e false as well as the true; for the state, being catholic
in its constitution, can never suffer the adherents of the false to
oppress the consciences of the adherents of the true. The church being
free, and the state harmonizing with her, catholicity has, in the
freedom of both, all the protection it needs, all the security it can
ask, and all the support it can, in the nature of the case receive from
external institutions, or from social and political organizations.

This freedom may not be universally wise or prudent, for all nations
may not be prepared for it: all may not have attained their majority.
The church, as well as the state, must deal with men and nations as
they are, not as they are not. To deal with a child as with an adult,
or with a barbarous nation as with a civilized nation, would be only
acting a lie. The church cannot treat men as free men where they are
not free men, nor appeal to reason in those in whom reason is
undeveloped. She must adapt her discipline to the age, condition, and
culture of individuals, and to the greater or less progress of nations
in civilization. She herself remains always the same in her
constitution, her authority, and her faith; but varies her discipline
with the variations of time and place. Many of her canons, very proper
and necessary in one age, cease to be so in another, and many which are
needed in the Old World would be out of place in the New World. Under
the American system, she can deal with the people as free men, and
trust them as freemen, because free men they are. The freeman asks,
why? and the reason why must be given him, or his obedience fails to be
secured. The simple reason that the church commands will rarely
satisfy him; he would know why she commands this or that. The
full-grown free man revolts at blind obedience, and he regards all
obedience as in some measure blind for which he sees only an extrinsic
command. Blind obedience even to the authority of the church cannot be
expected of the people reared under the American system, not because
they are filled with the spirit of disobedience, but because they
insist that obedience shall be rationabile obsequium, an act of the
understanding, not of the will or the affections alone. They are
trained to demand a reason for the command given them, to distinguish
between the law and the person of the magistrate. They can obey God,
but not man, and they must see that the command given has its reason