d States, not Congress, far less the
Executive. The error of the Government is not in recognizing the
territorial laws as surviving secession but in counting a State that
has seceded as still a State in the Union, with the right to be counted
as one of the United States in amending the Constitution. Such State
goes out of the Union, but comes under it.

I have endeavored throughout to refer my particular political views; to
their general principles, and to show that the general principles
asserted have their origin and ground in the great, universal, and
unchanging principles of the universe itself. Hence, I have labored to
show the scientific relations of political to theological principles,
the real principles of all science, as of all reality. An atheist, I
have said, may be a politician; but if there were no God, there could
be no politics. This may offend the sciolists of the age, but I must
follow science where it leads, and cannot be arrested by those who
mistake their darkness for light.

I write throughout as a Christian, because I am a Christian; as a
Catholic, because all Christian principles, nay, all real principles
are catholic, and there is nothing sectarian either in nature or
revelation. I am a Catholic by God's grace and great goodness, and
must write as I am. I could not write otherwise if I would, and would
not if I could. I have not obtruded my religion, and have referred to
it only where my argument demanded it; but I have had neither the
weakness nor the bad taste to seek to conceal or disguise it. I could
never have written my book without the knowledge I have, as a Catholic,
of Catholic theology, and my acquaintance, slight as it is, with the
great fathers and doctors of the church, the great masters of all that
is solid or permanent in modern thought, either with Catholics or
non-Catholics.

Moreover, though I write for all Americans, without distinction of sect
or party, I have had more especially in view the people of my own
religious communion. It is no discredit to a man in the United States
at the present day to be a firm, sincere, and devout Catholic. The old
sectarian prejudice may remain with a few, "whose eyes," as Emerson
says, "are in their hind-head, not in their fore-head;" but the
American people are not at heart sectarian, and the nothingarianism so
prevalent among them only marks their state of transition from
sectarian opinions to positive Catholic faith. At any ra