ters from their proper work as churchmen, and impose on them the
duties of politicians and statesmen. Where there is nothing in the
state hostile to the church, where she is free to act according to her
own constitution and laws, and exercise her own discipline on her own
spiritual subjects, civil enactments in her favor or against the sects
may embarrass or impede her operations, but cannot aid her, for she can
advance no farther than she wins the heart and convinces the
understanding. A spiritual work can, in the nature of things, be
effected only by spiritual means. The church wants freedom in relation
to the state--nothing more; for all her power comes immediately from
God, without any intervention or mediation of the state.

The United States, constituted in accordance with the real order of
things, and founded on principles which have their origin and ground in
the principles on which the church herself is founded, can never
establish any one of the sects as the religion of the state, for that
would violate their political constitution, and array all the other
sects, as well as the church herself, against the government. They
cannot be called upon to establish the church by law, because she is
already in their constitution as far as the state has in itself any
relation with religion, and because to establish her in any other sense
would be to make her one of the civil institutions of the land, and to
bring her under the control of the state, which were equally against
her interest and her nature.

The religious mission of the United States is not then to establish the
church by external law, or to protect her by legal disabilities, pains,
and penalties against the sects, however uncatholic they may be; but to
maintain catholic freedom, neither absorbing the state in the church
nor the church in the state, but leaving each to move freely, according
to its own nature, in the sphere assigned it in the eternal order of
things. Their mission separates church and state as external governing
bodies, but unites them in the interior principles from which each
derives its vitality and force. Their union is in the intrinsic unity
of principle, and in the fact that, though moving in different spheres,
each obeys one and the same Divine law. With this the Catholic, who
knows what Catholicity means, is of course satisfied, for it gives the
church all the advantage over the sects of the real over the unreal;
and with thi