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great and everlasting principle, the denial of which is the assertion of the subjection of religion to the State, and God to man. If our Puritan fathers had been the Church of God, as they falsely assumed they were, they would have been right, and no descendant of theirs would have had cause to blush for their principles or general conduct. Their major was sound; only their minor was false. Even as American citizens, as descendants of the Puritans, we are bound to assert the principle of the supremacy of the Church, and to refuse to make religion justify herself before the temporal authority. But be this as it may, religion is, as we have said, the lex suprema, the law of laws, and the right of the Church to teach and to govern all nations is established the moment she is established to be God's Church. Deny that she is his Church, give a respectable reason for your denial, and we will meet you and discuss her claims ; but never will we discuss with you, whether she is favorable to one political order or another, the national spirit and the national majesty, or against them.

These very scientific and logical Professors, these attorneygenerals of the human race, the rejuvenescence of the famous Baron Anacharsis Clootz of the French Convention, also cry out against the Jesuits and demand their condemnation in the name of humanity. But here again they forget their theory, and assert law, which their theory repudiates, - refute them

selves by assuming authority which has the right to control human activity, — the very thing they charge against the Jesuits. But waive this. Consistency is rarely a striking quality in the enemies of truth. They speak in the name of humanity, — a respectable name, we do not deny ; but there is a higher name, a name which is above every name, which every tongue must confess, and at which every knee must bend, whether in heaven, on the earth, or in hell. The Jesuits profess to speak in this higher name, and to promulgate the law humanity is bound to obey, not to take their law from humanity. Humanity is no lawgiver. It is the creature ; is itself under law; and all its glory is in obedience to the law imposed upon it by its sovereign, and by which it is to be judged. To undertake to impeach the Jesuits in the name of humanity, prior to impeaching them in the name of God, is to make man the law, the sovereign, to substitute him for God, and to fall into idolatry, forbidden even by the law of nature. You stand, then, in your own wrong, and cannot be entitled to judgment against the Jesuits.

The Professors contend that the Jesuits are opposed to human progress, and are therefore the enemies of God; but it is only progress in their sense that they allege the Jesuits oppose. But they are not entitled to assume their sense as the true sense, and to oppose the Jesuits because they do not accept it. The progress of mankind in the knowledge and love of God, in faith, and hope, and charity, in all, they being judges, which constitutes the true good and real glory of man, nobody can allege the Jesuits oppose ; for this is an end which they avow, and for which they labor with a zeal and a perseverance which even their enemies applaud. The question between them and the Professors, then, is, whether the one or the other takes the right view of progress, - evidently a question for the court to decide.

But the view of progress taken by the Professors is only a recent and a crude speculation, is entertained only by the Professors and their party, and in their works is assumed without proof, or any attempt at proof. It is, then, without authority ; and to seek to condemn the Jesuits because they disregard it is to seek to condemn them without any authority for condemning them, — rank injustice, tyranny, oppression. In the

, very name of humanity, then, in which they affect to speak, they are themselves condemned ; for there is nothing more repugnant to humanity than oppression, tyranny, injustice. Humanity demands justice ; justice is inconceivable without law, and law, without the Sovereign Lawgiver. Justice, by the force of the word itself, means conformable to law. Deny law, the jus, and there is no justice. Hence, the Professors, in denying law, in denying all authority to declare the law, and in arraigning the Jesuits for adhering to law, and maintaining that it is what the sovereign ordains, are themselves guilty of that enmity to man which they charge upon the Jesuits ; for in this they deny justice, and leave man no appeal from the tyranny and oppression of his brother.

So it always is. They who break from the Church, who seek some other rule of life, whether they do it in the name of liberty, or progress, or philanthropy, are always sure to defeat the end they profess to have in view. In every country, the ruin of the constitution, and the loss of the liberty of the subject, and finally of the state, have invariably been due to measures introduced by the partisans of liberty. If any one doubts it, let him read the histories of Greece and Rome. The liberal party always are the party that overthrow liberty.

It has been so in France ; it has been so in England; it is rapidly becoming so in this country. Every step the party whose battle-cry is liberty takes in advance, here and everywhere, is the loss of some guaranty of freedom. Their shout of victory is always over some edifice thrown down ; never over some one erected. It is when demolishing palace and cottage, and making the abodes of peace, elegance, and safety a heap of ruins, that the frantic shouts of the mob make the welkin ring, and honest people feel that hell is broken loose.

It has been the same in regard to religion. The Reformers would have religious freedom, and they have gained by their sacrilegious attacks on the Church, in most countries where they have succeeded, the complete subjection of religion to the State, and in others, religious anarchy, even worse than religious despotism. For the last hundred years the world has scouted the holy name of charity, and taken up the sentimental name of philanthropy. The great men would not hear of God; they were all for man, for fraternity, peace on earth, and good-will; and hardly since the world began have vice and crime more prevailed, the poor been more neglected, the lower orders more trampled on, or doomed to suffer greater privation and distress; tyranny and arbitrary power made more rapid strides, or established ihemselves more securely in their thrones of oppression. Truth, justice, mercy, all that man needs, all that is honorable to human nature, is sacrificed to " the almighty dollar.” The money-god is worshipped everywhere, and daily are whole hecatombs of human hearts sacrificed at each of his ten thousand shrines. Yet all is done in the name of liberty, brotherhood, universal love, and good-will! O, the terrible madness which seizes men, the moment they leave God to follow the devices of their own hearts! The devil then has full power over them, and whirls and tosses them hither and thither, and sports with them at his leisure ; and they, poor souls, fancy it is all freedom, and joy, and peace, and love, and quiet and easy journeying to heaven. But there is no way but God's way, and the only way of securing a hundredfold in this life is to give up all for the life to come. Man never suffices for himself, and whenever he attempts, in his own way, by his own wisdom and strength, to effect even a good end, and labors for it with all zeal and diligence, with constancy and perseverance, shrinking from no difficulty and danger, and pressing on even to the sacrifice of life, he only finds himself the farther from its accomplishment, and that he has only aggravated the disease he sought to cure.

Let who will examine the actual results of all the extraCatholic movements in modern times for the melioration of man's moral, religious, or social condition, and he will be struck with the truth of what we assert. Let one go farther, and examine with some care, with some philosophical insight and logical acumen, the theoretic plans according to which these movements take place, and he will see, with equal clearness, that these results ought in all cases to be precisely what they have been. We are not disposed to deny, even to our French Professors, a certain kind of humanity, and though, like all reformers and philanthropists out of the Church, they act on the principle that the end sanctifies the means, we have no doubt but they wish a better order of things than they seem to themselves to see, and really persuade themselves, that, if they could once realize their theory in actual life, the condition of the individual and of society would be greatly ameliorated ; yet there is not a single good their theory proposes which is not, on that theory, impracticable. Their theory is hostile to the end they wish. The good they crave for society, may be, is possible ; but whoever knows the nature of man knows that it does not consist in the elements they suppose, and whoever knows the ordinary laws of cause and effect knows equally well that it is not attainable by the means they would have us adopt. Let actual living men, men not in the closet, but out in the world, with all their natural dispositions and passions, sympathies and antipathies, hurtling one against another, adopt that theory and attempt to act upon it, and its authors would themselves be among the first to condemn the result.* Nothing of that which they promise them

* In confirmation of what is asserted in the text, we may remark that the original movers of all great social or religious revolutions are always found, as the revolution proceeds, seeking to arrest its progress, and to prevent it from going too far. Luther soon found himself obliged to struggle against the legitimate development of the movement he commenced, and we see him during the last years of his life battling with a broken heart against the practical workings of his own theories. The men who made the French Revolution in 1789 nearly all turned their arms against it, sought to arrest its progress, and most of them perished in the attempt. What a sad spectacle does Lafayette present, seeking to persuade his army to leave the frontier, and march upon Paris to suppress the Convention which he himself had helped create! In no instance we have ever read or heard of have the men who have sought to remodel the Church

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selves would be realized, and all of that which even they most
dread would be multiplied a thousand fold. Men are not mere
machines, and their conduct is governed by moral and not
mechanical laws. They are living, and it is the property of
life to suspend the action of many of the natural laws.
know the action of chemical laws upon the dead body, but
these laws are held in abeyance during life. Another and
a subtler agent is at work, on the laws or modes of whose ac-
tivity chemistry can throw no light. These are taught us only
by another science, and one of which they who sneer at the
scientia divina and study only the scientia humana are and
must be ignorant. Hence they miscalculate their forces, mis-
take their operation, and consruct in their theories only monu-
ments to their own rashness and folly. The explanation of
man is not in man himself, but in his Maker alone.
tains to a knowledge of himself only in proportion as he attains
10 knowledge of God. Ever are we riddles to ourselves, till
we find in God the solution. We must be adequate to the
design of a work of art, before we can comprehend the whole
design of the artist from the contemplation of the work itself.
Man must be equal to the creation of man, before from man
himself he can comprehend the full meaning of man. But
only he who comprehends the full meaning of man can deter-
mine his end, or disclose the means of attaining it. Hence all
those human theories fail of their purpose, and must fail; and
for both the knowledge of our end and the means of gaining it,
as well as for the ability to will it, and to use the means, we
must depend on the bounty of Him who has made us, and alone
knows what we are, what is our true good, and how it is to be
attained. If he has not furnished us with the means of in-
struction and of grace, it is idle to seek for the melioration
of society; and if he has, it is worse than idle to seek the
end by any other means than those which he furnishes.

But enough of moralizing for the present. In what we have thus far said, we have aimed merely to show the folly and ab

or the State after their own theories been satisfied with the result of their efforts. They almost always abandon their work in disgust, and, if carried on at all, it is by another generation, who succeed them, and who in their turn are disappointed and disgusted and give or are compelled to give way to another and a madder generation. Calvinism sinks to Socinianism, Socinianism to Transcendentalism; constitutional monarchy descends to democracy, democracy to ochlocracy, and ochlocracy yields only to military despotism.

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