesses, and protects liberty as she under- 
 stands it, and her understanding of it, at the very 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH. 29 
 
 lowest, is as likely to be just as is that of modern 
 secret societies, who, in the name of hberty, prac- 
 tise the most, outrageous tyranny over thoir 
 members." 
 
 " Yet the Reverend Father will not deny that 
 the Church is opposed to popular or demo- 
 cratic government, and fulminates her anathemas 
 against aU who are laboring to introduce and 
 estabUsh democracy in Europe." 
 
 " I have observed, my dear friend, that your 
 free-thinking gentlemen, who claim to be en- 
 lightened above ordinary mortals, are very 
 neglectful of the categories, that they mix up 
 the incongruous in the same sentence, make 
 assertions that may be one-tenth true and nine- 
 tenths false, and then conclude the truth of their 
 whole assertion, as if all the incongruous matter 
 jumbled together in it pertained to the same 
 category. They probably thus deceive them- 
 selves, and certainly deceive others. You should 
 mind the categories, and be always careful to 
 define your terms. The Church never opposes, 
 but always supports, and requires her children to 
 support, popular democratic government, when 
 and where it is the legal order. She has never 
 condemned democracy, nor erected any particu- 
 lar form or constitution of government into an 
 
30 CONVERSATIONS ON 
 
 article of faitli, or a Oatliolic dogn^a. She 
 requires all her children to obey the law, and to 
 be loyal to the constitution of their country, as 
 long as it remains the legal government, whatever 
 its form. She forbids them, whatever the regi- 
 men under which they Hve, to be seditious or 
 turbulent citizens, or to do anything contrary to 
 Christian charity. She teaches that unjust laws 
 are violences rather than laws, and do not bind 
 the conscience, and that always and everywhere 
 we are to obey God rather than men ; but that 
 to avoid the danger of turbulence or sedition, 
 from a just regard for the peace and order of 
 society, love to our neighbor or our country, we 
 may often be bound to obey even unjust laws, if 
 they only require us to suffer wrong. Yet if they 
 require us to do wrong, or what God forbids, we 
 are by no means to obey them, but to suffer 
 martyrdom rather, as did the early Christians 
 under the heathen emperors. What the Church 
 really opposes, anathematizes, if you will, is 
 neither popular government nor legal efforts to 
 introduce and estabhsh it, but efforts to intro- 
 duce and estabhsh it by unlawful means, by the 
 crimes of sedition, insurrection, rebellion, or vio- 
 lent revolution — crimes which strike at all law, 
 all civil justice, and render all orderly and stable 
 
UBERAUSM AND THE CHURCH. 31 
 
 government impracticable. She holds it as wi'ong 
 to conspire to overthrow the existing government 
 by violence in the name of the people, as in the 
 name of monarchy or aristocracy." 
 
 This, I confess, struck me as a fair view of the 
 case. If we hold that a certain portion of the 
 people of a nation may, when they choose, con- 
 spire against the legally existing government, and 
 by rebellion and civil war overthrow it, we take 
 from law its sacredness and inviolability, and 
 render all government, except that of mere brute 
 force, impossible. The people have, undoubtedly, 
 the right to reform, amend, modify, or change 
 their institutions as they see proper, but only by 
 such means as the existing law or constitution 
 authorizes or does not prohibit, as under our 
 American system. 
 
 I could never imderstand why sedition, insur- 
 rection, rebellion, should be less criminal under 
 or for a democracy than under or for a monarchy. 
 Obedience to law is as much a duty under a re- 
 publican as under any other form of government. 
 If not, on what ground can the General govern- 
 ment pretend to justify the war it lately waged 
 for the suppression of the revolt of the Southern 
 Stalos, especially since those States did not defend 
 
32 CONTEESATIONS ON 
 
 their secession from tlie Union on tlie ground of 
 the " sacred right of insurrection," or revolution, 
 as Lafayette calls it. In nearly aU cases, the act 
 of insurrection or rebellion against the national 
 authority is the act of a disappointed or turbu- 
 lent minority, makuig itself formidable by secret 
 combinations and underground operations. Their 
 aim is to make their will override that of the ma- 
 jority. Their leaders seldom attain to power 
 without proving themselves detestable tyrants, 
 cruel, greedy, and selfish monsters. But the 
 imperturbable editor proceeded on the maxim 
 of aU successful journahsm, " whether conviaced 
 or not, never own that you are in the wrong." 
 
LIBEBALISM AND THE CHURCH. 33 
 
 CHAPTEE in. 
 
 "Then again," went on the able editor, as if 
 the priest had said nothing, "your Chui-ch is 
 undeniably at war with all modem civilization. 
 You see it in the Papal Encyclical of 1864, with 
 its appended Syllabus of condemned errors. All 
 those liberal-minded and enlightened Catholics 
 who partake somewhat of the spirit of the nine- 
 teenth century, disapprove the retrograde pohcy 
 of the oscurantisti, and seek to effect a reconcili- 
 ation between the Church and modem ideas, or 
 between her and our advanced and ever advanc- 
 ing civiMzation, are, if not absolutely under the 
 ban of the ecclesiastical authorities, looked upon 
 with distrust, held to be dangerous men, and 
 false, if not to the doctrines, at least to the spirit 
 of the Church. To call a member of your Church 
 a liberal, is httle less damaging to his character 
 than to call him a heretic. Every advance in 
 modern civilization has been effected not only 
 without the aid of the Church, but in spite of 
 ber most strenuous resistance." 
 
34 CONTERSATIONS OK 
 
 " Mind the%categories, my dear Editor. Such 
 things are a Httle vague, and must be defined 
 before one can say precisely what they are or 
 are not. Will you tell me precisely what you 
 understand, first, by civilization, and second, by 
 modern ciidlization ?" 
 
 " Civilization is one of those terms which are 
 more easily understood than defined. It needs 
 no defining." 
 
 " To lend itself to vague declamation, certainly 
 not. But you and I are not declaiming ; we are 
 endeavoring to look seriously and dispassionately 
 at things as they are. Words are nothing except 
 ia their meaning, and their meaning is worthless, 
 or worse, if not clear, distinct, fixed, and definite. 
 Civilization is a word of recent coinage, and its 
 meaning is vague, loose, and floating. It hardly 
 means the same thing to any two minds. It was 
 at first a court term, and a civilized person meant 
 one who had the manners and breeding of the 
 court ; it was next used to designate, by way of 
 extension, the town-bred, or, as Shakespeare calls 
 it, 'inland-bred,' as distinguished ftom the coun- 
 try-bred, or rustics and clowns ; but gradually, 
 without losing entirely its relation to polite oi 
 urbane manners, it has cpme, in most modern 
 languages, to mean the poUtical and social ordei 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH. 35 
 
 which stands opposed to barbarism, and indndes 
 ideas, manners, poHty, government, laws, arts, 
 sciences, and religion. .Its essential meaning 
 may be determined either by ascertainiag the 
 essential element of barbarism to which it is 
 directly ppposed, or by analyzing the nations 
 generally recognized as civilized, and ascertain- 
 ing their essential and distinctive principle. 
 
 " The essence or the distinctive principle of 
 barbarism, I take it," continued the priest, "is 
 the domination of wiU directed by passion ; the 
 distinctive or essential principle of civihzation, 
 as I understand it, is the government of wiU 
 directed by reason, or power obeying the dic- 
 tates of justice. The barbarian state is that in 
 which the government is force exercised by the 
 lawless will, the caprice, the uni'estrained pas- 
 sions of the chief, who holds the power as his 
 own indefeasible right, and uses it at and for 
 his own pleasure alone. In the civilized state 
 the supreme political power' vests in the nation, 
 and the chief magistrate, be he called king, em- 
 peror, or president, and all subordinate officers, 
 hold their power as a trust to be exercised for 
 the public or common good. All despotic states 
 are therefore to be classed as barbarian, and all 
 civilized states as republican in principle. The 
 
36 CONYEESATIONS ON 
 
 distinction between barbarism and civilization, is 
 simply the distinction between despotism and lib- 
 erty, or republicanism, taking the word repuUicaii 
 in its radical or etymological sense, correctly 
 translated by your English word commonwealth. 
 Now when and where does the Church oppose, 
 or ever has opposed civilization in the sense I 
 have defined ?" 
 
 "Tour definition is not broad enough to in- 
 clude all that is commonly understood by civil- 
 ization. We commonly include in it refinement 
 of manners, mental and moral culture, the fine 
 arts, and the sciences." 
 
 "My definition does not exclude them, but 
 those are all to be found in a greater or less 
 degree in both ancient and modern nations not 
 usually, if ever, counted among civilized nations. 
 All I have pretended to do is to give the dis- 
 tinctive character or mark of civilization, and 
 that is liberty, the supremacy of law, or power 
 directed and controlled by justice or reason, not 
 by arbitrary will directed and controlled by pas- 
 sion. But be this as it may, we have already 
 seen that the Church opposes none of the things 
 which you pretend m.j definition does not in- 
 clude. She refined and softened the manners 
 and humanized the sentiments of the Barbarians 
 
LIBEEALISM AND THE CHUBCH. 37 
 
 who overthrew the Roman Empire, as you your- 
 self have admitted, and I have challenged you to 
 name the science she opposes. I have shown 
 you that she favors education and general intel- 
 Mgence by all the means in her power, and even 
 you will not pretend that she has not been the 
 great patron of the fine arts. K you should 
 attempt to do it, her grand cathedrals, which the 
 nations that have renounced her communion can- 
 not even copy, and the magnificent pictures that 
 adorn her churches, would soon reduce you to 
 silence. The fact is, and everybody knows it, 
 that all the civilized nations of Europe, indeed, 
 all the civilized nations now existing on the face 
 of the globe, have received their civilization from 
 her, and owe it to the patient and often misun- 
 derstood labors of her pontiffs, her priests, her 
 religious, and her faithful people, giving form 
 and expression to the faith and charity living 
 and working in them. Pray tell me what 
 there is, then, in modern civilization, that she 
 opposes ?" 
 
 "She opposes aU that is pecuhar to it, and 
 constitutes its glory." 
 
 "The distinguishing feature of modern civil- 
 ization, if we take what is positive in it, is the 
 apphcation of the discoveries of science to the 
 
38 CONTEESATIONS ON 
 
 mechanic and productive arts. Has she opposed 
 this application ? Does she condemn the use of 
 the steam-engine, the spinning- jenny and spin- 
 mng-mule, or the power-loom, the steamboat, the 
 railroad, the locomotive, or the lightning tel- 
 egraph ; mowing, reaping, threshing, or winnow- 
 ing machines ; steam-ploughs, iron-clads, and the 
 like?" 
 
 " The Pope for a long time resisted, I believe, 
 the construction of railroads in the Pontifical 
 States." 
 
 " As temporal sovereign lie may liave done so,, 
 and he doubtless had Ms reasons, good or bad ; 
 but has he ever condemned the construction of 
 railroads and the use of locomotives as prohibited 
 by the Christian faith, or declared them forbid- 
 den by the law of God?" 
 
 "I am not aware that he has." 
 
 "Then he has not opposed them as head of 
 the Church ; and what he may or may not have 
 opposed as head of the state is nothing to me, 
 who am not his temporal subject. Since rail- 
 roads, steamboats, and the various appHcations 
 of science to the invention and construction of 
 labor-saving machinery have been introduced, 
 and the modem world is adjusted to them, we 
 could not well do without them, and it would be 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHUKCH. 39 
 
 a calamity to be deprived of them ; but there are 
 grave thinkers who greatly doubt if real civiliza- 
 tion has been advanced by them, or if the world 
 gets on any better with than it did without them. 
 They have completely changed the face of the 
 industrial world, to some extent the mutual rela- 
 tions of capital and labor, and vastly increased 
 the power of production; but that they have 
 made it easier for a poor man to earn his living, 
 or added anything to the real happiness or well- 
 being of the people, is not so certain. Under the 
 new system, the rich as a class grow richer, and 
 the poor as a class grow poorer. The small 
 home industries of the olden time give way to 
 large industries, in which capital, as necessary to 
 introduce machinery, counts for more, and labor 
 for less. Wages may be nominally higher, but 
 are less in proportion to the wants of the 
 laborer." 
 
 "You do not agree with the poHtical econo- 
 mists, who tell us a very different story." 
 
 "The political economists consider man only 
 as a producing, distributing, and consuming ma- 
 chine, and seek only to get the greatest possible 
 supply with the greatest possible demand. I, by 
 my profession, if not by my sympathy with my 
 fellow-men, am led to look upon man as having a 
 
40 CONVEESATIONS ON 
 
 sentient, intellectual, and moral nature, ami I geek 
 for him the greatest possible sum of vix-tue and 
 happiness. It is not likely, then, that the pohti- 
 cal economists and I should think alike. It adds 
 not to the well-being of the poor that the aggre- 
 gate wealth of a nation increases, if they are all 
 the time growing poorer, and find it every day 
 more difficult to supply their wants, or to obtain 
 by honest industry their bread. Under the new 
 system, it may be that wealth increases, but the 
 tendency in the great industrial nations is to 
 concentrate it in fewer hands, or ia huge over- 
 grown corporations, which in your countiy are 
 stronger than the government, and control, not 
 always the elections, but the legislative assem 
 bhes, both state and national. 
 
 "I was taught," continued the priest, "that to 
 make a man happy we should study not to 
 increase his stores, but to diminish his desires. 
 The pohtical economists study to increase a 
 man's desires, and to develop new wants in him, 
 ,ai order to increase as much as possible con- 
 Jumption, which, in turn, wiU increase the de- 
 mand, and the increased demand will stimulate 
 increased production. The demand creates the 
 supply, and the supply stimulates consumption, 
 which, in turn, creates an increased demand. 
 
LIBEEALISM AND THE CHUBCH. 41 
 
 This, if I understand it, is the essence of your 
 modern science of political economy. But what 
 is the gain to the laborer ?" 
 
 " He is better fed, better clothed, better lodged 
 than he was under the old system. He can sat- 
 isfy more*wanta, and the more wants one satis- 
 fies, the more he enjoys." 
 
 " The more wants one has that he is unable to 
 satisfy, the more he suffers. A man's happiness 
 does not consist in the number of wants satisfied, 
 but in having no wants unsatisfied. It may well 
 be conceded that if the laboring classes were 
 thrown back into the condition in which they 
 were in the Middle Ages, or even in the sixteenth 
 century, they would be far more wretched than 
 they are now; but that is not the question. 
 Were their means of satisfaction less, in propor- 
 tion to their actual wants, then than they are 
 now, in proportion to their present actual wants ? 
 No doubt more wants may now be satisfied, but 
 that is nothing, if there is a proportionate increase 
 of wants that are not and cannot be satisfied." 
 
 " Do you contend that the proportion between 
 the wants and the means of satisfying them has 
 been diminished under the wonderful develop- 
 ment of commerce and industry since the begin- 
 ning of the present century?" 
 
42 CONVEESATIONS ON 
 
 " Between what were the wants of the work- 
 ingmen in former times, and their present means 
 of satisfying them, no ; but between their present 
 wants and the means of supplying them, yes. 
 Tliis is an age of forgetfulness. You seem to 
 forget that no longer ago than 1848 nearly all 
 European society was convulsed by the loud 
 demand for what was then called the ' right to 
 labor,' the right to gain one's bread by the sweat 
 of one's face. Thou-sands, millions even, of men 
 in. the great industrial and commercial nations, 
 able and willing to work, were standing idle, 
 gaunt and grim, because there was no work to 
 be had. The labor market was overstocked °, 
 supply had outrun the demand. The demand 
 for labor depends on the state of the markets 
 throughout the world, and a surplus of labor is 
 the normal state in all your great industrial and 
 commercial centres. Were the whole productive 
 force at the command of industry employed to 
 its fuU extent, more could be produced in any 
 one year than could be disposed of to the actual 
 consumer in any four years, as I am told by 
 those who profess to know, and conseqaently the 
 operatives are either thrown out of employment 
 or compelled to work on short time for what is 
 equivalent to three out of every four years. 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHUECH. 43 
 
 Hence the frequency of distress in manufactur- 
 ing districts, which finds relief only in pubKc oi 
 private charity. Various expedients are sug- 
 gested by political economists, and tried by gov- 
 ernments, but as yet with indifferent success. A 
 favorite measure with one class is what is called 
 protection, or a tax imposed on the importation 
 of foreign productions for the protection and 
 encouragement of our own. But this does not 
 help the operative class ; for its only effect is to 
 increase the profits of the capital employed in 
 the industries protected, and these enhanced 
 profits must be paid by labor, or, at best, by 
 labor and land." 
 
 " But the wiser class of political economists 
 reject the protective system, and defend free 
 trade." 
 
 "I do not know whether the free traders or the 
 protectionists are the wiser ; I only know that 
 neither can remedy the evil. Free trade simply 
 gives the advantage to those nations that have 
 already got the start of the others in the produc- 
 tion of exchangeable commodities. Its maxim 
 is to buy where you can buy cheapest, and to 
 sell where you can sell dearest, and its interest 
 is therefore to enhance as much as possible the 
 profits of capital by diminishing the cost of labor, 
 
44 CONVERSATIONS ON 
 
 and therefore the value to the laborer of his labor, 
 the only commodity he has to dispose of. The 
 only difference I can see between the two systems 
 is, that the protective system taxes the land and 
 labor of the nation that adopts it, and the free 
 trade system taxes the land and labor of all 
 trading nations for the benefit of capital, es- 
 pecially of the capital of the nation that has 
 already the start of the others. Free trade is, 
 undoubtedly, the interest of British capital, for 
 Great Britain is the greatest manufacturing and 
 commercial nation of the world ; and perhaps for 
 the United States, so largely engaged in the 
 production of agricultural staples and raw ma- 
 terials. Free trade between Great Britain and 
 France, Spain, Germany, Italy, would operate 
 to the advantage of British capital. Besides, 
 trade itself creates a competition for the markets 
 of the world, which originates nearly aU the 
 wars of modern times, and necessitates those 
 large standing aknies of European states which 
 are such a heavy burden on land and labor." 
 
 "But the Beverend Father himself is forget- 
 ful ; he forgets that commerce is the grand 
 civilizer of nations ; that it brings aU nations 
 into communion with one another, and binds 
 them tcgeiher by one and the same interest." 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH. 45 
 
 " I am no enemy to commerce, but I should 
 be much obliged to you if you would name to 
 tne a single barbarous or semi-barbarous people, 
 in either ancient or modern times, that com- 
 merce has civilized." 
 
 "The-^reat commercial nations of the world 
 are precisely those which are called civilized 
 nations, which proves that commerce and civili- 
 zation go together." 
 
 " The statement is rather too broad. Ancient 
 Eome was not a commercial nation. France 
 has never been predominantly commercial ; nor 
 Germany, either of the north or of the south. 
 But let that pass. That the great commercial 
 nations have been and are civilized nations, and 
 that they have extended the area of civilization 
 by establishing colonies of emigrants from their 
 own bosom, is undoubtedly true ; but the poiat is, 
 has commerce ever civilized a nation it found on 
 opening trade with it uncivilized? I recollect 
 no instance of the kind. As far as my historical 
 reading goes, the only force that has ever civ- 
 iUzed a savage, barbarous, or semi-barbarous 
 tribe or people, is religion. Commerce brings 
 civilized and uncivilized nations in contact, no 
 doubt, but as a rule the uncivilized are broken, 
 as the earthen pot that comes in contact with 
 
46 CONVEESATIONS ON 
 
 the iron pot. What has the commerce of Great 
 Britain done for India, where civilization was 
 once far superior to what it is now ? Great 
 Britain, and perhaps other Christian nations, 
 have gained by it, but India herself has lost her 
 autonomy and been impoverished hj it. The 
 people of India are poorer to-day, find it harder 
 to live, than when the Bnghsh East India Com- 
 pany was formed. England, to obtain a market 
 for her own wares, broke up the native manufac- 
 tures, and reduced the poor people io abject 
 dependence. . The same process has been begvm 
 with China and Japan, though it may not be so 
 successful there as it has been in India, where 
 the natives have thus far deteriorated, and in no 
 sense advanced in civilization. Commerce has 
 only one principle — ' to buy cheap and sell dear ;' 
 it does not concern itself with civilization." 
 
 " Then you would annihilate commerce, break 
 up our labor - saving machinery, destroy our 
 steamboats and railroads, and go back to the 
 ox-team, the spinning-wheel, and the hand-loom 
 — ^back to the Dark Ages. That is the spirit of 
 your religion. Said I not true, then, that your 
 Church opposes progress and resists modern 
 civilization ? " 
 
 " Not at aU. I am not arguing against prog- 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE OHOBCH. 47 
 
 ress, but simply endeavoring to show that some 
 things so called, may, after all, not deserve that 
 respectable name. I propose no going back to 
 former industrial arrangements. True, I do not 
 believe all is gold that glisters, nor that the peo- 
 ple are really any better oS under the new system 
 than they were before it was adopted ; but since it 
 is adopted, and habits and modes of action are can- 
 formed and adjusted to it, we could not dispense 
 with it without causing a far greater evil than 
 was caused by its introduction and adoption. 
 The Church can use your raihoads and steam- 
 boats for her missionaries, and your lightning 
 telegraphs for rapid communication between her 
 head and members. If it was no advantage to 
 make the change, it still would be a great disad- 
 vantage to be forced to return to the past. The 
 Church may, as a question of human prudence, 
 regard certain changes as vmadvisable, but if 
 they leave her full freedom of action for herself, 
 and do not conflict with faith, or with what in 
 her discipline is unalterable without serious 
 detriment to its efficiency, she, when they arc 
 once effected, accepts them as facts, and adjusts 
 her modes of action to them." 
 
 I was not prepared to agree or even disagree 
 
48 CONVEESATIONS ON 
 
 ■with the priest in his views of the comparative 
 merits of the modem industrial system, or, as 
 Nicholas of Eussia called it, "the mercantile 
 sj^stem," which was inaugurated by the Peace of 
 Utrecht, in 1713, and at the head of which 
 stands Great Britain ; but as he evidently spoke 
 his own views on the subject, not in the name of 
 the Church, I could see nothing in them that 
 committed her against modern civilization. Many 
 facts occurred to me in favor of the priest's 
 views. Under the olden system the people often 
 suffered from famine, occasioned by short crops, 
 by war, and by pestilence, which always fol- 
 lows a dearth of provisions ; but I am not aware 
 that when there was plenty in the land, that any 
 one who was able and willing to work must 
 starve, because he could find no work to do. I 
 recalled the fact that so often struck me in my 
 foreign travels, that the greatest distress among 
 the operatives, and the most squalid wretchedness 
 that came under my eye, I invariably found in 
 the leading industrial and commercial nations. 
 Nowhere did- 1 find the extremes of wealth and 
 poverty so striking as in Great Britain. The 
 wealth of her nobUity was often great, but that 
 was, in most cases, due to the enhanced value of 
 their landed estates, and led to no painful re- 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH. 49 
 
 flections. But the huge wealth of her merchant 
 princes, her cotton or industrial lords, her bank- 
 ers and money-changers, contrasted sadly witli 
 the mighty mass of pauperism, every day increas- 
 ing, and supported by rates levied on household- 
 ers, themselves often but a shade above the 
 pauper. I could not but think, by what a terri 
 Lie tax on the laboring classes their enormous 
 wealth must have been accumulated. Their 
 wealth has been gained at the expense not only 
 of the laboring class of their own country, but at 
 the expense of the laboring classes of British 
 Lidia, and of all nations against which Great 
 Britain holds the balance of trade. It has 
 been gained by coining the toil, the sweat, the 
 tears, and the blood of miUions ; and what can I 
 say in defence of the system that permits, en- 
 courages, nay, demands for its success, such 
 gross outrages upon our fellow-men ? 
 
 I see the same system adopted in my own 
 country, whose prosperity, up to the breaking 
 out of the late civil war, was due to three prin- 
 cipal causes — the large tracts of fertile land, easily 
 accessible, and cheap ; to southern slavery, which 
 stimulated the production of cotton; and thb 
 mighty influx into the non-slaveholding States of 
 foreign laborers. To these, and not to our dem- 
 
50 CONVERSATIONS ON 
 
 ocratic institutions, nor to any wise legislation, 
 state or national, whieh has from the first been 
 about as unwise, as shortsighted, and as blunder- 
 ing as it well could be, do we owe our prosperity. 
 Slavery is abohshed, the public lands are re- 
 mote from the great centres of population, and 
 the best and richest of them have been given 
 away to great corporations, and the British sys- 
 tem, before the war confined mostly to the 
 Northern States, and against which the Confed- 
 erate States waged their disastrous war, can now 
 spread over the whole Union, and produce, in 
 time, more fatal results than in England, for it 
 meets here no counterpoise in a landed aris- 
 tocracy, and the government operates simply as 
 its agent or instrument. 
 
 We declaim against feudahsm, under which 
 the great vassals of the crown were more pow- 
 erful than the crown itself, and often reduced 
 the central authority to a legal fiction. How 
 ranch better is it with us, where the effective 
 power is vested in huge raihoad and other cor- 
 porations? The government, both state and 
 national, is only the factor of these corporations, 
 which, though its own creations, it cannot con- 
 trol, but must obey. 
 
 These and other considerations make it im- 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHUECH. 51 
 
 possible for me to say the priest was wrong; and 
 yet, a man of the nineteenth century, I hardly 
 dare hint, even to myself, the possibihty of his 
 being right. It is true, I have an aversion to 
 trade, and never find any music in the clack of 
 the cottqp-mill, but I have not the courage to 
 think that what almost every man I meet 
 boasts as a miracle of progress, can possibly be 
 no progress at all 
 
 Cornell Catholic 
 Union Library. 
 
52 CONVEESATTONS ON 
 
 CHAPTEE IV. 
 
 The conversation was interrapted, as the 
 priest made his last remark on the modem 
 iadustrial or mercantile system, by an imexpected 
 arrival, at our quiet watering-place, of a fashion- 
 able lady, with two marketable — I beg pardon, 
 two marriageable daughters, and was not re- 
 sumed for several days. The lady had been 
 misinformed, and was much disappointed in not 
 finding our mountain spa a fashionable watering- 
 place. It is true, the guests were aU gentlemen, 
 but unhappily, all except the priest and myself 
 were married. The priest was old, and be- 
 sides was bound, as a priest, to celibacy, and I 
 was, for reasons of my own, no marrying man. 
 The mother was pleasant, amiable, chatty, and 
 the daughters were charming, and we were sorry 
 to have them leave us. But they concluded the 
 waters would not agree with them, and on the 
 morning of the third day after their arrival, they 
 left us for Saratoga. Their departure took from 
 us a ray of sunshine, and cast a sombre hue for 
 
LIBEBALI8M AND THE CHURCH. 53 
 
 a little while over our lonely village, and indis- 
 posed us to listen to the grave discussions be- 
 tween the priest and the progressive journaUst. 
 
 But several days after the departure of our 
 lady guests, the editor and priest resumed their 
 conversattons in the usual place. As I drew 
 near, I heard the priest say : 
 
 "After all, my dear Journalist, what in modem 
 civilization, that is manifestly a progress, do you 
 pretend the Church opposes and condemns ?" 
 
 " She condemns the very ideas and principles 
 on which modem civilization is based, such as 
 the dignity and worth of human nature, the per- 
 fectibility of the species, the inaUenable right of 
 every man to think for himself and to be ex- 
 empt from all obhgation in religion, morals, or 
 politics, to obey, or even to consult any authority 
 but his own reason and judgment, and the doc- 
 trine that no one is bound to obey any goA'- 
 ernment but such as claims no powers not de- 
 rived from the consent of the governed." 
 
 "With regard to the dignity and worth of 
 human nature, she probably rates them some- 
 what higher tL»n you do, for she teaches that 
 God assumed human nature into hypostatic union 
 with himself, and made it his own nature, with- 
 out its ceasing to be distinctively and properly 
 
54 CONVERSATIONS ON 
 
 human nature. With regard to the, perfectibiKty of 
 the species, I will only say that she teaches that 
 man can be regenerated and supernaturahzed, 
 and that he is not only perfectible, but by grace 
 can attain to perfection, to the actualization of 
 all the possibilities of his nature. With regard 
 to reason and authority, she requires every man 
 to retain and exercise his reason to the fullest 
 extent, and she demands obedience to no au- 
 thority that is not reasonable. As to govern- 
 ment or power, she teaches with St. Paul and all 
 sound philosophy, that non est potestas nisi a Deo, 
 there is no power but from God. Do you not 
 agree with St. Paul ? " 
 
 " I hold with the American Congress of 1776, 
 and the immortal Jefferson." 
 
 "Jefferson was, I doubt not, a sincere and 
 earnest American patriot, a skiliful diplomatist, 
 and a very distinguished man ; but I hardly 
 think you would be willing to pubhsh in your 
 journal that you hold the author of the Declara- 
 tion of American Independence to be higher au- 
 thority than the great Doctor of the Gentiles 
 and author of the Episile to the Eomans. The 
 American Congress of 1776 was, I have always 
 understood, a highly respectable body of men, 
 deserving to be held in high honor by their 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH. 55 
 
 countrymen. As a naturalized American citizen, 
 I respect their act, but in case tbey put forth 
 doctrines that conflict with the teachings of St. 
 Paul, I must beg leave to cousider the Apostle, 
 who taught by the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, 
 as the higfher authority." 
 
 " You then differ from the American Congress?" 
 " I must obey God rather than men, and the 
 authority of the Apostle overrides any and 
 every human authority. The opinions or theo- 
 ries put forth in the Declaration of Independence, 
 form no part of the American Constitution, or of 
 American law, and I can reject them, if I see 
 reason for so doing, without committing any act 
 of disloyalty to the American state. The prin- 
 ciples asserted in the preamble to the Declara- 
 tion, I presume, are to be interpreted by the act 
 they are intended to justify, and I see no right 
 that you or I have to give them a broader sense 
 than the occasion demanded. The Congress 
 were about to declare the Anglo-American colo- 
 nies they represented absolved from their alle- 
 giance to the British crown, and to be free and 
 independent states, and all they needed to affirm 
 was, that every government derives its just 
 powers from the consent of the people who are 
 to be governed, or to live imder it, not from the 
 
56 CONTEESATIONS ON 
 
 will or might of a foreign nation, prince, or 
 potentate. This I do not deny ; for I hold, with 
 the great body of Catholic theologians, that 
 power is under God a trust from the people or 
 nation; but if you understand the Congress to 
 mean that no government has any power to 
 govern any individual except by his personal 
 consent, or that the government derives its just 
 powers from the people in their individual and 
 personal capacity, I must differ widely from it. 
 The law derives its force as law from the law- 
 giver, and from the people only in the sense in 
 which they make the law, which certainly is not 
 ia their personal and individual capacity. The 
 court will hardly permit the murderer to plead 
 that he has never consented to the law under 
 which he is to be tried, or that declares murder 
 a crime, and that he refuses his assent to the 
 penalty it requires to be iaflicted on those who 
 commit it. Such a plea, if admitted, would very 
 soon put an end to all courts of criminal juris- 
 diction, to all government indeed, and leave 
 every man to live as he lists. I cannot, however, 
 beheve that the American Congress ever meant 
 anything so anti-social and absurd. As I under- 
 stand it, there is no conflict between it and St 
 Paul." 
 
LltERALISM AND THE CHUROH. 5? 
 
 "I want no better proof than this, that the 
 Church opposes the essential principle of mod- 
 ern civilization. She denies, as you virtually 
 concede, that government derives all its just 
 powers from the governed, and therefore asserts 
 its right'to govern me without my consent. She 
 therefore denies the sovereignty of the people." 
 
 " The sovereignty of the individual, or of the 
 people as individuals, most certainly ; of the 
 people collectively understood, or the people as 
 the community, by no means. In this latter 
 sense, the sovereignty of the people, the political 
 people, is nothing peculiar to modern civiliza- 
 tion, but has always been asserted by all civil- 
 ized nations, and is, as we have seen, the 
 distinctive principle of civiUzation itself ; the 
 former, which is, in principle, only a phase of des- 
 potism, has never been asserted or submitted to 
 by any civilized people on earth. That there is 
 in most modem states a party more or less nu- 
 merous that plead it in justification of their con- 
 spiracies, insurrections, rebellions, or revolution- 
 ary movements against legally existing govern- 
 ments, I do not deny ; but this doctrine forms 
 the basis of no modern state, and even these, 
 when they attain to ]iower, are forced to aban- 
 don it. You mistake as the actual basis of mod- 
 
58 CONVEBSATIONS ON 
 
 ern civilization, tlie principle which a party is 
 everywhere struggling to make its basis, but 
 which is as yet not so made." 
 
 " The state with us is confessedly founded on 
 these principles — on the sacred right of insurrec- 
 tion, rebellion, revolution." 
 
 " I think not ; I find no such right recognized 
 or provided for in the Constitution. I find trea- 
 son recognized as a high crime, and generally 
 punishable with death. That even the Ameri- 
 can people do not practically hold the principles 
 you allege, is evident from their recent war in 
 vindication of the Union against armed seces- 
 sion. Whether the secession of States is rebel- 
 lion or not, depends on the fact whether Amer- 
 ican sovereignty vests in the States severally, or 
 in the States united. If the former be the fact, 
 secession is no rebellion, is only the exercise, 
 saving the breach of faith, of a right inherent in 
 each of the several States, and never surrendered 
 to the Union ; if in the States united, the Con- 
 federates, in making war on the Union, were 
 rebels. In which vests the sovereignty I am not 
 the authority to decide. The Church gave her 
 Sacraments to men on either side alike ; but the 
 American people, as represented by the govern- 
 ment, called secession rebellion, and put it down 
 
UBERALISM AND THE CHURCH. 59 
 
 by armed force, and thus proved that they are 
 very far from conceding, in any practical sense, 
 that government can rightfully exercise no power 
 not derived from the consent of the governed. 
 On the principle you contend for, not only States 
 but individuals may secede or withdraw them- 
 selves from the government whenever they please, 
 or find it convenient. If your interpretation of 
 the Declaration of Independence is the true one, 
 the war against secession was wholly indefensi- 
 ble. But I am aware of no government that does 
 not assert its right of self-preservation against 
 any and every class of assailants, whether from 
 within or from without." 
 
 " I do not deny the right of self-defence to the 
 government, or its right to put down rebeUion, 
 or suppress revolt." 
 
 " Therefore, you concede the authority of the 
 nation, and deny that of the individual citizen, 
 or of any combination of individual citizens, to 
 rebel against it or to resist it, and abandon, very 
 properly, the principle that government has no 
 just powers not derived from the personal 
 consent of the individuals governed ; for it can- 
 not be pretended that they who resist or rebel 
 oigainst the government consent to it." 
 
 " Modern civilization is not so much the civili- 
 
60 CONYEESATIONS ON 
 
 zation tliat actually obtains, as that to wliicli the 
 modern world is tending, or that is struggling to 
 be the civilization of the future. There is much 
 of the leaven of the past still retained in the 
 present, which must be cast out, before it can 
 become actual." 
 
 " It is no insignificant fact that the party 
 which wars against the Church is always the 
 party of the future, and never attains, but is 
 always just a-going to attain to the good it 
 seeks. Your modern civilization is something 
 that is just a-going to be effected." 
 
 "That is because men and society are infi- 
 nitely progressive. They pursue and struggle to 
 realize an ideal that is always just above and 
 before them, and which recedes as they advance. 
 No individual ever overtakes his ideal. The in- 
 dividual is finite, the ideal is infinite. The great- 
 ness, the glory of man, is not that he is perfect, 
 but that he is infinitely perfectible ; is always 
 Hearing perfection, but never reachiag it — in thfe 
 fact that there are no limits to his progress. 
 His happiness is not in the quarry, but in thfe 
 chase." 
 
 " I am parched with thirst ; I see the waters 
 of the cool, bubbling spring ; I run towards it ; 
 it recedes ; and the faster, the faster I run. I 
 
ltberalism; and the chukch. 61 
 
 am faint with hunger ; before me is a table 
 spread with rich viands and precious fruits ; I 
 hasten towards it, it recedes as I advance, and 
 keeps always in sight, but just beyond my reach, 
 and never a morsel can I obtain. This is the 
 happineSs you promise me, the glory of my 
 nature, of which you speak, and the advanced 
 civilization you condemn the Church for not 
 approving ! Why, my dear friend, you offer me 
 as heaven what the Greeks imagined to be hell, 
 and proffer me as bliss what they thought was 
 the severest punishment to which armipotent 
 and triumphant Jove could doom the defeated 
 giant Tantalus." 
 
 " You seem to forget, Beverend Father, that a 
 poet of your own Church, if I mistake not, has 
 sung: 
 
 ' Hope springs eternal in tlie haman breast, 
 Man never is, but always to be blest ' " 
 
 " No, I forget not ; but I need something more 
 than rhyme, whether I am to take it gravely or 
 satirically, to persuade me that it is happiness 
 never to be happy, a blessing never to be blest, 
 to hunger and thu'st and never be filled. A 
 greater than the poet Pope said, ' Blessed are ye 
 that hunger and thirst after justice, for ye .ihall 
 be satisfied.' Hope is a great consoler, but I do 
 
62 CONVERSATIONS ON 
 
 not understand how there can be hope where 
 there is full assurance that fruition is impossible. 
 There would be despair, not hope. Sweet i? 
 repose after labor, and the hofie of obtaiuinr 
 makes the labor light. But when you tr me 
 the labor will be eternally in vain, that the hour 
 of repose will never come, that there remaiueth 
 no rest after toil, no calm after the storm, no 
 peace after the war, you depri\ e me of heart and 
 hope, and make life a weary burden, too heavy 
 to be borne." 
 
 " But the labor is not in vain. It is in the 
 labor, in the chase, in the effort, in the struggle, 
 in the battle that the powers of the mind, and 
 soul, and body are developed and strength- 
 ened." 
 
 " To what end? What avail the development, 
 the strengtheniag, the growth of our faculties, 
 when there is no maturity for them, no end to be 
 gaiued? It is only the hope of winning that 
 stimulates us to labor, and sustains us rmder our 
 fatigue. Your doctrine deprives us of hope, by 
 teaching us that' it is an illusion. That your 
 doctrine of progress is false, you might infer froni. 
 the very fact that to effect it an illusion is ne- 
 cessary. Take away the illusion of hope, and 
 you render every effort impossible. Can that be 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH. 63 
 
 true which, is possible only by an illusion, a 
 falsehood?" 
 
 It seemed to me that here the priest had tho 
 better of the editor. I had early been divested 
 of all my fllusions ; I no longer saw anything to 
 gain, and had ceased to make any effort; my 
 mind and affections became stagnant, and I 
 vegetated under an intolerable lassitude and 
 weariness of life rather than lived. I had adopt- 
 ed, without much reflection, the modern doctrine 
 of perfectibility, or indefinite progress. While its 
 novelty lasted, and the illusions of youth were 
 undissipated by experience, I was active, and 
 exerted my faculties in various directions. I 
 found pleasure in activity ; in the effort, in the 
 chase, and said the happiness is in striving to 
 attain, not in the attainment. Possession dis- 
 pels the illusion ; nothing turns out to be what 
 we expected ; we turn away wearied and dis- 
 gusted from the possession of that which we had 
 moved heaven and earth to gain. But when the 
 illusion is once dispelled by experience, and we 
 see no object of pursuit large enough to fill the 
 soul, to satisfy all its wants, and afford it ever 
 fresh delight, we cease to exert ourselves. 1 
 became apathetic, took no interest in anything, 
 
&i C0NTEESATI0N8 ON 
 
 Looked upon all the pursuits, pleasures, pains, 
 hopes, and fears of my fellow-men, with ILstless 
 indifference. One thing was as good as another ; 
 all was vanity. Vanitas vanitatum, et omnia 
 vanitas. My Ufe had no object, no aim, no pur- 
 pose, and I thought only of how to tide over the 
 present hour. 
 
 The priest startled me by showing me that those 
 who placed, as I had done, the good in always 
 pm'suing an ideal, and never attaining it, simply 
 mistake hell for heaven. All the torture, the 
 agony of soul, all the tragedy of life, comes from 
 unrealized ideals. The age in which we live, 
 perhaps more than any other, is in pursuit of 
 ideals never to be realized. Hence its restless- 
 ness, its agitation, its frivolity, its feebleness, 
 its abasement of character, its iU-at-ease, its 
 craving for stimulants of all sorts, for body, mind, 
 and soul. O, if one could only fully believe 
 him who says, " Come unto me all ye that labor 
 and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest ;" 
 " Blessed are ye who hunger and thirst after 
 righteousness, for ye shall be filled ;" " Blessed 
 are ye that mourn, for ye shall be comforted." 
 O, is it true that there remaineth a rest for the 
 
 iOul 
 
IJBER.\LISM AND THE OHUBCH. 65 
 
 CHAPTEE V. 
 
 The priest replied, " You are right, my dear 
 Editor, in saying man is progressive, and in hold- 
 ing that the ideal which floats above and before 
 him, and draws him upward and onward, is infi- 
 nite. It is infinite ; and we are finite. However 
 near to it we may advance, or however near to 
 us it may be, it is always infinitely above and 
 beyond us. You touch here, without knowing it, 
 the great mystery of human life, and which is 
 inexplicable to all men who have hope only in 
 this world, and see nothing beyond the grave. 
 Have you ever asked yourself what that ideal 
 is ? Is it real ? Is it a vain illusion ? Is it a 
 creation of your own fancy? Is it your own 
 mind projected ? or, is it the real end for which 
 you are created, to which the soul so nobly as- 
 pires, and without union with which she can 
 neither attain the complement of her nature, or 
 the beatitude she craves ?" 
 
 " Your question is metaphysical, and I eschew 
 metaphysics. The moment a man enters into 
 
66 CONTEESATIONS ON 
 
 the field of metaphysics, he loses himself in a 
 dense fog, in which he can neither see nor be 
 seen. I make it a rule to give the metaphy- 
 sicians and theologians a wide berth. I am con- 
 tented with practical common sense, and deal 
 only with realities. I am of Anglo-Saxon de- 
 scent." 
 
 " Your Anglo-Saxon ancestors are doubtless 
 proud of their gifted descendant. But the man 
 who professes to regard it as a merit to eschew 
 philosophy and theology, should studiously avoid 
 raiskig questions which, in the nature of the 
 ;ase, only philosophy and theology can answer. 
 Yon have all along been engaged ia philosophy 
 and theology, though it may be without being 
 aware of it. You tell us there hovers ever be- 
 fore us an infinite ideal, which we are always 
 striving to realize, but which forever eludes us. 
 1 think even Anglo-Saxon common sense can 
 comprehend that this ideal is either something or 
 nothing, and that, since it moves and agitates us, 
 it can hardly be nothing. The same common 
 sense, I think, must sufiice to assure us that if it 
 is infinite and we finite, it is something distinct 
 from and independent )f us, and not ourselves 
 projected. The finite projected can be only 
 finite. It is, then, no more than a dictate of 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH. 67 
 
 common sense, to conclude that the infinite ideal 
 you assert is and can be only real and infinite 
 being, that is, what philosophers and theolo- 
 gians call God, and that in her endless craving 
 for the ideal, the soul has what old Oudworth 
 would call*a prohpsis of her end in God. Do you 
 concede it ?" 
 
 "I discuss no such questions, and therefore 
 neither affirm nor deny anything of the mat- 
 ter ?" 
 
 " Well, respecting your ignorance, since you 
 honestly avow it, permit me to say that a man's 
 ideal must always be greater than he actually is, 
 or otherwise it would be no ideal at all. An infi- 
 nite ideal must be God, for he alone is infinite, 
 and in him the ideal and the real, or the actual 
 and the possible, are identical. The ideal must 
 be infinite, or man could not be infinitely pro- 
 gressive as you say he is. The soul in craving 
 and seeking to possess the ideal, in which yoa 
 place progress, craves and seeks to possess God 
 in a sense that she does not as yet possess him. 
 She now possesses God, lives and moves, and 
 has her being in him as her Creator. The ideal 
 is before us, not behind us ; something to be ap- 
 proached, not recoiled from. The ideal is the 
 end we are striving to realize, but which, you 
 
68 CONVERSATIONS ON 
 
 siiy, can never be realized or attained to. But 
 the infinite ideal is God : God revealing himself, 
 not as our Maker, but as our End, our final 
 cause, to whom we return, and in whom our prog- 
 ress finds its term. Say, then, not. that we are 
 infinitely progressive, but that we are progressive 
 to the infinite, and that the soul cannot rest till 
 it attains to the infinite God. Progress is not 
 indefinite, then, but has a term, and that term 
 is the hifinite God, not, as you assvmie, an ab- 
 straction ; and the infinite God is our final cause, 
 as he is our first cause. When we have reached 
 our end, we have attained, have found, possess 
 our beatitude, and our progress terminates : for 
 we have reached the iafinite, and I think even 
 you will concede that there is no advance beyond 
 the infinite, and that the infinite is large enough 
 to fill and satisfy the most hungry soul." 
 
 " But how do you prove that the infinite God 
 is the term of our progress ?" 
 
 "You eschew metaphysics, so I can only an- 
 swer, that you assert that man is infinitely pro- 
 gressive ; but this can only mean that he is pro- 
 gressive even to the infinite, to oneness with the 
 infinite God, for we have before settled it that 
 progress is motion forward, an advance towards 
 an end ? Without a term to be reached, a goal 
 
LIBEBAUSM AND THE CHUBCH. 69 
 
 'o be attained, or at least to be aimed at, prog- 
 ress would be inconceivable, and there could be 
 no forward or backward motion. Do not forget 
 the illustration of the treadmill, or, if you please, 
 that of a man trying to step on his own shadow. 
 Remember Jthat you cannot assert progress M^ith- 
 out asserting for it both a starting-point and a 
 terminating point — a beginning and an end — ■ 
 therefore, my son, asplcefinem, look to the end, 
 which, through CJhrist the Mediator is, I dare as- 
 sert, attainable, if you will, realizable." 
 
 " Grant the ideal is God, that God can fiU the 
 soul, yet we may never attain to him or reaUze 
 our ideal : we may miss the realization." 
 
 " That is well said ; for men are free agents, 
 and it is to be feared that many do miss their 
 end, fail to fulfil their destiny, by preferring the 
 creature to the Creator, a finite to an infinite 
 good, and by refusing to concur with the grace 
 and to use the means necessary to gain it. These 
 are, in the language of Christians, lost ; are 
 doomed to hell or the lower regions ; but they 
 are as lost in precisely the condition which you 
 assume is the normal condition of all men, that 
 of pursuing forever an ideal which they can 
 never realize or attain to ; of seeking and never 
 finding; doomed to hunger and thirst without 
 
70 CONVERSATIONS ON 
 
 ever being filled ; to crave what they have not, 
 and to see it always elude them, and to be de- 
 prived of aU hope of ever attaining. They are 
 in what you call heaven, but ia what Christians 
 call hell ; they are, according to you, manifesting 
 the greatness, the dignity, and the glory of hu- 
 man nature ; but to the Christian they are 
 ' clouds without Avater, which are carried about 
 by the mnds ; trees of the autumn, unfruitful, 
 twice dead, plucked up by the roots; raging waves 
 of the sea, foaming out their own confusion ; 
 wandering stars to whom the storm of darkness 
 [despair] is reserved forever,' as St. Jude de- 
 scribes them. They have failed of their destiny, 
 and remain always below it, with the Infinite 
 Ideal, henceforth for them, forever imreaUzable, 
 fioating above and beyond their reach." 
 
 "You paint nothing. Reverend Father, to 
 frighten me, and the condition you describe is, as 
 far as I can see, no less bearable than our pres- 
 ent condition, which I find so pleasant that I 
 am loth to leave it." 
 
 " So I expected a true son of the nineteenth 
 century to answer. But here you are sustained 
 by hope ; there aU hope is left behind, and only 
 black despair goes with you. Yet, let me tell 
 you, my young friend, .that when you have lived 
 
LIBEEALI8M AND THE OHTJHCH. 71 
 
 to my age, and gone through what I have, you 
 will not find your present pleasure in the effort, 
 the struggle, the pursuit ; you will be glad to find 
 that the battle is one day to be over, that the 
 victory is to be won, and that henceforth you 
 may throw pff your harness, for there is laid up 
 for you a crown of life that fadeth not away, 
 eternal in the heavens." 
 
 There was no sadness in the priest's tones; 
 his face wore a smile of victory, and it was evi- 
 dent that he was looking forward, with joy un- 
 speakable, to the hour when he should be re- 
 leased and welcomed to the eternal home where 
 was his love. I looked at him as he ceased 
 speaking, and asked myself is it possible that 
 faith is something more than opinion, and Chris- 
 tianity something more than a theorem for phil- 
 osophers ? Here the conversation ended for the 
 day, and I sought sohtude, that I might reflect 
 on the great questions which it had raised in my 
 mind in spite of myself. 
 
 The metropolitan editor evidently was proof 
 against anything the priest could say, and if, for 
 a moment he seemed, like King Agrippa, to be 
 almost persuaded on some points, he soon veri- 
 fied the old maxim — 
 
73 CONVEESATIONS ON 
 
 " A man persuaded against hia will, 
 Is of the same opinion still." 
 
 He amused himself, and whiled away the time 
 by calling out the priest, whom he admired not 
 for his deep earnestness, sincerity, and evident 
 good faith, but as a skillful lawyer speaking 
 from his brief. He himself probably had no very 
 deep convictions of any sort. Like too many of 
 his fraternity, he had never seriously thought for 
 iaimself on any subject once in his life ; he had sim- 
 ply inquired for the dominant opinion or tendency 
 of his age, his country, his party, or his coterie, 
 and supported it without raising the question 
 whether it was right or wrong. He called it the 
 will of the people, the voice of the people ; and 
 the voice of the people, you know, is the voice of 
 God. He had taken up with the modem doc- 
 trine of progress, sneered at everything old, and 
 lauded everything new. The priest, as an old 
 man, who had seen many revolutions in states 
 and empires, and had reflected much on what he 
 had seen, was inclined to believe that all wisdom 
 and virtue was not born with the nineteenth cen- 
 tury, that " brave men lived before Agamem- 
 non," and that the birth of the Saviour was a 
 greater event for the human race than the French 
 Revolution of 1789. 
 
IJBEBALISM AND THE CHURCH. 73 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 The next day the priest did not make liis ap- 
 pearance. It was, as I afterwards learned, the 
 anniversary of a sad event in his memory, when 
 several of his near relatives and dear friends 
 were massacred while endeavoring to protect 
 their church and its altar from desecration by a 
 band of revolutionists. The editor spent the day 
 with one or two of his friends in rambling over 
 the green liills and climbing the mountains in 
 pursuit of the picturesque ; the rest of us con- 
 gregated at the usual place, under the huge old 
 maples and beeches, and conversed among oui-- 
 selves on the ideas advanced by the priest. The 
 general sympathy, as a matter of course, was 
 with the editor, only most of the guests thought 
 he pushed his views of progress a little too far, 
 and that in some of his notions he was too tran- 
 scendental ; but all dissented in toto, except per- 
 haps myself, from the priest's political economy. 
 Hi a doctrine, if true, would strip the present cen- 
 tury of its special glory. What ! intimate that 
 
74 COJfVERSATIONS UN 
 
 the present industrial system operates to breat 
 up small home industries, and to make the rich 
 richer, and the poor poorer ! It was downright 
 treason, nay, blasphemy, for it blasphemed the 
 works of genius, and genius is divine. 
 
 The day after, the editor resumed the discus- 
 sion with the priest, though on a different point. 
 "Tou and your Church, Reverend Father, 
 make too little of the progress of liberty in your 
 estimate of modern civilization. Civil Hberty 
 has made and is making immense progress.'' 
 
 " In imperial France, imperial Austria, autocra- 
 tic Russia, despotic Prussia, aristocratic England, 
 oppressed Ireland, newfangled Italy, "evolution- 
 ary Spaiu, and anarchical Spanish America ?" 
 
 " In the United States we have a republic 
 based on the principle of the equahty of all 
 men without regard to race or complexion." 
 
 "A principle proclaimed more than eighteen 
 centuries ago, by the Church of God, embodied 
 in the Civil Law, and always acted on and realized 
 in the Church herself, or the Commonwealth of 
 Christ. The Church has never known any dis- 
 tinction of race or complexion, and she has al- 
 ways had the same service for the master and 
 the servant, and the same law and the same 
 discipline for the prince and the peasant. The 
 
LIBERALISM AND IHE CHUKCH. 75 
 
 United States, I hope I may say without offence, 
 are not the whole world, and their political prin- 
 ciples are practically adopted by no other nation, 
 I own you are a great people, but you have at 
 best only applied, in the political order, the prin- 
 ciples the Ohurch has always taught and insisted 
 on. If I am not misinformed, it is even yet doubt- 
 ful if the no-distinction policy between the white 
 race and the colored races — black, red and yel- 
 low — will be sustained by a majority of the 
 American people. You are in the midst of a 
 struggle, the result of which is, as yet, uncertain. 
 It is not many years since you held, in round 
 numbers, four millions of people out of thirty- 
 one millions, in slavery, and treated them as 
 chattels. It is too soon to boast of your prog- 
 ress in liberty." 
 
 " But Russia has emancipated her serfs." 
 " Very true : at least what is called emanci- 
 pating them ; but, as I read history, there were 
 no serfs in Eussia till near the beginning of the 
 sixteenth century. The autocracy, due to the 
 usurper, Peter the Great, remains, and the prog- 
 ress effected is, at best, only a partial return 
 to the hberty enjoyed in Eussia prior to the 
 date of what you call modern civilization." 
 "Count you for nothing the fact that both 
 
76 30NVEESATI0NS ON 
 
 Prussia and Austria have become constitutional 
 •Btates, with parKamentary governments ?" 
 , " It is only to-day that they have become so. 
 As yet the Prussian constitution is only a paper 
 constitution, and practically the government is a 
 miUtary despotism, as much so as under Fred- 
 eric the Second. The Austrian constitution has 
 hardly as yet got into working order, and I have 
 not been able to discover in. it any guaranty for 
 any greater liberty to the people than they had 
 previously enjoyed. Yon Beust governs as ab- 
 solutely as did Prince Kaunitz, with whom Aus- 
 tria's misfortunes began. You count, I presume, 
 the extinction of the once great and free king- 
 dom of Poland by Prussia, Russia, and Austria 
 as a progress of freedom. The rights and inde- 
 pendence of nations do not seem to have any 
 connection in the modern political miud with 
 liberty." 
 
 " Italy, long divided into petty states, held in 
 tutelage by despotic Austria and the no less 
 despotic Pope, and reduced to a mere geographi- 
 cal expression, has been, with the exception of 
 the city of Rome and its adjacent territory, 
 emancipated politically from the despotism of 
 both, and united into a single state under a lib- 
 eral monarchy and a popular constitution. She 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH. 77 
 
 now belongs to herself, and is one of the Great 
 Powers of Europe. Is that nothing ?" 
 
 " The events that have occurred in the Itahan 
 peninsula are of too recent a date to afford you 
 any solid argument. What is to be the future of 
 the Italian peninsula, I do not pretend to fore- 
 tell ; your so-called kingdom of Italy is in the 
 process of formation rather than definitively 
 formed, and Italian statesmen are attempting to 
 found it in iniquity, by the violation of interna- 
 tional law, or the disregard of vested rights, and 
 the suppression of the freedom and independ- 
 ence of sovereign states. I have no faith in 
 paper or parchment constitutions, or constitu- 
 tions which are drawn up with ' malice afore- 
 thought,' and which have no support in the hab- 
 its and traditions of the people who are to live 
 under them. Such constitutions can be upheld 
 only by military force, and no government upheld 
 only by military force, with no moral hold on the 
 people, is likely to work well, or to stand a long 
 time. Italy, for more reasons than one, is very 
 dear to me, and I cannot wish her iU ; but as yet 
 the Italian people are practically less free, and 
 far more heavily taxed, !han they were under 
 their legitimate princes, who have been so vio- 
 lently and iniquitously dispossessed." 
 
78 CONVERSATIONS ON 
 
 " But while we are talking, news comes of a 
 revolution in Spain and the expulsion of Isabella 
 Segunda, and a free repubUc or a constitutional 
 monarchy will be estabhshed by the free action 
 of the Spanish people. Surely that is a progress 
 of Kberty." 
 
 " I know not that. There is a strong repub- 
 lican party in the large Spanish towns, but the 
 great majority of the population of the country 
 are attached to monarchy, and if left free will 
 vote for a king. The government overthrown 
 was a parliamentary government, a constitutional 
 monarchy. Spain is my native country, and 
 the news distresses me. I never acknowledged 
 Isabella for my sovereign, for she had by Span- 
 ish law no right to the Spanish throne ; but I 
 credit none of the rumors against her character 
 as a woman or as a queen. She has fallen a vic- 
 tim to the revolutionary spirit of the day, not 
 because she was immoral, tyrannical, or capri- 
 cious, but because she loved the Church and 
 sympathized with the Holy Father in his mani- 
 fold troubles, and perhaps because a brother-in- 
 law wanted her crown. Spain was once a free 
 state, the freest in Europe, till she fell imder 
 Austrian sovereigns, who destroyed her commun- 
 eros, and reduced her nobles to mere courtiers. 
 
IJBEEALISM AND THE CHURCH. 79 
 
 Each of her provinces and towns had its fueros, 
 its rights and privileges, which even her Austrian 
 and Bourbon kings respected, but which revolu- 
 tions professedly in favor of popular freedom have 
 swept away. For the last few years, under the 
 government of Isabella and the Cortes, she has 
 been rapidly recovering from the abyss into which 
 thirty years of revolution and disorder had plunged 
 her ; her trade and industry have been reviving, in- 
 ternal improvements encouraged, rehgion— as far 
 as the queen's power extended — fostered, and the 
 day seemed not distant when she would, proudly 
 resume in the European congress of nations her 
 place as a Great Power. What is in store for her 
 in the future, I know not ; I fear it is only anarchy, 
 civil war, and a baser prostration. Cite her not, I 
 pray you, as a proof of the progress of liberty, if 
 you wish me to believe the liberty you talk of is 
 a thing the Church should bless, or from which 
 civihzation has anything to hope. Do not force 
 me to exclaim with Madame Koland, on her way 
 to the scaffold, to which the revolution she had 
 done so much to foment and to urge on in its 
 devastating career, conducted her, ' O liberty, 
 what crimes are committed in thy name !' Yes, , 
 Dame Eoland, you felt it, when your turn came 
 to reap the fruit of your own sowing." 
 
80 CONVEESATIONS ON 
 
 " But little as you think, Eeverend Father, of 
 the liberty gained by the people of Europe in this 
 brave and generous struggle against the despot- . 
 isms of kings and nobles, you cannot deny that 
 they have emancipated themselves from the des- 
 potism of the Pope, and broken the gaUing 
 chains of the old union of Church and State." 
 
 "The old union of Church and State is dis- 
 solved, and no government now on earth, unless 
 fallen Portugal be an exception, acknowledges 
 its obligation of spiritual obedience to the Vicar 
 of Christ, the supreme pastor, teacher, and gov- 
 ernor of the Universal Church ; but whether that 
 is a gaia or a loss to Hberty, to the state, or to 
 the people, is another matter. The Pope never 
 claimed any temporal authority out of the States 
 of the Church, though he exercised for a time 
 an arbitratorship of Christian nations, poorly 
 replaced by your modern congresses and confer- 
 ences of sovereigns ; but that was an accident, 
 and no essential element of the papacy. The 
 nations, not the papacy, have suffered by the 
 change. In aU other respects the authority of 
 the Pope was spiritiaal, and the emancipation of 
 the nations you boast is simply emancipation 
 from the law of God, and the assertion of the ia- 
 dependence of the secular order, or its freedom to 
 
LIBEEALISM AND THE CHUBCH. 81 
 
 dispense with justice and morality in politics. I 
 have yet to learn that the people have gained any- 
 thing by this sort of emancipation. Kings and 
 princes have gained the power of violating all laws, 
 human and divine, without exposing themselves 
 to the spiritual discipline of the Church. That 
 is all that has been gained, as far as I can see. 
 You are obliged to resort to revolution and 
 bloody and disastrous civil war to effect now what 
 once could generally be effected peaceably by a 
 brief from the acknowledged spiritual head of 
 Christendom. Even from your purely human 
 point of view this seems to me more like a loss 
 than a gain." 
 
 " I see the old spirit survives, and that those 
 who oppose the spread of the Church here on 
 the ground of her incompatibility with the exist- 
 ence of our free institutions, aqd the sovereignty 
 of the people, are right. You regret the lost 
 union of Church and State, and if you had the 
 power you would re-estabUsh it here." 
 
 " That by no means follows : I may regret the 
 passing away of things which I believe were in 
 their day good and useful, and yet be very un- 
 willing to restore them. The relation of the 
 Church to the state, which subsisted in the ]\Iid- 
 dle Ages, I believe was a proper relation at that 
 
82 CONVEESATIONS ON 
 
 time, and served the interests botli of religion 
 and of society ; but times have changed, and 
 that relation is no longer practicable nor even 
 desirable. Whether the changes that have 
 taken place are for the better or for the worse, 
 it is useless to inquire. They have taken place, 
 and the Church in fulfilling her diviae mission 
 takes the world where she finds it. She did not 
 treat the feudal regime as she had treated the 
 Roman imperial regime, nor will she treat the 
 republican society of America as she did the 
 feudal society of Europe, or the monarchical so- 
 ciety that supplanted the feudal. She wiU assert 
 here, as always and everywhere, the supremacy 
 of the law of God, for states as for individ- 
 uals, and the incompetency of the state in 
 spirituals. Here and elsewhere, all she asks is 
 protection in her free and independent perform- 
 ance of her own work, or in her freedom and in- 
 dependence in governing in spiritual matters her 
 own cliildren according to her own law. She 
 can have no motive or disposition to change the 
 constitution of your republic, for under it she has 
 nearly all she ever struggled with the civil au- 
 thorities of the Old World to obtain. The only 
 thing she has any motive to strive for here is to 
 prevent any fundamental change in the constitu- 
 
LIBLBALISM AND THE CHURCH. 83 
 
 tion and laws in regard to the relations of Churcb 
 and state." 
 
 " That sounds plausible enough, and is the 
 proper thing for you to say here. Yet you know 
 perfectly well, Eeverend Father, that the Church 
 condemns • those of her children who advocate 
 the separation of Church and State." 
 
 " Those she condemns are not those who 
 mean by the separation of Church and state the 
 order estabUshed by the Constitution of the 
 American Eepublic, but those who mean by it 
 the absolute independence and supremacy of the 
 secular order, the emancipation of the state from 
 the law of God, its freedom to suppress the 
 Church whenever it finds her in the way of its 
 ambition, its policy, its schemes of injustice 
 against either its own subjects or against foreign 
 states. In the Old World the separation of 
 Church and state means the supremacy of the 
 state alike in spirituals and temporals, as in Rus- 
 sia, Prussia, Great Britain, and other states, or at 
 least, the right of the state to define the bound- 
 aries of the Church, and to enlarge or contract 
 the sphere of her freedom at will. This right is 
 claimed, is asserted for itseK in every European 
 state, and the state holds itself free to restrict 
 the freedom of the Church or to exclude her 
 
84 CONTEESATIONS ON 
 
 altogether, as it sees proper. This claim renders 
 concordats or treaties between the Church and 
 the State nfeccssary in order to secure to the 
 Church some degree of freedom and independ- 
 ence. What the Church condemns under the 
 head of separation of Church and State, is the 
 independence of the state of the laws of God, 
 the abrogation of these concordats, and the 
 right of the state to abrogate them by its own 
 authority without her consent, as has been done 
 in the Italian states by the pretended kingdom 
 of Italy, and more recently by Austria, which 
 places the Church at the mercy of the state, 
 In your republic concordats are not necessary. 
 The state disclaims all authority ia spirituals, 
 and by its fundamental law recognizes the inde- 
 pendence and freedom of the spiritual order, and 
 its obligation to protect and defend the Church 
 with all its power in the peaceable exercise of 
 her spiritual freedom, which is more than the 
 most favorable concordat has ever yet secured to 
 her elsewhere. There is no country in the world 
 where the Ohuroh is or ever has been as free to 
 govern her children according to her own disci- 
 pline and laws, or where Pius IX. is so truly 
 Pope as the United States. And this freedom 
 is not held hf.re as a grant from the state revo 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH. 85 
 
 cable at its will, but is the right of conscience of 
 each and eyery citizen; one of those rights of 
 man, or rather of God, which are antecedent to 
 civil society, and which government is instituted 
 to protect and defend. Bome would have but a 
 small sha^e of that wisdom and sagacity she gets 
 credit for, if she should seek or suffer her chil- 
 dren to seek to substitute for this system any 
 system which does or ever has obtained in the 
 Old World." 
 
 "But this freedom which the Church has 
 here she has only in common with all religious 
 denominations. With that she never has been 
 and never will be satisfied. She would reign 
 alone; and when she gets the power she will 
 compel the state to suppress all religious de- 
 nominations hostile to herself. Such is at least 
 a fair inference from her past history." 
 
 "I think not. She has never had in the past 
 a state of things such as obtaias here, and there- 
 fore no inference of the kind can be drawn from 
 her past history. The Church is exclusive, in- 
 tolerant, as is truth itself, in the theological 
 order, but she is obliged by no doctrine or prin- 
 ciple she holds, to exact from the state civil 
 intolerance. She does not beheve it a matter of 
 indifference in regard to eternal salvation, or 
 
86 CONVEESATIONS ON 
 
 even in regard to ciTil society, whether a man 
 believes truth or error; but she can very well 
 consent, where she is free herself, where all her 
 own rights are protected, and she stands on a 
 footing of civil equahty with the sects, that they 
 should be before the state as free as herseK. If 
 the state gives them no advantage over her, she 
 can get along very well without its giving her 
 any advantage oVer them." 
 
 Here I confess the priest surprised me. Like 
 the majority of my countrymen, I had supposed 
 the Church is innately and necessarily antago- 
 nistic to our republican institutions, and that it 
 would be impossible for her to coexist with them. 
 Naturally tolerant in consequence of a native 
 want of earnestness, and having no very strong 
 religious convictions of iny own, I had been will- 
 ing to allow her an " open field and fan- play ;" 
 for here she was feeble, and I felt confident that 
 the influence of American intelligence and Amer- 
 ican freedom would be amply sufficient to pre- 
 vent her from ever becoming strong enough to 
 be at all dangerous to the American state or to 
 civil and rehgious liberty. To hear the priest 
 assert that the Church found here aU or nearly 
 all she wanted, or had ever struggled for, seemed 
 
LIBEHALISM .VNl) THE CHURCH. 87 
 
 a ridiculous paradox. Was it, indeed, true that 
 the popes in theii long and bitter struggle with 
 the German Emperor and other sovereigns had 
 been contending only for that freedom and inde- 
 pendence which the state with us recognizes in 
 every reUgjous denomination, and protects as the 
 birthright of every American citizen, and not 
 for supreme power in the state, and the subjuga- 
 tion of the entire secular order to the domination 
 of a haughty and arrogant priesthood ? 
 
 This was too much. Could Luther and Calvin, 
 Henry and Cranmer, and the great and learned 
 divines of the Anghcan and other communions, 
 who for three hundred years have strenuously 
 mantained the contrary, have been deceived or 
 trying to deceive others ? Tet here was a priest 
 who seemed to imderstand himself, who appeared 
 also to be perfectly familiar with the principles 
 and history of his Church, and who was certainly 
 no trimmer, and no courtier of king or people, 
 quietly, and as a matter of course, placing wholly 
 in the wrong those great divines, and nearly the 
 whole Protestant world, who had excused the 
 civil intolerance of the early Reformers and the 
 princes who espoused their cause, on the ground 
 that they only followed the teaching and exam- 
 ple of Rome, and asserting, as if it were an 
 
88 CONYEKSATIONS ON 
 
 admitted truth, tliat the Church finds here in 
 this land of rehgious hberty, all or nearly all 
 that she wants, or has ever struggled to gain, 
 and therefore must be led by her own principles 
 and interests to use all her influence, even if 
 gaining the ascendency, to preserve our free 
 institutions, and especially the equal civil and 
 religious rights of all men before the state, which 
 our government is bound by its very constitution 
 to recognize, protect, and defend ! It discon- 
 certed all my preconceived notions, set aside 
 what I had supposed to be the final judgment of 
 the world, and denied what I had supposed no 
 one would or could question. I was puzzled. 
 But the able editor was not puzzled or surprised 
 at all, and I listened attentively for his reply. 
 
UBERALISM AND THE CHLTICH. 89 
 
 CHAPTEE VII. 
 
 "All tliat, Reverend Father, is easily said, and 
 it is decidedly for your interest to say it. Your 
 Church has nearly run itself out in the Old 
 World, and the only remaining hope of the 
 papacy is in gaining the people of the United 
 States ; and you well know that were you to tell 
 them the truth, and disclose to them the hopes 
 and designs of Eome, you could not get them to 
 Usten to you a moment. Were you to tell them 
 that there is an innate incompatibility between 
 your Church and their republic, they would soon 
 put an end to your mission. You are shrewd 
 enough to understand that your success depends 
 on your persuading them that your Church, in- 
 stead of opposing, approves the principles of 
 American republicanism, and is necessary for 
 their preservation and free and orderly working. 
 Tell that to the marines ; I believe you not ; you 
 are no disinterested witness." 
 
 "Are you a disinterested witness, my dear 
 Editor?" 
 
90 CONVEKSATIONS ON 
 
 "What can you mean by asking me such a 
 question? I have no prejudices, no interest in 
 opposing your Chiu'ch." 
 
 "Let no man say he has no prejudices. You 
 have your pride of opinion to maintain, and are 
 not a man predisposed to yield it up to any one, 
 or to any argument. Interest? You have no 
 more interest, I gi-ant, in opposing the Church 
 than the shrine-makers of Ephesus had hi op- 
 posing St. Paul. You are simply a shrine- 
 maker, and your idol is public opinion, or at least 
 the public opinion of your party, of which you 
 are also one of the chief priests. You are a 
 leading journalist, and journalism is a power in 
 the American state; but you would be nobody 
 were you to avow yourself a member of the 
 Church, and use your journal to defend her 
 against the misrepresentations and slanders 
 daily inculcated against her, as strenuously as 
 you would if they were attacks on the purity and 
 honor of your mother. You have not as yet the 
 grace nor the earnestness of character for that. 
 You are too well satisfied with yourself as you 
 are, and with the position you hold." 
 
 "And what else is to be said of the Ee; .rend 
 Father ? What sacrifices has he made ?" 
 
 "None that I count, though it may be some 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH. 91 
 
 saciifices which you and your coimtrymen -would 
 shrink from; for of all the people I have ever 
 known, democrats as you are, you are the greatest 
 idolaters of wealth, rank, and title. I have made 
 no sacrifice, for I count all things as dung and 
 dross, if I dan but win Christ, and I have already 
 been rewarded a hundred fold for all I ever gave 
 up for Him. I want no higher glory on earth 
 than to be a priest of the Hving God, and no 
 greater consolation than to toU and suffer for the 
 salvation of souls. But you are in no disposition 
 to appreciate things of this sort. There is a life 
 that is hidden from you with God, and a joy you 
 have"no relish for." 
 
 "I c'fertainly am no enthusiast, no fanatic, and 
 I did not suppose you to be either one or the 
 other. I have generally regarded the clergy of 
 your Church as cool, shrewd, calculating, am- 
 bitious men, bent on acquiring power for their 
 Church, and unscrupulous as to the means they 
 adopt ; devoted to their Church in aiding her to 
 dominate over kings and emperors, over the lives 
 and fortunes, the minds and consciences of men, 
 and to be as supreme on earth as God is in 
 heaven; but I have held them generftUy as 
 devoid of faith, of conscience, of enthusiasm, 
 fanaticism, as of honor, and ready at *all times 
 
92 CONTEESATIONS ON 
 
 to act on the maxim, ' The end sanctifies the 
 means.'" 
 
 " We sometimes commit a grave mistake, my 
 dear Mr. Editor, when we judge others by our- 
 selves, and transfer our own views, feelings, and 
 aims to persons who Uve and move in an at- 
 mosphere very different from our own, and act 
 from motives which we have no conception of. 
 The hfe of a simple, siucere, earnest child of the 
 Church is something of which you have had no 
 experience^ my friend, and that lies beyond the 
 range of your philosophy. For my part, I do not 
 beheve what you think of us is generally true 
 even of the ministers of the Eeformed religion. 
 It is difficult for me to conceive the existence of 
 a class of men moved by a spirit so satanic as 
 we must be, if you are right. I can not see in the 
 domination you say we seek to secure for our 
 Church a sufficient motive for our conduct, for 
 really, if we are as shrewd and as good calcula- 
 tors as you pretend, we must see that we do and 
 Can gain nothing. I can understand Satan. He 
 sets himself up as the rival of God, seeks to 
 defeat his kingdom, and to get himself worshiped 
 as God. He has a personal end, a personal 
 defeat to avenge, a personal victory to win, a 
 personal malice to gratify. He hates all good, 
 
i,tbeejVlism and hie church. 93 
 
 and wars against it wherever he sees it, for he 
 has said to himself, ' Evil, be thou iny good ; hell, 
 be thou my heaven.' I can understand why he 
 should seek to destroy the kingdom of God, as I 
 can understand why your ministers, deceived by 
 his wiles and carried away by his delusions, 
 should seek to destroy the Church "that every- 
 where confronts and embarrasses them ; but my 
 knowledge of human nature does not enable me 
 to conceive how men who beUeve not the Church 
 to be a divine institution, who credit not her 
 promises or her doctrines, and seek only power 
 over men in this world, could devote their lives, 
 traverse oceans and huge forests, in hunger and 
 fatigue, in toil and infirmity, foregoing all the 
 comforts of civiHzation, bearing contumely and 
 contempt and persecution even unto death, to 
 build up a powerful corporation, in whose domi- 
 nation they have no personal interest and can 
 have no personal share." 
 
 " But do you not consider it a higher honor to 
 be a simple priest of the Church than to be a 
 grandee of Spain or any other nation, than to be 
 even king or kaiser ?" 
 
 " Unquestionably, but only because I beheve 
 the Church to be really the kingdom of God on 
 earth, her doctrines to be the revealed word 
 
94 CUNVEBSATIONS ON 
 
 of God, and her sacraments to be really insti- 
 tuted by Clirist himself, and that they really 
 confer the grace they signify, are the chan- 
 nels through which the Holy Ghost is really in- 
 fused into our hearts, regenerates us, elevates us 
 to a higher Ufe, and makes us heirs and joint- 
 heirs with Christ of eternal glory in the heavens. 
 Take away that beUef, suppose me to act from 
 calculation, not faith, from the mere love of 
 earthly power, I should see no glory or greatness 
 in the priesthood, I should find nothing in it to 
 sustain me in my labors, or to console me in my 
 privations, and should say with St. Paul, 'if in 
 this hfe only we have hope, we are of all men 
 the most miserable.' "What could we, if we 
 believed not, see in the domination of the 
 Church, even if we shovdd secure it, worth living 
 for and dying for?" 
 
 "You pretend, Eeverend Father, that your 
 Church is satisfied with the order established 
 here, and that she really favors the great princi- 
 ples of natural freedom and equality on which 
 our republic is founded. If she approves these 
 principles, and is satisfied with the relations 
 which subsist here between Church and State, 
 why has she nowhere founded the state on the 
 basis of equal rights?" 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHUECH. 95 
 
 "The Cburch is not the state nor the framer 
 of its constitution, and she has not and never 
 has pretended to have temporal authority iu the 
 temporal order. She is a spiritual kingdom — 
 the kingdom of God on earth — and she leaves to 
 the civil alid political order that which God 
 liimseK leaves to it — human free will. She has 
 always asserted the great principles which the 
 American people more successfully than any 
 other have carried out in their political constitu- 
 tion, but it has never been her mission to apply 
 them practically out of her own order. Oui' 
 Lord did not come as a temporal Messiah. The 
 efforts to defend these principles, even iu then* 
 spiritual appUcation, has raised an almost uni- 
 versal clamor against her for encroaching on the 
 province of the civil power, and are the basis of 
 the principal charges her enemies even now 
 allege against her. What then would have been 
 the outcry, had she attempted to organize -polit- 
 ical society in accordance with these principles ! 
 The relation between Church and State here, 
 which so well meets her wants, can subsist only 
 where the state is founded on the recognition of 
 the freedom of conscience, and the equal rights 
 of all, which it is bound to protect and defend. 
 Never in the Old World has it been humanly 
 
96 OON\'EESATIONS ON 
 
 possible to found the state on the American doc- 
 trine of equal rights embodied in the American 
 Constitution. Neither the Government nor the 
 Church, even if in the province of the Church, 
 could have done it." 
 
 "Why not?" 
 
 "You, a journalist whose profession it is to 
 instruct the people ui their political rights and 
 duties, and who ought therefore to be a master of 
 pohtical science and of true statemanship, ask me 
 such a question ? Constitutions of states are not 
 things that can be made to order, and imposed 
 by authority, regardless of the habits, manners, 
 customs, and traditions of the people who are to 
 live under them. England, monarchical and 
 aristocratic to the core, could not get on as a 
 commonwealth, and when the dictator Cromwell 
 died, and left no successor, she recalled the 
 Stuarts, re-established the throne, and restored 
 her old constitution. France, after the example 
 of England, made a revolution, beheaded her 
 king, aboHshed royalty, aboUshed nobility, adopt- 
 ed as her motto, 'hberty, equality, and frater- 
 nity,' imposed on herself with much ceremony, 
 fanfaronade, beating of drums, and sounding of 
 trumpets, an entire new constitution, made after 
 the most approved pattern ; and not only one, but 
 
XJBERALTSM AND THE CHURCH. 97 
 
 many new constitutions ; yet, as Thomas Carlyle 
 says, 'they wouldn't go,' though drawn up by 
 one who boasted that ' politics is a science he had 
 finished.' After a period of mihtary despotism 
 under Napoleon I., she was forced to recall her 
 legitimate kibg, to reconstruct the throne she had 
 demolished, and reconsecrate the altars she had 
 profaned; and she is even now governed chiefly 
 by military force. Mexico and the South Amer- 
 ican colonies of Spain asserted their independ- 
 ence of the mother country, adopted constitu- 
 tions framed after the great Anglo-Ameiican 
 model, and have been in a state of anarchy ever 
 since. 
 
 "No, sir; constitutions," continued the priest, 
 "cannot be made and imposed on a nation, 
 liord John Bussell's numerous experiments, 
 under the most favorable circumstances, have 
 proved that much. They must be born and de- 
 veloped Avith the nation ; generated, not made, as 
 Count de Maister has amply proved. You may 
 change a dynasty, or the magistracy of a nation, 
 without destroying it, and sometimes with happy 
 results ; the constitution of a nation, never. Eve- 
 ry true statesman knows this, and seeks always to 
 administer the affairs of the state in accordance 
 with its fundamental constitution. He accepts 
 
98 CONVEBSATIONS ON 
 
 that constitution as his starting-point and his in- 
 flexible law, and labors only to correct abuses 
 that may creep in, to clear away anomalies that 
 the vicissitudes of time or the course of events 
 may create, and to do the best he can with it foi 
 the nation. The Church cannot do otherwise, 
 however overwhelming may be her influence. 
 The necessary conditions of such a constitution 
 as that of the United States, have never been 
 found in European society, and do not exist there 
 even yet. Its principles may have been recogniz- 
 ed and defended by both statesmen and church- 
 men, but it has never been possible to organize 
 any European state in accordance with them. 
 
 " The peculiarity of the American Constitution," 
 the priest went on, " under the point of view we 
 are now considering it, is not merely in asserting 
 the equahty of aU men before the law, but in as- 
 serting their equal rights as held not from the 
 law, but from the Creator, anterior to civil so- 
 ciety, and therefore rights which government 
 is bound by its very constitution to recognize 
 and protect to the fuU extent of its power. This 
 view of rigbts you will not find in the Greek and 
 Eoman republics. Under them man was held to 
 exist for the state, and had n o rights but sucb as 
 he held from it. You will not find it in the 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHUBCH. 99 
 
 Roman Empire, whicli differed from the republic 
 only in that it aggregated the several functions 
 of the state to the emperor. Under feudalism 
 you had the Roman imperial system, and in ad- 
 iition not the rights of man, but the personal 
 rights of the feudal chief. All your boasted 
 progress in Europe consists in eliminating, some- 
 times peaceably, sometimes violently, the feudal 
 element, and in rendering exclusive Roman im- 
 perialism on the one hand, or the pagan repubhc 
 on the other, as Mazzini and Garibaldi are seek- 
 ing to do in Italy, the Radicals in England, and 
 the Progresistas in Spain. Is your question an- 
 swered?" 
 
 "You have not. Reverend Father, proved to 
 my satisfaction, that the Church, if she gains the 
 ascendency, will not require the state to use its 
 power to suppress all sects opposed to her, and 
 forbid the profession of any creed or dogma 
 contrary to hers. It is the dread of her ex- 
 clusive and persecuting spirit, which she has 
 always manifested when she has had the power, 
 that makes enlightened Americans set their faces 
 against her. She has been, ever since the de- 
 '•elopment of the papacy, a persecuting Church, 
 drunk with the blood of saints and martyrs, as 
 the Waldenses and Albigenses can beai witness, 
 
100 CONTEESATIONS ON 
 
 as the auto-da-fes of your own native Spain, 
 the massacre of the Reformed in the Low Coun- 
 tries under the gloomy bigot, Philip the Second, 
 but too well prove." 
 
 " Can you name to me any doctrine or priaci- 
 ple of the Church which makes it obligatory on 
 her to call on the secular arm to suppress heresy 
 or schism that uses no violence or physical force 
 against her ?" 
 
 "However that may be, her practice proves 
 that she claims and exercises the right, and has 
 the disposition to use it." 
 
 " Can you point m6 to an iastance in which 
 she has ever inflicted, or reqxiired to be inflicted, 
 anything more than ecclesiastical censures and 
 discipline on peaceable schismatics and heretics, 
 who, iQ defence of their heresy or their schism 
 use no other weapons than arguments drawn 
 from reason, history, and the Holy Scriptures ? 
 If so, will you be so good as to name it ?" 
 
 " I presume that there are many instances, 
 but I cannot name one at this moment." 
 
 " No, nor at any other moment. I am not an- 
 swerable for what civU or miLLtary governments 
 have done. They have often violated the princi- 
 ples and wishes of the Church by their treatment 
 of heretics. She never authorized the cruelties of 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHUBCH. 101 
 
 Henry VIII., in England, of the Duke of Alba, 
 in the Netherlands, the revocation of the Edict 
 of Nantes, or the dragonades of the Huguenots, 
 by Louis the Fourteenth — the last ordered by 
 the king during the suspension of his diplomatic 
 relations with the Holy See. The Waldenses, 
 after they desisted from violence towards the 
 Church and her priests and members, were left 
 in peace, and have remained unmolested to this 
 day in the secluded valleys of Piedmont. The 
 Albigenses were Manichseans, the descendants of 
 the Paulicians, preaching the most licentious 
 doctrines, and practicing moral and social abom- 
 inations, such as are punishable by your own 
 laws. They were not peaceable heretics ; but, 
 protected and supported by Eaymond VII., 
 Count of Thoulouse, took possession of the 
 churches and their revenues, broke up peaceable 
 congregations of worshipers, maltreated and 
 murdered the clergy, and even assassinated a 
 legate of the Holy See. The Pope called on the 
 King of France, the Count's suzerain, for pro- 
 tection, and the king responded, and a bloody 
 war foUo\^ ed against the Count, assisted, part of 
 the time at least, by James of Arragon, who was 
 under excommunication from the Pope. Sup- 
 pose Brigham Young, chief of the Mormons^ 
 
102 CONVERSATIONS ON 
 
 whose well-known principle is, that the Lord has 
 given to the Mormons all the possessions of the 
 Gentiles, and that if they do not take them by 
 force, it is because they are not yet strong 
 enough to do it — should let loose his Danites 
 to disturb peaceable Cathohc congregations met 
 for worship, should plunder Cathohc churches, 
 murder or otherwise maltreat Catholic priests, 
 would not the American government hold itself 
 bound to suppress the violence, and enforce the 
 laws against him and his followers ? " 
 
 "Undoubtedly, whether the misdeeds were 
 committed against your Church or against any 
 other Church." 
 
 " Precisely : now this is all that the Pope re- 
 quired of the secular arm against the Albigenses, 
 in the south of France. That Simon de Mont- 
 fort — ^who was appointed to lead the forces and 
 execute the laws against the Albigenses, and 
 who hoped to succeed to the possessions of Ray- 
 mond — went beyond his iustructions, turned the 
 war into a war for his own personal aggrandize- 
 ment, and committed cruel excesses and gross 
 outrages on peaceable and inoffensive persons, 
 even on helpless women and children, never in- 
 tended either by the Pope or the king, is very 
 certain, for the Pope withdrew the authorization 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH. 103 
 
 he had given him, and under the direction of 
 St. Dominic, established a court of inquiry, or 
 inquisition, to protect the peaceable and well- 
 disposed heretics from the excesses of the civil 
 power." 
 
 This seemed conclusive enough, conceding the 
 facts to be as the priest stated them. Whether 
 they were so or not, I was not able to say ; I 
 could only say that Protestant historians give a 
 very different account. According to them, the 
 Albigenses were a numerous body of peaceful, 
 evangelical Christians, who adhered to primitive 
 Christianity, and maintained themselves in Gos- 
 pel purity and free from papal corruptions and 
 superstitions. But I do not know that Protest- 
 ant historians, after aU, are any better authority 
 than Catholic historians. If the latter have an 
 interest in white-washing, the former have an 
 equally strong interest in black-washing the 
 Church. The editor seemed to have nothing to 
 reply, and changed the subject. 
 
104 0ONVEK8ATI0N8 ON 
 
 CHAPTER Vin. 
 
 "But you say nothing, Eevereud Father, of 
 the Spanish Inquisition and its two hundred and 
 thirty thousand victims tortured and burned to 
 death for daring to differ, on some abstruse ques- 
 tions, from the Pope of Eome. As a native-born 
 Spaniard, I suppose you w^ill defend it." 
 
 " Llorente, on whose authority you rely, was a 
 native-born Spaniard, and he did not defend it, 
 but circulated innumerable lies against it. He 
 was a bad Spaniard, a bad priest, and a bad 
 Catholic, and therefore worthy of the full confi- 
 dence of the Reformed Communion. The Inqui- 
 sition, as I have just told you, was originally 
 instituted for the protection of heretics against 
 the severity of the civil laws, which date from 
 the pagan republic of Eome, from which the 
 Church herself had suffered for centuries, and 
 which she had no hand in making. The Chris- 
 tian Eoman emperors, who never allowed the 
 Church to interfere with their law-making power, 
 sometimes suspended and sometimes renewed 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHUECH. 105 
 
 them, ani the Barbarian nations, that sncceeded 
 the Romans, though they had certain laws and 
 customs of their own, which were the law for 
 Barbarians, continued in force for the Roman 
 population the Roman law and jurisprudence. 
 The Spani^ Inquisition, of which many horrid 
 tales — ^lies for the most part — are told, was a 
 politico-ecclesiastical court, conceded by the 
 Pope to the soHcitations and representations of 
 the kings of Spain, though reluctantly-, and had 
 for its object to ferret out and bring to trial, 
 according to the judicial forms of the kingdom, 
 persons accused or suspected of being engaged 
 in secret conspiracies to overthrow in Spain both 
 the Church and the state. These persons were, 
 for the most part, recently baptized Jews and 
 Mussulmans, who were suspected, whUe publicly 
 professing themselves Christians, and in some 
 instances filling high offices in the Church and 
 in the state, of practising in secret their old reli- 
 gion, and plotting with the unbaptized Jews and 
 Moors of Africa against the peace of the king- 
 dom. I speak of the Spanish Inquisition in its 
 origin. It was directed against real criminals, 
 such as the laws of every civihzed state treat, 
 and, on conviction, punish as such." 
 
 " Do you mean to say the Inquisition was not 
 
106 CONVERSATIONS ON 
 
 establislied to ferret out and bring to punish- 
 ment persons held to be heretics ?" 
 
 " Tlie persons against whom it was instituted, 
 doubtless were, heretics, but it was not to ferret 
 out and punish heretics, simply as such, that the 
 Pope authorized the extraordinary court called 
 the Inquisition, or that it was solicited by the 
 kings, but against them as secret conspirators, 
 threateniag the destruction of Spanish society, 
 both civil and religious, as it was then consti- 
 tuted. The court, in its first period, did not 
 take cognizance of heresy when not suspected of 
 being coupled with other offences." 
 
 " Will you say that no heretie, as such, and 
 such only, was ever arrested and condemned by 
 the Inquisition ?" 
 
 " No, I will not say that ; but I will say that it 
 was not instituted or consented to by the Su- 
 preme Pontiff for that purpose." 
 
 " Were not persons suspected of favoring the 
 Reformers in Germany and the Low Countries, 
 arrested by the agents of the Inquisition, and 
 thrown into its dungeons ?" 
 
 "Undoubtedly : but that makes nothing against 
 my position. You know, I presume, that the 
 Reformers in Germany and the Low Countries, 
 if not everywhere else, we] i not simply heretics 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH. 107 
 
 in the eyes of the Church, but also a poUtical 
 party in the eyes of the state, and, as such, 
 carried on in the Netherlands, then belonging to 
 Spain, a civil war against their sovereign or 
 suzerain. They were in the eyes of the Spanish 
 government rebels and revolutionists, and no 
 Spaniard could favor even their theological doc- 
 trines without suspicion of high treason. At least 
 so it was represented to the Pope, who consented 
 to the revival of the Inquisition under PhOip II., 
 and its extension to the Low Countries. That 
 the Supreme Pontiff did not regard the suppres- 
 sion of heresy unconnected with a dangerous 
 political party seeking to revolutionize the state 
 as well as the Church, as its special purpose, 
 is evident from the fact, that though there were 
 many adherents of the Reformers — some open, 
 and more concealed — ^in Naples, then an appan- 
 age to the Spanish crown, the Pope absolutely 
 refused to consent to the introduction of the 
 Inquisition into that kingdom." 
 
 "Do you maintain that no one guilty of no 
 offence but what the Church calls heresy, was 
 ever condemned by the Inquisition?" 
 
 " Not at all : I only say that this was not the 
 purpose for which the Pope consented to its es- 
 tabUshment, or re-estabUshment. That it was 
 
108 CONYEESATIONS ON 
 
 abused, and used for purposes not originally 
 intended, we know from tlie letters of the Pon- 
 tiff, seriously reprimanding the inquisitors for 
 their severity and cruelty, and from his author- 
 izing appeals from their sentences to the Papal 
 court, where in most of the cases carried up, the 
 sentences of the Inquisition were overruled, and 
 the prisoners discharged. Besides, the two orders 
 were so intermingled in Spain, that it was hardly 
 possible that an offence could be committed 
 against either order that would not be equally an 
 offence against the other ; and it is easy to con- 
 ceive, that even after the adherents of the Re- 
 formers had ceased to couple their heresy with 
 rebellion, or treasonable practices against the 
 government — if in fact they ever did cease so to 
 couple it in Spain — the Inquisition might con- 
 strue the heresy as an offence of which it had 
 cognizance." 
 
 " But whose fault was it that the two orders 
 became so intermingled ?" 
 
 " It was the fault of time. Many things are 
 just and useful when adopted, that cease to be so, 
 and indeed become positively hurtful, in process 
 of time and the changes which it brings with 
 it ; yet to undo them, or to reform the abuses 
 to which they have ultimately led, and which 
 
LIBERAIilSir AND THE CHURCH. 109 
 
 have become incorporated into the habits, the 
 customs, the hfe of a people, and especially if 
 they favor the secular government by giving it 
 a (^vasi authority in ecclesiastvoal affairs, is a 
 work of great difficulty and deKo.\cy. 'Hie opus, 
 hie labor £sV The Popes had tonceded many 
 privileges to the Christian princes of Spain after 
 the Mussulman invasion and conquest of 
 nearly the whole kingdom, and the Christians 
 were but a feeble remnant taking refuge in the 
 mountains of the Asturias, and during tlie war 
 against the Infidels for the recovery of Iho king- 
 dom, which lasted nearly eight hundred years. 
 These privileges strengthened the hands of the 
 princes and of the Christian warriors, and served 
 the interests of both religion and national inde- 
 pendence. But when the war was ended, Gran- 
 ada had fallen, the last Mussulman prince ex- 
 pelled from the Iberian peninsula, and Spain 
 was once more free and Christian, the order of 
 things that had grown up during the long strug- 
 gle for the Christian faith and national integrity 
 ceased to be necessary or useful, and became in 
 many respects positively injurious to both 
 Church and state, and especially embarrassing 
 to the Chiu'ch. The king was found to have an 
 undue authority in ecclesiastical matters ; there 
 
llO CONTEESATIONS ON 
 
 was produced a sort of confusion of the two or- 
 ders, for which Spaiu and Spanish America arc 
 now paying the penalty. I defend not that con- 
 fusion of Church and State, which resulted from 
 measures wise and just in their origin, nor do 
 I defend throughout the Spanish Inquisition, 
 always more pohtical than ecclesiastical ; but I 
 cannot join in the ordinary outcry against either. 
 I prefer, wherever practicable, the relations of 
 Church and State which subsist ia your repub- 
 lic." 
 
 " But did I not understand you to defend the 
 union of Church and State in the Old World ?" 
 
 " The union, yes ; but not the fusion of Church 
 and State, or the intermingling of the two au- 
 thorities. The trouble in Spain was not, as you 
 suppose, that the Church had too much power 
 or iudependence, but that the government had 
 gradually come to exercise an undue power in 
 ecclesiastical appointments and ecclesiastical 
 administration. The two authorities should al- 
 ways be kept distinct ; and whUe the Church ab- 
 stains from all interference in the administration 
 of the purely temporal affairs of state, the secu- 
 lar government should have no authority in the 
 administration of ecclesiastical affairs. The only 
 union of Church and State, as pohties or corpo- 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHUKCH. Ill 
 
 rations, I haye defended,, is that implied by con 
 cordats which accord to the state certain spec- 
 ified rights and powers, and impose on it cer- 
 tain obligations with regard to ecclesiastical mat- 
 ters." 
 
 "If jOKL express the views of your Church, I 
 see not why she condemns those who advocate a 
 separation of Church and State." 
 
 "I have already shown you why. In the Old 
 World the state has never recognized the Amer- 
 ican doctrine. The state has remained always 
 pagan, as you are laboring to make it here, and 
 I fear successfully. It claimed the absolute 
 supremacy in all things, and that the rights of 
 the Church were held from it, or by its conces- 
 sion. It would concede her freedom only as the 
 state religion, and as a state religion the state 
 had, according to its theory, of its own suprem- 
 acy, the right to control its administration. 
 This the Church could not, as a spiritual king- 
 dom, permit; but as the state would concede her 
 no rights save as the established religion of the 
 state, she was obliged to acquiesce in her estab- 
 lishment by law, and to secure by law or treaty 
 the best terms for herself that she could. To 
 dissolve the treaty or abrogate the law, and thus 
 separate her entirely from the state, would leave 
 
112 CONVEESATIONS ON 
 
 her withovit any rights at all, which the secular 
 poorer holds itself bound to recognize." 
 
 "But what need, even supposing this to be so, 
 had she to insist that the state should exclude, 
 under the severest pains and penalties, all reli- 
 gions but herself ? Simple protection from their 
 violence would have answered her purpose as 
 you pretend it does now." 
 
 "I am not aware that she ever did so insist. 
 She had to accept her establishment as the state 
 religion to be able to exercise any of her spir- 
 itual rights under the protection of law, and the 
 state was too logical, when it had declared her 
 the state rehgion, not to forbid all religions op- 
 posed to her. The laws against heretics grew nat- 
 urally out of the supremacy claimed by the state, 
 as under both the pagan republic and the pagan 
 empire; and as that claim had never been 
 acknowledged by the Church, she is in no sense 
 responsible for the civil exclusion of heretics. 
 You have only to study the controversies be- 
 tween the legists and the canonists during the 
 struggle of the Pope and the Emperor in the 
 Middle Ages, or between the canonists and the 
 French parliaments in more recent times, to be 
 satisfied that much of what you and men like 
 you have attributed to the Church, is simply due 
 
UBEEALISM AND THE CHURCH. 113 
 
 to the arrogant and false claims of the seculai 
 order, always denied and resisted by the Church. 
 The whole difficulty grew out of the assumption 
 by the pagan state of supremacy, or its refusal to 
 acknowledge an order of rights which you call 
 the rights "of man, and I the rights of the Crea- 
 tor, anterior and superior to itself, not derived 
 from if, and which it is, as I so often repeat, 
 bound to recognize and protect for all men. The 
 Church was the guardian and defender of this 
 order of rights against the tj'ranny of princes and 
 civil magistrates." 
 
 " You would then claim for your Church the 
 championship of hberty against tyi-anny, and 
 boldly deny her despotic, tjrannical, and perse- 
 cuting sphit?" 
 
 " Of course I do, and so would you, if you had 
 studied her history, understood and approved 
 the order of rights recognized and established by 
 your own republic. The Church has always 
 been on the side of true hberty, of justice, 
 charity, humanity. He who defends against the 
 arrogant pretensions of the secular order the 
 rights of God, if I may so speak, defends the 
 rights of man. You see, or would see, if your 
 eyes were open, that the Popes, in defending the 
 rights of the spiritual order against secular 
 
114 CONVERSATIONS ON 
 
 tyrants, were the real defenders of freedom, and 
 the powerful opponents of the pagau republic or 
 empire where liberty was restricted to the lib- 
 erty of the state or city to govern ; where the 
 individual was nothing and the state everything. 
 You would see it also, by what followed in those 
 nations that, in the sixteenth century, threw off 
 the papacy and rejected the authority of the 
 Church. In them all, the secular authority was 
 alike supreme in politics and in religion ; and if 
 there was liberty for the individual to blaspheme 
 the Church and curse the Pope, there was no 
 liberty for him to dissent from the religion of the 
 state or the prince. Cardinal Fisher and Sir 
 Thomas More, in England, were beheaded, be- 
 cause they would not subscribe to the declara- 
 tion that the king was supreme in spirituals as 
 well as temporals, and seventy-two priests were 
 condenmed to death and executed, and hundreds 
 of laymen were doomed to death, and I know not 
 how many more had their goods confiscated and 
 were suffered to die in loathsome dungeons, or 
 were banished the realm, under Queen Eliza- 
 beth, because they would not take the oath of 
 the royal supremacy. The king and parL'ament 
 enacted the creed and liturgy of the new-made 
 Church of England, as they stiU do, and as did 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CnURCH. 115 
 
 the princes or secular authority in every state 
 that apostatized from the Church. It has cost 
 these nations centuries of revolution and civil 
 war to regain some portion of the Uberty the 
 Church had always defended for them. Tou, my 
 dear friend, are a thorough pagan in your views 
 of the relation of Church and State, and in your 
 opposing the Church you are warring against 
 the very idea of that freedom which the Church 
 defends, and which makes the glory of your 
 republic." 
 
 " The American repubUc is only the American 
 people, and American liberty is simply liberty as 
 they understand it ; and the American people do 
 not understand either civil or religious liberty 
 in your sense, and they spurn the glory you 
 would award them." 
 
 " I call the American republic the American 
 people as organized by the Constitution and 
 laws, and I place their glory in having recog- 
 nized liberty as a spiritual right, not as a civil 
 grant, and therefore of having identified it in prin- 
 ciple with conscience, which is accountable to 
 God alone ; or in other words, in having founded 
 their state on the principles of justice and equal 
 rights, and therefore on the supremacy of the 
 spiritual order, which the Church has always 
 
116 OONVEESATIONS ON 
 
 asserted and defended. That you do not see 
 that making justice and equal rights, not civil 
 grants, but the very basis of the state, is the as- 
 sertion of the supremacy of the spiritual order, 
 is very possible ; that the American people are 
 losing sight of it, and are resolving the sov- 
 ereignty of the people into the sovereignty of 
 popular opinion, is no doubt true, and to be 
 deeply regretted. Tou are, as a people, no longer 
 what you were even when I first became an 
 American citizen, and you are changing every 
 day, and, in an old man's judgment, for the 
 worse. You are losing the sense of the great 
 priQciples on which your fathers built, and no 
 longer see or understand the deep significance of 
 the providential constitution of your republic. 
 You are perverting the Christian to the pagan 
 republic. Hence your great need of the Church 
 to recall your minds to the first principles of 
 your institutions, and to enable you to inherit 
 the glory of being the first nation that ever fully 
 asserted spiritual freedom." 
 
 Here the conversation closed for the day. The 
 editor was silent for the first time, and seemed 
 thoughtful. For myself, I was confounded, and 
 hardly dared trust my own ears. I had no more 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH. 117 
 
 doubted that the Romish Church had been an 
 arrogant and domineering, a cruel and persecut- 
 ing Church, than I had doubted my own exist- 
 ence. Had I not in my infancy learned the New- 
 England Primer — my father was a Puritan — and 
 the stor/ of John Eogers, and as I grew up had 
 I not not read Pilgrim's Progress, and Fox's 
 Booh of Martyrs ? Was I to be told all that I 
 had been taught, and all I had read iu history, 
 against the Church of Rome was false and ca- 
 lumnious, and that the Pope, instead of being 
 anti-Christ, had from the first been, in being the 
 champion of the claims of the Church, the 
 champion of freedom and humanity ? This was 
 too much. I could swallow much, but not this. 
 Were aU the great, learned, and pious men, who 
 ought to have known what they said, and who 
 had borne their testimony against her, been de- 
 ceived, or wOHng to deceive others ? No ; it could 
 not be. 
 
 And yet many more men, a hundred to one of 
 them, equally great, equally learned, equally 
 pious, equally distinguished, equally incapable 
 of deceiving or of being deceived, had as di- 
 rectly and as explicitly borne then- testimony in 
 her favor. Here was this venerable priest, whose 
 very face, and the tones of whose voice, won 
 
118 CONYERSATIONS ON 
 
 your confidence, and who seemed to know be- 
 forehand all the objections of the journaUst, and 
 was always prompt with his answer; could I 
 doubt his knowledge or his sincerity? He 
 seemed never to be taken by surprise, he seemed 
 to shirk no difficulty, and to meet every question 
 fairly and frankly. Had we all been mistaken ? 
 I wish the editor was better able to cope with 
 the priest. Well, I am too old to trouble my 
 head with so perplexing a question : I will dis- 
 miss it. 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH. 119 
 
 CHAPTEE IX. 
 
 I DID not succeed in dismissing the subject 
 from my mind, thougli I would not let it trouble 
 me much. I had learned long ago to take life 
 easy, and never to let anything seriously dis- 
 turb it. I had not thought much of reUgion, and 
 was not, though a New-Englander by birth and 
 breeding, of an earnest character. I usually, af- 
 ter my father's death, attended the services of 
 the Protestant Episcopal Church, for it was only 
 decent to observe some form of worship, and the 
 Episcopalian Church had a decorous service, 
 and was a Church that an easy-going gentleman 
 could attend. It did not pry into one's private 
 character or private affairs, exacted not much of ' 
 one's time or thought, and the minister, usually 
 a well-bred man, of agreeable manners, and a 
 good reader, edified his congregation with a 
 gracefully written and dehvered sermon, or 
 moral essay, which tasked no one's creduhty, 
 and disturbed no one's conscience. So it was 
 in my younger days ; it is somewhat different 
 
120 CONTEESATIONS ON 
 
 now, I am told ; but my pastor is of the old school, 
 and distracts his people with none of the novel- 
 ties which, since the beginning of the Tractarian 
 movement, have disturbed the peace of the 
 Church. 
 
 Yet the words of the priest had taken an unusual 
 hold of me, and haunted me in spite of myself. 
 They had not convinced me, but they had shaken 
 me, and made me suspect that -there might be 
 another side to the story ; so the next day, see- 
 ing the priest and the journahst apparently 
 about to resume the conversation of yesterday, I 
 drew near to listen, with more eagerness than I 
 was in the habit of showing or even feeling. The 
 journalist, as I came near, was saying : 
 
 " All that, Eeverend Father, will do to tell to 
 ignorant papists, who have been trained fi'om 
 infancy to swallow everything their priests say, 
 but we all know that your Church claims to teach 
 by authority, and that she allows no religious 
 liberty. She tolerates no free thought, no free 
 exercise of reason — that noblest prerogative of 
 man — ^permits no one to think for himself, or to 
 have and act on convictions of his own." 
 
 " Do not the adherents of the Reformers pro- 
 fess to teach by authority ? Do they not assert 
 the infallible authority of the Bible, and forbid 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH. 121 
 
 any one to hold anything contrary thereto ? How 
 much more free thought or free thinking for 
 one's self Ls there under an infallible book than 
 under an infallible Church ?" 
 
 " I am not bound by the Eeformers. I honor 
 them for tlie noble stand they took against the 
 arrogance and despotism of Eome, and for hav- 
 ing originated a movement which, in its onward 
 progress, sweeps away the spiritual despotism of 
 the papal Church, deUvers the world from spirit- 
 ual thraldom, secures religious liberty, regains 
 the free exercise of reason, and vindicates the 
 rights and dignity of human nature. Man can 
 now be man, free and noble, not the trembling, 
 crouching victim of priestcraft and superstition." 
 
 " Do you know all that, my dear journalist ?" 
 
 " Certamly I do." 
 
 " You know a great deal, then, as becomes the 
 chief editor of a leading metropohtan journal, 
 which gives its opinions off-hand on every sub- 
 ject and some others. But are you, after all, 
 quite sure that the Church proscribes reason, 
 anathematizes free thought, and permitsj no one 
 to think or act for himself." 
 
 "Quite sure." 
 
 " Then you are sure of much more than I am. 
 I have never found myseK forbidden to reason, 
 
122 CONVERSATIONS ON 
 
 and have never felt my freedom of thought 
 restrained." 
 
 "You know well, Eeverend Father, that the 
 Church imposes on you a creed, all cut and 
 dried, which you must beheve, without ever being 
 permitted any free examination of it, or to enter- 
 tain any doubt of its truth. You have never 
 been free to adopt any conclusion contrary to 
 her authoritative teaching." 
 
 " Without falling into error, and exposing my- 
 self to the inevitable consequences of error, 
 agreed ; but have you ?" 
 
 "Have I? I am free to examine all questions 
 for myself, and to abide by the convictions of my 
 own mind, whether they square with the teach- 
 ings of the Church or not." 
 
 "Without danger of error, or of missing the 
 truth?" 
 
 "My convictions — my honest convictions — are 
 the truth for me." 
 
 " Truth, then, has no existence independent of 
 one's own honest convictions. How, then, do you 
 distinguish truth from falsehood ? Nay, what dis- 
 tinction can there be ? Men's convictions differ, 
 and what is the truth for one may be falsehood 
 for another. The same thing, then, may be both 
 true and false, be and not be, at one and tha 
 
UBERALI8M AND THE CHUBCH. 'l23 
 
 same time. I admit I haye never been free to 
 believe that." 
 
 " In this world we can never know what truth 
 is independent of us, nor that there is any truth 
 but our own convictions. Freedom of thought, 
 the free exercise of reason, thought to think for 
 ourselves, means the recognition of the suffi- 
 ciency of each one's own convictions for him- 
 self." 
 
 " That is, a man who always acts according to 
 his own convictions of what is true or false, right 
 or wrong, is morally irreproachable ?" 
 
 " That is what I mean." 
 
 "So, if you had a real conviction that you 
 ought to cut my throat, you would commit no 
 wrong in doing so? Is that the conclusion at 
 which you arrive by what you call the free exer- 
 cise of reason?" 
 
 "My reason tells me that such an act would 
 be wrong." 
 
 "Undoubtedly, because it tells you that there 
 is a right, therefore a truth, not dependent on 
 your convictions, to which your convictions 
 themselves must conform in order to be true, or 
 a safe rule of conduct." 
 
 "But every man has the natural right to the 
 free exercise of his own mind in seeking the 
 
124 CONTEESATIONS ON 
 
 truth, and no one can believe contrary to hia 
 convictions." 
 
 "Nothing more true. But a man's convictions 
 to-day may change to-morrow, and the truth 
 which now contradicts them, may be in accord- 
 ance with them, when he has changed them. I 
 can not believe contrary to my convictions, for 
 my convictions are my belief, for the time being ; 
 and it is very true that no one can believe what 
 contradicts his reason. But things may appear 
 to contradict reason, and therefore incredible, 
 that in reality accord with reason. When the 
 apparent contradiction is explained they become 
 credible, and on sufficient testimony, or adequate 
 authority, may be believed without any surrender 
 of reason ; nay, reason then requires them to be 
 believed. Because in such cases I beheve on 
 the authority of the Church, am I deprived of 
 the free exercise of my reason ?" 
 
 "The Church tells you beforehand what you 
 must and must not believe, and permits you no 
 free inquiry after truth, and thus dwarfs or stunts 
 the growth of the mind." 
 
 " That is to say, the mind grows and expands 
 not by the possession of truth, but by the search 
 after it ! That is part and parcel of the doctrine 
 of progress, which we disposed of some days 
 
MBERALISM AND THE CHUECH. I'J.j 
 
 ago. The body, according to you, it seems, is 
 dwarfed or stunted in its growth, is rendered 
 weak and sickly by having appropriate food, 
 and grows, becomes strong and healthy by not 
 having it, and by seeking and never finding 
 it ! Trut& is the appropriate food of the mind, 
 which pines away and dies of inanition without 
 it. They who have the truth do not need to seek 
 it — for one seeks only what one has not — and 
 they who have it not are not only free, but bound 
 to seek it with all diligence and perseverance. 
 To you, and such as you, the Church not only 
 permits but commands free inquiry. Your objec- 
 tion to the Church, then, is not well put." 
 
 "The Church begias with the child and pre- 
 judices it in the very outset against all views of 
 truth but her own, so that never after can it in- 
 quire freely. The objection to her is, that she 
 closes the mind, and does not leave it open to 
 the reception of new views, new discoveries, nor 
 encourage it to advance with ever-advancing 
 science.' 
 
 " Something of that has already been consid 
 ered. There is, my friend, a difference between 
 us, which is not unnatural. You, finding that 
 you have not the truth, and despairing of ever 
 finding it, hold that the good thing is not the 
 
126 CONVERSATIONS ON 
 
 possession of truth, but the exertion the mind 
 makes in seeking it ; I, beheving that the Church 
 has taught me the truth from my infancy, hold 
 that the good thing is in possessing it, and using 
 it to make me and my fellow-men wiser and better. 
 You assume that the Church teaches the child her 
 view of truth — that is, a theory of truth ; I hold 
 that she teaches no view or theory of truth, but 
 the truth itseK. Supposing me to be right in 
 this, your objection turns only agaiast yourself 
 If the Church teaches the child the truth, she 
 does not prejudice the child against truth, but 
 simply arms it against error — a very wholesome 
 prejudice, if prejudice it be. Ton, confessing 
 that you have not yet attaiaed to the knowledge 
 of the truth, and therefore can have at best 
 only a view or theory of truth, which, upon ex- 
 amination, may or may not turn out to be true, 
 feel very naturally that any attempt to give the 
 child instruction is to prejudice it against every 
 view but the one presented, and thus to forestall 
 its judgment. You are right on your hypothesis ; 
 but how on that hypothesis can you consistently 
 give your child any instruction at all ? It strikes 
 me that you should leave the child's mind to 
 grow up in as complete-ignorance of religion and 
 morahty, as perfest a blank, as possible. This 
 
UBEBAUSM AND THE CHURCH. 127 
 
 would exclude all parental instruction, eU do- 
 mestic education and discipline, all schools, col- 
 leges, and even universities, and forbid aU efforts 
 to 'train tlie young idea how to shoot.' It is 
 your doctrine, not that of the Church, my dear 
 journalist,' that is hostile to thought, to educa- 
 tion, to science and learning, and that fosters 
 ignorance." 
 
 "I do not concede that what the Church 
 teaches is true, and reject her dogmas as false 
 and absurd, and her moraUty as repugnant to 
 human nature." 
 
 " Without having ever examined either, or as- 
 certained what they are ?" 
 
 "I know them well." 
 
 " As misrepresented and perverted by the ene- 
 mies of the Church." 
 
 " I reject her dogmas." 
 
 " On what authority ?" 
 
 " On the authority of reason : no better au- 
 thority is needed for a rational man." 
 
 " Do you say the dogmas of the Church con- 
 tradict reason ?" 
 
 " Certainly : her dogmas are unreasonable and 
 absurd." 
 
 "Does that mean, in your vocabulary, any- 
 thing more than that they do not he in the plane 
 
128 CONVERSATIONS ON 
 
 of reason, and that by reason alone j'ou are un- 
 able to see or demonstrate their truth ?" 
 
 "It means that they are contrary to reason, 
 and are intrinsically incredible." 
 
 "That is a serious assertion, and I presume 
 you are ready to prove it." 
 
 "That is easy enough; but it would necessitate 
 a sort of discussion for which I have no taste." 
 
 " I do not doubt it : besides, you shift youi 
 gi'ound. You began by objecting to the Church — 
 not as a theologian, but as a publicist — that she 
 holds principles and authorizes practices dan- 
 gerous to liberty, hostile to progress, and at war 
 with modern civilization. This was a legitimate 
 ground of objection for a secularist. You raised 
 a question which we could discuss on a ground 
 and decide by principles, common to us both." 
 
 "But I do the same when I object to the 
 Church that she teaches doctrines contrary to 
 reason, for we both admit the authority of rea- 
 son." 
 
 "For all questions lying within the plane of 
 reason ; but for questions above that plane, rea- 
 son has only a negative authority. The dogmas 
 of the Church are, if anything, above reason.; and 
 if they do not contradict reason, it can judge nei- 
 ther of their truth nor their falsity." 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH. 129 
 
 " So you refuse to submit the dogmas of the 
 Church to the tribunal of reason. That is pre- 
 cisely what I complain of." 
 
 " Their intrinsic truth or falsity, yes ; because, 
 if truths at aU, they are truths not of reason, but 
 of revelation. Yet the question, whether they 
 contradict reason or not, and the further ques- 
 tion, whether I have adequate authority for be- 
 lieving them to be divinely revealed or not, are 
 both questions to be decided, when raised, at the 
 tribunal of reason." 
 
 " But suppose I prove the dogmas contrary to 
 Scripture, would not that be enough for my pur- 
 pose ?" 
 
 " No dogmas repugnant to the Holy Scriptm-es 
 can be true ; but the question whether the dog- 
 mas of the Church are or are not repugnant to 
 the Holy Scriptures, is one I cannot discuss with 
 you." 
 
 " Why not ?" 
 
 " Because the Holy Scriptures were deposited 
 with the Church, not with you, and you are not 
 their authorized interpreter. Also, because I have 
 a strong suspicion that 3'ou have as Httle resptjct 
 for their authority' as you have for the authority 
 of the Church. You may or may not beUeve them 
 as you understand them, but they probably weigh 
 
130 CONVERSATIONS ON 
 
 little with you in any other sense. My under- 
 standing of them may be very different from 
 yours, and there is no authority we both accept, 
 to decide between us which of us is right or 
 ■which is wrong. Each of us might insist on his 
 own understandiag, and be unable to convince 
 the other, and so we might dispute forever with- 
 out settling anythiag." 
 
 " This, Beverend Father, is precisely my objec- 
 tion to your Church. She refuses to submit her 
 dogmas to the test either of reason.or the Scrip- 
 tures. It is therefore I accuse her of opposing 
 religious hberty, anathematizing reason, and de- 
 nying the freedom of thought." 
 
 " The Church refuses to submit no question to 
 the test of reason which is within the province of 
 reason, and she would be false to reason if she 
 submitted any other. Any doctrine that con- 
 tradicts either Scripture or reason, she holds to be 
 incredible and false. AU I insist on is, that the 
 doctrine must really, not apparently only, contra- 
 dict one or the other, and that the Church is as 
 high authority, to say the least, as my friend the 
 journalist, for determining what does or does not 
 contradict reason, what is or is not repugnant to 
 the Holy Scriptures." 
 
 "My objection is thrt she violates the freedom 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE OflUBCH. 131 
 
 of the mind and true religious liberty, by im- 
 posing a creed wliicli is not in the province of 
 reason, and commands her members, on pain of 
 eternal damnation, to beheve dogmas, of the truth 
 or falsity of which she herself teaches that 
 reason is ©ot competent to judge." 
 
 "Your objection, if vahd against the Church, 
 is equally valid against divine revelation itself ; 
 at least against the revelation of anything above 
 the natural order. But I see not how what you 
 allege, even if true, violates reUgious liberty. 
 The dogmas and discipUne of the Church are 
 msitters within the spiritual order, with which 
 you, as a pubhcist, have nothing to do. You are 
 not one of her members, and the law does not 
 compel you to become a member, to hold her 
 doctrines, or to submit to her discipline. No one 
 is compelled to join her communion against his 
 will; and would it accord with your notions of 
 religious Hberty to prevent by force those who 
 would do so from joining her, or to use force to 
 compel her to change either her doctrine or her 
 discipline ?" 
 
132 CONVERSATIONS ON 
 
 CHAPTEE X. 
 
 " It is a sliame and a disgrace, that in this en- 
 lightened age, and in this free republic, a Church 
 that teaches such antiquated and absurd dogmas, 
 and exercises such despotic control over her 
 members, should be suffered to exist." 
 
 " So you would suppress her by force, and 
 outlaw all who adhere to her ! You do not 
 seem to have made much progress since the 
 Beformers in your understanding of religious 
 liberty. Do you call it religious liberty to deny 
 me the right to belong to and defend the Church, 
 while you are free to reject her and use force 
 against her ? This, I am aware, was the view of 
 the Beformers in the sixteenth century, but I 
 thought you had advanced beyond them. Are 
 you not a httle .antiquated in your notions ? or 
 have you forgot your part, and supposed you 
 were opposing, not defending, the fireedom of 
 religion ?" 
 
 " There is no violation of religious liberty in 
 warring against the Church. She is intrinsically 
 
liber.\lism: and the chuech. 133 
 
 a. spiritual despotism. Such is the control she 
 has over her ignorant and superstitious mem- 
 bers, that few of them dare leave her commu- 
 nion." 
 
 " Well, what do you propose to do about it? 
 Does not rehgious liberty mean the freedom of 
 conscience ? If my conscience requires me to 
 believe what the Church teaches, and to submit 
 to her discipline, what freedom of conscience 
 have I if the state forbids me to do so, and pun- 
 ishes me with fine, imprisonment, exile, or death, 
 if I foUow my own conscience without disturbing 
 others in the peaceful enjoyment of theirs ? Do 
 you boast of the equaUty of all men, and yet 
 contend that I and my brethren have not an 
 equal right with you and yours to the freedom of 
 conscience ? Whence do you derive any right of 
 conscience which we have not ?" 
 
 " The Church denies to men their natural 
 freedom, and, by so doing, forfeits all right for 
 herself, and justifies the use of force against 
 her." 
 
 " So said the late Know-Nothing party, aud 
 therefore proposed to deprive Catholics of the 
 right of citizenship. Had they succeeded, they 
 probably would have gone so far as to prohibit 
 any citizen, under pain of treason to the state, 
 
134 CONVERSATIONS ON 
 
 to give a Catholic either 'fire or water.' This 
 would liave been not much more than was done 
 bj some of the old colonial laws, which made it a 
 highly penal offence to harbor a priest for a sin- 
 gle night, or to give him even a single meal of 
 victuals. Your countrymen, however, did not 
 take kiadly to jhe Know-Nothing party, except 
 in a few localities, and have already nearly i£ not 
 quite forgotten it. The doctrines and practices 
 of the Church cannot be more offensive to you 
 than the doctrines and practices of those outside 
 of her communion are to her or to me ; and if 
 she bears with you, why cannot you bear with 
 her ? If you dislike her doctrine and worship, 
 if you beheve them despotic and degrading, are 
 you not free to say so, and prove you are right if 
 you can ? What hinders you from using all your 
 learning, wit, and science against her? Do you 
 fear that in an open field and fair encounter she 
 wiU get the better of you, and therefore require 
 her to be bound hand and foot by the civil ma- 
 gistrate before you dare venture to enter the lists 
 against her? If so, your confidence in your 
 cause is far less than my confidence in mine." 
 
 "This would do very well if your Church held 
 herself amenable to reason, but that she does 
 not. A Churel that will not reason can not be 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHUECH. 135 
 
 met by reason. She can be met only by force. 
 She is exclusive, claims supremacy, will be aU or 
 nothing; and nothing, I say, let her be." 
 
 " So, while you recognize the equal rights as 
 citizens under the protection of the laws of sec- 
 tarians, Jews, Mahometans, pagans, and sco£fers 
 at all religion, you make an exception against the 
 Church, and against her alone. Well, if you did 
 but know it, the distinction you make is in the 
 highest degree honorable to her, and proves that 
 she must have a merit none of them can pretend 
 to. But let us examine your reasons for except- 
 ing the Church from the equal rights on which 
 your republic is based." 
 
 "Do you deny that she refuses to hold herself 
 amenable to reason ?" 
 
 " Certainly I do, and energetically. She holds 
 the truth or falsity of her doctrines is above the 
 plane of reason, but she concedes that her 
 children should have the highest and best of all 
 reasons for believing them. Things which con- 
 tradict reason are incredible and false, as I have 
 already told you; but things may be above 
 reason, the intrinsic truth or falsity of which hes 
 beyond the direct apprehension of reason, and 
 yet not be contrary to reason. These things, 
 accredited by adequate testimony, are credible, 
 
136 CONVEESATIONS OK 
 
 and reason herself requires us to belieye them. 
 The dogmas of the Church are received and be- 
 lieved because God, who can neither deceive nor 
 be deceived, has revealed them. I can not raise 
 the question whether what he reveals is true or 
 not. "What he reveals is his word, and his word 
 is truth. There is and can be no better or higher 
 reason for beheving anything than the fact Vhat 
 God says it." 
 
 "Than the fact that he says it; but that fact 
 must be proved. You have no proof of it ; you 
 simply take it on the authority of the Church, 
 and have only her word for it." 
 
 "If God has instituted the Church, made her 
 the witness and keeper of his revelation, and 
 commissioned her to go into all the earth and 
 teach it to every creature, to all men and nations ; 
 and if he remains ever present with her, assist- 
 ing her to teach it, and supernaturaUy guarding 
 her against the possibility of error in teaching it, 
 her word is amply sufficient to accredit the fact 
 of revelation, all the demands of reason are com- 
 plied with, and my faith is in the highest sense 
 reasonable. The divine commission to teach 
 warrants the infallibiUty of the commissioned in 
 teaching, for God can not authorize the teaching 
 of error." 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH. 137 
 
 "The fact of the divine commission to teach 
 the word of God, must itself be proved, not 
 assumed." 
 
 "Agreed. The Church has always claimed it, 
 and there is not and never has been a rival 
 claimant. Her claim was made in the time of 
 the apostles, and down to the sixteenth century 
 was admitted by the whole Christian world, and 
 is still admitted by the immense majority of all 
 who bear the Christian name ; by all, indeed, ex- 
 cept those whom she condemns as heretics, and 
 even they admitted it before she condemned 
 them. She has the right, then, to plead posses- 
 sion, prescription, and it is for those who deny 
 that she is rightfully in possession, to show good 
 and valid reasons why she should be ousted, or 
 her claim be set aside. 
 
 "Do you mean to assert that the Eastern 
 Churches have always admitted and stiU admit 
 the infaUible authority of the Church in teach- 
 
 mg?" 
 
 "Certainly I do. They hold as firmly as I do 
 the divine and infalhble authority of the Church 
 to teach aU men and nations the revelation of 
 God. There is no dispute between them and the 
 Western Church as to the authority of the 
 Church. The Oriental Churches not in com- 
 
138 CONTEESiTIONS ON 
 
 munion with the Koman See, simply deny that 
 the supreme authority is vested in the Bishop of 
 Biome, and assert that it is vested in the general 
 council of bishops. Yet they hold that it is 
 essential to a general council and the vahdity of 
 its acts that it be convoked and presided over by 
 the Roman pontiff, in person or by his legates, 
 and that its acts be approved by him. The only 
 nominal Christians worth counting, who deny 
 the infallibility of the Church in matters of faith 
 and morals, are the adherents of the Reformers 
 in the sixteenth century, commonly called Prot- 
 estants. They have all the rest of Christendom 
 against them." 
 
 "Prescription may be a good title in law, or 
 in matters where absolute right is impracticable, 
 and can be only approximated; but in matters 
 of faith, where absolute truth is assumed to be 
 necessary, if presumptive proof, it certainly is 
 not conclusive." 
 
 "It is only as presumptive proof that I urge 
 it. Yet in the present case it is really conclusive. 
 There is no moment of time since the apostles, 
 that the claim has not been made, conceded, 
 and acted on. It must then have an apostolic 
 origin ; and if of apostolic origin, the question is 
 ^lettled, since the Church is founded on the 
 
liberalism: and the church. 139 
 
 apostles, Jesus Christ liimself being tlie chief 
 corner-stone." 
 
 "The claim of the Church was vicious in its 
 origin, and prescription avails nothing. No such 
 commission ever issued." 
 
 "The presumption is against you, and the ontis 
 probandi is on you; prove vifhat you allege, and 
 you will unquestionably unchurch the Church. 
 But how will you prove it? Do you set up a 
 counter-claim for yourself or the Reformation?" 
 
 "No. Have I not just said that no commission 
 was issued." 
 
 "Then, of course, neither you nor the sects 
 that sprung from the Reformation, have any in- 
 fallible authority or divine commission to teach?" 
 
 "We claim none. We have not the arrogance 
 and presumption of Eome." 
 
 " Then neither you nor they are any authority 
 against the Church. You at best are confessedly 
 fallible, and she at worst can be only fallible. 
 Her chances, at the very lowest of being right, 
 are equal to yours at the very highest. You 
 must, then, support your denial by proof, or it 
 will coimt for nothing." 
 
 " The Church can not be infallible, if she con- 
 tradicts herself ; teaches one thing to-day and 
 another and a contradictory doctrine to-morrow." 
 
OONVETISATIONS OTf 
 
 "Certainly not. But she has never 'cjii& 
 and you aro liardly £iec, till you retract the 
 charge you began by preferring, to maintain thai 
 she has." 
 
 "Whether she has or has not contradicted 
 herself, is a purely historical question ; and his- 
 tory presents us the scandal of councils contra- 
 dicting councils, popes contradicting councils, 
 and councils contradicting popes." 
 
 " So says Chillingworth ; but so says not his- 
 tory ia any sense to your purpose. The infalli- 
 biUty of the Church is not universal, but extends 
 only to the things covered by the commission, in 
 the words of our Lord, ' All things whatsoever I 
 have commanded you.' It is not claimed that it 
 is commensurate with her authority, or that she 
 is infallible except in teaching the revealed truth, 
 and in judging what does or does not accord with 
 it. Disciplinary canons are obligatory, but not 
 necessarily infallible ; and the infallibility of the 
 Church is restricted to her doctrinal canons, or 
 her dogmatic definitions ; definitions either de- 
 claring what the faith is, or what it is not ; that 
 is, condemning what is opposed to it." 
 
 "Very well. I understand all that." 
 
 "The Church speaks infallibly only when she 
 speaks in her unity and integrity, that is, through 
 
LTBEEALISM AND THE CHUKCH. 141 
 
 an (Ecumenical Council, or througli her Supreme 
 Pontiff, Vicar of Christ, and successor of Peter 
 in apostolical authority. Theologians add a 
 third way, the ecclesia dispersa, or the bishops 
 dispersed, and each in communion With the Pope, 
 teaching irf his own particular diocese; but as 
 we can know only through the Pope or an (Ecu- 
 menical Council, what these bishops dispersed 
 throughout the whole world agree in teaching 
 and believing, I need not count it. Now, in 
 order to sustain your assertion, you must produce 
 an instance of an (Ecumenical Council contra- 
 dicting the dogmatic teaching of another (Ecu- 
 menical Council or a Pope, and of a Pope con- 
 tradicting the dogmatic teaching of an (Ecumen- 
 ical Council or another Pope or Supreme Pon- 
 tiff. Can you produce an instance ?" 
 
 " I can find instances enough. The Council of 
 Nicsea differed from the Council of Antioch. 
 Pope Liberius, after his return from exile, con- 
 demned the acts and the fathers of the Council 
 of Eimini; the Council of Chalcedon and the 
 Pope both contradicted the second Council of 
 Ephesus, in regard to the monophysite doctrine 
 of Eutyches ; a council and a Pope both censure 
 Pope Honorius as a fautor of the monothelite 
 heresy ; and there were several councils that con- 
 
142 CONVERSATIONS OS 
 
 demned the keeping and worshiping of images, 
 and others that approved it. Many more in- 
 stances, I doubt not, might be adduced, but these 
 are enough to prove what I have said." 
 
 " Yet, unhappily for your argument, not one of 
 them is historically true, or if true, to your pur- 
 pose. There was no CEeumenical Council of An- 
 tioch, and therefore its acts were not contradicted 
 by the Council of Mcsea. The Council of Bimiai 
 was no (Ecumenical Council, and the acts of the 
 bishops assembled, who were gTossly maltreated 
 by the Arian Emperor, had no vahdity, for St. Li- 
 berius refused to approve, and in fact, as you al- 
 lege, condemned them. There was no second 
 Council of Ephesus, and so there could be no 
 contradiction between it and Chalcedon. There 
 was an irregular and tumultuous assembly, com- 
 monly called the latrocinium of Ephesus, but its 
 acts were instantly condemned by the Pope, St. 
 Leo the Great, and were never accounted of any 
 authority either in the East or in the West. No 
 council or Pope ever condemned any dogmatic 
 decision of Pope Honorius, and he was cen- 
 sured after his death, not for his faith, which was 
 orthodox, but for having favored the monothelite 
 heresy by his culpable neghgence in not sup- 
 pressing it. No council, general or particular 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH. 143 
 
 ever approved what you call the worship of 
 images, and no general council ever condemned 
 the keeping and honoring sacred images and pic- 
 tures for the worth to which they are related. 
 The assembhes convoked by the iconoclastic 
 Emperors of Byzantium, that condemned them, 
 had no authority to speak in the name of the 
 Church. There is no instance on record, or pro- 
 ducible, of any dogmatic contradiction betweer 
 one Pope and another, or between a Pope and a 
 General or (Ecumenical Council." 
 
 " It is easy to get rid of contradictions in you** 
 way ; you have only to declare one of the contra- 
 dictors an irregular assembly, or no council, an(7 
 the work is done." 
 
 " The sneer is misplaced. The General Coun- 
 cil is a regular body, and must be convoked by 
 the Pope, or with his consent ; it must be pre- 
 sided over by the Roman Pontiff in person or by 
 his legates, and its acts must be approved bj 
 the Pope, as must the acts of your Congress by 
 your President. So it is ordained by the an- 
 cient canons, admitted by the East and the 
 West, and hence the schismatic Greeks confess 
 to this day their inabihty to hold an QBcumenical 
 Council, because such a council can be held only 
 under the presidency of the Archbishop of Borne '' 
 
144 CONVEESATIONS ON 
 
 " Let the Greeks go ; they are no better than 
 the Eomanists. Bat because no instance of 
 dogmatic contradiction has been produced, we 
 cannot say none exists." 
 
 "But you must produce it before you can 
 argue from it against the infallibility of the 
 Church. If there were any such, we should 
 have had it produced by the enemies of the 
 Church before this. Tour learned divines have 
 ransacked every nook and corner of history to 
 find a well-authenticated instaace of the kind, 
 and have failed, and now very generally, Hke 
 yourself, bring the contrary charge, that she is 
 unprogressive; and teaches always the same dog- 
 mas, and claims always the same authority." 
 
 It struck me that the priest here made a 
 strong point, and if borne out by the facts of the 
 case, the charge of the editor, that the Church 
 does not hold herself amenable to reason, and is 
 therefore a spiritual despotism which may be 
 suppressed in the name of religious hberty, is 
 not sustained. Certainly the Reformers did 
 claim the right to use force against her, and as 
 far as I recollect my reading, there was no in- 
 stance in which the Reformation gained an es- 
 tablishment, except by the aid of the civil au- 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH. 145 
 
 thority ; and wherever it gained over the civil 
 authority, it prohibited the Church, forbade 
 OathoUc worship, and punished adherence to it 
 with fines, imprisonment, exile, and death. The 
 state confiscated the revenues of the old religion, 
 demolished or took possession of its churches, 
 abbeys and priories, schools, colleges, universi- 
 ties, libraries, hospitals, foundations for the poor 
 and the infirm, and carried on a wholesale sys- 
 tem of robbery and plunder, and in some coun- 
 tries of wholesale massacre ; as for instance, in 
 Sweden, under Gustavus Vasa. 
 
 These things always pained me, but I had 
 supposed them excusable, if not justifiable, by 
 the fact that the old Church was a spiritual des- 
 potism, the common enemy of God and man. So 
 on the same ground I Lad defended the Euro- 
 pean Liberals in their violence to the Church, 
 who, wherever they attain to power, use it to 
 abolish her, as in the French revolution, or to 
 restrict her, as in Italy, Austria, and Spain. But 
 if what the priest says be true, the Church is no 
 spiritual despotism, and offers no violence to 
 reason, but gives the highest and best of all rea- 
 sons for the authority she claims, and the truth 
 of what she teaches. 
 
 Surely things may be above reason, or supra- 
 
146 CONVEESATIONS ON 
 
 rational without being against reason or contra- 
 rational. Human reason is not unlimitecl, and 
 who dares say that nothing exists of which reason 
 can not take cognizance, or that the limits of 
 reason are the limits of reality ? This is a ques- 
 tion which affects Protestants no less than it 
 does Cathohcs, and no one felt it more strongly 
 than Luther, who even represents, as I am told, 
 reason as worthless. Whoever professes to be- 
 lieve in the Christian mysteries, whether he be- 
 lieves them on the authority of the Church or 
 of the Bible, professes to believe in the suprara- 
 tional, or truths above reason. The mysteries 
 of the Trinity, the Incarnation, the vicarious 
 Atoflement and Sacrifice, Redemption, Election, 
 Regeneration, "the relation of the regenerated 
 soul to Christ, or the Holy Catholic Church, the 
 Communion of Saints, the Resurrection of the 
 Flesh, and Eternal Life, are all above reason; 
 and if nothing above reason can be believed 
 without denying and rejecting reason, nothing 
 distinctively Christian can be believed. 
 
 Whether God has revealed these mysteries or 
 not, is a question of fact ; and if the fact be duly 
 accredited, to believe it is as reasonable as to be- 
 lieve any fact on competent and sufficient testi- 
 mony. There are thousands of things which we 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH. 147 
 
 all believe on testimony, that is, simply on au- 
 thority ; and do I reject reason when, on the au- 
 thority of history, I beUeve there was such a man 
 as Julius CsBsar, or that he was assassinated in 
 the senate-chamber ? Is behef on adequate au- 
 thority never a reasonable belief ? Nobody can 
 pretend it. Then suppose the mysteries are 
 simply above reason, not against reason, they are 
 not incredible a priori, and on adequate author- 
 ity or testimony, may be as readily and as rea- 
 sonably believed as any other facts that rest on 
 testimony. No testimony, less than the direct 
 testimony, or word of God, could suffice to prove 
 directly their truth ; but all that is needed to be 
 proved is the fact that God has revealed them ; 
 their truth follows from the fact that God, who 
 reveals them, can not lie, and is truth itself; and 
 to prove the fact that God has revealed them, 
 ordinary historical testimony suffices. 
 
 Clearly, then, the editor was hasty in declaring 
 that the Church refuses to reason. If the facts 
 are as the priest stated, his conclusion is logical, 
 and can not be gainsaid. There can be no 
 doubt that the Divine commission to teach car- 
 ries with it the Divine pledge of the infaUibility 
 oi the commissioned in all things covered by the 
 commission. If the commission was issued to 
 
148 OONVEBSATIONS ON 
 
 the Churcli — to the Papal Ch^ircli — her infalli- 
 bility foUows as a simple logical sequence, as 
 does the truth of all she teaches as divine reve- 
 lation. Suppose the facts, the conclusion is irre- 
 sistible 3ut was the commission ever issued? 
 was it issued to the apostles and their suc- 
 cessors, and is the Papal Church their legitimate 
 successor ? These are the points to be proved, 
 and if proved, the controversy is ended with all 
 who can and dare reason. Is it Protestants, 
 tihen, who reject reason ? 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHUBCH. 149 
 
 CHAPTEE XI. 
 
 The journalist saw nothing in the priest's an- 
 swer to accept or deny. He could and would on 
 no consideration whatever accept the infallibihty 
 of the Church. He did not profess to be a 
 philosopher or a theologian, and seemed to re- 
 gard a publicist as perfectly competent to sit in 
 judgment on either. I who, perhaps, had first 
 and last picked up here and there far more 
 knowledge of ecclesiastical history than he could 
 boast, felt myself, while reluctant to admit the 
 priest's reading of history, quite too ignorant to 
 pronounce him wrong. But the editor proceeded 
 as if all statements that went beyond his knowl- 
 edge, or against his theories, could be only a 
 fable or a cunning invention. What struck me 
 most in him was his apparent inability to recog- 
 nize common sense or common honesty in the 
 adherents of the old religion. He seemed to 
 suppose them all knaves or fools, devoured on 
 the one hand by a crafty and intriguing spirit, 
 and on the other degraded by the grossest 
 
150 CONVEBSATIONS ON 
 
 ignorance, superstition, and slavishness. He 
 believed this was the only effect to be looked for 
 from the Church, and therefore he would keep 
 no terms with her. Indifferent to aU else, he 
 was deadly hostile to the Pope and Catholicity. 
 He repHed : 
 
 " Be all that, Eeverend Father, as it may, I 
 still insist that your Church is hostile to freedom 
 of thought, to the use of reason, and to religious 
 liberty. She professes to be the kingdom of God 
 op earth, to have the right to govern all men and 
 nations, and to be invested with absolute author- 
 ity over reason and conscience. In joining her 
 communion, you surrender both to her dictation, 
 and are no longer free to say your soul is your 
 own. Tou part with your very manhood, and be- 
 come an abject slave." 
 
 " It is singular that I have never, during my 
 long life, discovered that alleged fact. I have 
 always felt and acted as a freeman, as I have 
 already told you." 
 
 " That is because her ehaius have eaten into 
 your very soul, and you are a slave without 
 knowing it. Tou know you are not free to 
 beheve as your own reason dictates, and must 
 defend the opinions your Church bids you de- 
 fend." 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH. 151 
 
 " I am a slave, as St. Paul said he was a slave, 
 to Jesus Christ, and glory in it, for slavery to him 
 is true freedom — a freedom which none separated 
 from him or his Church ever enjoy or have any 
 conception of. You, my dear JournaUst, have 
 yet to leaim that all real freedom is in subjection 
 to God. They who do not submit themselves, 
 body and soul, to Him to whom they belong, 
 have no true hberty, but are veritable slaves of 
 doubt and uncertainty, of ignorance and error, 
 or of their own passions and lusts. It is the 
 truth, not error, that makes free." 
 
 " The Church denies you the liberty of form- 
 ing your own opinions ; you are obliged to ac- 
 cept hers on pain of eternal exclusion from 
 heaven." 
 
 "You labor under a slight mistake, my phil- 
 osophical friend. The Church teaches and en- 
 joins no opinions. According to her doctrine, 
 as I have learned it, opinions are free, and she in 
 no degree restricts them in anything which is a 
 matter of opinion, or on which the truth is not 
 revealed or known." 
 
 " But you are not free to form your own opin- 
 ions." 
 
 " Why not ? "What restrains me ? Perhaps 
 there is a Httle misunderstanding between us. 
 
152 CONYERSAIIONS ON 
 
 You demand freedom to form your own opin- 
 ions : may I ask on what subjects ?" 
 
 " On all subjects.'' 
 
 " Are you free to form opinions on subjects on 
 which you know the truth, and are certain? 
 Take the axioms of mathematics, and the defi- 
 nitions of geometry ; are you free to form your 
 own opinions concerning them ? Is it a matter 
 of opinion that the sun, whose golden rays we 
 see gilding yonder mountain-top, is approaching 
 the western horizon? Is it a matter of opinion 
 that the three angles of a triangle are equal to 
 two right angles ?" 
 
 " No ; these are matters of science or of sight. 
 I know them, and assert them as facts of knowl- 
 edge, not as opinions." 
 
 " Then where you know the truth, and are cer- 
 tain, you are not free to form your own opinions, 
 for there is no room for any opinion at aU. 
 Then you are and demand to be free to form 
 your own opinions only where you are ignorant 
 and uncertain of the truth ?" 
 
 " That is aU." 
 
 "Well, my dear free-thinking friend, I have 
 all the freedom that you have or ask for. Where 
 the Church does not teach me the truth, put me 
 in possession of the knowledge of the truth, she 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH. ]5S 
 
 leaves me free to form and follow my own opin- 
 ions. I am, then, at least as free as you are ; 
 besides I may, possibly, have much knowledge of 
 truth which you have not." 
 
 "But, if you form, utter, or act on opinions 
 contrary, to what she teaches, she condemns and 
 punishes you as a heretic." 
 
 " Not if I do it ignorantly and in good faith, 
 not knowing what on the points on which I err 
 she really teaches ; but if I do know what she 
 teaches, and thus know the truth, there is, as we 
 have seen, no matter of opinion in the case . We 
 can form opinions only where we do not know 
 the truth, and are doubtful where it lies. The 
 Church does not impose opinions, she teaches 
 the truth. Your misapprehension grows out of 
 your assumption that all theological doctrines 
 are simply opinions. They really are so with 
 you, who substitute opinion for faith, and there- 
 fore you conclude they must be so with the 
 Church and with all who receive her as their 
 teacher. Hence you suppose that in submitting 
 to her authority, I am deprived of my freedom 
 of mind, the use of my reason, the Hberty of 
 forming my own opinions, and therefore am in 
 spiritual bondage, under a degrading and spir- 
 itual despotism." 
 
154 CONTEESATIONa ON 
 
 "Certainly; that is my view." 
 
 "But as you are not infallible, it is possible 
 that you are wrong. The Church does no vio- 
 lence to my reason or understanding in exacting 
 my belief in or assent to the creed she teaches, 
 any more than the mathematician does in exact- 
 ing my assent to his axioms or his demonstra- 
 tions, because the creed is the truth, received on 
 the veracity of God revealing it, not an opinion 
 which may or may not be true." 
 
 "Authority commands, it does not reason. 
 You feel yourself bound to believe what the 
 Church teaches, but this sense of obligation is 
 not a rational conviction. Authority may silence 
 reason, but does not convince it. It may well 
 happen, that if you exercise your reason, it wiU 
 dictate one thing while the Church commands 
 you to believe another. Yet you must submit 
 and refuse to follow or hear your own reason. 
 This is why I term your Church a spiritual des- 
 potisni, and denounce her as the enemy of 
 reason, and the grave of aU free thought." 
 
 "The internal conflict between reason and the 
 Church in the bosom of her members, which you 
 suppose, is impossible, if they know the grounds 
 of their faith, and all may know them. I have 
 all my life thought and reasor 3d as freely as most 
 
liberalism: and the chuech. 155 
 
 men ; I have read and studied the substance o£ 
 all that sectarians, Jews, infidels, rationalists, 
 naturalists, pantheists, and atheists, have writ- 
 ten againet the Church, and I believe I am 
 ignorant of no important objection urged from 
 any quarter against her ; and yet I have never for 
 a moment found her and my reason in conflict, for 
 my reason has always assured me that nothing 
 is or can be more reasonable than to believe on 
 the authority of God's revealed word duly accred- 
 ited as his word." 
 
 "You have only the word of your Church, 
 composed of fallible men, that what you are re- 
 quired to believe is the revealed word of God." 
 
 "I have the testimony of a divinely instituted, 
 commissioned, and assisted body, reaching in un- 
 broken unity and continuity from our Lord and 
 his apostles down to me, to be the witness of the 
 fact of revelation, and therefore a witness amply 
 competent to accredit it to me and to all men and 
 nations. In believing what the Church teaches, 
 I believe the word of God, and am satisfied, as 
 thoroughly convinced, as I could be by any de 
 monstration in EucHd." 
 
 " You forget that I have denied the fact of (he 
 Divine commission." 
 
 " I do not forget it, but I do not heed it. You 
 
156 C0NVEESATI0N3 ON 
 
 gave no valid reason for your denial. You are 
 confessedly fallible, and your denial, made on no 
 authority, can have no value." 
 
 " But have you no authority for asserting the 
 Divine commission but my alleged inability to 
 disprove it?" 
 
 "I have. But in a discussion with you, the 
 reasons I have already assigned, and which I need 
 not repeat, are amply sufficient. The fact of the 
 historical continuity of the Church from the 
 apostles to us, always claiming it, professedly 
 acting under it, and having her claim from the 
 first conceded, is enough for any reasonable man. 
 To a behever I could give additional and even 
 stronger reasons, drawn from the very nature and 
 design of Christianity as the means of the re- 
 demption, moral and spiritual progress, and final 
 beatitude of the human race, but what I have 
 said must suffice, unless you take avowedly the 
 groimd of rationalism or naturalism." 
 
 "Suppose I should take that ground, what 
 would you do ? Many, even amongst Protestants, 
 have maintained that Protestantism is illogical, 
 and inconsistent with itself; either too much or 
 too little; too much, if God has made no revela- 
 tion, too little, if he has ; for it leaves us without 
 any certain means of determining what it is he 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH. 157 
 
 has revealed, which it is derogatory from the 
 character of God to suppose he either could or 
 would do. There is no question that Protestant- 
 ism leaves all Protestants who think in doubt and 
 uncertainty as to what God has revealed, if he 
 has revealed anything. I have no sympathy 
 with the Church, but I own it has a logical con- 
 sistency with itself that Protestantism, as a 
 system of religion, has not. I adhere to the 
 Reformation, not for its doctrines, but as the up- 
 rising of the human mind against the intolerable 
 despotism of Rome. But what have you to say 
 in defence of your Church against one who takes 
 the ground of rationalism or pure naturahsm ?" 
 
 "To one who takes it by way of argument or 
 banter, nothing ; to one who takes it seriously, I 
 should have much to say. I would undertake 
 to convince him, by arguments he could not 
 deny, that neither nature nor reason suffices for 
 itself ; that nothing is more unnatural than nat- 
 uralism, or irrational than rationaUsm ; that nei- 
 ther does or can explain either the origin or 
 the end of the universe in general, or of man 
 in particular. Then I would show him that the 
 natural is impossible without the supernatural, 
 and that reason can not, by her own hght or 
 revelation, solve her own problems. Having 
 
158 CONVERSATIONS ON 
 
 shown this, I would proceed to show him that 
 revelation is possible, is in accordance with the 
 order of Divine Providence as manifested in na- 
 ture, and therefore capable of being accredited 
 by ordinary testimony. After that I would 
 prove to him the historical fact of revelation, 
 that it was made to man in the beginning, and 
 that in no age or nation has man ever been 
 left entirely without it ; and close my argument 
 by showing him that the revelation made in the 
 Garden, and in substance the only revelation that 
 has ever been made to man, is identically the 
 Christian revelation transmitted through the pa- 
 triarchs and the synagogue, preserved and taught 
 in its purity and integrity by the CathoHc Church. 
 This would cover the whole ground, and meet 
 all the objections of every class of objectors, 
 fi'om whatever point of view they object." 
 
 "I will not put you to the trouble of doing 
 that, Eeverend Father. I really do not take in- 
 terest enough in the question to discuss it, or to 
 listen to its discussion. All I demand is free, 
 untrammeled thought for myself and for all 
 men and on all subjects. Your Church does not 
 allow it, and therefore I hold every true man 
 should oppose her, and do his best to make away 
 with her." 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH. loS 
 
 " Do you demand free thought so as to be able 
 to arrive at the truth ?" 
 
 " I demand it so as to be able to exercise and 
 develop my faculties as a man, and not be kept 
 always in leading-strings as a child." 
 
 " Still, I • presume, you would like to think 
 wisely and justly. We have agreed that truth is 
 something real, independent of us, and that 
 there is the right to which we ought to conform 
 our thoughts, words, and deeds. Are you under 
 no obligation to do the right when you know it, 
 or to believe the truth when made known to 
 you?" 
 
 " I regard all authoritative teaching, in matters 
 of religion, as hostile to religious liberty ; what I 
 believe or disbeHeve makes no difference. I say 
 with Pope, nominally at least, a member of your 
 own Church : 
 
 ' For modes of faith let graceless bigots fight, 
 His can't be wrong whose life is in the right.' 
 
 The important thing is, not what a man thinks or 
 believes, but what he does." 
 
160 CONTEESATIONS ON 
 
 CHAPTEE XII. 
 
 I WAS sorry that tlie editor did not give the 
 priest the opportunity to develop and establish 
 his several points in defence of the Church 
 against rationalism ; but it was clear that how- 
 ever deep the editor's hostility to all author- 
 itative teaching, he was really indifferent to all 
 religion, and had no wish to beheve in any. The 
 only thing that he seemed in earnest about, was 
 to get rid for himself and others of all positive 
 belief of any kind. He had no serious convic- 
 tions, and no earnest desire to know and believe 
 the truth. It seemed clear to me that he thought 
 he had an advantage of the priest, and that he 
 was disposed to press it. There is no denying 
 that the Church does claim to teach by author- 
 ity, and to govern in spiritual matters her own 
 members ; and this age and country hold all au- 
 thority in horror, and call it, however legitimate, 
 just, and necessary, despotism. The journalist 
 would recognize no distiuction between just and 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH. 1(51 
 
 unjust authority. AH authority, in that it is 
 authority, was for him despotism, and destmctive 
 of hberty. He would have no restraint in 
 thought, word, or deed placed on any one ; but 
 every one should be free to live as he lists, un- 
 less, percHance, he adhered to the Catholic 
 Church. He understood perfectly that the 
 priest could not and would not concede this un- 
 bounded license, and thought, if he could only 
 force him to denv it, he could then raise the cry 
 of despotism against the Church with some ap- 
 pearance of justice, or with some plausibility. I 
 was not pleased with him ; for the principle of 
 authority in matters of faith no man who believes 
 in revelation at all can deny. We Protestants 
 hold the principle of authority in faith as really 
 as Catholics do, only we believe the authority on 
 which we are to receive the revelation is the 
 Bible, the infallible witness of what God has re- 
 vealed, while Catholics hold that the authority, 
 the iufalHble witness, is the Church. 
 
 But is it, after all, more difficult for Catholics 
 to prove the infallibility of the Church than it is 
 for us to prove the infallible authority of the 
 Scriptures? The Bible is authoritative, because 
 written by men divinely inspired to write it. 
 How do I prove their inspiration ? By the mir- 
 
162 CONVERSATIONS ON 
 
 acles of our Lord and his apostles. But how 
 can miracles prove that? None but God can 
 work a real miracle, and miracles therefore sim- 
 ply accredit those in whose behalf they are 
 wrought as messengers from God, who could 
 not work them unless God were with them, and 
 God could not work miracles to accredit false 
 witnesses or lying messengers. They are the 
 seal of the divine commission that God gives to 
 his messengers, or ambassadors, to speak in his 
 name. Then if those thus accredited say they 
 are inspired to reveal his "Word, they are so. 
 We believe the writers of the Holy Scriptures 
 were inspired, because, being divinely accredited 
 as his messengers, they are so. We must, then, 
 prove the divine commission of the apostles, 
 before we can prove they were inspired, or that 
 the Sacred Scriptures were written by divine 
 inspiration. All rests, then, on the fact of the 
 divine commission of the apostles. With us, as 
 well as with Oathohcs, this is the vital element. 
 They, then, to prove the infallibihty of the 
 Church, have to prove only the same fact that 
 we must prove in order to prove the infallibil- 
 ity of the Bible. If they can prove, as they 
 say they can, that their Church is apostohc, that 
 it continues without break the apostolate, its 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHUECH. 1G3 
 
 word is as higli authority for what God has 
 revealed as is the Bible itself, and the faith of 
 Catholics is as reasonable, to say the least, as 
 that of Protestants. I must think of this. 
 
 " You hold, then," replied the priest, " that it 
 makes n6 difference what a man believes, if his 
 life is in the right. Would what would be a 
 right Ufe in a pig, be a right hfe in a man ?" 
 
 " Not at aU ; for man is the superior animal. ' 
 
 " Would it make no difference in regard to his 
 life, whether a man beheved as you do, or on the 
 contrary, that the life of the pig is the proper 
 human life?" 
 
 " Perhaps it would." 
 
 " Then it is not a matter of absolute indiffer- 
 ence what a man believes. Man has, you have 
 conceded, a moral nature, and therefore moral 
 relations — ^relations to his Creator, to his neigh- 
 bor, to society, and to the state. If so, he has 
 certain duties as well as rights, which grow out 
 of these several relations. Is the life of him 
 in the right who neglects these duties, pays no 
 attention to them, denies that he is under any 
 obligation to perform them, that his neighbor 
 has any rights he is bound to respect, and insists 
 on his right to Uve as he lists ?" 
 
 " I say not that." 
 
164 CONVERSATIONf? ON 
 
 " After all, is a man's life, on tlie whole, any- 
 thing but a more or less imperfect practical ap- 
 plication of his belief and that of the community 
 in which he lives ? I leave out, of course, excep- 
 tional characters, great rogues and great crim- 
 inals, who are the slaves of untamed passions, 
 and yet even these are not uniformly wicked in 
 their whole lives, and perhaps the larger portion 
 of their lives is inoffensive. I speak only of the 
 generality of men." 
 
 " I have known atheists whose conduct might 
 shame many Christians." 
 
 " But they had been born and bred in a Chris- 
 tian community, and formed under the influence 
 of Christian morals, manners, customs, and civil- 
 ization. The habits of early life remain and in- 
 fluence the conduct after the faith which formed 
 them is gone. This is no fair test. The fair test 
 would be to take, if you could find one, a na- 
 tion of atheists, with only atheistical traditions, 
 trained under atheistical influences, without 
 regard to moral obligation, living without re- 
 straint, and with no other rule of conduct than 
 the calculations of interest, or the impulses of 
 passion." 
 
 "I do not deny morality, nor the obligations 
 of duty." 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH. 165 
 
 "If you concede moral obligations you must 
 assert tlie existence of God, for only Gpd can 
 impose an obligation. Human laws derive all 
 their vigor as laws, from the law of God, which 
 is his own eternal wiU or reason. There can be no 
 moral obligation without a moral law, and crea- 
 tures do not and can not create the moral law, 
 for it is above them, and prescribes to them 
 what they ought and what they ought not to do." 
 
 "' But they may be a law unto themselves." 
 
 " Yes ; if God has placed his law in their rear- 
 son and instincts, and written it in their hearts, 
 not otherwise. But even if so, it is none the less 
 a law ordained by the Legislator who has the 
 right over them, and to prescribe their conduct. 
 A man is no less bound by the dictates of rea- 
 son than by the precepts of an external law. 
 Sins against the dictates of reason are the least 
 excusable of all sins. Without God, then, no 
 moral law ; without the moral law, no moral ob- 
 ligation, no morality ; without morality, based on 
 the moral law, no state, no wise or just pohtics. 
 Does it make no difference, then, whether men 
 believe in God or deny him, and hold them- 
 selves accountable for their conduct in the sev- 
 eral relations of Ufe, or not?" 
 
 " But that does not prove that in order to 
 
166 CONTERSATIONS ON 
 
 determine wliat is a proper human life, it is ne- 
 cessary to know and believe all the dogmas 
 your Church teaches." 
 
 " All in good time. It is necessary to believe 
 in God. Is it less necessary that we should, as 
 far as concerns our relations to him, believe what 
 is true of him, or wiU it answer as well to believe 
 what is not true ?" 
 
 " Proceed : say, what is true." 
 
 " Then it wiU be necessary to know or believe 
 our true and real relation to him, the fact that 
 he creates us, the end for which he creates us, 
 the law under which he places us ; also, our true 
 relations to the rest of his creatures, to natiu-e 
 or the external universe, to our feUow-men, or 
 to one another, as husband and wife, parent and 
 child, brother and sister, neighbors, citizens or 
 subjects, magistrates or rulers." 
 
 " Be it so." 
 
 " No less important or necessary will it be that 
 we understand what are, and how we are to use, 
 the true and efficient means of discharging the 
 religious, moral, domestic, social, and political 
 duties that grow out of our several relations in 
 life — of fulfilling the law under which we are 
 placed, and gaining the end for which we are 
 made." 
 
LIBEKAUSM AND THE CHUKCH. 167 
 
 " Be it so, again." 
 
 " Well, my dear Journalist, the principles, the 
 dogmas, the teachings of the Church go no far- 
 ther than this ; they only cover the several points 
 on which every one in his degree and according 
 to his stats in life, needs to be rightly instructed 
 from earliest childhood, if his life is to be in the 
 right. Your mistake, my dear sir, as that of 
 many others, arises from your not perceiving the 
 practical character of the dogmatic teaching of 
 the Church, and from supposing that her dogmas 
 are merely speculative opinions, which have and 
 can have no practical bearing on the real busi- 
 ness of life. Hence your disdain or contempt of 
 theology, and the disgust with which you look on 
 the earnestness and warmth with which theolo- 
 gians discuss what to you are idle or senseless 
 questions. Gibbon somewhere says with a 
 sneer, in relation to the discussion between the 
 Homoousians and the Homoiousians, the Chris- 
 tian world, for a hundred years, disputed and cut 
 each others' throats for a single diphthong. 
 True ; yet in that diphthong was involved the 
 whole question, whether the human race, after 
 three himdred years of martyrdom, and when just 
 emerging from the catacombs, was to be replunged 
 into the idolatry, superstition, and barbarism of 
 
168 CONVERSATIONS ON 
 
 effete heathenism, or to go forward to the light 
 and glory, the peace and happiness of Christian 
 worship and Christian civilization,. The whole 
 future of humanity in this world and the next 
 was at stake. The Athanasians, the Catholics, 
 were the party of the future, of progress, of truth, 
 of Christian civilization ; the Arians were the 
 party of the past, seeking to retain the human 
 race in the bonds of heathen error, superstition 
 and idolatry ; for like the heathen they paid di- 
 vine honors to one they held to be not God but 
 a creature. Theological disputes you see, my 
 worthy journalist, that seem to you trifling, non- 
 sensical even, may, nevertheless, have a deep 
 significance, and involve the gravest practical 
 consequences. It is a sad proof of modern prog- 
 ress, the low rank you Hberals or rationaUsts 
 assign to theological science. They were deeper 
 and sounder thinkers, and wiser men, who 
 called theology " the Queen of the Sciences." 
 
 "But, Reverend Father, you seem to have 
 changed sides, and to have become the advocate 
 of progress, the champion of the future." 
 
 " No more than I have been all along. It is 
 you and your . friends, my dear sir, who are the 
 enemies of progress. You seek to deprive hu- 
 manity of all it has accumulated "by the labors 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH. 169 
 
 of all past generations, to reduce it to utter 
 nakedness, and turn it out into a bleak and win- 
 try world to starve, freeze, and die. I would i 
 preserve all that has been gained, and especially 
 the living principles and practical truths, without 
 which there may be destruction, but no progress, 
 because no continuity of life. You and the party 
 you sympathize with would render progress im- 
 possible if you could have your own way; for 
 you would place the human race back in the 
 darkness and slavery from which the Church 
 has rescued it with so much toil and suffering, 
 and by so many martyrdoms. You tell ue noth- 
 ing the world has not known and tried before 
 the advent of our Lord, except what you have 
 borrowed from the Church herself. You have 
 borrowed, indeed, from her the very idea of prog- 
 ress, of which you will find no recognition in the 
 writings even of the most eminent of Gentile 
 philosophers, and you will seek in vain in the 
 Gentile world for any practical progress, unless 
 in the material order. The Gentile nations had 
 all th« nature that we have, and yet their moral, 
 and intellectual, and social progress, was null. 
 Their religious history is a history of a contin- 
 uous deterioration, and the noble truths which 
 you find in a Plato or a Cicero, were not new 
 
170 CONYEESATIONS ON 
 
 discoveries or uew developments, but confessedly 
 borrowed from the wisdom of the ancients, and 
 •which later generations had forgotten or obscured. 
 You see repeated the same history in China, in 
 Turkey, in all contemporary pagan and Moham- 
 edan states and nations. Christian nations 
 alone are living and progressive nations. And 
 never have Christian nations advanced in all that 
 makes the true glory of civilization so rapidly as 
 they did from the downfall of Rome to the rise of 
 what you call the Reformation. 
 
 " The reason of this," continued the priest, "is 
 plain enough. The Church is always present 
 in these nations, asserting the principles, and 
 the means and conditions of all true progress, 
 and aiding iu their application to individual, 
 social, and political life. She furnishes the prin- 
 ciples, and assists in their continuous explication 
 and appHcation. Here is the reason why Chris- 
 tian nations, truly such, are living and progres- 
 sive nations, and why non-Christian nations are 
 neither living nor progressive. All heresies and 
 infidelity are disintegrating and destructive, if 
 you will, but reaUy hostile to progress. They 
 interrupt the work of the Church, they interpose 
 obstacles to her influence, deny or obscure the 
 principles of progress, and as far as their power 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHUECH. 171 
 
 extends, so prevent their development and prac- 
 tical application, and not only peril sonls, but 
 hinder or retard the progress of civilization. 
 Heretical nations are running the same career 
 the ancient Gentile nations ran, and their influ- 
 ence, aide€ by the flesh, the world, and the 
 devil, extends even to orthodox nations, and 
 neutralizes, to a fearful extent, the power of the 
 Church to apply her principles to her own chil- 
 dren, so that these nations become almost as 
 unprogressive as heretical nations themselves. 
 
 " I defend," concluded the priest, " progress, 
 but by preserving the priuciples and institutions 
 by which it is eifected ; I accept the New, joy- 
 fully and gratefully, so far as it grows out of the 
 Old, and is but its development and apphcation 
 under the law prescribed by the true end of man. 
 I war against what the liberals call new, because 
 it is not new, but a revival of what the race has 
 outgrown and thrown off, and because it tends 
 only to destroy all that has been gained during 
 the last eighteen hundred years. You do not 
 and wiU not believe me, for you are bent on re- 
 storing defunct paganism, though you perhaps 
 know it not. But events are rapidly proving 
 that I am right. KeUgion is fast losing its 
 hold on the new generation; reverence for the 
 
172 CONVEESATIONS ON 
 
 Tidsdom of the past, the experience of ages, and 
 the universal convictions of mankind, is well 
 nigh gone, and it seems to be taken for granted 
 that our fathers were all old fogies, and that all 
 wisdom -1 3 bom with us. The youth of every 
 nation become its counsellors. Men of mature 
 age, and ripe experience, are set aside as too 
 slow. Indeed, power passes from men, to women, 
 and boys ; and not to the women who veil their 
 faces and listen to the priest, but to women 
 who, with brazen front, spout infidelity under 
 the name of philanthropy or humanity, and bid 
 us forget their sex, and treat them as men. 
 The result will soon be seen." 
 
LIBEBALISM AND THE OHtTBCH. 173 
 
 CHAPTEK XIII. 
 
 In the evening after the last conversation, the 
 metropolitan editor left us. Whether his duties 
 called him away, or whether he had grown weary 
 of the part he had played, I know not ; but I am 
 sure he left us no less and no more prejudiced 
 against the Church, no less and no more firm in 
 his belief in the nineteenth century, than before. 
 The priest had made not the slightest impression 
 on his mind. The whole had been for him a 
 sparring match. He did justice to the priest's 
 skUl in fence, admired it, and that was all. The 
 priest's words had by no means convinced me, 
 for I could not come at once to look favorably 
 on the Church thab I had been accustomed, 
 from earliest childhood, to regard as the Mys- 
 tery of Iniquity, the Sorceress of Babylon, the 
 Mother of Abominations. Had I not been 
 taught that the Pope is Anti-Christ, the veri- 
 table Man of Sin, — that the Church had apos- 
 tatized, fallen away from Christ, corrupted the 
 faith, imbruted the nations, and left the worship 
 
174 CONVERSATIONS ON 
 
 of tlie living and true God for the worship of 
 idols, graven images, senseless pictures, and dead 
 men's bones? 
 
 It is true, that as I had grown older, and 
 traveled abroad in Catholic as well as in Prot- 
 estant countries, this early teaching had lost 
 with me much of its sharpness, and been not a 
 httle modified ; yet the early impression it made 
 on my mind remained, and prevented me from 
 even examining, as I might have done, the prac- 
 tical effects of the doctrine and practices of the 
 Church on the members of her communion who 
 really beheved her teaching, obeyed her pre- 
 cepts, and practised her morahty. The aged 
 priest, at our little watering-place of Springdale, 
 was the first Catholic of whose inner life I had 
 ever caught even the faintest glimpse. 
 
 I saw in this meek and modest old man, a 
 man of learning and ability, born to a princely 
 title and vast estates, brought up in wealth and 
 luxury, highly cultivated and refined, foregoing 
 all, making himself poor by his charities, leav- 
 ing rank and family, country and fi-iends, be- 
 coming a hard-working missionary in a foreign 
 land, among a people strangers in speech, man- 
 ners, and blood, the great majority of whom 
 looked up in his religion with bitter hatred, and 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH. 175 
 
 upon himself as an emissary of Satan, and 
 where there were only a widely-scattered few 
 who would recognize his sacred caUing, ask his 
 services, and who were in general poor and de- 
 spised, the pariahs of society. With these he 
 had spenf, without murmuring or repining, in 
 cheerfulness and gaiety of heart, forty of the 
 best years of his life, in journeyings from 
 place to place, lodging in. miserable shanties, 
 sometimes on the bare ground, teaching the 
 ignorant, consoUng the afflicted, recalling the 
 erring, rebuking the sinner, visiting the sick 
 and dying, and burying the dead ; often ia hun- 
 ger and thirst, in watchiags and fastings, and 
 ready to faint from weariness and exhaustion, 
 and yet never counting his labor and want, luj 
 privations, and fatigue, holding himself repaid, 
 and more than repaid, if so be he could wia souls 
 to Christ, and save his own soul at last. When 
 I saw this, and reflected that he had done only 
 what thousands had done before him, and were 
 stUl doing, in all parts of the world, I could not 
 but say to myself there must be something 
 deeper and diviner in this old Church than we 
 Protestants have believed possible. 
 
 The priest resolutely maiutained, in some con- 
 versations I had with him after the editor had loft 
 
176 CONVEKSATIONS ON 
 
 US, that, except in the material order, due in 
 great measure to the previous discovery by 
 Catholics of this western hemisphere, and in the 
 jfurther extension and practical application of 
 certain great principles always insisted on by 
 the Church, there had been no real progress of 
 civilization since the epoch of the Eeformation. 
 There was a great political and social change in 
 Europe in the fifteenth century, he said, when 
 monarchical centralism triumphed over feudal- 
 ism which had reigned for four centuries; but 
 whether the change was a progress or not, many 
 students of history and society think is quite 
 doubtful. The change, as far as he had been 
 able to understand it, consisted, he said, in prin- 
 ciple at least, in a return to what may be called 
 the Grseco-Eoman order of civilization, which 
 had been weakened but not destroyed by the 
 Barbarian invasion of the Empire. The change 
 has certainly been in favor of monarchy, and, in 
 the more advanced nations of Europe, has re- 
 sulted in the reestablishment of Csesarism. 
 
 The struggle now going on in Europe, the echo 
 of which affects the American system most dis- 
 astrously, he said, is the attempt to substitute 
 democratic absolutism for monarchical absolut- 
 ism, as it was in England during what is called 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH. 177 
 
 the English EebeUion in the seventeenth cen- 
 tury, and in the French Eevolution in the eight- 
 eenth, not yet ended. The party of democratic 
 absolutism is regarded, just now, as the party of 
 progress, the party of the future, the party of 
 humanity,* and because it represents the spirit of 
 the age and promises the race unbounded liberty 
 and an earthly paradise. What favors it is ap- 
 proved ; what opposes it is condemned. Would 
 you oppose the people, pit yourself against your 
 age, and repress its aspirations? Yet both ab- 
 solutisms are founded on a falsehood, for they 
 are founded on man, and man, either individually 
 or collectively, is not absolute, but dependent and 
 relative. 
 
 " But LiberaHsm is the great word of the day 
 No human institution is strong enough to resist 
 it, and it would, if it were possible, sweep away 
 the Divine. Its force is the force of passion, not 
 reason. You began your movement by rejecting 
 the authority of the Pope and Councils, and as- 
 serting that of the Bible interpreted by private 
 illumination or by private judgment, and have 
 gone on and denied the authority of the Bible, 
 and asserted, first, that of the interior spirit, and 
 then, that of reason alone. You have been forced, 
 by the light of your Liberal movement, to go far- 
 
178 C0NTEBSATI0N3 ON 
 
 tlier, and reject the interior spirit, to reason and 
 to restrict yourselves to the senses, and finally 
 to the passions and instincts of the people. You 
 have lost faith, lost hope in another world, re- 
 solved God into man, and man into a mere ani- 
 mal — probably the tadpole or monkey devel- 
 oped. To this you have been forced, step after 
 step, and you call it progress ! You have got rid 
 of the spiritual order, emaacipated what you 
 regard as the advanced portion of mankind — the 
 only portion in your estimation worth counting — 
 from the restraints of all law except tlie physical 
 laws of your constitution and those of the uni- 
 verse ; have discarded all moral ideals as vain 
 illusions, and are reduced, naked and alone, to 
 your own passions and lusts. You have pro- 
 claimed people-king, people-priest, people-God, 
 and made popular opinion, fickle as the wind, 
 your law, your criterion of right and wrong. Un- 
 der your progress in losing, poverty increases in 
 greater ratio than wealth, the poor become 
 more and more abject and servile, and are 
 treated as unfortunates or criminals. Intelh- 
 gence is lowered, minds lose their vigor, charac- 
 ters are enfeebled and abased, and man loses his 
 dignity, his personal freedom and independence. 
 " Yet you applaud you.rselves for the wonder- 
 
IJBERALISM AN'D THE CHURCH. 179 
 
 ful progress you have made, and for your im- 
 measurable superiority over the generations that 
 went before you. The evils to which we call 
 your attention, and which you were told before- 
 hand would inevitably follow your course, you 
 excuse as the necessary incidents of the transi- 
 tion state through which you are passing, and 
 trust they wUl disappear when you have left 
 the Old completely behind, and have fully estab- 
 lished the New. Alas ! you are always in a tran- 
 sition state. You started from passion, not rea- 
 son ; from falsehood, not truth ; from a false not 
 a true principle ; and how can you expect to 
 arrive at anything fixed, solid, and permanent? 
 You are followiag an illusion, a will-o'-the-wisp, 
 and can hardly escape being caught ia the bogs, 
 or sunk in the quagmire at last. 
 
 " You were warned in the beginning of the 
 danger you run, of the inevitable consequences 
 of the false principle you adopted, and you called 
 those who told you the truth, and begged you to 
 heed their words, 'fools' and 'asses.' Even to- 
 day you mock at us who try to rend the veil 
 from your eyes, dispel your illusions, and enable 
 you to see things as they are ; you get angry at 
 us, abuse us, call us moral cowards, dwellers 
 among the tombs, worshipers of the dead past, 
 
180 CONVERSATIONS ON 
 
 with our eyes on the back side of our headsj 
 lovers of darkness and haters of light, dcniera 
 of God and enemies of man. We are your ene- 
 mies, forsooth, because we tell you the truth, and 
 insist that it is truth, not error, that gives free- 
 dom to the mind, strength and energy to reason, 
 elevation and dignity to character. 
 
 " The Church has always and everywhere," he 
 continued, " had to struggle with the world, and 
 always and everywhere will you find much, even 
 in Catholic countries, to deplore ; for never yet, 
 even in professedly Catholic states, have the evil 
 passions and ignorance of statesmen, and the 
 blindness and ambition of rulers left her an open 
 field and fair play. The Philistines, moreover, 
 have always continued to dwell in the land. 
 Yet you must have been struck in your travels 
 with the moral elevation and personal dignity of 
 the Catholic peasantry, and their freedom from 
 the debasing servility to rank and wealth, from 
 which the poor are not by any means free even 
 in democratic America. The poor in Catholic 
 countries are never abject as a class, and retain, 
 even when beggars, a certain self-respect, per- 
 sonal dignity, and independence of feeling. They 
 feel that 
 
 ' A man 's a man for a' that.' 
 
LIBERALISM AND THE CHURCH. 181 
 
 Compare a Spanish or an Irish peasant with an 
 English peasant, and my meaning is at once ap- 
 parent. Did it ever occur to you that this supe- 
 rior moral elevation and personal dignity and 
 independence of the Catholic poor are due to 
 their religibn, which attaches merit to voluntary 
 poverty, regards the poor as blest and a bless- 
 ing, and never treats them as an unfortunate 
 class, or poverty as an evU, far less as a crime ? 
 These modern bastiles, called poor-houses, in 
 which the poor are shut up as crimiaals, are not 
 Cathohc constructions, and I thiak you have 
 never seen in Catholic countries, as I have in this 
 country, the poor set up at auction in town-meet- 
 ing, and knocked down to the lowest bidder, or 
 person who would take and keep them at the 
 least expense to the town. In Cathohc states 
 pubhc charities and corrections are seldom 
 classed together and placed in charge of one and 
 the same board of commissioners. 
 
 " There was no little barbarism in the temper 
 and manners of what are called ' the Dark Ages,' 
 inherited from pagan Eome even more than from 
 the German barbarian ; but you will look ia 
 vain among your non-Catholic contemporaries 
 for that clearness and vigor of intellect, and that 
 moral elevation, force, and independence of indi- 
 
182 CONVEESATIONS ON 
 
 vidual character, wliick you meet everywhere in 
 mediseval society. If there were great crimes in 
 those ages, they were followed, as the historian 
 of the Monks of the "West justly remarks, by 
 grand expiations. If there was great pride, 
 there was deeper humility, and always will the 
 period from the sixth to the end of the fifteenth 
 century stand out as the most glorious in the 
 annals of the race. 
 
 " The movement party curses those ages, and 
 for a century and a half has been engaged in a 
 huge leveling process, which, while it has done 
 really nothing to elevate the depressed, and has 
 really injured the poor by multiplying their 
 wants, and aggravating their discontent, has 
 brought down all elevations to the low level of 
 commonplace. The progress you boast consists 
 chiefly in losing the rich faith, the high principle, 
 the elevated character, and the sublime ideal 
 cherished by the Church, and in reducing all 
 moral, intellectual, individual, and social emi- 
 nences to a general average, where the race stag- 
 nates and rots." 
 
 I will not say the priest was right, that he did 
 not exaggerate, or even adopt, a false rule of 
 Jud'giiieiit;-"?but I felt that he had thought longer 
 and far more deeply on the subject than I had. 
 
LIBEEALISK AJTD THE CHURCH. 183 
 
 He had evidently mastered tlie subject to a 
 degree, and studied it in a light that I had not 
 done, and I had no right to regard him as less 
 honest and truthful, or more "one-sided" than 
 myself. He made me feel I linew yery little of 
 the real history of my race — that I had frittered 
 away my time, and that there were depths and 
 analogies even in common things that I had not 
 dreamed of exploring. He showed me at least 
 that I had many things as to the principles and 
 influence of religion and the Church : to learn, 
 and stimulated me to do all in my power at any 
 age to redeem the time I had lost. 
 
 I do not thiiik I shall ever be convinced of the 
 priest's doctrine, and seek admission into the 
 communion of the Cathohc Church ; but I am 
 thoroughly resolved to investigate, if my life is 
 prolonged, her claims, which I am certain are 
 not as unreasonable or as unfounded as I had 
 hitherto supposed. 
 
 THE END 
 
 ComeU CathoKc 
 Union Library.