"The Mission of America," Brownson's Quarterly Review for October, 1856

WE called attention to Dr. Spalding's volume of Miscellanies when it first appeared, and we call attention to it again, for though it has been well spoken of and well received, we fear that it has not met with a success proportioned to its intrinsic merits. It should be in every public and every private library in the country, and studied by every American who makes the least pretensions to literary taste and judgment; for it is really one of the richest and most valuable works that have ever proceeded from an American author. It is the production of a distinguished American prelate, who feels that this is his own, his native land, and who identifies himself with the American people, and consults their interests as his own. He speaks to us from an American heart, and what he says is hardly less valuable under the point of view of patriotism than under that of religion. He is not only a bishop and a theologian, but also a learned man, an accomplished scholar, an eloquent, fresh, and vigorous writer, who counts nothing foreign to his purpose that affects the welfare of men, either in this world or in that which is to come, His reviews, lectures, and essays, are well thought and reasoned out; they are written in a free, flowing, and popular style, and filled with precisely the sort of information most needed by our countrymen in the present crisis of our national life. They are not written solely or primarily for theologians, or even Catholics; they are addressed to the American people at large, whatever their religious or political preferences or tendencies.

The views of the Right Reverend author on the deposing power, and one or two other points, are indeed not precisely those we have from time to time set forth, and pertain to a school which we have not been accustomed to follow; but we pass them over, for we have already sufficiently discussed the subjects to which they relate. But his reviews of Bancroft, Prescott, and other popular historians of the day, are admirable specimens of enlightened and dignified criticism, and place him in the first rank of American authors. They prove, too, that the American critic, when he does take up a subject, treats it with a candor, a fairness, a depth, and fulness, that we usually look for in vain in the criticisms which come to us from the writers of other nations. In them Dr. Spalding shows that these popular authors, especially Prescott, are not up to the level of the age, and that they are very far from appreciating the true province of history. He rectifies their principles, corrects their errors, and exposes their prejudices. His essays on civil liberty and the social condition respectively of Catholic and Protestant countries prove him an enlightened friend of freedom, and a generous sympathizer with the poorer and more numerous classes. We want more essays of the same sort, whose tendency is alike opposed to an impracticable and undesirable aristocracy on the one hand, and to a wild and destructive radicalism on the other. They teach us to distinguish in Catholic countries what is by the Church, or in harmony with her principles, from what exists in spite of her authority, and against her teachings and influence. They furnish us principles applicable to the present state of society; and while they do not blind us to the faults of Catholic states, or to the defects of our own republic, they deepen our gratitude to the Church, and kindle in our hearts a pure, enlightened, and vigorous patriotism.

What we more especially admire in Dr. Spalding as a writer, is his free, manly, independent American spirit. He is a Catholic, a Catholic bishop, and, as a matter of course, free from all national bitterness, and above all, the narrow and narrowing prejudices of race or country. He knows that God has made of one blood all the nations of men, and that he has instituted one Catholic Church, one spiritual kingdom on earth, for the government and salvation of all. Wherever he sees a man, he sees a brother, for whom Christ has died, a neighbor whom he is to love as himself. But he is an American, free born, a citizen, and feels that he is in bondage to no man. He was bred and born in an atmosphere of freedom, -in a country where man is man in all the integrity of his manhood. His spirit is free, lofty, independent, firm and unbending, yet gentle, sweet, loving, through the charity of the Gospel, such as should be the spirit of every American. His faith purifies and elevates his manliness, and his religion intensifies and consecrates his patriotism. It does not extinguish it or permit it to lose itself in a vague philanthropy, or an unmeaning cosmopolitanism. He makes the brotherhood of the race a living fact, not a watery sentiment, and seeks to promote the welfare of mankind by laboring specially for those committed to his care, or with whom his own lot in God's providence is bound up. In this respect at least, he is the model of an American citizen, an American prelate, an American scholar, and an American author, especially worthy of the study and imitation of our literary aspirants.

Any one who reads Dr. Spalding's book must find the objection, now growing somewhat stale, that Catholicity is hostile to our political and social order, forever silenced, if not by his arguments, at least by his tone and spirit. No American can read it without feeling that the Catholic religion is at home in the American breast, if we may so speak, more American than the greater part of Americans themselves, and that it is just what is needed to complete and consecrate the American character. The author is not one of those Americans who have no sympathy with the institutions of their own country, and are really foreigners in their sentiments and affections. He sees, what some Catholics even, though of American birth and lineage, do not see, that the natural relation between our religion and the government is that of concord, and not of antagonism. The dominant sentiment of the country is non-Catholic, but the political and civil order is in accordance with Catholicity, and the duty of all Catholics is to place a generous confidence in the government, to love and cherish it as their own. Dr. Spalding never thinks of asking whether he is American in thought and feeling, for he lives Americanism, which is his natural, as Catholicity is his supernatural life. He tells us by his spirit and example that Catholics are an integral portion of the American people, and that we are to let the warm current of American life flow through our veins, to assume as a matter of course our position as free American citizens, and to study, understand, and loyally perform our duties as freeborn Americans.

The lesson conveyed by the illustrious Bishop of Louisville, is opportune and important. Owing to the fact that the active Catholic population of the country is in great part made up of recent emigrants from various foreign nations, with habits, manners, usages, sentiments, affections, and traditions, different from those of the great body of the American people, an impression has been produced that Catholicity is here a foreign religion, or, in the main, only the religion of certain classes of foreigners, and that to be Catholic is to be un-American. Hence a war is excited against us in the name of American patriotism. On the other hand, a considerable number of Catholics confound the sentiments of a portion of the American people with the American political order itself. Finding a majority of the people hostile, or at best indifferent to Catholicity, they look upon the American civil and political order as at war with their religion, separate themselves in their feelings from it, and forget that the government is as much our government as it is that of non-Catholics, and that we are as responsible for its doings as any other class of citizens. They obey the laws, but do not love the American institutions, and look upon the government as an enemy to be distrusted, and whose actions are always to be construed in a hostile sense. They have no confidence in the American state, and believe neither in its will, nor in its ability to serve our holy religion. They do not admit that as Catholics they are under any obligations to it, and they regard themselves as at liberty to express their distrust of it, or to declaim against it as loudly and as fiercely as they please. Certainly these are not the majority, they are in fact only a feeble minority of the Catholic body; but they are numerous and clamorous enough to give the Know Nothings a pretext for opposing us in the name of American patriotism. They do more harm than is commonly imagined. They check the free expression of the deep loyalty so natural to the Catholic heart, and obstruct by their coldness, their suspicions, and their lack of American sympathy, those efforts which Catholic charity and Catholic zeal, in obedience to the earnest exhortation of our Holy Father, Pius IX, would prompt for the conversion of those of our countrymen who are still in spiritual darkness, and sitting in the region and shadow of death. They exert an unhappy influence within and without, and are, if they did but know it, as uncatholic as unpatriotic in their spirit and tendency.

The very poorest way in the world to make authority your friend is to treat it as your enemy. By treating it as your enemy, you give it a good excuse for not treating you as its friend. In a country like Ireland, under a Protestant government, whose persistent policy has been for ages to crush out its nationality and with it the Catholic faith, we can well understand that Catholics should regard the government as their enemy, as hostile to their interests, as having no claim on their loyalty, and to be distrusted, evaded, resisted, as far as prudence will warrant. There the Catholic has the right to do it, because the government is in his regard a tyrant, makes him its victim, and his self-preservation demands it. But here every thing of this sort is misplaced and uncatholic. Here the government is no more Protestant than it is Catholic, -nay, in its principles it harmonizes far better with Catholicity than with Protestantism, -and Catholics and Protestants are placed by the Constitution and laws on a footing of perfect equality. We, as Catholics, are not slaves or helots; and the feeling expressed by an American born Catholic the other day, in a Catholic journal, that he has no country, that he is a helot in the land of his birth, is as unfounded as it is unpatriotic. The American born Catholic has a country in the same sense and to the same extent that an American born Protestant has a country. If he finds public sentiment hostile to him, it is no more than many a Protestant finds. If he looks upon himself as a helot, the fault is his own, or that of those who had the forming of his childhood and youth. He is, in fact, a free born citizen, equal in his rights with every other citizen, and every avenue to success in life is open to him that would be were he a Protestant; and when we count up the merchants, lawyers, doctors, mechanics, contractors, & c., in this city, and find that Catholics, all things considered, have their full proportion among the most eminent, the most successful, and the most highly esteemed, we scout the idea that in this country a man forfeits his equality by being a Catholic.

In this country, every man, supposing him to be a man, is free to make his position pretty much what he chooses. If he chooses to forego his birthright as a citizen, and to regard himself as a helot, he will find few disposed to thwart his choice. He will most likely be treated as a helot. If Catholics choose to separate themselves from the great current of American nationality, and to assume the position in political and social life of an inferior, a distinct, or an alien people, or of a foreign colony planted in the midst of a people with whom they have no sympathies, they will be permitted to do so, and will be treated by the country at large according to their own estimate of themselves. But if they quietly take their position as free and equal American citizens, with American interests and sympathies, American sentiments and affections, and throw themselves fearlessly into the great current of American national life, ready to cooperate with any and every class of their fellow citizens for the true interests and glory of a common country, their religion will not be in their way, and they will gain that weight and influence in the country to which their real merit entitles them. All depends on ourselves. If we have the spirit and virtues of freemen, there is nothing to hinder us from being freemen, and holding the rank of freemen. If we choose to cultivate our powers, and make ourselves worthy of high consideration in the commonwealth, there is nothing to hinder us from doing so, and exerting a commanding influence. If we choose to be servile and querulous, to attribute what is due to our own indolence or imbecility, to the hostile influences of the country and its institutions, and to fold our hands and sit down and wait for the people or the government to take us from the dunghill and elevate us to the first rank in social and political life, we shall not find ourselves rising in our social position or in the estimation of the country, or even of ourselves.

It cannot be too often repeated that here man is man, if he chooses; but if he chooses to be less than man, he is at liberty to be so. The man must choose his own position and rely on himself, and depend on his own exertions. God will not work a miracle to give him the first rank in the state or in society because he is a Catholic, nor will the government raise him for that reason. Our political and social order gives and secures freedom to all to aspire; but it gives success to none. That the individual must earn for himself. If he lack the ability, the energy, the perseverance to do it, there is no help for him, and he must go without success. Self-reliance, energy, perseverance, are with us the chief elements of success alike for Catholic and non-Catholic, and they are pretty sure, in the long run, to secure it. But this is no country for those who lack these qualities. Men who know not how to help themselves, and are always looking to others to help them, who have never been out of leading strings, and dare not venture abroad without a dry nurse, who have never dared act from their own motion, motu proprio, or to rely on their own judgments, are sadly out of place here, and are sure to find the crowd jostling them aside, pushing past them, and leaving them far in the rear. Catholics, who are self-reliant and energetic, who enter into the spirit of the country, and conform to the inherent laws of American society, may go on with the rest, may, perhaps, even lead them; but such as are frightened at that spirit, throw up their hands in holy horror at it, or declaim against it, denounce it, and stoutly resist it, will count for little in the commonwealth, and be generally regarded with suspicion or contempt.

These are hard facts, but facts they are, and the sooner we admit it, and govern ourselves accordingly, the better for us and for our country. The Neapolitan lazaroni, no doubt, practise much of the true philosophy of life, —that is, of life in Naples, but it will not do to be lazaroni in America. To attempt it were suicidal. We may regret that such is the fact, but we cannot help it. There is, as far as we know, nothing in the American self-reliance, activity, energy, hurry and bustle, however repugnant to our old world notions, that a Catholic may not reconcile with Catholic faith and morals. We know nothing in our religion that requires us to be lazaroni. They were the Gabeonites, not the chosen people of God, who were doomed to be "hewers of wood and drawers of water." Labor, trade, law, medicine, every honest calling may be converted into prayer, is prayer, if done in and for the love of God. Our religion does not make us slaves; it makes us freemen, for they are free indeed whom the Son makes free. God has given the earth to the children of men; he has given them the beasts of the field, the fowls of the air, and the fishes of the sea, that they should have dominion over them. He has not, indeed, given man dominion over man, or subjected any man to the arbitrary will of another, by whatever name he may be called, and hence all governments of mere human will are tyrannies, and as such unlawful and unjust. But he has given man dominion over the whole lower creation, and in the chase after this lawful dominion Catholics are as free as non-Catholics to engage, and they may engage, if they choose, without detriment to their faith or their piety. Voluntary poverty for Christ's sake is meritorious, but involuntary poverty, poverty due to our indolence, our improvidence, or our intemperance, is not meritorious, is not a virtue at all, and inherits no promise. Humility is a Christian virtue, the root of every virtue, and the mark of all true greatness; but, not servility, tameness, mean spiritedness, or cowardice. To be capable of humility, one must be brave, manly, magnanimous. We know no reason why a man may not be a thoroughgoing American, and at the same time an orthodox, devout, fervent Catholic. No man to be a Catholic is required to abjure his manhood.

No doubt to be a true Catholic in the rough and tumble of our American life demands a robust faith, and a robust piety; but that need not alarm us. God proportions his grace, if we seek it and are faithful to it, to our needs. He promises that his grace shall be sufficient for us. We may just as well have a faith or a piety equal to all exigencies and to all trials, as a weak and sickly faith, and a puny piety that must be fed on milk, and can never endure strong meat. The self-reliance in spiritual matters so common to our non-Catholic countrymen, of course, is to be guarded against; but other things being equal, the self-reliant, robust, energetic man in the natural order, will be all the more robust, energetic, and trustworthy in the supernatural. The saints the Church proposes to us for our veneration were, for the most part, great men as well as great saints. Catholicity does not keep men in ignorance or in perpetual pupilage, in order to keep them docile and submissive. It is adapted to the wants of the simple, the rude, the barbarian, and the savage, but it prefers to deal with the civilized and highly cultivated man, and it has always found its greatest obstacle in the ignorance and barbarism of the ages it has traversed. The Church nurses a certain number in the cloister, and honors especially those who voluntarily, and for the love of God, give up all for a life of prayer and charity; but she prepares also her children to live in the world, and sustains them in the struggles of secular life. She demands, wherever practicable, the highest development of our natural faculties, and the highest order of civilization. She has no fear of strong men, resolute men, independent, self-reliant men, born to command, or to make their way in the world against every obstacle. The active, energetic, self-reliant American character she regards with no unfriendly eye, for she knows that, once purified, elevated, and directed by grace, it is a character from which she has every thing to hope. Grace does not destroy nature, nor change the national type of character. It purifies and elevates nature, and brings out whatever is good, noble, and strong in the national type. No national character stands more in need of Catholicity than the American, and never since her going forth from that "upper room" in Jerusalem, has the Church found a national character so well fitted to give to true civilization its highest and noblest expression.

It is but simple truth to assert that ours, at present, is the country towards which Catholics throughout the world should especially turn their hopes, and that it is the last country in the world which they should set down as hostile to the Church and her interests. The American people, in their national capacity, have never rejected the Catholic faith; as a government they have never made war on the Pope, have never cast off the authority of the Church. They have never, since their birth as a nation, performed one act of hostility to the Catholic religion, martyred or persecuted a single Catholic, and their first act on winning their independence, establishing their Federal government, and remodelling their State constitutions, was to repair the injustice of the mother country towards the Church, and to place Catholics, in their religion, on a footing of equality with Protestants. We as a nation are not guilty of the sin of persecution or apostasy. We have never dishonored or blasphemed the Spouse of the Lamb. We have done no injustice to Catholicity, and have repaired the injustice of the country from which we sprang. We have opened here an asylum for the oppressed Catholics of all lands, and given them the equal rights of American citizens. We are not under the curse pronounced against persecutors, apostates, and blasphemers. We are as a nation entitled to the gratitude and love of the Catholic heart throughout the world; and Catholics, especially American Catholics, should be prompt to acknowledge the generous and noble conduct thus far pursued by the American state. For noble and generous it was in a non-Catholic people in the last century, when all Europe was rising in rebellion against the Church, when fashion and literature had discarded Catholicity, when the Holy Father was soon to be dragged a prisoner from his throne by his apostate sons, and to die in exile, and when even Catholics themselves were willing to accept restrictions on their liberty, to proclaim the equality of Catholics, then too few to have any weight in the councils of the nation, and to open to them here an asylum alike from religious and civil tyranny. No nation on earth has ever, the circumstances considered, done a nobler act, one of greater service to the Church of God. And think you that that act is not registered in heaven? Think you that it will be suffered to go unrewarded? Think you ingratitude towards the American state, the denunciation of the American people, or alliance with their enemies on the part of Catholics, will be suffered to go unpunished? What is or can be baser on the part of Catholics than to curse the hand that has knocked off their fetters, and to place themselves in an attitude of hostility to their liberal benefactor? Are we not, indeed, to ascribe the late Know Nothing movement as much to the forgetfulness, by some amongst us, of the generosity of the American people, or their refusal to recognize it, as to the hatred of Catholicity entertained by the more violent of the sects? And should we not regard that movement as an admonition from Heaven to be on our guard against disloyalty, and the encouragement of foreign or unpatriotic tendencies in any portion of our body? Every Catholic should love America, rejoice in her prosperity, labor for her true interests, and pray for her conversion.

America, we need not say, is the future of the world. Asia and Africa have long since lapsed into barbarism, and Europe, the heir of the ancient and the seat of the modern civilization, has culminated, and the most that can be expected of it is that it shall preserve itself from growing worse. Spanish and Portuguese America has no promise of the future. We see nowhere outside of ours a nation really advancing in a civilization in accordance with Christian principles. Indeed, modern civilization itself is doomed, and must be supplanted some day by another, as it supplanted the Græco Roman. The new order of civilization which is to supplant it can find its seat or its people only with us. The old Græco Roman or ancient civilization contained so many inherent vices, was marked by so much cruelty and inhumanity, and was so saturated with pagan idolatry and superstition, that it could neither be reformed by Christianity nor stand before it. The interests of religion and of the human race demanded the destruction of the old world which sustained it. The Germanic tribes, whom imperial Rome had labored in vain for three centuries to subdue, and who had wrongs unnumbered to avenge in the city of the wolf nursed Romulus, served the cause of civilization by their conquest of the empire of the West. They prepared the way for modern civilization, and the progress of society by the aid of the Christian Church. But though they conquered the Roman empire and planted themselves on its ruins, they did not do it all at once, nor in all respects as avowed enemies. They often acted as the allies of the emperor, and their kings and chieftains held commissions in the imperial armies. In destroying the Roman power they continued the Roman jurisprudence, the Roman fiscal system, the Roman policy, and to no inconsiderable extent, Roman ideas, manners, and usages. They retained, I grant, all that was good in Roman civilization, but unhappily much also that was bad, and hence modern civilization, though a progress, a great progress on the ancient, is imperfect, and far below that order of civil society which accords with the Christian ideal. It is too imperfect, too pagan, and too little Christian, too incompatible with Christianized humanity, to be the last term of human progress.

Hence modern civilization must give way to a higher and a more Christian order. This advanced civilization we look for cannot find its first realization in Europe; for in Europe there is no field for its development, and no nation that has attained to it, or that will permit it to be attained to. Russia, no doubt, advances in modern civilization, but she does not advance and cannot advance civilization itself. The most that can be hoped of her is, that she will come up with those European nations that had the start of her in the race. In the rest of Europe, at least of continental Europe, you have two parties, the party of the government and the party of the Revolution, each alike opposed to the progress of civilization. The governments of Europe hold on to the traditions of the Roman empire, and the revolutionists seek their model in the old Roman republic, and neither conceive or allow true liberty. If the governments triumph, then liberty is extinct, individual energy is suppressed, man is dwarfed, and the mass of the people will become servile, imbecile, and unable to assert or even to conceive their natural rights and dignity; if the Revolutionists triumph, disorder, anarchy, old pagan cruelty and inhumanity will follow, to end in general barbarism, for old pagan Rome still lies smouldering at the bottom of all European society. England is bound up with her aristocratic constitution, and must stand or fall with it, and that constitution favors the few and depresses the many, and is sustained only by means incompatible with an advanced civilization. A change that should throw the power into the hands of the democracy, would, in the present state of things, be a change for the worse. The Church is indeed in old Europe, and it is well that she is; but the Church addresses only conscience, the free will of men, and she cannot save them, or even civilize them against their will. She imparts to man the power to work out his own salvation, but she does not work it out for him. He must voluntarily co-operate, or he will not be saved. It is the same with nations. They can neglect to do their proper work, and ruin themselves in spite of her, although they could not save themselves without her.

We can find the elements and conditions of this advanced civilization, or this new order of civilized life, only in our own country, and we see nowhere else a country that can legitimately claim to have the promise of the future. The medieval civilization has lost, or is rapidly losing, its hold on mankind, and it will not do to despise the sentiments and aspirations of its enemies. We can easily declaim against the red republicans, democrats, radicals, socialists, communists, and vague dreamers of an earthly paradise, now so numerous and in some countries so fierce; but it will be far wiser to recognize that they have something at bottom in their dreams, sentiments, and aspirations which is true and just, and which ought to find its expression in our social and political order. These movements of large masses of the people throughout the whole civilized world for something which they have not, and which threaten at times the very existence of society, perverted as they are by the ambitious and the designing, are not wholly satanic. They have their origin in the irrepressible instincts of humanity, and indicate the need and the capacity of the nations for a higher and less imperfect order of civilization. In their actual character, they are no doubt bad, terribly destructive, but there underlies them a want that must be met, if we would have social peace. They are disorderly, because the party of order is indiscriminate in its hostility, and does not distinguish between authority and its abuses; they are antireligious, anti-Catholic, if you will, because they fancy they find religion and the Church on the side of their enemies, and because Catholics themselves are exceedingly slow to distinguish in modern civilization what is by or in accordance with the Church, and what has existed from the old pagan world, whether barbaric or Roman, in spite of her. The necessary distinction in either case cannot be made in any European nation. Parties in them all are so evenly balanced, and passions are so excited and so fierce, that the slightest concession to either side is the signal for a conflagration. Liberty and order in them are divorced, and the one is maintained only at the expense of the other; and unhappily, as to the social and political order, a like divorce between religion and humanity has been effected. It is only in this country that we are free to make the proper distinctions, to reject what is bad in the mediæval civilization, and to accept and harmonize with the Church the good these movements of the age indicate, but are incompetent to realize.

The elements of this new or advanced civilization exist here in a much purer state, in greater life and vigor, than they do in any nation of the Old World. The mediæval civilization eliminated much that was bad in the preceding civilization, and added, through the influence of Christianity, many new elements of the highest importance; but it could never found a temporal republic in strict accord with the spiritual. Too many discordant, barbarous and despotic elements for that were retained from pagan Rome and her unchristianized conquerors. But these elements, by a singular good Providence, our fathers, for the most part, left behind them when they sought a home in this New World. They brought with them the majestic system of the Roman jurisprudence as modified and improved by the English common law and the influences of Christianity, but not either the Roman or the barbarian political system. Their political doctrines were those which had been developed and taught by the Church through her Popes, and councils, and doctors, during the Middle Ages, but which European society had never been able to realize. The Church had constantly labored to bring society back to the principles of natural justice and equity, and the maxims of natural justice and equity, recognized indeed by the civil and canon law, but left without adequate political guaranties, were those which the English republicans of the seventeenth century so strenuously asserted against the Stuarts, and which our republican ancestors brought with them, and made the basis of the state they founded. Our fathers were, perhaps, precisely those of their age who had, in the natural order, the best collected and embodied in themselves the fruits of the past labors of mankind, especially of the Christian Church, in regard to politics and jurisprudence. They were, in regard to civilization, the advanced guard of the human race in their times, and brought with them the best the Old World had to give. They lost nothing during their colonial days; they even advanced, by virtue both of their own experience and of the labors and experience of the Old World, and probably the world has never seen so august and so advanced a political assembly as that which met in 1787, in Philadelphia, to form our present Federal Constitution. The French Constituent, which met two years afterwards, was far behind it, and indeed hardly more advanced than the age of Charlemagne. Its best ideas were borrowed from us, and all it established that seems likely to live was copied from the American type in contradistinction from the English, a fact which is not unworthy of the consideration of our friends in France who seek their model in England.

The circumstances of the country and the times were favorable to the founding of an advanced civilization. The country was new and unsettled, and required, on the part of the colonists, great boldness, energy, self-reliance, and perseverance. It was encumbered with the primitive forest, indeed, but not with the superannuated institutions, conventionalities, puerilities, and barbaric usages of the Old World. It was a virgin soil, in which the colonists could plant in freedom institutions in accordance with the ideal advance they had made, and remote enough from older communities to escape their blighting influence. The English colonies had a great advantage over those established by the French, the Spanish, and the Portuguese, in that, during their earlier period, they were neglected by the mother country, and left to provide for themselves. The French, Spanish and Portuguese American colonies were either founded by the government of their respective mother countries, or were carefully watched over, directed, and in some sense subjected by it. They were never left to themselves, were never permitted a free development of their own, and therefore offer us nothing fresh, original, or in advance of the mother country. They never had any subsistence or independent life of their own, and hence those of them that have declared their independence have not as yet been able to sustain it, and they are continually crumbling to pieces. French Canada has acquired far more of a national character of its own since subjected to England than it ever had before, and the world may yet see a Canadian nation, -will do so, if by any accident Canada should escape annexation to the Union. But the Anglo American colonies were left, in great measure, to themselves from the first, and were not spoiled by the over nursing and over anxious care of the mother country. England, in the beginning, was too much occupied with affairs at home, with the great contest between the Crown and Parliament, the Monarch and the Commons, to be at leisure to look very closely after feeble and scattered colonies in another hemisphere. The colonies were therefore permitted to take a free development, and to mould their institutions in accordance with reason and nature, the wisdom of experience, and the dictates of common sense. Hence they cast deep the foundations of an original and advanced civilization.

The geographical character and position of the country appear to us to fit it to be the seat of this new civilization, and the leading nation of the future. Its vast extent of territory, spreading as it does, or will, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the frozen regions of the North to the Isthmus of Darien; its variety of climate, soil, and production make it, as it were, a world in itself, able to suffice for itself, and to have its own policy free from all danger from foreign powers. Commercial intercourse with other nations is in our genius, our habits, and our convenience, but not in our necessities, and we could forego it, if necessary to our national development, without ruin, and even without grave injury. This fact gives us, and always will give us, a commanding position; for it renders us less dependent on other nations than they are on us. It places the power of peace and war in our own hands. No nation will voluntarily go to war with us, and we have only to pursue a calm, dignified, and just policy towards other nations, to remain virtually at peace with the whole world.

The population of the country is also admirably fitted for what we conceive to be its mission. It is a mixed population indeed, but it is a mixture of the strongest races of Europe, -the Teutonic, the Celtic, and the Iberian. The Teutonic or Germanic element predominates, and in the Germanic the Norse element, which gave to Europe the greater part of its nobility. We are comparatively free from all admixture with the inferior races of Asia and Africa, and also with that of the aborigines of the country. The majority of us have sprung from races which could subjugate, but which could never be subjugated, -races animated by a lofty spirit of independence, and an invincible love of liberty. Our population combines the best qualities of the English, the French, the Germans, and the Irish, rapidly amalgamating into one homogeneous people, with an original national character, superior, perhaps, to any which the world has hitherto seen. We have, as a nation, the proud consciousness of having never been conquered, or deprived of our independence. We do not know what it is to be a dependent, far less an enslaved people. We sprang into existence as a free people, were born free, and know not what it is to be in bondage. As Americans we are free men, not freedmen, and have none of the habits or dispositions of manumitted slaves. We may, and no doubt in many instances do, carry our self-reliance and our sense of independence to a very disagreeable length, so far that they become vices; but nevertheless, in doing so we only abuse generous and manly qualities, and prove that our national character has a noble foundation.

As a people we have very generally the conviction that Divine Providence has given us an important mission, and has chosen us to work out for the world a higher order of civilization than has hitherto obtained. We look upon ourselves as a providential people, as a people with a great destiny, and a destiny glorious to ourselves and beneficent to the world. This fact indicates generous instincts and a noble nature, and it will not be without its influence in kindling lofty aspirations in our bosoms, and urging us on in the path of a true and legitimate ambition. We believe ourselves the people of the future, and that belief itself will do much to make us so. There is more than meets the eye in the popular expression, Manifest Destiny." We have a manifest destiny, and the world sees and confesses it, some with fear and some with hope; but it is not precisely that supposed by our journalists, or pretended by our filibusters, although these filibusters may be unconsciously and unintentionally preparing the way for its fulfilment. It may be our manifest destiny to extend our government over the whole American continent, but that is in itself alone a small affair, and no worthy object of true American ambition. It is desirable only inasmuch as it benefits the new territories annexed to the Union, and secures our frontiers, and protects us in the peaceful elaboration and extension of the new social order of the world. The manifest destiny of this country is something far higher, nobler, and more spiritual, -the realization, we should say, of the Christian Ideal of Society for both the Old World and the New. Many things below this, and in themselves far enough from being in harmony with it, Divine Providence may permit, and compel to serve it, but these should never be the term of our ambition; they should never be encouraged by us, -should be carefully eschewed, or at best tolerated only as unavoidable evils for the time being.

This manifest destiny of our country, showing that Providence has great designs in our regard, that he has given us the most glorious mission ever given to any people, should attach us to our country, kindle in our hearts the fire of a true and holy patriotism, and make us proud to be Americans. Especially should it endear the country to every Catholic heart, and make every Catholic, whatever his race or native land, a genuine American patriot; for it is the realization of the Christian Ideal of Society, and the diffusion through all quarters of the globe, for all men, whatever their varieties of race and language, of that free, pure, lofty, and virile civilization which the Church loves, always favors, and has from the first labored to introduce, establish, and extend, but which, owing to the ignorance, barbarism, and superstitions retained, in spite of her most strenuous exertions, from pagan Rome and the barbarian invaders of the empire, she has never been able fully to realize in the Old World.

Let no one, because we thus speak, hastily conclude that we overlook the discrepancy which exists between the actual character of a large portion of our countrymen and the principles of our American order. We do no such thing. We do not blind or deceive ourselves as to the actual manners and morals of a large portion of the population of the country, nor as to the errors, the vices, the corruptions, which abound in both public and private life. Our readers know that we have for years dwelt on these, even to satiety, and that we have spared our countrymen none of their faults. We concede that our faults are numerous and grave, and that, if they are not corrected, they will compromise our mission. But without seeking in the least to disguise or to extenuate them, we still retain our hope in our country's future, for they spring from no inherent vice in our constitution. We see in them a ground for encouragement, rather than of discouragement; for they are either foreign to our real character, or are such as indicate a rich and generous nature, not yet grown effete. They grow out of the abuse of sound principles and grand qualities. They result, for the most part, from the fact that the bulk of our old American population have lost their confidence in Protestantism, without having acquired faith in Catholicity, and are therefore thrown back on nature alone, without the restraints or the aids of Christianity. But this need not surprise or alarm us. It was to be expected, and might have been foreseen. There is an inherent antagonism between our American order and Protestantism claiming to be a divinely revealed and an authoritative religion, and as Protestantism has not been able to retain life and vigor enough to suppress our American civilization, it has been forced to give way before it.

This inherent antagonism between our American political and social order and Protestantism claiming to be a supernatural religion, has not been sufficiently noted either by Protestants or Catholics. Protestant authors overlook it altogether, claim our American system as the creature of Protestantism, and contend that its natural enemy is Catholicity. Catholic writers have usually contented themselves with denying that the Church is incompatible with Republicanism or hostile to true liberty. That at the epoch of American colonization, absolute monarchy very generally obtained in Catholic Europe, and that it would have been very difficult to have found in a single Catholic state colonists that could or would have founded institutions like ours, I am willing to concede. That the early Anglo American colonists were, with few exceptions, Protestants, and Protestants of the most rigid stamp, is a well known fact, and cannot be denied. But in founding the American state they did not follow their Protestantism. They were bravely inconsequent, and “builded better than they knew." The liberty they loved, the political and social order they introduced and sustained, were only accidentally connected with their Protestant religion, as the absolutism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was only accidentally connected with Catholicity. In both cases the connection was unnatural, and could subsist only for a time. Monarchy in Catholic countries for a period became absolute, through the weakness, servility, or cupidity of Catholics. It suppressed the popular franchises and very nearly enslaved the Church herself; but the hour of trial came, and monarchs found the altar, deprived of its freedom, could not sustain the throne. The people believing the Church, because she was the victim, was the ally of despotism, turned against her, and God permitted the horrors of the French Revolution to teach those who had tried to make religion subservient to arbitrary and oppressive government, that liberty is an instinct and a necessity of human nature, and that whoever tamely surrenders it to the monarch is faithless to his duty as a Catholic and as a man. The Catholics who identified their religion with the political régime so eloquently defended by the great Bossuet and impersonated in Louis the Fourteenth, were as much out in their reckoning as the Jacobins, who identified liberty with the rejection of the Gospel, the persecution of the Church, and the worship of the goddess of Reason. Protestant authors who identify our American order with Protestantism commit a like mistake, and wander equally far from the truth.

Our Protestant ancestors founded the American order, not on their Protestantism, but on the natural law, natural justice and equity as explained by the Church, long prior to the Protestant movement of Luther and his associates, and they only followed out those great principles of natural right, justice, and equality, which Catholic councils, doctors, and jurisconsults during fifteen hundred years had labored to render popular. The merit of our ancestors was, that in an age when Cæsarism almost every where triumphed, and substituted the maxims of pagan Rome for those of natural justice, they remained faithful, and dared attempt to found a new world on an equitable basis. But in doing so they adopted a basis incompatible with the preservation of Protestantism as a religion. The basis they adopted was that of the natural law, natural reason, and justice; but this natural reason, this natural law, natural justice, Protestantism denies, and must deny; for it asserts the total depravity of human nature, declares all acts done in a state of nature to be sin, and denies nature to make way for grace, and reason to make way for faith. At least this is the character of all Evangelical Protestantism, especially of the form of Protestantism embraced by our ancestors, and indeed of all Protestantism that is not pure rationalism. Here, then, is a fundamental antagonism between Protestantism and American civilization, and it is clear to the dullest understanding that the one can exist and develop itself only at the expense of the other. Either Protestantism must get the upper hand and eliminate the American system, or the American system must get the upper hand and eliminate Protestantism. The latter is what has happened.

Moreover, Protestantism, basing itself on a subjective fact, private judgment or private illumination, -very good, and never to be spoken lightly of in its sphere, —has no bond of union, and necessarily, where not restrained by outward civil force, splits into innumerable sects and parties. If the civil order has, as with us, for its fundamental principle, its incompetency in spirituals, and is bound to recognize all these sects and parties as standing on a footing of perfect equality before the law, the people in all their political action are obliged to treat them all as alike sacred, and seeing no objective ground of preference among them, very naturally come to regard one sect as good as another, and then to treat them all with indifference, perhaps, with a superb indifference, to fall back on the reason and nature on which their political and social order is founded, and practically to place their politics above their religion. This is what has been the result. There are very few, comparatively speaking, of our non-Catholic countrymen, who really believe in any positive. religion, and even the fiercest Evangelicals have abandoned or are abandoning all dogmatic theology. The forms of religion, no doubt, are observed after a fashion, for the majority of our people, though without faith in any particular religion, have still a belief that there is a religion of some sort, and that it is essential to the health of the soul, and the preservation of the state, -a belief of great value as the foundation on which the Catholic is hereafter to build, but comparatively of little value in the practical conduct of life. The effect thus far of our institutions has been, as might have been foreseen, to bring the majority of our people back to simple nature, and to leave them without any positive religion. Their institutions have proved too strong for their Protestantism, and hence we see in the Know Nothing movement, the politicians carrying it over the ministers.

Now it is not surprising that in this state, thrown back on nature alone, there should be the vice, crime, corruption, profligacy, which threaten so seriously our institutions; for nature alone is not sufficient, even under the best government and laws, to sustain the virtue and integrity of a people. But this need not discourage us, for this sad state of things is only temporary, and will last only during the period of transition from a religion incompatible with our order of civilization, to another which accepts, consecrates, and sustains it. Many of our non-Catholics feel this, and hence they demand with some earnestness the Church of the Future, and not without a good degree of confidence as well as hope, that it will come. They are right. Protestantism is outgrown, and has fallen into the past. One needs not to be a prophet, or the son of a prophet, to foretell that it is not to rule the future. But the Church of the Future exists, and already exists in our country. Between it and our institutions there is no incompatibility, for Catholicity accepts, nay, asserts the natural law on which our American order is founded. The Church does not recognize the Protestant doctrine of total depravity. She does not deny nature in favor of grace, nor reason in favor of faith. She presupposes nature, asserts natural justice and equity, and maintains the rights of reason. She comes not to destroy the natural, but to fulfil -to purify, elevate, direct, and invigorate it. That is, she comes to give us precisely the help we need, and as our country is the future hope of the world, so is Catholicity the future hope of our country; and it is through Catholicity bringing the supernatural to the aid of the natural, that the present evils which afflict us are to be removed, and the country is to be enabled to perform its civilizing mission for the world.

In speaking of a new order of civilization we do not suppose a new development of Christian doctrine, or any modification of the Church herself. Christian doctrine and the Church were perfect in the beginning, and as they are divine, or represent the Divinity in human affairs, they are unalterable. We are not arguing either for something in advance of Christianity as it has been professed in every age from the Apostles downward, or for a modification or adaptation of the Church to a new order of things. We believe in progress by Christianity, not in it; by the Catholic Church, not in it; and the new order of civilization we speak of is not a new Christianity, but a new progress in society, which places it as civilized society in more perfect harmony with Christianity, with Catholicity or the Church. The foundations of this civilized society have been cast broad and deep in America by our Protestant ancestors, following not their Protestantism, but natural reason and justice as explained by Catholic doctors. The sentiments, the manners, the morals of the people, are very far from being in perfect harmony with Catholicity; but the civility, the political and social order, what we call the institutions of the country, being founded on natural right and equity, are in perfect accordance with it; for Catholicity republishes the law of nature, ―natural right and equity, -and gives it new and higher sanctions. All that is needed to realize in practice the Ideal of Christian society is to bring the sentiments, manners, and morals of the people into harmony with American institutions, or the American political and social order. This Protestantism could not do, and therefore has been obliged to give way; this reason and nature alone, -on which our non-Catholics are thrown back, -cannot do, for reason and nature alone, without the assistance of the supernatural providence of God, are, as the history of the world proves, practically as impotent to sustain true and genuine civilization, as they are to save the soul or secure the bliss of eternal life; but this Catholicity, which has the promise of the life that now is and of that which is to come, can do, and will do, if permitted; and in doing it, will effect, without undergoing any change or modification in herself, a new and higher civilization than the world has hitherto known.

We know there are persons who pretend that Christianity culminated in the thirteenth century, and imagine that the reign of antichrist is commencing and the end of the world is not far off. But we are not of their number. Even in the days of the Apostles some thought the end of the world was near at hand; when the Barbarians overturned the Roman Empire of the West, some thought the end of the world had come; again, in the year 1000, there was a prevalent persuasion in many countries of Europe that the world would end with that year; and indeed, in every age since the founding of the Christian Church, individuals have been persuaded that that day and hour of which no man knoweth, not even the Son, but the Father only, was about to strike; but we do not think that Christianity has yet more than fairly begun her mission. Only a small portion of mankind has become Christian, and in no nation has society as yet been thoroughly Christianized. As yet Christ has nowhere made his religion as universal and all-pervading as was false religion in the old Pagan world. His victory over Satan is not yet, save in principle, completely won. Why should not his religion become as general in society, pervade as thoroughly all departments of public and private life, as Gentilism did in the old Roman world? Have we not the promise that the end should not come till the Gospel of the kingdom had been preached to all nations? And can it be said to have been preached to those nations in which it has been at best barely announced to a few individuals, and which it has never converted or annexed to the kingdom of Christ? What right have we to say, as some of us do, that a nation which has once thrown off the faith has never been reconverted? Instances are not wanting in which the same people has been converted several times over. If no nation can be recovered to the faith that has once thrown it off, why does the Church sanction prayers for the conversion of England? Why does she authorize missions and prayers for the conversion of heretics? What right have we to limit the mercy of God? While there is life there is hope, and there is no nation or individual on earth that we have the right to assert cannot be converted to God. Let us beware of fatalism, and especially beware of seeking to find in God's providence an excuse for our indolence, our absence of missionary zeal, and our neglect of duty. The nation of the Goths was originally converted from paganism to Christianity by Catholic Missionaries; it fell into the Arian heresy to please the Emperor Valens, and to gain his assistance against its enemies; but the Goths were subsequently reconverted to Catholicity. The world lapsed into heresy or infidelity may be recovered, and will be so, when Catholics learn to live in accordance with the religion they profess.

We dismiss all the counsels to indolence or despair drawn from the supposed impossibility of regaining nations once lost, or from the supposed approaching end of the world. We know not when the world will end, but our business is to live as if it might end tomorrow, and as if it were not to end for a thousand ages to come. We are to look at the work God gives us to do today, and to do it with all our might. Catholicity is here to perfect our civilization, and to make ours the land of the future. But Catholicity does not work irrespective of human agents. She works as a help, as an assistance, a power, an influence, but not as an irresistible force. She works on free will and conscience, gives the power to do, but does not do the work without the cooperation of free agents. She does not take a people, will they, nill they, and by main force raise them to virtue or civilization. The Church deals with the world as she finds it. She takes things as they are, and seeks to remedy what is amiss, not by violence, not by revolutionary measures, but by Christian charity. She finds Cæsarism established; she makes no direct war on it; but seeks to infuse into the heart of the monarch the sense of justice and humanity, to impress on his mind and conscience that he is himself under law, and must one day render an account of his conduct, that he holds his power as a trust, and that the king is not in reigning, but in reigning justly." She finds the broad distinction of rich and poor, the few gorged with superfluous wealth, and the many suffering for the want of the necessaries of life. She does not excite the latter against the former, nor demand an agrarian law or an equal division of property; but consoles the poor with the assurance, that if they bear their poverty with resignation, for Christ's sake, theirs is the kingdom of heaven, and admonishes the rich that they are but stewards, and that what they have more than they need for themselves belongs to the poor, and that if they withhold it, they must answer for their lack of charity and their abuse of their stewardship. She finds masters and slaves; she does not command the relation to cease; but she teaches the slave to render cheerful service to his master for Christ's sake, and the master that the slave is his brother, a man like himself, for whom Christ has died, a soul with all the rights and dignity of a human soul, and therefore that he must treat him with justice and humanity, respecting in him the image of God and the rights of conscience. Her mission is not to revolutionize states and empires, and by force to introduce and sustain even the political and social order that best harmonizes with her own principles. The political and social changes needed she leaves the people, inspired by her teaching, and following the dictates of justice and prudence, to introduce for themselves, as they see proper, or as circumstances permit.

Whether Catholicity shall do for us the work needed in this country, and therefore whether we fulfil our mission or not, depends on the fidelity or non-fidelity of Catholics themselves. It is not enough that the Catholic Church is here. She will not operate as a charm to remove existing evils or to give us the needed virtues. It is not enough that there is a large body of Catholics here; their mere presence has in itself no virtue to save the country, or to enable it to fulfil its mission. This is a fact that we should lay to heart. If Catholics do not surpass others in domestic and civil virtues, they will render the country no greater service than others. As yet we Catholics cannot applaud ourselves as having done much to advance public virtue. I do not see that the Catholics we have had in public life have shown themselves much more honest, more capable, much more devoted to principle, or much less accessible to party or selfish interests than non-Catholics, in the same rank or official station. I do not perceive that our Catholic electors, at least those who are most prompt to exercise the elective franchise, have generally surpassed their non-Catholic fellow citizens in their intelligence, or that they have voted more independently, or with an eye more single to the public good. Not a few of them are apparently swayed very little by the common interests of the country, and are moved chiefly by other appeals than those made to them as simple American citizens. Too many who pass for Catholics have been as deeply implicated as any other class of citizens in the scandals which have of late years been so frequent in our elections; and I do not find that Catholics have been especially diligent to study the institutions, laws, and genius of the country, to understand its peculiar dangers, its more urgent wants, and the special duties of citizens. They sometimes act on the principle that all is to be done for the people, but nothing by them; and when rejecting this principle, they are apt to act on a worse principle, that the people are sovereign and may do whatever they please. In this they certainly are no worse than non-Catholics, and would deserve no special censure, if no more was demanded of them than of Protestants. But the responsibility of Catholics in this country is greater than that of any other class of citizens. It is only through Catholicity that the country can fulfil its mission, and it is through Catholics that Catholicity reaches and assists the country. The salvation of the country and its future glory depend on Catholics, and therefore they must prove themselves superior in intelligence, independence, public spirit, all the civic virtues, to non-Catholics, or else they will do nothing to save and develop American civilization.

It is this consideration, that more depends on us than on non-Catholics, that I wish to impress on the minds and hearts of my Catholic brethren. Looking to the future, we Catholics are the American people, and we hold the destinies of the country in our hands. If we suffer the country to fail in its mission, we have no excuse. We have all that our non-Catholic fellow citizens lack. We have faith, we have religion, we have principles, we have the truth, we have instruction, we have grace to assist us, and need not be at a loss to know how we should act on any of the great questions that come up. We are the only class of American citizens that can fully understand and appreciate the lofty mission of the United States, and therefore the heaviest responsibility rests on us. We ought to be able to exhibit on all occasions, superior wisdom, intelligence, and virtue, and I will add, superior capacity. We ought to be able to enlighten every public question that comes up, and to give a right direction to the public mind. If we cannot do so, by what right do we boast the superiority of Catholicity, under the point of view of civilization? We boast in vain, and shall deserve as we shall secure only scorn and derision, if we remain below or do not rise above the average of non-Catholics. We must win the minds and hearts of our countrymen, not by empty boastings or idle assertions. of what Catholics have done in other times and places, but by proving our own superiority in wisdom, intelligence, and virtue, here and now. We must be the best Americans, the best and ablest men in the country, and prove that we are so by the services we render, the disinterestedness we show, and the sacrifices we are ready to make. Here authority stands aloof, and we cannot invoke its power to eke out the deficiency of our own. We must enter the lists, and fight out our battle with non-Catholics, man to man, hand to hand, and win the victory, or confess our inferiority.

Why is it that we do not already exert a commanding influence in the country, in the sense of American civilization? Our numbers are sufficient to enable us to do it, and there is no good reason, no reason creditable to us as Catholics, why our wisdom, intelligence, and virtue are not also sufficient. We must do it. But in order to do it we must not seek the elements of our strength in a foreign nationality, but must identify ourselves with the country, accept loyally its institutions, confide in the grandeur of its mission, and be warmed and inspired by it. We must dismiss such of our old world notions as have and can have no application here but to create divisions and enfeeble our powers; we must get our minds out of the grooves in which ages of despotism have compelled them to run, and say to Routine, “Get behind me, Satan;" we must become a reading and a thinking people, developing in the highest degree our moral and intellectual faculties, taking broad and comprehensive views of men and things, and applying them with freedom and conscientiousness to all the great questions of the age or the country as they rise. The policy, however good in other times and places, of folding our hands, of refusing to do any thing for ourselves, and sitting down in indolence or despair, and calling upon authority or waiting for it to come to our relief, is no policy for Catholics in the United States. The world helps only those who show that they are able to help themselves, and respects only those who are able to command its respect. We must exert our own powers, understand what the country needs, and do it, and do it before and better than any others can possibly do it.

We have rich, original geniuses, powerful intellects, and noble hearts in our Catholic population; we have a whole army of young men, increasing every day in numbers and discipline, whose hearts are burning to find some outlet for their fiery activity, some work equal to their lofty and laudable ambition. These young men are the future hope of the Church, and through the Church of the country. We must not lose these young men; we must not damp their ardor, or extinguish their generous enthusiasm, whatever their calling or sphere in life, unless we would commit an act of suicide. We must give them a broad field for their activity, and confide in their honest intentions and generous instincts. What if we do find them inexperienced, hot headed, and a little rash now and then? Nothing venture, nothing have. Perhaps their inexperience and rashness will not be more fatal than the timidity and overprudence of those who are counted wise and experienced. We who are grey headed, and pass for wise and prudent, must remember that we ourselves were once young and inexperienced, and that if our elders had not placed a generous confidence in us, and given us scope for our activity, we should never have had an opportunity for acquiring our wisdom and experience. When there is work to be done, a cause to be advanced, the unsafest men in the world to confide it to are those who are usually termed safe men. The British army learned this to their cost in the Crimean war. What we want in this nineteenth century and in these United States are men of fresh hearts, bold and energetic characters, -men of enterprise, of daring enthusiasm, of positive virtues, who can act, can do good, with God's blessing, advance the cause of truth and virtue, religion and civilization; not simply good easy men, whose chief merit is their inability to do harm, and whose chief study is to keep things quiet and as they are. Life is better than death, and it is better sometimes to blunder, if we blunder through disinterested zeal and generous devotion, than it is never to act. We do not want to keep things quiet; we do not want to keep things as they are; we want progress. We want to excite activity, and stir up our whole community to energetic and continued efforts to advance the cause of truth and civilization. As Catholics we must go forward, or cease to hold our own in the country. We can maintain our position only by advancing.

When the end we have to consult is not simply to hold our own, but to advance, to make new conquests, or to take possession of new fields of enterprise, we must draw largely upon young men whose is the future. These Catholic young men, who now feel that they have no place and find no outlet for their activity, are the future, the men who are to take our places and carry on the work committed to us. We must inspire them with faith in the future, and encourage them to live for it. Instead of snubbing them for their inexperience, mocking them for their greenness, quizzing them for their zeal, damping their hopes, pouring cold water on their enthusiasm, brushing the flower from their young hearts, or freezing up the wellsprings of their life, we must renew our own youth and freshness in theirs, encourage them with our confidence and sympathy, raise them up if they fall, soothe them when they fail, and cheer them on always to new and nobler efforts. O, for the love of God and of man, do not discourage them, force them to be mute and inactive, or suffer them, in the name of Catholicity, to separate themselves in their affections from the country and her glorious mission. Let them feel and act as American citizens; let them feel that this country is their country, its institutions their institutions, its mission their mission, its glory their glory. Bear with them, tread lightly on their involuntary errors, forgive the ebullitions of a zeal not always according to knowledge, and they will not refuse to listen to the counsels of age and experience; they will take advice, and will amply repay us by making themselves felt in the country, by elevating the standard of intelligence, raising the tone of moral feeling, and directing public and private activity to just and noble ends.

We do not want Catholics to be radicals, political agitators, or place-hunters; but we do want them to be Americans in the fullest and best sense of the term; we do want them to study and understand the institutions and the mission of the country, and to devote themselves with their best thoughts and energies to the interests of American civilization, in every sphere or way which Providence opens to them; we do want them to qualify themselves to take the lead in every department of human activity; in a word, to understand the enviable position in which God has placed them, and to rise to its height. What we urge, and what we always have urged, is that Catholics should fit themselves to be the foremost men in the nation, to exert that influence on its life and activity which belongs to superior wisdom, virtue, and intelligence, and which they who have faith, religion, clear and well defined principles, and determinate doctrines, who know what they want, and wherefore they want it, always must exert on a high minded and generous people who have fallen into doubt, and no longer know what to believe or what to do. Nobody can say how much the presence of the Church here has done for the country, or how many judgments that might have fallen on it have been averted by her prayers and those of her devout children; but we must say, that as yet Catholics have not acquired that moral weight in the American community, or exerted that high and salutary influence on national thought and action, to which our numbers and our religion would seem to entitle us. We owe the country a higher and nobler service than we have as yet rendered it, or shall render it, till we prepare ourselves for the position God has given us, and feel the high and terrible responsibility that rests upon us.

We know the battle is not always to the strong, nor the race always to the swift. We know that God has chosen the foolish things of this world that he may confound the wise, weak things that he may confound the strong, and mean things and contemptible things that no flesh may glory in his presence. But not, therefore, are we to be foolish, weak, mean, and contemptible. That were to fall, under pretence of piety, into fatalism, and to forget the part God assigns to human activity. Undoubtedly we are to be on our guard against the Gentile spirit, which is that of pride. Certainly all Christian virtues have their root in humility; but humility prompts to action, not to indolence. Man must remember that he can do nothing without the Divine assistance, and should do whatever he does for God's sake; but he is also to do with God's assistance and for God's sake the best in his power, and leave it to God to give or to withhold success. God gives the harvest, but man must till the ground, sow the seed, and nurse the plant. We ask only the performance of the part given to man, and if we perform that with fidelity and alacrity, with pure motives, and for a right end, we may rely with confidence on God to crown our labors with success. Let us live as our religion commands, and do what our character as American citizens requires of us, and we need not doubt that the great body of non-Catholics will soon listen to us, study and embrace our faith, and join with us, not only in the work of saving souls, which is of course the great thing, but in effectually realizing for our country and the world the true Christian ideal of society.

We know the Church in this world is always the Church militant, and we are far from being so visionary as to suppose that even the realization of the Christian ideal of society will leave her no enemies to combat. All obstacles to her spiritual work will not be removed, and there will be room for the combat as long as life lasts or the world stands. Society, however admirably organized, and however perfectly Christianized, will always remain human society, and will never become or supersede the Church of God. We would fain hope that it is possible so to perfect it that the Church will find comparatively no obstacles to her work in its government, its institutions, its manners or usages; so that she will have few obstacles except those which spring from the flesh and the temptations of Satan in the individual, and which not being embodied institutions, and favored by the prevailing civilization, will be less formidable, and more easily surmounted. The flesh or concupiscence remains after baptism; and though not itself sin, concupiscence inclines to sin, and so long as it remains there will be disorders; but much is gained, if we can keep these disorders confined to the bosom of the individual, and prevent them from breaking out into society, or embodying themselves in institutions, public manners, or social usages. This much we hope from the realization of the Christian ideal of society, or the realization of that order of civilization which the American people have it in charge to realize.

We do not pretend, as is obvious from all we have said, that the American people have as yet realized the Christian ideal of society. They have through God's providence laid its foundations, recognized its principles, and adopted the necessary institutions, but they have not yet practically conformed themselves to the new order of civilization. This they could not do without the supernatural aid to be obtained only through the Catholic Church. In urging Catholics to study our institutions, to understand and love them, to accept and conform to them, we are only following out the teaching of the Church, and cooperating, as a simple layman in his own sphere, with the venerable Hierarchy, who teach us to love and serve our country, and to use the freedom she secures for the glory of religion and the progress of civilization. have no sympathy with that false liberalism represented by a Kossuth or Mazzini, nor with that superb Gentilism we sometimes meet with in the writings of Gioberti, either of which is as un-American as it is un Catholic. We do not erect our American form of republicanism into a Catholic dogma, though we hold our order of civilization is based on natural justice and equity, which the Church recognizes, interprets, and enforces. We do not hold that we have a right to introduce by revolutionary violence even this order where it does not exist; we have only urged Catholics to accept it, to develop it, and do their best to perfect it where it already exists, and is the law for the Catholic conscience,

It is no doubt true, we say in conclusion, that the prospects of our country may appear to some of our friends as gloomy, and good men, and even firm patriots, may almost despond. To the superficial observer, the American Union may seem threatened by the violence of party, and on the eve of dissolution. Foreign war hovers over us, and almost civil war rages within; public spirit disappears; public and private virtue are at a discount; selfish ends govern our public men, and private vice and profligacy are loosening the bonds of society. But we must listen to no alarmists, and suffer none of these things to move us. There is, after all, no real cause for discouragement or gloomy forebodings. There is a vitality in the American people that the present night's debauch cannot destroy, can indeed hardly impair. It will take two or three generations, corrupter even than the present, to break down our Constitution and effect our dissolution. Happily the remedy is in our hands, and we can apply when we choose. We must give way to no discouragements. We must feel our position and prove ourselves equal to it, understand the mission of our country, confide in it, and suffer ourselves to be inspired by it, and thus work with cheerfulness and hope. God is with us, the Holy Father encourages us, and, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, the only living sentiment of the country is for us, and we need fear nothing that can oppose us. They who are for us are more and mightier than they who are against us, for we are working with God and Humanity.

From the work God and our country give us no Catholic is excluded. They who can contribute nothing else can contribute their prayers, and the poor servant girl who can only say her Ave Maria may be contributing more than we who write elaborate essays to call public attention to it. Nor are those not of American birth and lineage excluded. The American mission is not restricted in its intent or in its results to a narrow and exclusive nationality. The legitimacy of American nationality is in the fact that it is not exclusive, that it is founded on the principles of natural justice and equity, and is as broad as the human race. It embraces and absorbs all distinctive nationalities, and moulds all into one family in the natural order, as Catholicity does in the supernatural. We must recognize no cliques at home or abroad, and neither divide nor suffer ourselves to be divided by the accidents of birth or race. Are we not all men and Catholics? Is not the American mission in the interest of all Catholics and of all men? Then why should not foreign born as well as native born Catholics labor for its realization? We appeal alike to all Catholics, wherever born, whencesoever they come, or whatever their national peculiarities. All who have American hearts, love the American mission, and are willing to devote themselves to the cause of religion and the advancement of civilization, are in our sense of the word Americans. They are our countrymen, our fellow citizens, and we will have no other rivalry with them than that of seeing who will best adorn our religion and serve American civilization.

If there is division between native born and foreign-born Catholic citizens, we wash our hands of it. It is not we who have made it, and it shall never be we who make it. If we have complained of some foreign born Catholics, it has not been because they were foreign born, but because they held themselves aloof from the natural born citizens, regarded themselves as pertaining to a separate nationality, and felt that they must conduct themselves as foreigners rather than as men who are to “the manner born,” It has been because they have attempted to force their narrow and insular nationality upon our continental hearts, and seemed unable to feel themselves our equals unless they were recognized as our masters, and permitted to lord it over us. But these of whom we have complained, though making much noise, are only a small part, and that neither the more intelligent nor the more virtuous part of our foreign-born population. The more numerous, intelligent, and respectable portion of foreign-born Catholics, those who have some stamina, and are not afraid of being lost in the crowd unless distinguished by a foreign badge, or labelled with some un-American nationality, are as American in their convictions, intentions, and affections, as those born on the soil, and not seldom even more so. No native born American would for one moment dream of excluding these from the American army, or of realizing the American mission without their cooperation.

We insist, indeed, on the duty of all Catholic citizens, whether natural born or naturalized, to be, or to make themselves, thorough going Americans; but to be Americans is to understand and love American institutions, to understand and love the American mission, to understand and love American liberty, to understand and love American principles and interests, and to use with a free and manly spirit the advantages of American citizenship to advance the cause of religion and civilization. Those who will not be Americans in this sense, we disown, we hold to be "outside barbarians," and not within the pale of the American order. They have no business here, and the sooner they leave us the better. They have no lot or part in our work, no part or lot in the American mission. But whoever does his best to be in this sense an American, whoever is devoted to true American interests, and is fired with a noble ambition to promote the glory of America, we embrace as a countryman, wherever he was born or reared; we hold him to be our fellow laborer, and to him we make our appeal. To all such we say, here is a glorious work to be done, in which you may perform a glorious part, a work which you will be doing, whenever preparing yourselves for your part as Catholics, as citizens, or as men, to which every noble sentiment you cherish, every generous sacrifice you make, every disinterested act you perform, every prayer you breathe even in secret, every living word you drop from your lips, will contribute. The field is as broad as your activity, the work as high as your ambition, as great as your thought. You may, if you will, add a nation, a nation destined to rule the future, to your Church, and to the world a new civilization. You may bring faith to the doubting, hope to the desponding, and peace to the troubled, -send freedom to the down-trodden millions of the Old World, redeem long oppressed continents, and fill with joy the broken-hearted friends of the human race. Let each one work in his own sphere, according to his ability and opportunity, but always with a view to the greater glory of God, and with a firm reliance on Him for support and ultimate success.