The American Republic [136]
none of the sects have been able to get their peculiarities incorporated into its constitution or its laws. The state conforms to what each holds that is catholic, that is always and everywhere religion; and what 419 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 constitution, 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 institutions, 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. The church, as well as the state, must deal with men and nations as they are, not as they are not. To deal with a child as with an adult, or with a barbarous nation as with a civilized nation, would be only acting a lie. The church cannot treat men as free men where they are not free men, nor appeal to reason in those in whom reason is undeveloped. She must adapt her discipline to the age, condition, and culture of individuals, and 420 to the greater or less progress of nations in civilization. She herself remains always the same in her constitution, her authority, and her faith; but varies her discipline with the variations of time and place. Many of her canons, very proper and necessary in one age, cease to be so in another, and many which are needed in the Old World would be out of place in the New World. Under the American system, she can deal with the people as free men, and trust them as freemen, because free men they are. The freeman asks, why? and the reason why must be given him, or his obedience fails to be secured. The simple reason that the church commands will rarely satisfy him; he would know why she commands this or that. The full-grown free man revolts at blind obedience, and he regards all obedience as in some measure blind for which he sees only an extrinsic command. Blind obedience even to the authority of the church cannot be expected of the people reared under the American system, not because they are filled with the spirit of disobedience, but because they insist that obedience shall be rationabile obsequium, an act of the understanding, not of the will or the affections alone. They are trained to demand a reason for the command given them, to dis- 421 tinguish between the law and the person of the magistrate. They can obey God, but not man, and they must see that the command given has its reason in the Divine order, or the intrinsic catholic reason of things, or they will not yield it a full, entire, and hearty obedience. The reason that suffices for the child does not suffice for the adult, and the reason that suffices for barbarians does not suffice for civilized men, or that suffices for nations in the infancy of their civilization does not suffice for them in its maturity. The appeal to external authority was much less frequent under the Roman Empire than in the barbarous ages that followed its downfall, when the church became mixed up with the state.
This trait of the American character is not uncatholic. An intelligent, free, willing obedience, yielded from personal conviction, after seeing its reasonableness, its justice, its logic in the Divine order--the obedience of a free man, not of a slave--is far more consonant to the spirit of the church, and far more acceptable to God, than simple, blind obedience; and a people capable of yielding it stand far higher in the scale of civilization than the people that
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. The church, as well as the state, must deal with men and nations as they are, not as they are not. To deal with a child as with an adult, or with a barbarous nation as with a civilized nation, would be only acting a lie. The church cannot treat men as free men where they are not free men, nor appeal to reason in those in whom reason is undeveloped. She must adapt her discipline to the age, condition, and culture of individuals, and 420 to the greater or less progress of nations in civilization. She herself remains always the same in her constitution, her authority, and her faith; but varies her discipline with the variations of time and place. Many of her canons, very proper and necessary in one age, cease to be so in another, and many which are needed in the Old World would be out of place in the New World. Under the American system, she can deal with the people as free men, and trust them as freemen, because free men they are. The freeman asks, why? and the reason why must be given him, or his obedience fails to be secured. The simple reason that the church commands will rarely satisfy him; he would know why she commands this or that. The full-grown free man revolts at blind obedience, and he regards all obedience as in some measure blind for which he sees only an extrinsic command. Blind obedience even to the authority of the church cannot be expected of the people reared under the American system, not because they are filled with the spirit of disobedience, but because they insist that obedience shall be rationabile obsequium, an act of the understanding, not of the will or the affections alone. They are trained to demand a reason for the command given them, to dis- 421 tinguish between the law and the person of the magistrate. They can obey God, but not man, and they must see that the command given has its reason in the Divine order, or the intrinsic catholic reason of things, or they will not yield it a full, entire, and hearty obedience. The reason that suffices for the child does not suffice for the adult, and the reason that suffices for barbarians does not suffice for civilized men, or that suffices for nations in the infancy of their civilization does not suffice for them in its maturity. The appeal to external authority was much less frequent under the Roman Empire than in the barbarous ages that followed its downfall, when the church became mixed up with the state.
This trait of the American character is not uncatholic. An intelligent, free, willing obedience, yielded from personal conviction, after seeing its reasonableness, its justice, its logic in the Divine order--the obedience of a free man, not of a slave--is far more consonant to the spirit of the church, and far more acceptable to God, than simple, blind obedience; and a people capable of yielding it stand far higher in the scale of civilization than the people that