The evils attributed to universal suffrage are not inseparable from it, and, after all, it is doubtful if it elevates men of an inferior cla.s.s to those elevated by restricted suffrage. The Congress of 1860, or of 1862. was a fair average of the wisdom, the talent, and the virtue of the country, and not inferior to that of 1776, or that of 1789; and the Executive during the rebellion was at least as able and as efficient as it was during the war of 1812, far superior to that of Great Britain, and not inferior to that of France during the Crimean war. The Crimean war developed and placed in high command, either with the English or the French, no generals equal to Halleck, Grant, and Sherman, to say nothing of others. The more aristocratic South proved itself, in both statesmanship and generalship, in no respect superior to the territorial democracy of the North and West.
The great evil the country experiences is not from universal suffrage, but from what may be called rotation in office. The number of political aspirants is so great that, in the Northern and Western States especially, the representatives in Congress are changed every two or four years, and a member, as soon as he has acquired the experience necessary to qualify him for his position, is dropped, not through the fickleness of his const.i.tuency, but to give place to another whose aid had been necessary to his first or second election.
Employes are "rotated," not because they are incapable or unfaithful, but because there are others who want their places. This is all bad, but it springs not from universal suffrage, but from a wrong public opinion, which might be corrected by the press, but which is mainly formed by it. There is, no doubt, a due share of official corruption, but not more than elsewhere, and that would be much diminished by increasing the salaries of the public servants, especially in the higher offices of the government, both General and State. The pay to the lower officers and employes of the government, and to the privates and non-commissioned officers in the army, is liberal, and, in general, too liberal; but the pay of the higher grades in both the civil and military service is too low, and relatively far lower than it was when the government was first organized.
The worst tendency in the country, and which is not encouraged at all by the territorial democracy, manifests itself in hostility to the military spirit and a standing army. The depreciation of the military spirit comes from the humanitarian or sentimental democracy, which, like all sentimentalisms, defeats itself, and brings about the very evils it seeks to avoid. The hostility to standing armies is inherited from England, and originated in the quarrels between king and parliament, and is a striking evidence of the folly of that bundle of antagonistic forces called the British const.i.tution. In feudal times most of the land was held by military service, and the reliance of government was on the feudal militia; but no real progress was made in eliminating barbarism till the national authority got a regular army at its command, and became able to defend itself against its enemies. It is very doubtful if English civilization has not, upon the whole, lost more than it has gained by subst.i.tuting parliamentary for royal supremacy, and exchanging the Stuarts for the Guelfs.
No nation is a living, prosperous nation that has lost the military spirit, or in which the profession of the soldier is not held in honor and esteem; and a standing army of reasonable size is public economy.
It absorbs in its ranks a cla.s.s of men who are worth more there than anywhere else; it creates honorable places for gentlemen or the sons of gentlemen without wealth, in which they can serve both themselves and their country. Under a democratic government the most serious embarra.s.sment to the state is its gentlemen, or persons not disposed or not fitted to support themselves by their own hands, more necessary in a democratic government than in any other. The civil service, divinity, law, and medicine, together with literature, science, and art, cannot absorb the whole of this ever-increasing cla.s.s, and the army and navy would be an economy and a real service to the state were they maintained only for the sake of the rank and position they give to their officers, and the wholesome influence these officers would exert on society and the politics of the country--this even in case there were no wars or apprehension of wars. They supply an element needed in all society, to sustain in it the chivalric and heroic spirit, perpetually endangered by the mercantile and political spirit, which has in it always something low and sordid.
But wars are inevitable, and when a nation has no surrounding nations to fight, it will, as we have just proved, fight itself. When it can have no foreign war, it will get up a domestic war; for the human animal, like all animals, must work off in some way its fighting humor, and the only sure way of maintaining peace is always to be prepared for war. A regular standing army of forty thousand men would have prevented the Mexican war, and an army of fifty thousand well-disciplined and efficient troops at the command of the President on his inauguration in March, 1861, would have prevented the rebellion, or have instantly suppressed it. The cost of maintaining a land army of even a hundred thousand men, and a naval force to correspond, would have been, in simple money value, only a t.i.the of what the rebellion has cost the nation, to say nothing of the valuable lives that have been sacrificed for the losses on the rebel side, as well as those on the side of the government, are equally to be counted. The actual losses to the country have been not less than six or eight thousand millions of dollars, or nearly one-half the a.s.sessed value of the whole property of the United States according to the census returns of 1860, and which has only been partially cancelled by actual increase of property since. To meet the interest on the debt incurred will require a heavier sum to be raised annually by taxation, twice over, without discharging a cent of the princ.i.p.al, than would have been necessary to maintain an army and navy adequate to the protection of peace and the prevention of the rebellion.
The rebellion is now suppressed, and if the government does not blunder much more in its civil efforts at pacification than it did in its military operations, before 1868 things will settle down into their normal order; but a regular army--not militia or volunteers, who are too expensive--of at least a hundred thousand men of all arms, and a navy nearly as large as that of England or France, will be needed as a peace establishment. The army of a hundred thousand men must form a cadre of an army of three times that number, which will be necessary to place the army on a war footing. Less will answer neither for peace nor war, for the nation has, in spite of herself, to maintain henceforth the rank of a first-cla.s.s military and maritime power, and take a leading part in political movements of the civilized world, and, to a great extent, hold in her hand the peace of Europe.
Canning boasted that he had raised up the New World to redress the balance of the Old: a vain boast, for he simply weakened Spain and gave the hegemony of Europe to Russia, which the Emperor of the French is trying, by strengthening Italy and Spain, and by a French protectorate in Mexico, to secure to France, both in the Old World and the New--a magnificent dream, but not to be realized. His uncle judged more wisely when he sold Louisiana, left the New World to itself, and sought only to secure to France the hegemony of the Old. But the hegemony of the New World henceforth belongs to the United States, and she will have a potent voice in adjusting the balance of power even in Europe.
To maintain this position, which is imperative on her, she must always have a large armed force, either on foot or in reserve, which she can call out and put on a war footing at short notice. The United States must henceforth be a great military and naval power, and the old hostility to a standing army and the old attempt to bring the military into disrepute must be abandoned, and the country yield to its destiny.
Of the several tendencies mentioned, the humanitarian tendency, egoistical at the South, detaching the individual from the race and socialistic at the North, absorbing the individual in the race, is the most dangerous. The egoistical form is checked, sufficiently weakened by the defeat of the rebels; but the social form believes that it has triumphed, and that individuals are effaced in society, and the States in the Union. Against this, more especially should public opinion and American statesmanship be now directed, and territorial democracy and the division of the powers of government be a.s.serted and vigorously maintained. The danger is that while this socialistic form of democracy is conscious of itself, the territorial democracy has not yet arrived, as the Germans say, at self consciousness--_selbsbewusstseyn_--and operates only instinctively. All the dominant theories and sentimentalities are against it, and it is only Providence that can sustain it.
CHAPTER XV.
DESTINY--POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS.
It has been said in the Introduction to this essay that every living nation receives from Providence a special work or mission in the progress of society, to accomplish which is its destiny, or the end for which it exists; and that the special mission of the United States is to continue and complete in the political order the Graeco-Roman civilization.
Of all the states or colonies on this continent, the American Republic alone has a destiny, or the ability to add any thing to the civilization of the race. Canada and the other British Provinces, Mexico and Central America, Columbia and Brazil, and the rest of the South American States, might be absorbed in the United States without being missed by the civilized world. They represent no idea, and the work of civilization could go on without them as well as with them. If they keep up with the progress of civilization, it is all that can be expected of them. France, England, Germany, and Italy might absorb the rest of Europe, and all Asia and Africa, without withdrawing a single laborer from the work of advancing the civilization of the race; and it is doubtful if these nations themselves can severally or jointly advance it much beyond the point reached by the Roman Empire, except in abolishing slavery and including in the political people the whole territorial people. They can only develop and give a general application to the fundamental principles of the Roman const.i.tution.
That indeed is much, but it adds no new element nor new combination of preexisting elements. But nothing of this can be said of the United States.
In the Graeco-Roman civilization is found the state proper, and the great principle of the territorial const.i.tution of power, instead of the personal or the genealogical, the patriarchal or the monarchical; and yet with true civil or political principles it mixed up nearly all the elements of the barbaric const.i.tution. The gentile system of Rome recalls the patriarchal, and the relation that subsisted between the patron and his clients has a striking resemblance to that which subsists between the feudal lord and his retainers, and may have had the same origin. The three tribes, Ramnes, Quirites, and Luceres, into which the Roman people were divided before the rise of the plebs, may have been, as Niebuhr contends, local, not genealogical, in their origin, but they were not strictly territorial distinctions, and the division of each tribe into a hundred houses or gentes was not local, but personal, if not, as the name implies, genealogical. No doubt the individuals or families composing the house or gens were not all of kindred blood, for the Oriental custom of adoption, so frequent with our North American Indians, and with all people distributed into tribes, septs, or clans, obtained with the Romans. The adopted member was considered a child of the house, and took its name and inherited its goods. Whether, as Niebuhr maintains, all the free gentiles of the three tribes were called patres or patricians or whether the term was restricted to the heads of houses, it is certain that the head of the house represented it in the senate, and the vote in the curies was by houses, not by individuals en ma.s.se. After all, practically the Roman senate was hardly less an estate than the English house of lords, for no one could sit in it unless a landed proprietor and of n.o.ble blood.
The plebs, though outside of the political people proper, as not being included in the three tribes, when they came to be a power in the republic under the emperors, and the old distinction of plebs and patricians was forgotten, were an estate, and not a local or territorial people.
The republican element was in the fact that the land, which gave the right to partic.i.p.ate in political power, was the domain of the state, and the tenant held it from the state. The domain was vested in the state, not in the senator nor the prince, and was therefore respublica, not private property--the first grand leap of the human race from barbarism. In all other respects the Roman const.i.tution was no more republican than the feudal. Athens went farther than Rome, and introduced the principle of territorial democracy. The division into demes or wards, whence comes the word democracy, was a real territorial division, not personal nor genealogical. And if the equality of all men was not recognized, all who were included in the political cla.s.s stood on the same footing. Athens and other Greek cities, though conquered by Rome, exerted after their conquest a powerful influence on Roman civilization, which became far more democratic under the emperors than it had been under the patrician senate, which the a.s.sa.s.sins of Julius Caesar, and the superannuated conservative party they represented, tried so hard to preserve. The senate and the consulship were opened to the representatives of the great plebeian houses, and the provincials were clothed with the rights of Roman citizens, and uniform laws were established throughout the empire.
The grand error, as has already been said, of the Graeco-Roman or gentile civilization, was in its denial or ignorance of the unity of the human race, as well as the Unity of G.o.d, and in its including in the state only a particular cla.s.s of the territorial people, while it held all the rest as slaves, though in different degrees of servitude.
It recognized and sustained a privileged cla.s.s, a ruling order; and if, as subsequently did the Venetian aristocracy, it recognized democratic equality within that order, it held all outside of it to be less than men and without political rights. Practically, power was an attribute of birth and of private wealth. Suffrage was almost universal among freemen, but down almost to the Empire, the people voted by orders, and were counted, not numerically, but by the rank of the order, and the comitia curiata could always carry the election over the comitia centuriata, and thus power remained always in the hands of the rich and n.o.ble few.
The Roman Law, as digested by jurists under Justinian in the sixth Century, indeed, recognizes the unity of the race, a.s.serts the equality of all men by the natural law, and undertakes to defend slavery on principles not incompatible with that equality. It represents it as a commutation of the punishment of death, which the emperor has the right to inflict on captives taken in war, to perpetual servitude; and as servitude is less severe than death, slavery was really a proof of imperial clemency. But it has never yet been proved that the emperor has the right under the natural law to put captives taken even in a just war to death, and the Roman poet himself bids us "humble the proud, but spare the submissive." In a just war the emperor may kill on the battle-field those in arms against him, but the jus gentium, as now interpreted by the jurisprudence of every civilized nation, does not allow him to put them to death after they have ceased resistance, have thrown down their arms, and surrendered. But even if it did, it gives him a right only over the persons captured, not over their innocent children, and therefore no right to establish hereditary slavery, for the child is not punishable for the offences of the parent. The law, indeed, a.s.sumed that the captive ceased to exist as a person and treated him as a thing, or mere property of the conqueror, and being property, he could beget only property, which would accrue only to his owner. But there is no power in heaven or earth that can make a person a thing, a mere piece of merchandise, and it is only by a clumsy fiction, or rather by a bare-faced lie, that the law denies the slave his personality and treats him as a thing. I the unity of all men had been clearly seen and vividly felt, the law would never have attempted to justify perpetual slavery on the ground of its penal character, or indeed on any ground whatever. All men are born under the law of nature with equal rights, and the civil law can justly deprive no man of his liberty, but for a crime, committed by him personally, that justly forfeits his liberty to society.
These defects of the Graeco-Roman civilization the European nations have in part remedied, and may completely remedy. They can carry out practically the Christian dogma of the unity of the human race, abolish slavery in every form, make all men equal before the law, and the political people commensurate with the territorial people. Indeed, France has already done it. She has abolished slavery, villenage, serf.a.ge, political aristocracy, a.s.serted the equality of all men before the law, vindicated the sovereignty of the people, and established universal suffrage, complete social and territorial democracy. The other nations may do as much, but hardly can any of them do more or advance farther. Yet in France, territorial democracy the most complete results only in establishing the most complete imperial centralism, usually called Caesarism.
The imperial const.i.tution of France recognizes that the emperor reigns "by the grace of G.o.d and the will of the nation," and therefore, that by the grace of G.o.d and the will of the nation he may cease to reign; but while he reigns he is supreme, and his will is law. The const.i.tution imposes no real or effective restraint on his power: while he sits upon the throne he is practically France, and the ministers are his clerks; the council of state, the senate, and the legislative body are merely his agents in governing the nation. This may, indeed, be changed, but only to subst.i.tute for imperial centralism democratic centralism, which were no improvement, or to go back to the system of antagonisms, checks and balances, called const.i.tutionalism, or parliamentary government, of which Great Britain is the model, and which were a return toward barbarism, or mediaeval feudalism.
The human race has its life in G.o.d, and tends to realize in all orders the Divine Word or Logos, which is Ionic itself, and the principle of all conciliation, of the dialectic union of all opposites or extremes.
Mankind will be logical; and the worst of all tyrannies is that which forbids them to draw from their principles their last logical consequences, or that prohibits them the free explication and application of the Divine Idea, in which consists their life, their progress. Such tyranny strikes at the very existence of society, and wars against the reality of things. It is supremely sophistical, and its success is death; for the universe in its const.i.tution is supremely logical, and man, individually and socially, is rational. G.o.d is the author and type of all created things; and all creatures, each in its order, imitate or copies the Divine Being, who is intrinsically Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, principle, medium, and end. The Son or Word is the medium, which unites the two extremes, whence G.o.d is living G.o.d a real, active, living Being--living, concrete, not abstract or dead unity, like the unity of old Xenophanes, Plotinus, and Proclus. In the Holy Trinity is the principle and prototype of all society, and what is called the solidarity of the race is only the outward expression, or copy in the external order, of what theologians term the circ.u.msession of the three Divine Persons of the G.o.dhead.
Now, human society, when it copies the Divine essence and nature either in the distinction of persons alone, or in the unity alone, is sophistical, and wants the principle of all life and reality. It sins against G.o.d, and must fail of its end. The English system, which is based on antagonistic elements, on opposites, without the middle term that conciliates them, unites them, and makes them dialectically one, copies the Divine model in its distinctions alone, which, considered alone, are opposites or contraries. It denies, if Englishmen could but see it, the unity of G.o.d. The French, or imperial system, which excludes the extremes, instead of uniting them, denies all opposites, instead of conciliating them--denies the distinctions in the model, and copies only the unity, which is the supreme sophism called pantheism.
The English const.i.tution has no middle term, and the French no extremes, and each in its way denies the Divine Trinity, the original basis and type of the syllogism. The human race can be contented with neither, for neither allows it free scope for its inherent life and activity. The English system tends to pure individualism; the French to pure socialism or despotism, each endeavoring to suppress an element of the one living and indissoluble TRUTH.
This is not fancy, is not fine-spun speculation, or cold and lifeless abstraction, but the highest theological and philosophical truth, without which there were no reason, no man, no society; for G.o.d is the first principle of all being, all existence, all science, all life, and it is in Him that we live and move and have our being. G.o.d is at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of all things--the universal principle, medium, and end; and no truth can be denied without His existence being directly or indirectly impugned. In a deeper sense than is commonly understood is it true that nisi Dominus aedificaverit domum, in vanum laboraverunt qui aedificant eam. The English const.i.tution is composed of contradictory elements, incapable of reconciliation, and each element is perpetually struggling with the others for the mastery. For a long time the king labored, intrigued, and fought to free himself from the thraldom in which he was held by the feudal barons; in 1688 the aristocracy and people united and humbled the crown; and now the people are at work seeking to sap both the crown and the n.o.bles. The state is const.i.tuted to n.o.body"s satisfaction; and though all may unite in boasting its excellences, all are at work trying to alter or amend it. The work of const.i.tuting the state with the English is ever beginning, never ending. Hence the eternal clamor for parliamentary reform.
Great Britain and other European states may sweep away all that remains of feudalism, include the whole territorial people with the equal rights of all in the state or political people, concede to birth and wealth no political rights, but they will by so doing only establish either imperial centralism, as has been done in France, or democratic centralism, clamored for, conspired for, and fought for by the revolutionists of Europe. The special merit of the American system is not in its democracy alone, as too many at home and abroad imagine; but along with its democracy in the division of the powers of government, between a General government and particular State governments, which are not antagonistic governments, for they act on different matters, and neither is nor can be subordinated to the other.
Now, this division of power, which decentralizes the government without creating mutually hostile forces, can hardly be introduced into any European state. There may be a union of states in Great Britain, in Germany, in Italy, perhaps in Spain, and Austria is laboring hard to effect it in her heterogeneous empire; but the union possible in any of them is that of a Bund or confederation, like the Swiss or German Bund, similar to what the secessionists in the United States so recently attempted and have so signally failed to establish. An intelligent Confederate officer remarked that their Confederacy had not been in operation three months before it became evident that the principle on which it was founded, if not rejected, would insure its defeat. It was that principle of State sovereignty, for which the States seceded, more than the superior resources and numbers of the Government, that caused the collapse of the Confederacy. The numbers were relatively about equal, and the military resources of the Confederacy were relatively not much inferior to those of the Government. So at least the Confederate leaders thought, and they knew the material resources of the Government as well as their own, and had calculated them with as much care and accuracy as any men could. Foreign powers also, friendly as well as unfriendly, felt certain that the secessionists would gain their independence, and so did a large part of the people even of the loyal States. The failure is due to the disintegrating principle of State sovereignty, the very principle of the Confederacy. The war has proved that united states are, other things being equal, an overmatch for confederated states.
The European states must unite either as equals or as unequals. As equals, the union can be only a confederacy, a sort of Zollverein, in which each state retains its individual sovereignty; if as unequals, then someone among them will aspire to the hegemony, and you have over again the Athenian Confederation, formed at the conclusion of the Persian war, and its fate. A union like the American cannot be created by a compact, or by the exercise of supreme power. The Emperor of the French cannot erect the several Departments of France into states, and divide the powers of government between them as individual and as united states. They would necessarily hold from the imperial government, which, though it might exercise a large part of its functions through them, would remain, as now, the supreme central government, from which all governmental powers emanate, as our President is apparently attempting, in his reconstruction policy, to make the government of the United States. The elements of a state const.i.tuted like the American do not exist in any European nation, nor in the const.i.tution of European society; and the American const.i.tution would have been impracticable even here had not Providence so ordered it that the nation was born with it, and has never known any other.
Rome recognized the necessity of the federal principle, and applied it in the best way she could. At first it was a single tribe or people distributed into distinct gentes or houses; after the Sabine war, a second tribe was added on terms of equality, and the state was dual, composed of two tribes, the Ramnes and the t.i.ties or Quirites, and, afterward, in the time of Tullus Hostilius, were added the Lucertes or Luceres, making the division into three ruling tribes, each divided into one hundred houses or gentes. Each house in each tribe was represented by its chief or decurion in the senate, making the number of senators exactly three hundred, at which number the senate was fixed. Subsequently was added, by Ancus, the plebs, who remained without authority or share in the government of the city of Rome itself, though they might aspire to the first rank in the allied cities. The division into tribes, and the division of the tribes into gentes or houses, and the vote in the state by tribes, and in the tribes by houses, effectually excluded democratic centralism; but the division was not a division of the powers of government between two co-ordinate governments, for the senate had supreme control, like the British parliament, over all matters, general and particular.
The establishment, after the secession of the plebs, of the tribunitial veto, which gave the plebeians a negative power in the state, there was an incipient division of the powers of government; but only a division between the positive and negative powers, not between the general and the particular. The power accorded to the plebs, or commons, as Niebuhr calls them--who is, perhaps, too fond of explaining the early const.i.tution of Rome by a.n.a.logies borrowed from feudalism, and especially from the const.i.tution of his native Ditmarsch--was simply an obstructive power; and when it, by development, became a positive power, it absorbed all the powers of government, and created the Empire.
There was, indeed, a nearer approach to the division of powers in the American system, between imperial Rome and her allied or confederated munic.i.p.alities. These munic.i.p.alities, modelled chiefly after that of Rome, were elective, and had the management of their own local affairs; but their local powers were not co-ordinate in their own sphere with those exercised by the Roman munic.i.p.ality, but subordinate and dependent. The senate had the supreme power over them, and they held their rights subject to its will. They were formally, or virtually, subjugated states, to which the Roman senate, and afterward the Roman emperors, left the form of the state and the mere shadow of freedom.
Rome owed much to her affecting to treat them as allies rather than as subjects, and at first these munic.i.p.al organizations secured the progress of civilization in the provinces; but at a later period, under the emperors, they served only the imperial treasury, and were crushed by the taxes imposed and the contributions levied on them by the fiscal agents of the empire. So heavy were the fiscal burdens imposed on the burgesses, if the term may be used, that it needed an imperial edict to compel them to enter the munic.i.p.al government; and it became, under the later emperors, no uncommon thing for free citizens to sell themselves into slavery, to escape the fiscal burdens imposed. There are actually imperial edicts extant forbidden freemen to sell themselves as slaves.
Thus ended the Roman federative system, and it is difficult to discover in Europe the elements of a federative system that could have a more favorable result.
Now, the political destiny or mission of the United States is, in common with the European nations, to eliminate the barbaric elements retained by the Roman const.i.tution, and specially to realize that philosophical division of the powers of government which distinguish it from both imperial and democratic centralism on the one hand, and, on the other, from the checks and balances or organized antagonisms which seek to preserve liberty by obstructing the exercise of power. No greater problem in statesmanship remains to be solved, and no greater contribution to civilization to be made. Nowhere else than in this New World, and in this New World only in the United States, can this problem be solved, or this contribution be made, and what the Graeco-Roman republic began be completed.
But the United States have a religious as well as a political destiny, for religion and politics go together. Church and state, as governments, are separate indeed, but the principles on which the state is founded have their origin and ground in the spiritual order--in the principles revealed or affirmed by religion--and are inseparable from them. There is no state without G.o.d, any more than there is a church without Christ or the Incarnation. An atheist may be a politician, but if there were no G.o.d there could be no politics, theological principles are the basis of political principles. The created universe is a dialectic whole, distinct but inseparable from its Creator, and all its parts cohere and are essential to one another. All has its origin and prototype in the Triune G.o.d, and throughout expresses unity in triplicity and triplicity in unity, without which there is no real being and no actual or possible life. Every thing has its principle, medium, and end. Natural society is initial, civil government is medial, the church is teleological, but the three are only distinctions in one indissoluble whole.
Man, as we have seen, lives by communion with G.o.d through the Divine creative act, and is perfected or completed only through the Incarnation, in Christ, the Word made flesh. True, he communes with G.o.d through his kind, and through external nature, society in which he is born and reared, and property through which he derives sustenance for his body; but these are only media of his communion with G.o.d, the source of life--not either the beginning or the end of his communion.
They have no life in themselves, since their being is in G.o.d, and, of themselves, can impart none. They are in the order of second causes, and second causes, without the first cause, are nought. Communion which stops with them, which takes them as the principle and end, instead of media, as they are, is the communion of death, not of life.
As religion includes all that relates to communion with G.o.d, it must in some form be inseparable from every living act of man, both individually and socially; and, in the long run, men must conform either their politics to their religion or their religion to their politics. Christianity is constantly at work, moulding political society in its own image and likeness, and every political system struggles to harmonize Christianity with itself. If, then, the United States have a political destiny, they have a religious destiny inseparable from it.
The political destiny of the United States is to conform the state to the order of reality, or, so to speak, to the Divine Idea in creation.
Their religious destiny is to render practicable and to realize the normal relations between church and state, religion and politics, as concreted in the life of the nation.
In politics, the United States are not realizing a political theory of any sort whatever. They, on the contrary, are successfully refuting all political theories, making away with them, and establishing the state--not on a theory, not on an artificial basis or a foundation laid by human reason or will, but on reality, the eternal and immutable principles in relation to which man is created. They are doing the same in regard to religious theories. Religion is not a theory, a subjective view, an opinion, but is, objectively, at once a principle, a law, and a fact, and, subjectively, it is, by the aid of G.o.d"s grace, practical conformity to what is universally true and real. The United States, in fulfilment of their destiny, are making as sad havoc with religious theories as with political theories, and are pressing on with irresistible force to the real or the Divine order which is expressed in the Christian mysteries, which exists independent of man"s understanding and will, and which man can neither make nor unmake.
The religious destiny of the United States is not to create a new religion nor to found a new church. All real religion is catholic, and is neither new nor old, but is always and everywhere true. Even our Lord came neither to found a new church nor to create a new religion, but to do the things which had been foretold, and to fulfil in time what had been determined in eternity. G.o.d has himself founded the church on catholic principles, or principles always and everywhere real principles. His church is necessarily catholic, because founded on catholic dogmas, and the dogmas are catholic, because they are universal and immutable principles, having their origin and ground in the Divine Being Himself, or in the creative act by which He produces and sustains all things. Founded on universal and immutable principles, the church can never grow old or obsolete, but is the church for all times and Places, for all ranks and conditions of men.
Man cannot change either the church or the dogmas of faith, for they are founded in the highest reality, which is above him, over him, and independent of him. Religion is above and independent of the state, and the state has nothing to do with the church or her dogmas, but to accept and conform to them as it does to any of the facts or principles of science, to a mathematical truth, or to a physical law.
But while the church, with her essential const.i.tution, and her dogmas are founded in the Divine order, and are catholic and unalterable, the relations between the civil and ecclesiastical authorities may be changed or modified by the changes of time and place. These relations have not been always the same, but have differed in different ages and countries. During the first three centuries of our era the church had no legal status, and was either connived at or persecuted by the state.
Under the Christian emperors she was recognized by the civil law; her prelates had exclusive jurisdiction in mixed civil and ecclesiastical questions, and were made, in some sense, civil magistrates, and paid as such by the empire. Under feudalism, the prelates received invest.i.ture as princes and barons, and formed alone, or in connection with the temporal lords, an estate in the kingdom. The Pope became a temporal prince and suzerain, at one time, of a large part of Europe, and exercised the arbitratorship in all grave questions between Christian sovereigns themselves, and between them and their subjects. Since the downfall of feudalism and the establishment of modern centralized monarchy, the church has been robbed of the greater part of her temporal possessions, and deprived, in most countries, of all civil functions, and treated by the state either as an enemy or as a slave.
In all the sectarian and schismatic states of the Old World, the national church is held in strict subjection to the civil authority, as in Great Britain and Russia, and is the slave of the state; in the other states of Europe, as France, Austria, Spain, and Italy, she is treated with distrust by the civil government, and allowed hardly a shadow of freedom and independence. In France, which has the proud t.i.tle of eldest daughter of the church, Catholics, as such, are not freer than they are in Turkey. All religious are said to be free, and all are free, except the religion of the majority of Frenchmen. The emperor, because nominally a Catholic, takes it upon himself to concede the church just as much and just as little freedom in the empire as he judges expedient for his own secular interests. In Italy, Spain, Portugal, Mexico, and the Central and South American states, the policy of the civil authorities is the same, or worse. It may be safely a.s.serted that, except in the United States, the church is either held by the civil power in subjection, or treated as an enemy. The relation is not that of union and harmony, but that of antagonism, to the grave detriment of both religion and civilization.
It is impossible, even if it were desirable, to restore the mixture of civil and ecclesiastical governments which obtained in the Middle Ages; and a total separation of church and state, even as corporations, would, in the present state of men"s minds in Europe, be construed, if approved by the church, into a sanction by her of political atheism, or the right of the civil power to govern according to its own will and pleasure in utter disregard of the law of G.o.d, the moral order, or the immutable distinctions between right and wrong. It could only favor the absolutism of the state, and put the temporal in the place of the spiritual. Hence, the Holy Father includes the proposition of the entire separation of church and state in the Syllabus of Errors condemned in his Encyclical, dated at Rome, December 8, 1864. Neither the state nor the people, elsewhere than in the United States, can understand practically such separation in any other sense than the complete emanc.i.p.ation of our entire secular life from the law of G.o.d, or the Divine order, which is the real order. It is not the union of church and state--that is, the union, or ident.i.ty rather, of religious and political principles--that it is desirable to get rid of, but the disunion or antagonism of church and state. But this is nowhere possible out of the United States; for nowhere else is the state organized on catholic principles, or capable of acting, when acting from its own const.i.tution, in harmony with a really catholic church, or the religious order really existing, in relation to which all things are created and governed. Nowhere else is it practicable, at present, to maintain between the two powers their normal relations.
But what is not practicable in the Old World is perfectly practicable in the New. The state here being organized in accordance with catholic principles, there can be no antagonism between it and the church.
Though operating in different spheres, both are, in their respective spheres, developing and applying to practical life the one and the same Divine Idea. The church can trust the state, and the state can trust the church. Both act from the same principle to one and the same end.
Each by its own const.i.tution co-operates with, aids, and completes the other. It is true the church is not formally established as the civil law of the land, nor is it necessary that she should be; because there is nothing in the state that conflicts with her freedom and independence, with her dogmas or her irreformable canons. The need of establishing the church by law, and protecting her by legal pains and penalties, as is still done in most countries, can exist only in a barbarous or semi-barbarous state of society, where the state is not organized on catholic principles, or the civilization is based on false principles, and in its development tends not to the real or Divine order of things. When the state is const.i.tuted in harmony with that order, it is carried onward by the force of its own internal const.i.tution in a catholic direction, and a church establishment, or what is called a state religion, would be an anomaly, or a superfluity.
The true religion is in the heart of the state, as its informing principle and real interior life. The external establishment, by legal enactment of the church, would afford her no additional protection, add nothing to her power and efficacy, and effect nothing for faith or piety--neither of which can be forced, because both must, from their nature, be free-will offerings to G.o.d.
In the United States, false religions are legally as free as the true religion; but all false religions being one-sided, sophistical, and uncatholic, are opposed by the principles of the state, which tend, by their silent but effective workings, to eliminate them. The American state recognizes only the catholic religion. It eschews all sectarianism, and none of the sects have been able to get their peculiarities incorporated into its const.i.tution or its laws. The state conforms to what each holds that is catholic, that is always and everywhere religion; and what ever is not catholic it leaves, as outside of its province, to live or die, according to its own inherent vitality or want of vitality. The state conscience is catholic, not sectarian; hence it is that the utmost freedom can be allowed to all religions, the false as well as the true; for the state, being catholic in its const.i.tution, can never suffer the adherents of the false to oppress the consciences of the adherents of the true. The church being free, and the state harmonizing with her, catholicity has, in the freedom of both, all the protection it needs, all the security it can ask, and all the support it can, in the nature of the case receive from external inst.i.tutions, or from social and political organizations.
This freedom may not be universally wise or prudent, for all nations may not be prepared for it: all may not have attained their majority.