to concede
the church just as much and just as little freedom in the empire as he
judges expedient for his own secular interests. In Italy, Spain,
Portugal, Mexico, and the Central and South American states, the policy
of the civil authorities is the same, or worse. It may be safely
asserted that, except in the United States, the church is either held
by the civil power in subjection, or treated as an enemy. The relation
is not that of union and harmony, but that of antagonism, to the grave
detriment of both religion and civilization.

It is impossible, even if it were desirable, to restore the mixture of
civil and ecclesiastical governments which obtained in the Middle Ages;
and a total separation of church and state, even as corporations,
would, in the present state of men's minds in Europe, be construed, if
approved by the church, into a sanction by her of political atheism, or
the right of the civil power to govern according to its own will and
pleasure in utter disregard of the law of God, the moral order, or the
immutable distinctions between right and wrong. It could only favor
the absolutism of the state, and put the temporal in the place of the
spiritual. Hence, the Holy Father includes the proposition of the
entire separation of church and state in the Syllabus of Errors
condemned in his Encyclical, dated at Rome, December 8, 1864. Neither
the state nor the people, elsewhere than in the United States, can
understand practically such separation in any other sense than the
complete emancipation of our entire secular life from the law of God,
or the Divine order, which is the real order. It is not the union of
church and state--that is, the union, or identity rather, of religious
and political principles--that it is desirable to get rid of, but the
disunion or antagonism of church and state. But this is nowhere
possible out of the United States; for nowhere else is the state
organized on catholic principles, or capable of acting, when acting
from its own constitution, in harmony with a really catholic church, or
the religious order really existing, in relation to which all things
are created and governed. Nowhere else is it practicable, at present,
to maintain between the two powers their normal relations.

But what is not practicable in the Old World is perfectly practicable
in the New. The state here being organized in accordance with catholic
principles, there can be no antagonism between it and the c