goods of the church seized by revolutionary governments and appropriated to secular uses, it acquires thereby no rights over them or liberty to supervise their discharge of their spiritual functions. We do not deny the same or an equal right in regard to schools and school-teachers. It may found and endow schools and pay the teachers, but it cannot dictate or interfere with the education or discipline of the school. That would imply a union of church and state, or, rather, the subjection of the spiritual order to the secular, which the Catholic Church and the American system of government both alike repudiate.

It is said, however, that the state needs education for its own protection, and to promote the public good or the good of the community, both of which are legitimate ends of its institution. What the state needs in relation to its legitimate ends, or the ends for which it is instituted, it has the right to ordain and control. This is the argument by which all public education by the state is defended. But it involves an assumption which is not admissible. The state, having no religious or spiritual function, can give only secular education, and secular education is not enough for the state's own protection or its promotion of the public good. Purely secular education, or education divorced from religion, endangers the safety of the state and the peace and security of the community, instead of protecting and insuring them. It is not in the power of the state to give the education it needs for its own sake, or for the sake of secular society. The fact is, though statesmen, and especially politicians, are slow to learn it, and still slower to acknowledge it, the state, or secular society, does not and cannot suffice for itself, and is unable to discharge its own proper functions without the co-operation and aid of the spiritual society. Purely secular education creates no civic virtues, and instead of fitting unfits the people for the prompt and faithful discharge of their civic duties, as we may see in Young America, and indeed in the present active and ruling generation of the American people. Young America is impatient of restraint, regards father and mother as old-fogies, narrow-minded, behind the age, and disdains filial submission or obedience to them, has no respect for dignities, acknowledges no superior, mocks at law if he can escape the police, is conceited, proud, self-sufficient, indocile, heedless of the rights and interests of others—will be his own master, and follow his own instincts, passions, or headstrong will. Are these the characteristics of a people fitted to maintain a wise, well-ordered, stable, and beneficent republican government? Or can such a people be developed from such youngerlings? Yet with purely secular education, however far you carry it, experience proves that you can get nothing better.

The church herself, even if she had full control of the education of all the children in the land, with ample funds at her command, could not secure anything better, if, as the state, she educated for a secular end alone. The virtues needed for the protection of the state and the advancement of the public or common good, are and can be secured only by educating or training the children and youth of a nation not for this life as an end, but for the life to come. Hence our Lord says, "Seek first the kingdom of God and his justice, and all these things shall be added unto you." The church does not educate for the secular order as an end, but for God and heaven; and it is precisely in educating for God and heaven that she secures those very virtues on which the welfare and security of the secular order depend, and without which civil society tends inevitably to dissolution, and is sustained, if sustained at all, only by armed force, as we have seen in more than one European nation which has taken education into its own hand, and subordinated it to secular ends. The education needed by secular society can be obtained only from the spiritual society, which educates not for this world, but for the world to come. The virtues needed to secure this life are obtained only by seeking and promoting the virtues which fit us for eternal life.

This follows necessarily from the fact that man is created with a spiritual nature and for an immortal destiny. If he existed for this life only, if he were, as some sciolists pretend, merely a monkey or a gorilla developed, or were like the beasts that perish, this indeed would not and could not follow, and the reconciliation of the nature and destiny of man with uniform human experience would be impossible. We should be obliged, in order to secure the peace and good order of society, as some unbelieving statesmen do not blush to avow, to educate in view of a falsehood, and take care to keep up the delusion that man has a religious nature and destiny, or look to what is false and delusive for the virtues which can alone save us from anarchy and utter barbarism. Yet what would serve the delusion or the falsehood, if man differs not by nature from the dog or the pig? But if man has really a spiritual nature and an immortal destiny, then it must necessarily follow that his real good can in no respect be obtained but in being educated and trained to live for a spiritual life, for an immortal destiny. Should not man be educated according to his spiritual nature and destiny, not as a pig or a monkey? If so, in his education should not the secular be subordinated to the spiritual, and the temporal to the eternal? We know well, experience proves it, that even the secular virtues are not secured when sought as the end of education and of life, but only in educating and living for that which is not secular, and in securing the virtues which have the promise of the life of the world to come.

All education, as all life, should be religious, and all education divorced from religion is an evil, not a good, and is sure in the long run to be ruinous to the secular order; but as a part of religious education, and included in it, secular education has its place, and even its necessity. Man is not all soul, nor all body, but the union of soul and body; and therefore his education should include in their union, not separation—for the separation of soul and body is the death of the body—both spiritual education and secular. It is not that we oppose secular education when given in the religious education, and therefore referred to the ultimate end of man, but when it is given alone and for its own sake. We deny the competency of the state to educate even for its own order, its right to establish purely secular schools, from which all religion is excluded, as Mr. Webster ably contended in his argument in the Girard will case; but we do not deny, we assert rather, its right to establish public schools under the internal control and management of the spiritual society, and to exact that a certain amount of secular instruction be given along with the religious education that society gives. This last right it has in consideration of the secular funds for the support of the schools it furnishes, and as a condition on which it furnishes them.

Let the state say distinctly how much secular education in the public schools it exacts, or judges to be necessary for its own ends, and so far as the Catholic Church has anything to do with the matter it can have it. The church will not refuse to give it in the schools under her control. She will not hesitate to teach along with her religion any amount of reading, writing, arithmetic, history, geography, music, and drawing, or the sciences and the fine arts, the state exacts and provides for; nor will she refuse to allow it to send, if it chooses, its own inspectors into her schools to ascertain if she actually gives the secular education required. Let it say, then, what amount of secular education it wants for all the children of the land, and is willing to pay for, and, so far as Catholics are concerned, it can have it, and