It is one of the mysteries of Providence that what the popes for ages struggled for and still struggle for in the old world, and in all parts of the new world originally colonized by Catholic states, should for the first time in history be fully realized in a society founded by the most anti-papal people on earth, who held the church to be the Scarlet Lady of the Apocalypse. Surely, they builded better than they knew. But explain it as you will, such is the fact. The United States is the only country in the world where the church is really free. It would seem that both state and church had to emigrate to the new world to escape the antagonisms of the old, and to find a field for the free and untrammeled development of each. It is idle to fear that the church will ever seek to disturb the order established here, for she supports no principle and has no interest that would lead her to do it. Individual Catholics, affected by the relations that have subsisted between church and state in the old world, and not aware that the church has here all that she has ever struggled for against kings and princes, may think that the church lacks here some advantages which she ought to have, or may think it desirable to reproduce here the order of things which they have been accustomed to elsewhere, and which in fact the church has submitted to as the best she could get, but has never fully approved. These, however, are few, and are soon corrected by experience, soon convinced that the real solution of the questions which have so long and often so fearfully agitated the nations of Europe, has been providentially obtained by the American people. The church has no wish to alter the relation that exists with us between her and the state.