sedition, insurrection,
rebellion, revolution, by the elevation of the civic virtues to the
rank of religious, virtues, and making loyalty a matter of conscience.
Religion is brought to the aid of the state, not indeed as a foreign
auxiliary, but as integral in the political order itself. Religion
sustains the state, not because it externally commands us to obey the
higher powers, or to be submissive to the powers that be, not because
it trains the people to habits of obedience, and teaches them to be
resigned and patient under the grossest abuses of power, but because it
and the state are in the same order, and inseparable, though distinct,
parts of one and the same whole. The church and the state, as
corporations or external governing bodies, are indeed separate in their
spheres, and the church does not absorb the state, nor does the state
the church; but both are from God, and both work to the same end, and
when each is rightly understood there is no antithesis or antagonism
between them. Men serve God in serving the state as directly as in
serving the church. He who dies on the battle-field fighting for his
country ranks with him who dies at the stake for his faith. Civic
virtues are themselves religious virtues, or at least virtues without
which there are no religious virtues, since no man who loves not his
brother does or can love God.

The guaranties offered the state or authority are ample, because it has
not only conscience, moral sentiment, interest, habit, and the via
inertia of the mass, but the whole physical force of the nation, at its
command. The individual has, indeed, only moral guaranties against the
abuse of power by the sovereign people, which may no doubt sometimes
prove insufficient. But moral guaranties are always better than none,
and there are none where the people are held to be sovereign in their
own native right and might, organized or unorganized, inside or outside
of the constitution, as most modern democratic theorists maintain;
since, if so, the will of the people, however expressed, is the
criterion of right and wrong, just and unjust, true and false, is
infallible and impeccable, and no moral right can ever be pleaded
against it; they are accountable to nobody, and, let them do what they
please, they can do no wrong. This would place the individual at the
mercy of the state, and deprive him of all right to complain, however
oppressed or cruelly treated. This would establish th