e true (p. 91).

No such analogy in reality subsists as is here assumed. There is a great
difference between the Irish and the English establishment; but even the
latter has no similarity of principle with the Catholic establishments
of the continent.

The fundamental distinction is, that in one case the religion of the
people is adopted by the State, whilst in the other the State imposes a
religion on the people. For the political justification of Catholic
establishments, no more is required than the theory that it is just that
the religion of a country should be represented in, and protected by,
its government. This is evidently and universally true; for the moral
basis which human laws require can only be derived from an influence
which was originally religious as well as moral. The unity of moral
consciousness must be founded on a precedent unity of spiritual belief.
According to this theory, the character of the nation determines the
forms of the State. Consequently it is a theory consistent with freedom.
But Protestant establishments, according to our author's definition,
which applies to them, and to them alone, rest on the opposite theory,
that the will of the State is independent of the condition of the
community; and that it may, or indeed must, impose on the nation a faith
which may be that of a minority, and which in some cases has been that
of the sovereign alone. According to the Catholic view, government may
preserve in its laws, and by its authority, the religion of the
community; according to the Protestant view it may be bound to change
it. A government which has power to change the faith of its subjects
must be absolute in other things; so that one theory is as favourable to
tyranny as the other is opposed to it. The safeguard of the Catholic
system of Church and State, as contrasted with the Protestant, was that
very authority which the Holy See used to prevent the sovereign from
changing the religion of the people, by deposing him if he departed from
it himself. In most Catholic countries the Church preceded the State;
some she assisted to form; all she contributed to sustain. Throughout
Western Europe Catholicism was the religion of the inhabitants before
the new monarchies were founded. The invaders, who became the dominant
race and the architects of a new system of States, were sooner or later
compelled, in order to preserve their dominion, to abandon their pagan
or their Arian religion, and to