ve that this Church is the medium through
which God manifests His will and dispenses His grace to man, and through
which alone we can hope for heaven; they believe that nothing can be
more reasonable than to believe God at His word, and that, above all,
they must seek the kingdom of God and secure their eternal salvation.

Being governed by the Church, as freemen, in the spirit of a republican
government, and enjoying, as they do, the freedom of the children of
God, Catholics feel nowhere more at home than under a republican form of
government. If a great pope could say in truth that he was nowhere more
pope than in America, every Catholic can, and does, also, say in truth,
"Nowhere can I be a better Christian than in the United States." Hence
it is that Catholics are very generally attached to the republican
institutions of the country--no class of our citizens more so--and would
defend them at the sacrifice of their lives. Catholics far more readily
adjust themselves to our institutions than non-Catholics, and among
Catholics it must be observed that _they_ succeed best who best
understand and best practise their religion. They who are least truly
American, and yield most to demagogues, are those who have very little
of Catholicity, except the accident of being born of Catholic parents,
who had them baptized in infancy.

Practical Catholics are the best Republicans! If we consult history, we
find that they were always foremost in establishing and maintaining the
republican form of government. Who originated all the free principles
which lie at the basis of our own noble Constitution? Who gave us trial
by jury, _habeas corpus_, stationary courts, and the principle--for
which we fought and conquered in our revolutionary struggle against
Protestant England--that taxes are not to be levied without the free
consent of those who pay them? All these cardinal elements of free
government date back to the good old Catholic times, in the middle
ages--some three hundred years before the dawn of the Reformation! Our
Catholic forefathers gave them all to us.

Again, we are indebted to Catholics for all the republics which ever
existed in Christian times, down to the year 1776: for those of
Switzerland, Venice, Genoa, Andorra, San Marino, and a host of minor
free Commonwealths, which sprang up in the "dark ages." Some of these
republics still exist, proud monuments and unanswerable evidences of
Catholic devotion to freedom. They a