the

on, they must be conceded, if they are within the scope of temporal order, and involve no sacrifice of the rights of the spiritual. When the children of Israel grew tired of the governinent of the Lord through divinely-appointed judges, and demanded a king to go in and out before them, that they might be like other nations, he rebuked them sharply for their ingratitude, and exposed to them the folly of their request: nevertheless, he complied with it, and gave them a king.

Undoubtedly, the changes which it is lawful to demand or to concede are such as lie within the province of the temporal, in regard to which the people under God are Sovereign, and have the right to follow their own will. Certainly, the state has no right to make at the popular demand any concessions incompatible with the moral and spiritual order represented by the Church; for neither it nor the people have any authority in that order. The proper sphere of all human government is the sphere of human prudence, and it is only within this sphere that changes are admissi

ble.

All in human society that must be fixed and unalterable, and all that, though not fixed and unalterable, which pertains to spiritual discipline, is placed under the jurisdiction of the Church, whose authority both prince and people must always respect, and never contravene. But civil society, saving the supremacy of the spiritual and the freedom and independence of the Church, is free to act for itself, and to make such changes and compromises as it judges expedient under the circumstances of the time and place. As the state represents not the absolute and unalterable, but the relative and the changeable, it should always be constituted with the faculty of change, of keeping itself in har

mon

with the wants and wishes of the age and nation. In

this necessity of change on the part of civil society, we may see the reason why the Church leaves the constitution of the state to the people, and prescribes no particular form of civil polity. It is because no one particular form is adapted to allations, nor to the same nation through all the stages of its existence.

That the clergy, as a body, have a strong tendency to introduce into civil society the fixedness and unalterability of the Church, is no doubt a fact; and in this fact

we

may probably find the reason why sacerdotal governmen ts are generally regarded with disfavor by both states

men

and the people. Dealing in their own order with

fixed and unalterable principles, with the absolute and inflexible, only softened in the administration by kindness and charity, they are apt, from their special education and habits of mind, to look upon change as evil, and to seek to prevent it in the civil administration, and to compress all civil and political thought and action within certain fixed and unalterable rules, which permit the people no free spontaneous motion. It has been pretended that the great aim of Pope St. Gregory VII. was to establish a theocratic or sacerdotal government for Christendom, but unjustly; for he labored only to emancipate the Church from the domination of Cæsar, and to compel princes and peoples to respect her freedom and independence. The same charge has been brought against that great and much maligned Pope, Boniface VIII.; but he tells us expressly that he had no thought of interfering with the civil rights of princes, or the civil independence of their crowns. Certainly, in distinguishing the two orders, and in giving to each a separate representative, our Lord did not alter their natural relation one to the other. As the temporal order is, by its own nature, inferior and subordinate to the spiritual, so is the state inferior and subordinate to the Church, against which it has and can have no rights. But under the Church in spirituals, in its own order the state is free and independent.

The distinction of the two orders under separate representatives is asserted with unanimous voice by all Catholic theologians, and has been recognized by every Sovereign Pontiff who has had occasion to touch the subject. A Catholic Prelate, one of the ablest theologians we have ever had in this country, and whose resignation of his See on account of continued ill health and departure from among us all good men must lament, publicly criticized, some years since, some essays in the Review on the Papal Power, because he thought we pushed the doctrine of spiritual sovereignty so far as to deny this distinction, and to absorb the state in the Church. He misapprehended our meaning, as did many others; but, however inexact, unusual, or unguarded our language at times may have been, we have never used a word which meant, in our own mind, any thing incompatible with the distinction of the two powers conter ded for by the eminent Prelate himself, or which we are now asserting. We asserted then, we assert now, and we trust we always shall assert, the supremacy of the spiritual,

and, therefore, the duty of the temporal to recognize and conform to the spiritual order; but we have always understood and maintained that the spiritual leaves the temporal its freedom and independence in its own order. What we were, and still are sedulous to guard against, is political atheism, or the assumption of the spiritual independence of the temporal, or the freedom of the state from the law of God as interpreted and applied by the Church. As against the spiritual, or the Church, the temporal has no rights, no freedom, no independence; but within its own order, and taking care not to contravene the spiritual, it is free, and may follow its own judgment.

The importance of this distinction of the two powers is not always recognized and appreciated by statesmen. Conservative statesmen usually study in the constitution and administration of political power to copy the fixedness and unalterability of the spiritual order, and to make the state a quasi Church. Radicals or reformers aim to copy in the Church the mobility and changeableness of all things human, and to reduce the Church to simple civil society. Re⚫formers understand well that the faculty of change-progress in their language-is essential to the political constitution of society, and therefore conclude that the Church should have the same faculty, and change as the world changes. Conservatives understand equally well that the Church, as representing the divine, must have the attribute of immutability, and hence conclude that political society should also be immutable, and repress instead of yielding to

reasons from the human to the divine; the other from the divine to the human. Each has a truth, and each an error. The truth of each is preserved and the error avoided by the distinction of the two powers, and the understanding that

the

Church represents the unchangeable, and the state thehangeable or the progressive. We may demand prog

in civil society, provide for amendment or alteration in its constitution, as in the imperial constitution of France the several republican constitutions in our own country, but not in the essential constitution of the Church, because

that

itual wants of all ages and nations. was perfect in the beginning and adapted to the spir

The neglect to recognize in its true light this distinction between the two powers has led to the standing charge against the Church, that she favors social immobility,

permits no progress, and is therefore the support of despotism, the enemy of light and liberty, and the friend of darkness and slavery. She is believed to be leagued with the old system of government which has outlived its time, and has now become tyrannical and oppressive, and a barrier to all social progress. For this reason men make war on her, and large masses of the European populations are alienated from her, are exceedingly mad against her, and persuade themselves that the secular rights of individuals and nations can be secured only by her destruction. All this is false as false can be; but, unhappily, there is a class of very excellent people, and very excellent Catholics, learned and devout, where there is no question of politics,-called in Italy oscurantisti, who, by their words and deeds, contribute much to confirm in the minds of the alienated this false charge. They are, no doubt, honestly attached to the old régime and to modern Cæsarism, and firmly believe that the changes contended for by the popular party cannot be introduced without serious detriment both to religion and society. They deny that the hostility manifested to the Church is primarily hostility to the politics which it is falsely assumed she upholds with her spiritual authority, and quietly dispose of the undeniable recrudescence of infidelity in the last few years by ascribing it to the native wickedness of the human heart, or to the machinations of the Enemy of souls. Instead of yielding in the order of the changeable to the demands of the age, they do all that in them lies to strengthen the hands of power, to render more stringent the system of repression, and to exaggerate, if possible, the odious features of the very system which provokes opposition. Here is our great difficulty.

We honor and respect these people for their many virtues, and we honor their inflexibility and their superiority to all demagogical arts, and perhaps our own natural disposition would associate us with them. But we believe them mistaken. We believe we know these disaffected classes better than they do, and we do not concede that it is to the Church or to any thing essentially Catholic that, as a body, they are primarily opposed, but that it is to the politics defended in her name, and with which they believe her necessarily associated. The political and social obscurantism they find supported by what seem to be her accredited organs, they are determined to get rid of, and they imagine that they can successfully attack it only over her prostrate form.

We speak not without warrant when we say their hostility to the Church not seldom springs from the only good that is left in them. They are wrong, fearfully wrong; but their hostility to the Church does not, as our conservative brethren believe, as a general thing, spring from their hostility to Catholicity because it teaches the truth, and enjoins purity of heart or sanctity of life. Men do not reject a religion for such a reason, however corrupt or vicious they may be; for that is precisely what the worst of men believe religion should do. It may be a reason why they neglect to practise it, but it is not a reason why they seek to drive it from the world. The real cause is to be sought in their own political passions and convictions opposed to the political system maintained in her name, or as essential to her interests, by the oscurantisti, and we have little doubt that the great body of them would gradually abandon their hostility if these would cease to interpose themselves as an opaque substance between them and her, and to prevent them from seeing the Immaculate Spouse of God in her own resplendent beauty.

We of course do not accept the politics of the oscur antisti, for we are republicans, and opposed to the social system they defend. We are of the New World, not the Old. But we do not quarrel with them simply because they differ from us in politics. They have the same right to defend their honest political convictions that we have to defend ours. What we deny them is the right to defend their political system in the name of our common religion, and to claim for it the positive sanction of the Church. They have no such right in relation to their politics, as we have no such right in relation to ours. If they are Catholics, So are we; and we claim to be as good and as orthodox Catholics as they are, as firmly attached to our faith, and as submissive to the Holy See. It is for them to vindicate their Catholicity to us, as much as it is for us to vindicate ours to

them

for it does not follow that a man is a good orthodox

Catholic because he defends antiquated despotism, and an

on account of their politics, and they must not question our Catholicity on account of ours. Our quarrel with them is not that they are oscurantisti, but that they associate their Oscurantismo with the Church, and obscure her fair face with own dark shadow. We know nothing in the temporal order of Catholic politics. A Catholic church we know and

their