But as to the power of Protestantism to maintain the Republic by checking the great evils that have already sapped its foundations, it has not any at all. How could Protestantism check infidelity, since it leads to it? There are two causes of infidelity that have existed from the beginning of the world. But about three centuries ago Protestantism opened a very wide avenue to infidelity. Protestantism introduced the principle, "There is no divinely-commissioned authority to teach infallibly." Now infidelity exists in this principle of Protestantism, as the oak exists in the acorn, as the consequence is in the premise. On the claim of private judgment, Protestants reject the authority of St. Peter, the Vicar of Christ. The Calvinists, going, as they do, by the same principle, reject the Real Presence of our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. The Socinians, following the same principle, reject, to-day, the Divinity of Christ, and therefore abjure Christianity, and fall back into utter incredulity. The German and French philosophers, rationalists, and pantheists, of all degrees, do not even stop at that; they go farther, and deny the existence of a God Creator, and all by the privilege of free and private judgment. The individual reason taking, as it does, the place of faith, the Protestant, whether he believes it or not, is an infidel in germ, and the infidel is a Protestant in full bloom; in other words, infidelity is nothing but Protestantism in the highest degree. Hence it is that Edgar Quinet, a great herald of Protestantism, is right in styling the Protestant sects _the thousand gates open to get out of Christianity_. No wonder, then, that thousands of Protestants have ended, and continue to end, in framing their formula of faith thus: "I believe in nothing." But let us bring this subject home to our country. The disastrous issue of the revolutionary movements which convulsed all Europe in 1848-9, has thrown upon our shores masses of foreign political refugees, most of whom are infidels in religion, and red republicans, or destructionists of all social order in politics. They are men of desperate character and fortune--outlaws from society, with the brand of infidelity upon their brow. It is by this fast-increasing class of men that "Young America" is attracted, and learn from them their anarchical principles. The greatest, and, in fact, the only real danger to the permanency of our republican institutions, is to be apprehended from this class of infidels in our community. Now what has contributed most towards the enormous increase of these enemies of our republic? It is the godless education given in the Public Schools. And who established these schools, and who robbed the money from the people to support them--to make this source of infidelity flow so abundantly all over the land? You find the answer to this question in Chapter III.