and constituted to assert and uphold the supremacy of the moral order, and without her that order cannot be effectively asserted or upheld. As long as the Church stands in her freedom and independence, there is one friend to the soul of man, one protector of moral ideas, one shelter to which they who would follow the spirit and live for God can flee from an all-invading and all-absorbing materialism. We, who have been reared in the world outside the Church, feel, perhaps, as those who have been Catholics from their infancy do not and cannot, the incalculable value of this. We have known by bitter experience how the world mocks all our finer and nobler moral aspirations; we know how it chills the soul, and reduces us to a dead and deadening material life. How have we in our non-Catholic days mourned over the hollow morality of the non-Catholic world, its low and unspiritual aims, its want of disinterestedness and love! How have we been frozen by its heartlessness, and its indifference to all that constitutes the true dignity and glory of man! The body and its wants in our non-Catholic world engross every thought, and the soul and its wants are only subjects of pleasant or bitter mockery. In the Church we find all our nobler aspirations respected and cherished, our moral wants are met, our souls are quickened and invigorated by a supernatural spiritualism. We find the supremacy of the moral order asserted, practically asserted, and a man's spiritual worth made the criterion by which his rank is to be determined. All men and things are judged either by the great law of charity or by the eternal law of right and wrong. All the factitious distinctions of rank and race are discarded. All men are brothers, and the poor African slave stands on a level with the most lordly Kaiser, if his equal in spiritual worth. Right and goodness are honored in the lowest, wrong and iniquity are condemned and denounced in the highest. Humble virtue has a friend and protector; haughty vice a stern and inexorable censor. Conscience is respected, and he who acts from it is honored, not scorned or jeered.

We hear in our days much about religious liberty, but few in the non-Catholic world seem to have any understanding of what it means, or of the conditions in God's providence of its maintenance. Religious liberty, if it means anything, means the freedom and independence of the moral order, its emancipation from materialism, free

dom of religion, that is, freedom to worship God and to do in all things what he commands, without let or hindrance from kings or Kaisers, princes or nobles, sects or parties, nations or individuals. In this sense we claim religious liberty as the indefeasible right of all men. It is our solemn duty to assert it for every man, and to maintain it against all odds for ourselves. We hold this liberty from God; it is implied in our obligation to worship him, and no human power has the right to restrict it, or in any way to intermeddle with it. It is the right of rights, the liberty of liberties, and we can never consent to part with it. We will carry it with us in poverty and exile, in the dungeon, to the scaffold or the stake; but surrender it we will not. It is the only thing we can call our own, and with it we have all riches, as without it we have nothing. This is the religious liberty which makes martyrs and confessors, and hallows the earth with the blood of the righteous. It is true religious liberty, and the Catholic who will not assert it, and die for it, is a moral coward or a moral traitor, Protestant or a Know-Nothing in his heart. As a Catholic, we disown him.

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But on what conditions can the external practice of this liberty in such a world as ours be secured? The world, the flesh, and the Devil are opposed to it, princes and secular authorities hate it; for it is something above their power, which they cannot bind by their enactments or subdue by their arms. The flesh detests it, for it is its crucifixion; the world abhors it, for it tramples on the world; the Devil is enraged against it, for it scorns his temptations and defeats his wiles. We can die at its bidding, and conquer them all, and gain a more than royal crown, even the crown of eternal life, bestowed upon us by the right hand of Him who is Lord of all. But, nevertheless, all these make war upon it, and seek to deprive religion of external freedom, that is, to prevent the maintenance of the moral order in the affairs and government of the world. To be able under this point of view to withstand them, religious liberty needs an external organization. Conscience must have a visible polity, that is, the Church, the visible kingdom of God on earth. Now, how without the Papacy, with all its rights and prerogatives, can you maintain the freedom and independence of the Church? and how without the freedom and independence of the Church as the

organized protector of the rights of conscience, are you to maintain the freedom of religion in the external affairs of the world? We do not forget that the Church is Episcopal as well as Papal, and that ordinarily it is through the Episcopacy that the Papacy speaks to us; but the Episcopacy without the Papacy were a mere rope of sand. The bishops having no head, no political bond of union, would be obliged to succumb in the first conflict with the secular authority, or with the prejudices of the nation, and would be reduced to the necessity of teaching what the state or nation dictated, and of doing what the state or nation chose to command. Bishops are equal, and each, without the Pope, would be supreme in his own diocese, and exposed to be influenced, even controlled, by the national spirit and character. Who could then call him to account if he was, or if he encroached on the rights of his spiritual subjects? Or where would be the protection of religious liberty against his spiritual tyranny? Who, moreover, would protect him against the lawlessness or rebellion of his flock, and assist him to maintain his proper episcopal authority? Shall he appeal to the temporal power as the proper judge in the case? That would be to subordinate the spiritual to the temporal, and to deny religious liberty in its most essential principle. Certain it is, that religion under the Episcopacy, without the Papacy binding together in one polity all the bishops of all nations, forming thus a universal spiritual kingdom superior in dignity and broader in extent than any earthly kingdom, and organizing through them all the faithful of all nations into one vast spiritual union, as under Presbyterianism, Congregationalism, or individualism, could have neither the moral nor the physical conditions requisite to the maintenance of her freedom and independence. Without the

perpetual intervention of miracles, the Church, by ceasing to be catholic, would become enslaved to the temporal order. She would, as the race, be broken into nations, each nation would have its snug little national church, and we should have, as in the ancient Gentile world, as many religions as nations. This is evident from what we see in those European nations that have cast off the Papacy. In those nations there is no religious freedom, except the freedom to die, as under the Pagan Emperors, for religion. Let the national church of any Protestant nation attempt to

assert the freedom of religion, or the supremacy of the moral order, against the national sentiment or the secular authority, and it would soon be made to feel the chains, all gilded as they may be, which bind its limbs. Who has forgotten Queen Elizabeth's letter to her Bishop of Ely? "Proud prelate, I made you, and if you do not stop your insolence, by God, I will unmake you." Let the Anglican, the Prussian, the Danish, Swedish, or Russian Church, dare take a stand in favor of outraged right against the queen, king, or emperor, and it would soon receive a rebuke from royal or imperial lips that it would long remember. Having no support above or beyond the national authority, it has and can have no power to resist that authority, and maintain its freedom in spite of it, unless it be when the secular authority itself has lost its hold upon the nation, and the national sentiment is against it, as was the case in England under James the Second. When the national church can ally itself with the national sentiment against the prince, it may, no doubt, maintain itself against his authority, but it only changes masters; for it then becomes the slave of that same national sentiment which it has invoked to its aid.

It would be the same in Catholic states and 'nations without the aid derived from the Papacy, and even with all the aid thus derived, it is often very nearly the same. Let the Church in France assert the freedom of religion and the supremacy of the moral order against the French sovereign, and it would be obliged to succumb to the state, and do his Imperial Majesty's will, if it had no reliance on some power out of France. Nothing but the Papacy, strengthening the hands of good Catholics, and thundering its anathemas against the constitutional church and clergy, saved Catholicity in France during the old French Revolution.

In this country, we have no royalism in name, and no national church so denominated, and so far we have an advantage over others. The laws and the national administration recognize true religious liberty. But the laws and administration are for the most part impotent with us against popular sentiment, which can change them at will. Religious liberty here, as a matter of fact, lies at the mercy of the mob. We are a very religious people in our own way, almost every man having a religion of his own; but

the predominant religion, being non-Papal, with no chief and no support independent of the country, is obliged to follow instead of leading, much less resisting, popular sentiment or caprice. All religions are tolerated in so far as they are considered matters of no importance, and in so far as they are by their constitution flexible to public opinion, but no farther. None of the sects is able to assert with any effect the inflexible moral law against the caprices of public opinion, or a public opinion hostile to it, and they all sustain themselves by their suppleness, and extend themselves by adroitly availing themselves of some local or general popular excitement. Against popular opinions, though in favor of truth and justice, the most powerful of them are impotent, and their denunciations are a mere brutum fulmen. There is outside and independent of them a power greater than theirs, which says to them, "Thus far you may come, but no farther." Democracy with us takes the place of royalism in the Old World, and THE PEOPLE usurp the functions of the Church. The people make the laws. Any religion may be professed which does not deny their supremacy; but none which by its own constitution and laws is beyond their control. They will permit no church that is incapable of becoming a national church, or that receives its constitution and laws from another or a higher than an American source. Hence their peculiar hostility to the Catholic Church. The madmen leading on the war against her do not know how to state their own objections. They oppose her as anti-American, and as incompatible with the republican form of government, which is ridiculous and absurd. They pretend that we Catholics cannot be loyal citizens. As if our obedience to the Pope was incompatible with our allegiance to the state! Poor fools! they only echo the worn-out allegations of royalism, under cover of which it trampled on all rights, human and divine, natural and acquired, and established pure centralized despotism. The real ground of their opposition to us is, that our Church, being Papal, and therefore essentially one and catholic, cannot be a particular national church, independent of all extra-national ecclesiastical authority. Such is the character of our religion, that it is and must be independent of every national authority, and inflexible before public opinion. It is not that our religion is anti-American, or hostile