In consequence of his tendency to an exclusive asceticism, a tendency which he owed to the unsettled times in which he lived, and the reaction in his own mind against the liberalism be had at one time favored, Donoso Cortes countenanced, to some extent, political absolutism; and had great influence in leading even eminent Catholics to denounce constitutionalism, legislative assemblies, publicity, and free political discussion, as if these things were un-catholic, and inseparable from the political atheism of the age. There was a moment when the writer of this article himself, under the charm of his eloquence, and the force of the arguments he drew from the individual and social crimes committed in the name of liberty and progress, was almost converted to his side of the question, and supported popular institutions only because cause they were the law in his own country. But without pretending that the church enjoins any particular form of civil polity, or maintaining the infallibility or impeccability of the people, either collectively or individually, a calmer study of history, and the recent experience of our own country, have restored me to my early faith in popular forms of government, or democracy as organized under our American system, which, though it has its dangers and attendant evils, is, wherever practicable, the form of government that, upon the whole, best conforms to those great Catholic principles on which the church herself is founded. But the people cannot govern well, any more than kings or kaisers, unless trained to the exercise of power, and subjected to moral and religious discipline. It is precisely here that the work of Donoso Cortes has its value. The reaction which has for a century or two been going on against that mixture of civil and ecclesiastical government which grew up after the downfall of the Roman empire in the west, and which was not only natural but necessary, since the clergy had nearly all the learning, science, and cultivation of the times, and to which modern society is so deeply indebted for its civilization, has carried modern statesmen to an opposite extreme, and resulted in almost universal political atheism. The separation of church and state in our age means not merely the separation of the church and the state as corporations or governments, which the popes have always insisted on, but the separation of political principles from theological principles, and the subjection of the church and ecclesiastical affairs to the state. Where monarchy, in its proper sense, obtains, the king or emperor, and where democracy, save in its American sense, is asserted, the people, takes the place of God, at least in the political order. Statolatry is almost as prevalent in our days as idolatry was with the ancient Greeks and Romans.