The Project Gutenberg EBook of Catholic World, Vol. XIII, April to September, 1871, by Various This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Title: Catholic World, Vol. XIII, April to September, 1871 Author: Various Release Date: March 10, 2015 [EBook #48448] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CATHOLIC WORLD, APRIL-SEPT 1871 *** Produced by David Edwards, JoAnn Greenwood, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) THE CATHOLIC WORLD. A MONTHLY MAGAZINE OF General Literature and Science. VOL. XIII. APRIL TO SEPTEMBER, 1871. NEW YORK: THE CATHOLIC PUBLICATION HOUSE, 9 Warren Street. 1871. JOHN ROSS & CO., PRINTERS AND STEREOTYPERS, 27 ROSE ST., NEW YORK. CONTENTS. Albertus Magnus Vindicated, 712 America's Obligation to France, 836 Ancients, the Writing Materials of the, 126 [iii] Animas, Las, 353 Animals, Love for, 545 Bishop Timon, 86 Bordeaux, 158 Brébeuf, Memoir of Father John, 512, 623 Carlyle and Père Bouhours, 820 Catholic Associations, Spirit of, 652 Catholicity and Pantheism, 554 Cayla, A Pilgrimage to, 595 Cecilia, Saint, 477 Church, The, Accredits herself, 145 Church, What our Municipal Laws owe to the, 342 Civilization, Origin of, 402 Dion and the Sibyls, 56 Doña Fortuna and Don Dinero, 130 Döllinger, The Apostasy of, 415 Education and Unification, 1 Education, On Higher, 115 Egbert Stanway, 377 Egyptian Civilization according to the most Recent Discoveries, 804 England, The Serial Literature of, 619 Europe's Future, 76 Flowers, 305 Froude and Calvinism, 541 France, America's Obligation to, 836 Future, The Present and the, 452 Galitzin, The Mother of Prince, 367 Geneva, The Catholic Church in, 847 Genzano and Frascati, 737 Good Gerard of Cologne, The, 797 Gottfried von Strassburg's Hymn to the Virgin, 240 Independent, A Word to The, 247 Infallibility, 577 Ireland, Ancient Laws of, 635 Ireland, The Lord Chancellors of, 228 Irish Martyr, An, 433 Italian Guarantees and the Sovereign Pontiff, 566 Laws, Municipal, and the Church, 342 Letter from Rome, 134 Letter from the President of a College, 281 Liquefaction of the Blood of St. Januarius, 772 Locket, The Story of an Algerine, 643 Lourdes, Our Lady of, 98, 255, 396, 527, 662, 825 Lucas Garcia, 785 Mary Benedicta, 207 Mary Clifford's Promise Kept, 447 Mexican Art and its Michael Angelo, 334 On Higher Education, 115 Our Lady of Guadalupe, 189 Our Lady of Lourdes, 98, 255, 396, 527, 662, 825 Our Northern Neighbors, 108 Page of the Past and a Shadow of the Future, A, 764 Pantheism, Catholicity and, 554 Pau, 504 Père Jacques and Mademoiselle Adrienne, 677 Present and the Future, The, 452 Protestantism, Statistics of, in the U. S., 195 Reformation, The, Not Conservative, 721 Rome, How it Looked Three Centuries Ago, 358 Rome, Letter from, 134 Saintship, False Views of, 424 Santa Restituta, Legend of, 276 Sardinia and the Holy Father, 289 Sauntering, 35 Sayings of the Fathers of the Desert, 274 Scepticism of the Age, The, 391 Secular, The, Not Supreme, 685 Shamrock Gone West, The, 264 Sor Juan Inez de la Cruz, 47 Spanish America, Dramatic Moralists in, 702 Statistics of Protestantism in the U. S., 195 St. Januarius, Liquefaction of the Blood of, 772 The Church Accredits Herself, 145 Unification, Education and, 1 What Our Municipal Laws Owe to the Church, 342 Writing Materials of the Ancients, 126 Yorke, The House of, 15, 169, 317, 461, 604, 746 POETRY. "Amen" of the Stones, The, 168 A Pie IX., 684 Disillusioned, 489 Gualberto's Victory, 96 King Cormac's Choice, 413 On a Great Plagiarist, 206 Rose, The, 571 Saint John Dwarf, 357 Sancta Dei Genitrix, 771 Sonnet, 603 St. Francis and St. Dominic, 745 St. Francis of Assisi, 133 St. Mary Magdalen, 511 The Cross, 14 The True Harp, 594 To the Crucified, 352 Vespers, 275 Warning, The, 125 NEW PUBLICATIONS. Allies' St. Peter, 860 Anderson's Historical Reader, 855 Appleton's Annual Cyclopædia, 573 Barker's Text-Book of Chemistry, 142 Bret Harte's Poems, 144 Caddell's Never Forgotten; or, The Home of the Lost Child, 853 Catechism Illustrated, The, 854 [iv] Clement's Hand-Book of Legendary and Mythological Art, 143 Coleridge's Theology of the Parables, 432 Conyngham's Sarsfield, 143 Curtius's History of Greece, 575 Cusack's History of Kerry, 855 Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, 573 Elia; or, Spain Fifty Years Ago, 141 Fairbanks's History of Florida, 857 Familiar Discourses to the Young, 288 Fifty Catholic Tracts, 430 Folia Ecclesiastica, 144 Gaskin's Irish Varieties, 142 Glosswood, The Countess of, 288 Hamilton's Golden Words, 860 Heaven, The Happiness of, 286 Hefele on the Christian Councils, 718 Hemenway's Vermont, 857 Higginson's Sympathy of Religions, 286 Holy Exercise of the Presence of God, 854 Holmes on Mechanism in Thought and Morals, 139 Historical Gazetteer, 857 Illustrated Catholic Sunday-School Library, 573 Jesus and Jerusalem, 140 Kellogg's Arthur Brown, 143 Keon's Dion and the Sibyls, 429 La Grange's Thecla, 432 Lallemant's Spiritual Doctrine, 287 Lebon's Holy Communion, 573 Life and Writings of De Montfort, 141 Life of St. Gertrude, 859 Martyrs Omitted by Foxe, 575 Meditations on the Litany of the Most Holy Virgin, 431 Miles's Truce of God, 574 Moran's Life of Archbishop Plunkett, 574, 858, Mrs. Stowe's Pink and White Tyranny, 859 Mulrenan's Sketch of the Church on Long Island, 854 Natural History of New York, 432 Oakeley's Priest on the Mission, 719 Perrone's Divinity of Christ, 286 Rome and Geneva, 283 Russell's My Study Windows, 427 Seelye on Roman Imperialism, 141 Sestini's Manual of Geometrical Analysis, 856 Seton's Romance of the Charter Oak, 288 Starr's Patron Saints, 853 Stowe's Little Pussy Willow, 144 Sullivan's Prayers and Ceremonies of the Mass, 144 Synchronology of Sacred and Profane History, 144 Vaughan's Life of St. Thomas Aquin., 427 Weiss's American Religion, 720 West's State of the Dead, 574 Whipple's Literature and Art, 430 Wonders of European Art, 576 Wonders of the Heavens, 432 Young's Catholic Hymns and Canticles, 719 THE CATHOLIC WORLD. VOL. XIII., No. 73.—APRIL, 1871.[1] UNIFICATION AND EDUCATION.[2] The Hon. Henry Wilson, recently re-elected senator in Congress from Massachusetts, may not be distinguished as an original thinker or as a statesman of commanding ability, but no man is a surer index to his party or a more trustworthy exponent of its sentiments and tendencies, its aims and purposes. This gives to his article in The Atlantic Monthly, indicating the policy to be pursued by the Republican party, a weight it might not otherwise possess. Mr. Wilson is a strong political partisan, but he is above all a fervent Evangelical, and his aim, we presume, is to bring his political party to coincide with his Evangelical party, and make each strengthen the other. We of course, as a Catholic organ, have nothing to say of questions in issue between different political parties so long as they do not involve the rights and interests of our religion, or leave untouched the fundamental principles and genius of the American system of government, although we may have more or less to say as American citizens; but when either party is so ill-advised as to aim a blow either at the freedom of our religion or at our federative system of government, we hold ourselves free, and in duty bound, to warn our fellow-citizens and our fellow-Catholics of the impending danger, and to do what we can to avert or arrest the blow. We cannot, without incurring grave censure, betray by our silence the cause of our religion or of our country, for fear that by speaking we may cross the purposes of one or another party, and seem to favor the views and policy of another. Mr. Wilson's New Departure is unquestionably revolutionary, and therefore not lawful for any party in this country to adopt. It is expressed in two words, National Unification and National Education—that is, the consolidation of all the powers of government in the general government, and the social and religious unification of the American people by means of a system of universal and uniform compulsory education, adopted and enforced by the authority of the united or consolidated states, not by the states severally each within its own jurisdiction and for its own people. The first is decidedly revolutionary and destructive of the American system of federative government, or the division of powers between a general government and particular state governments; the second, in the sense proposed, violates the rights of parents and annihilates the religious liberty secured by the constitution and laws both of the several states and of the United States. The general government, in our American political system, is not the national government, or any more national than the several state governments. The national government with us is divided between a general government having charge of our relations with other powers and internal matters of a general nature and common to all the states, and particular state governments having charge of matters local and particular in their nature, and clothed with all the powers of supreme national governments not expressly delegated to the general government. In the draft of the federal constitution reported by the committee to the convention of 1787, the word national was used, but the convention finally struck it out, and inserted wherever it occurred the word general, as more appropriately designating the character and powers of the government they were creating. It takes under our actual system both the state governments and the general government to make one complete national government, invested with all the powers of government. By making the general government a supreme national government, we make it the source of all authority, subordinate the state governments to it, make them hold from it, and deprive them of all independent or undivided rights. This would completely subvert our system of government, according to which the states hold their powers immediately from the political people, and independently of any suzerain or overlord, and the general government from the states or the people organized as states united in convention. A more complete change of the government or destruction of the federative principle, which constitutes the chief excellence and glory of our system, it would be difficult to propose, or even to conceive, than is set forth in Mr. Wilson's programme. Mr. Wilson, however, is hardly justified in calling the revolution he proposes a "New Departure." It has been the aim of a powerful party, under one name or another, ever since 1824, if not from the origin of the government itself. This party has been steadily pursuing it, and with increasing numbers and influence, ever since the anti-slavery agitation seriously commenced. At one time, and probably at all times, it has been moved chiefly by certain business interests which it could not advance according to its mind by state legislation, and for which it desired federal legislation and the whole power of a national government, but which it could not get because the constitution and the antagonistic interests created by slave labor were opposed to it. It then turned philanthropist and called in philanthropy to its aid— philanthropy which makes light of constitutions and mocks at state lines, and claims the right to go wherever it conceives [1] [2] [3] the voice of humanity calls it. Under the pretext of philanthropy, the party turned abolitionist, and sought to bring under the action of the general government the question of slavery manifestly reserved to the states severally, and which it belonged to each to settle for itself in its own way. A civil war followed. The slaves were emancipated, and slavery abolished, professedly under the war-power of the Union, as a military necessity, which nobody regrets. But the party did not stop here. Forgetful that the extraordinary war-power ceases with the war, and military necessity can no longer be pleaded, it has, under one pretext or another, such as protecting and providing for the freed-men and reconstructing the states that seceded, continued to exercise it ever since the war was over, and by constitutional amendments of doubtful validity, since ratified in part under military pressure by states not yet reconstructed or held to be duly organized states in the Union, it has sought to legitimate it, and to incorporate it into the constitution as one of the ordinary peace-powers of the government. The party has sometimes coincided, and sometimes has not strictly coincided, with one or another of the great political parties that have divided the country, but it has always struggled for the consolidation of all the powers of government in the general government. Whether prompted by business interests or by philanthropy, its wishes and purposes have required it to get rid of all co-ordinate and independent bodies that might interfere with, arrest, or limit the power of Congress, or impose any limitation on the action of the general government not imposed by the arbitrary will of the majority of the people, irrespective of their state organization. What the distinguished senator urges we submit, therefore, is simply the policy of consolidation or centralization which his party has steadily pursued from the first, and which it has already in good part consummated. It has abolished slavery, and unified the labor system of the Union; it has contracted a public debt, whether needlessly or not, large enough to secure to the consolidation of the powers of a national government in the general government the support of capitalists, bankers, railroad corporators, monopolists, speculators, projectors, and the business world generally. Under pretence of philanthropy, and of carrying out the abolition of slavery, and abolishing all civil and political distinctions of race or color, it has usurped for the general government the power to determine the question of suffrage and eligibility, under the constitution and by the genius of our government reserved to the states severally, and sends the military and swarms of federal inspectors into the states to control, or at least to look after, the elections, in supreme contempt of state authority. It has usurped for the general government the power of granting charters of incorporation for private business purposes elsewhere than in the District of Columbia, and induced it to establish national bureaus of agriculture and education, as if it was the only and unlimited government of the country, which it indeed is fast becoming. The work of consolidation or unification is nearly completed, and there remains little to do except to effect the social and religious unification of the various religions, sects, and races that make up the vast and diversified population of the country; and it is clear from Mr. Wilson's programme that his party contemplate moulding the population of European and of African origin, Indians and Asiatics, Protestants and Catholics, Jews and pagans, into one homogeneous people, after what may be called the New England Evangelical type. Neither his politics nor his philanthropy can tolerate any diversity of ranks, conditions, race, belief, or worship. A complete unification must be effected, and under the patronage and authority of the general government. Mr. Wilson appears not to have recognized any distinction between unity and union. Union implies plurality or diversity; unity excludes both. Yet he cites, without the least apparent misgiving, the fathers of the republic—Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, Jay, and Madison—who were strenuous for the union of the several states, as authorities in favor of their unity or consolidation in one supreme national government. There were points in which these great men differed among themselves—some of them wished to give more, some of them less, power to the general government—some of them would give more, some of them less, power to the executive, etc., but they all agreed in their efforts to establish the union of the states, and not one of them but would have opposed their unity or consolidation into a single supreme government. Mr. Wilson is equally out in trying, as he does, to make it appear that the strong popular sentiment of the American people, in favor of union, is a sentiment in favor of unity or unification. But starting with the conception of unity or consolidation, and resolving republicanism into the absolute supremacy of the will of the people, irrespective of state organization, Mr. Wilson can find no stopping-place for his party short of the removal of all constitutional or organic limitations on the irresponsible will of the majority for the time, which he contends should in all things be supreme and unopposed. His republicanism, as he explains it, is therefore incompatible with a well-ordered state, and is either no government at all, but universal anarchy, or the unmitigated despotism of majorities —a despotism more oppressive and crushing to all true freedom and manly independence, than any autocracy that the world has ever seen. The fathers of the republic never understood republicanism in this sense. They studied to restrict the sphere of power, and to guard against the supremacy of mere will, whether of the monarch, the nobility, or the people. But having reached the conclusion that true republicanism demands unification, and the removal of all restrictions on the popular will, Mr. Wilson relies on the attachment of the American people to the republican idea to carry out and realize his programme, however repugnant it may be to what they really desire and suppose they are supporting. He knows the people well enough to know that they do not usually discriminate with much niceness, and that they are easily caught and led away by a few high-sounding phrases and popular catchwords, uttered with due gravity and assurance— perhaps he does not discriminate very nicely, and is himself deceived by the very phrases and catchwords which deceive them. It is not impossible. At any rate, he persuades himself unification or consolidation can be carried forward and effected by appeals to the republican instincts and tendencies of the American people, and secured by aid of the colored vote and woman suffrage, soon to be adopted as an essential element in the revolutionary movement. The colored people, it is expected, will vote as their preachers direct, and their preachers will direct as they are directed by [3] [4] the Evangelicals. The women who will vote, if woman suffrage is adopted, are evangelicals, philanthropists, or humanitarians, and are sure to follow their instincts and vote for the unification or centralization of power—the more unlimited, the better. But the chief reliance for the permanence in power of the party of consolidation is universal and uniform compulsory education by the general government, which will, if adopted, complete and preserve the work of unification. Education is the American hobby—regarded, as uneducated or poorly educated people usually regard it, as a sort of panacea for all the ills that flesh is heir to. We ourselves, as Catholics, are as decidedly as any other class of American citizens in favor of universal education, as thorough and extensive as possible—if its quality suits us. We do not, indeed, prize so highly as some of our countrymen appear to do the simple ability to read, write, and cipher; nor do we believe it possible to educate a whole people so that every one, on attaining his majority, will understand the bearing of all political questions or comprehend the complexities of statesmanship, the effects at large of all measures of general or special legislation, the bearing on productive industry and national wealth of this or that financial policy, the respective merits of free trade and protection, or what in a given time or given country will the best secure individual freedom and the public good. This is more than we ourselves can understand, and we believe we are better educated than the average American. We do not believe that the great bulk of the people of any nation can ever be so educated as to understand the essential political, financial, and economical questions of government for themselves, and they will always have to follow blindly their leaders, natural or artificial. Consequently, the education of the leaders is of far greater importance than the education of those who are to be led. All men have equal natural rights, which every civil government should recognize and protect, but equality in other respects, whether sought by levelling downward or by levelling upward, is neither practicable nor desirable. Some men are born to be leaders, and the rest are born to be led. Go where we will in society, in the halls of legislation, the army, the navy, the university, the college, the district school, the family, we find the few lead, the many follow. It is the order of nature, and we cannot alter it if we would. Nothing can be worse than to try to educate all to be leaders. The most pitiable sight is a congressional body in which there is no leader, an army without a general, but all lead, all command—that is, nobody leads or commands. The best ordered and administered state is that in which the few are well educated and lead, and the many are trained to obedience, are willing to be directed, content to follow, and do not aspire to be leaders. In the early days of our republic, when the few were better educated than now and the many not so well, in the ordinary sense of the term, there was more dignity in the legislative, judicial, and executive branches of the government, more wisdom and justice in legislation, and more honesty, fidelity, and capacity in the administration. In extending education and endeavoring to train all to be leaders, we have only extended presumption, pretension, conceit, indocility, and brought incapacity to the surface. These, we grant, are unpopular truths, but they, nevertheless, are truths, which it is worse than idle to deny. Everybody sees it, feels it, but few have the courage to avow it in face of an intolerant and tyrannical public opinion. For ourselves, we believe the peasantry in old Catholic countries, two centuries ago, were better educated, although for the most part unable to read or write, than are the great body of the American people to-day. They had faith, they had morality, they had a sense of religion, they were instructed in the great principles and essential truths of the Gospel, were trained to be wise unto salvation, and they had the virtues without which wise, stable, and efficient government is impracticable. We hear it said, or rather read in the journals, that the superiority the Prussian troops have shown to the French is due to their superior education. We do not believe a word of it. We have seen no evidence that the French common soldiers are not as well educated and as intelligent as the Prussian. The superiority is due to the fact that the Prussian officers were better educated in their profession, were less overweening in their confidence of victory, and maintained better and severer discipline in their armies, than the French officers. The Northern armies in our recent civil war had no advantage in the superior education of the rank and file over the Southern armies, where both were equally well officered and commanded. The morale of an army is no doubt the great thing, but it does not depend on the ability of the common soldier to read, write, and cipher; it depends somewhat on his previous habits and pursuits—chiefly on the officers. Under the first Napoleon, the Prussians were not superior to the French, though as well educated. Good officers, with an able general at their head, can make an efficient army out of almost any materials. It is not, therefore, for political or military reasons that we demand universal education, whether by the general government or under the state governments. We demand it, as far as practicable, for other and far higher reasons. We want it for a spiritual or religious end. We want our children to be educated as thoroughly as they can be, but in relation to the great purpose of their existence, so as to be fitted to gain the end for which God creates them. For the great mass of the people, the education needed is not secular education, which simply sharpens the intellect and generates pride and presumption, but moral and religious education, which trains up children in the way they should go, which teaches them to be honest and loyal, modest and unpretending, docile and respectful to their superiors, open and ingenuous, obedient and submissive to rightful authority, parental or conjugal, civil or ecclesiastical; to know and keep the commandments of God and the precepts of the church; and to place the salvation of the soul before all else in life. This sort of education can be given only by the church or under her direction and control; and as there is for us Catholics only one church, there is and can be no proper education for us not given by or under the direction and control of the Catholic Church. But it is precisely education by the Catholic Church that Mr. Wilson and his party do not want, do not believe in, and wish to prevent us from having even for our own children. It is therefore they demand a system of universal and uniform compulsory education by the authority and under the direction of the general government, which shall effect and maintain the national unification proposed, by compelling all the children of the land to be trained in national schools, under Evangelical control and management. The end and aim of the New Departure, aside from certain business [5] [6] [7] interests, is to suppress Catholic education, gradually extinguish Catholicity in the country, and to form one homogeneous American people after the New England Evangelical type. Of this there can be no reasonable doubt. The Evangelicals and their humanitarian allies, as all their organs show, are seriously alarmed at the growth of Catholicity in the United States. They supposed, at first, that the church could never take root in our Protestant soil, that she could not breathe the atmosphere of freedom and enlightenment, or thrive in a land of newspapers and free schools. They have been disappointed, and now see that they reckoned without their host, and that, if they really mean to prevent the American people from gradually becoming Catholic, they must change fundamentally the American form of government, suppress the freedom of religion hitherto enjoyed by Catholics, and take the training of all children and youth into their own hands. If they leave education to the wishes and judgment of parents, Catholic parents will bring up their children Catholics; if they leave it to the states separately, Catholics in several of them are already a powerful minority, daily increasing in strength and numbers, and will soon be strong enough to force the state legislatures to give them their proportion of the public schools supported at the public expense. All this is clear enough. What, then, is to be done? Mr. Wilson, who is not remarkable for his reticence, tells us, if not with perfect frankness, yet frankly enough for all practical purposes. It is to follow out the tendency which has been so strengthened of late, and absorb the states in the Union, take away the independence of the state governments, and assume the control of education for the general government, already rendered practically the supreme national government;—then, by appealing to the popular sentiment in favor of education, and saying nothing of its quality, get Congress, which the Evangelicals, through the party in power, already control, to establish a system of compulsory education in national schools—and the work is done; for these schools will necessarily fall into Evangelical hands. Such is what the distinguished Evangelical senator from Massachusetts calls a "New Departure," but which is really only carrying out a policy long since entered upon, and already more than half accomplished. While we are writing, Mr. Hoar, a representative in Congress from Massachusetts, has introduced into the House of Representatives a bill establishing a system of national education under the authority of the general government. Its fate is not yet known, but no doubt will be, before we go to press. The probabilities are that it will pass both Houses, and if it does, it will receive the signature of the President as a matter of course. The Evangelicals—under which name we include Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Dutch Reformed, Baptists, and Methodists, etc.—all the denominations united in the Evangelical Alliance—constitute, with their political and philanthropic allies, the majority in Congress, and the measure is advocated apparently by the whole Evangelical press and by the larger and more influential republican journals of the country, as any number of excerpts from them now before us will satisfy any one who has the curiosity to read them. We did think of selecting and publishing the more striking and authoritative among them, but we have concluded to hold them in reserve, to be produced in case any one should be rash enough to question our general statement. There is a strong popular feeling in many parts of the country in favor of the measure, which is a pet measure also of the Evangelical ministers generally, who are sure to exert their powerful influence in its support, and we see no reason to doubt that the bill will pass. But while we see ample cause for all citizens who are loyal to the system of government which Providence enabled our fathers to establish, and who wish to preserve it and the liberties it secures, to be vigilant and active, we see none for alarm. The bill, if it passes, will be manifestly unconstitutional, even counting the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments as valid parts of the constitution; and there may be more difficulty in carrying it into effect than its framers anticipate. It is part and parcel of a New England policy, and New England is not omnipotent throughout the Union, nor very ardently loved; not all the members of the several evangelical denominations will, when they understand it, favor the revolution in the government Mr. Wilson would effect. There are in those denominations many men who belong not to the dominant party, and who will follow their political rather than their denominational affinities; also, there are in them a large number, we should hope, of honest men, who are not accustomed to act on the maxim, "the end justifies the means," loyal men and patriotic, who consider it no less disloyalty to seek to revolutionize our government against the states than against the Union, and who will give their votes and all their influence to preserve the fundamental principles and genius of our federative system of government, as left us by our fathers, and resist, if need be, to the death the disloyal policy of unification and education proposed by Mr. Wilson. The Southern states are reconstructed and back now in their place in the Union, and will not be much longer represented by Northern adventurers, or men of little ability and less character, but very soon by genuine Southern men, who, while strictly loyal to the Union, will speak the genuine sentiments of the Southern people. The attempt to New- Englandize the Southern people has not succeeded, and will not succeed. When to the Southern people, who will never acquiesce in the policy of unification, we add the large number of people in the Northern states who from their political convictions and affinities, as well as from their conservative tendencies, will oppose consolidation, we may feel pretty sure that the policy Mr. Wilson presents as that of the Republican party will not be adopted, or if adopted will not be permitted to stand. As not wholly inexperienced in political matters, and looking at the present state of parties and temper of the nation, we should say that Mr. Wilson, as a party man, has committed a blunder, and that, if he has fancied that his New Departure is fitted to strengthen his party as a political party, and to give it a new lease of power, he has miscalculated. Nothing in our judgment would be more fatal to the continuance of his party in power than for it boldly and unequivocally to accept Mr. Wilson's programme. There is such a thing as reaction in human affairs, and reactions are sometimes very powerful. The educational question ought not to present any serious difficulty, and would not if our Evangelicals and humanitarians did not wish to make education a means of preventing the growth of the church and unmaking the children of Catholics, as Catholics; or if they seriously and in good faith would accept the religious equality before the state which the [8] [9] constitution and laws, both of the Union and the several states, as yet recognize and protect. No matter what we claim for the Catholic Church in the theological order—we claim for her in the civil order in this country only equality with the sects, and for Catholics only equal rights with citizens who are not Catholics. We demand the freedom of conscience and the liberty of our church, which is our conscience, enjoyed by Evangelicals. This much the country in its constitution and laws has promised us, and this much it cannot deny us without breaking its faith pledged before the world. As American citizens, we object to the assumption of the control of education, or of any action in regard to it, by the general government; for it has no constitutional right to meddle with it, and so far as civil government has any authority in relation to it, it is, under our system of government, the authority of the states severally, not of the states united. We deny, of course, as Catholics, the right of the civil government to educate, for education is a function of the spiritual society, as much so as preaching and the administration of the sacraments; but we do not deny to the state the right to establish and maintain public schools. The state, if it chooses, may even endow religion, or pay the ministers of religion a salary for their support; but its endowments of religion, when made, are made to God, are sacred, and under the sole control and management of the spiritual authority, and the state has no further function in regard to them but to protect the spirituality in the free and full possession and enjoyment of them. If it chooses to pay the ministers of religion a salary, as has been done in France and Spain, though accepted by the Catholic clergy only as a small indemnification for the goods of the church seized by revolutionary governments and appropriated to secular uses, it acquires thereby no rights over them or liberty to supervise their discharge of their spiritual functions. We do not deny the same or an equal right in regard to schools and school-teachers. It may found and endow schools and pay the teachers, but it cannot dictate or interfere with the education or discipline of the school. That would imply a union of church and state, or, rather, the subjection of the spiritual order to the secular, which the Catholic Church and the American system of government both alike repudiate. It is said, however, that the state needs education for its own protection, and to promote the public good or the good of the community, both of which are legitimate ends of its institution. What the state needs in relation to its legitimate ends, or the ends for which it is instituted, it has the right to ordain and control. This is the argument by which all public education by the state is defended. But it involves an assumption which is not admissible. The state, having no religious or spiritual function, can give only secular education, and secular education is not enough for the state's own protection or its promotion of the public good. Purely secular education, or education divorced from religion, endangers the safety of the state and the peace and security of the community, instead of protecting and insuring them. It is not in the power of the state to give the education it needs for its own sake, or for the sake of secular society. The fact is, though statesmen, and especially politicians, are slow to learn it, and still slower to acknowledge it, the state, or secular society, does not and cannot suffice for itself, and is unable to discharge its own proper functions without the co-operation and aid of the spiritual society. Purely secular education creates no civic virtues, and instead of fitting unfits the people for the prompt and faithful discharge of their civic duties, as we may see in Young America, and indeed in the present active and ruling generation of the American people. Young America is impatient of restraint, regards father and mother as old-fogies, narrow-minded, behind the age, and disdains filial submission or obedience to them, has no respect for dignities, acknowledges no superior, mocks at law if he can escape the police, is conceited, proud, self-sufficient, indocile, heedless of the rights and interests of others—will be his own master, and follow his own instincts, passions, or headstrong will. Are these the characteristics of a people fitted to maintain a wise, well-ordered, stable, and beneficent republican government? Or can such a people be developed from such youngerlings? Yet with purely secular education, however far you carry it, experience proves that you can get nothing better. The church herself, even if she had full control of the education of all the children in the land, with ample funds at her command, could not secure anything better, if, as the state, she educated for a secular end alone. The virtues needed for the protection of the state and the advancement of the public or common good, are and can be secured only by educating or training the children and youth of a nation not for this life as an end, but for the life to come. Hence our Lord says, "Seek first the kingdom of God and his justice, and all these things shall be added unto you." The church does not educate for the secular order as an end, but for God and heaven; and it is precisely in educating for God and heaven that she secures those very virtues on which the welfare and security of the secular order depend, and without which civil society tends inevitably to dissolution, and is sustained, if sustained at all, only by armed force, as we have seen in more than one European nation which has taken education into its own hand, and subordinated it to secular ends. The education needed by secular society can be obtained only from the spiritual society, which educates not for this world, but for the world to come. The virtues needed to secure this life are obtained only by seeking and promoting the virtues which fit us for eternal life. This follows necessarily from the fact that man is created with a spiritual nature and for an immortal destiny. If he existed for this life only, if he were, as some sciolists pretend, merely a monkey or a gorilla developed, or were like the beasts that perish, this indeed would not and could not follow, and the reconciliation of the nature and destiny of man with uniform human experience would be impossible. We should be obliged, in order to secure the peace and good order of society, as some unbelieving statesmen do not blush to avow, to educate in view of a falsehood, and take care to keep up the delusion that man has a religious nature and destiny, or look to what is false and delusive for the virtues which can alone save us from anarchy and utter barbarism. Yet what would serve the delusion or the falsehood, if man differs not by nature from the dog or the pig? But if man has really a spiritual nature and an immortal destiny, then it must necessarily follow that his real good can in no respect be obtained but in being educated and trained to live for a spiritual life, for an immortal destiny. Should not man be educated according to his spiritual nature and destiny, not as a pig or a monkey? If so, in his education should not the secular be subordinated to the spiritual, and the temporal to the [10] [11] eternal? We know well, experience proves it, that even the secular virtues are not secured when sought as the end of education and of life, but only in educating and living for that which is not secular, and in securing the virtues which have the promise of the life of the world to come. All education, as all life, should be religious, and all education divorced from religion is an evil, not a good, and is sure in the long run to be ruinous to the secular order; but as a part of religious education, and included in it, secular education has its place, and even its necessity. Man is not all soul, nor all body, but the union of soul and body; and therefore his education should include in their union, not separation—for the separation of soul and body is the death of the body— both spiritual education and secular. It is not that we oppose secular education when given in the religious education, and therefore referred to the ultimate end of man, but when it is given alone and for its own sake. We deny the competency of the state to educate even for its own order, its right to establish purely secular schools, from which all religion is excluded, as Mr. Webster ably contended in his argument in the Girard will case; but we do not deny, we assert rather, its right to establish public schools under the internal control and management of the spiritual society, and to exact that a certain amount of secular instruction be given along with the religious education that society gives. This last right it has in consideration of the secular funds for the support of the schools it furnishes, and as a condition on which it furnishes them. Let the state say distinctly how much secular education in the public schools it exacts, or judges to be necessary for its own ends, and so far as the Catholic Church has anything to do with the matter it can have it. The church will not refuse to give it in the schools under her control. She will not hesitate to teach along with her religion any amount of reading, writing, arithmetic, history, geography, music, and drawing, or the sciences and the fine arts, the state exacts and provides for; nor will she refuse to allow it to send, if it chooses, its own inspectors into her schools to ascertain if she actually gives the secular education required. Let it say, then, what amount of secular education it wants for all the children of the land, and is willing to pay for, and, so far as Catholics are concerned, it can have it, and of as good quality, to say the least, as it can get in purely secular schools, and along with it the religious education, the most essential to it as well as to the souls of all. But the difficulty here, it is assumed, is that the spiritual society with us is divided into various denominations, each with its distinctive views of religion. That, no doubt, is a damage, but can be easily overcome by bearing in mind that the several divisions have equal rights, and by making the public schools denominational, as they are in Prussia, Austria, France, and to a certain extent in England, where denominational diversities obtain as well as with us. Where the community is divided between different religious denominations, all standing on a footing of perfect equality before civil society, this is the only equitable system of public schools that is practicable. If the state does not adopt it, it must—1, let the whole business of education alone, and make no public provision for it; 2, establish purely secular, that is, godless schools, from which all religion is excluded, to which no religious people can be expected to consent, and which would ruin both public and private virtue, and defeat the very purpose of all education; or, 3, it must practically, if not theoretically, recognize some one of the several denominations as the state religion, and remit the education of childhood and youth to its management and control, as is virtually the case with our present public schools, but which would be manifestly unjust to all the others—to non-evangelicals, if evangelicalism is made the state religion, or to the Evangelicals, if a non-evangelical denomination be established as the religion of the state. The only way to be just to all is, as everybody can see, to recognize in practice as well as in profession the equal rights of all denominations in the civil order—make the public schools denominational, and give to each denomination that asks it for the sake of conscience its fair and honest proportion, to be as to their internal economy, education, and discipline under its sole control and management. Mr. Wilson proposes for our admiration and imitation the Prussian system of public schools, and though we do not know that it is superior to the Austrian or even the French system, yet we think highly of it. But, what the Evangelical senator does not tell us, the Prussian system is strictly the denominational system, and each denomination is free and expected to educate in its own schools its own children, under the direction of its pastors and teachers, in its own religion. The Prussian system recognizes the fact that different communions do exist among the Prussian people, and does not aim to suppress them or at unification by state authority. It meets the fact as it is, without seeking to alter it. Give us the Prussian system of denominational schools, and we shall be satisfied, even if education is made compulsory. We, of course, protest against any law compelling us to send our children to schools in which our religion cannot be freely taught, in which no religion is taught, or in which is taught in any shape or degree a religion which we hold to be false or perilous to souls. Such a law would violate the rights of parents and the freedom of conscience; but with denominational schools compulsory education would violate no one's conscience and no parental right. Parents ought, if able, to have their children educated, and if they will not send their children to schools provided for them by the public, and in which their religion is respected, and made the basis of the education given, we can see no valid reason why the law should not compel them. The state has the right, perhaps the duty, in aid of the spiritual society and for its own safety and the public good, to compel parents to educate their children when public schools of their own religion, under the charge of their own pastors, are provided for them at the public expense. Let the public schools be denominational, give us our proportion of them, so that no violence will be done to parental rights or to the Catholic conscience, and we shall be quite willing to have education made compulsory, and even if such schools are made national, though we should object as American citizens to them, we should as Catholics accept them. We hold state authority is the only constitutional authority under our system to establish schools and provide for them at the public expense; but we could manage to get along with national denominational schools as well as others could. We could educate in our share of the public schools our own children in our own way, and that is all we ask. We do not ask to educate the children of [12] [13] others, unless with the consent or at the request of parents and guardians. The Prussian system of denominational schools could be introduced and established in all the states without the least difficulty, if it were not for Evangelicals, their Unitarian offshoots, and their humanitarian allies. These are religious and philanthropic busybodies, who fancy they are the Atlas who upholds the world, and that they are deputed to take charge of everybody's affairs, and put them to rights. But they forget that their neighbors have rights as well as themselves, and perhaps intentions as honest and enlightened, and as much real wisdom and practical sagacity. The only obstacle to the introduction and establishment of a just and equitable system of public schools comes from the intolerant zeal of these Evangelicals, who seek to make the public schools an instrument for securing the national, social, and religious unification they are resolved on effecting, and for carrying out their purpose of suppressing the church and extirpating Catholicity from American soil. They want to use them in training our children up in the way of Evangelicalism, and moulding the whole American population into one homogeneous people, modelled, as we have said, after the New England Evangelical type. Here is the difficulty, and the whole difficulty. The denominational system would defeat their darling hope, their pet project, and require them to live and let live. They talk much about freedom of conscience and religious liberty and equal rights; but the only equal rights they understand are all on their side, and they cherish such a tender regard for religious liberty, have so profound a respect for it, that they insist, like our Puritan forefathers, on keeping it all to themselves,...