But this is a question of which the state can take no cognizance. We have under its constitution no right to call upon it to aid us, directly or indirectly, in unmaking Protestant children of their Protestantism. Of course, before God, or in the spiritual order, we recognize no equality between Catholicity and Protestantism. Before God, no man has any right to be of any religion but the Catholic, the only true religion, the only religion by which men can be raised to union with God in the beatific vision. But before the American state, we recognize in Protestants equal rights with our own. They have the same right to be protected by the state in the freedom of their conscience that we have to be protected by it in the freedom of ours. We should attack the very freedom of conscience the state guarantees to all her citizens, were we to call upon it to found or to continue a system of public schools, at the public expense, intended or fitted to detach Protestant children from the religion of their parents, and turn them over to be brought up in the Catholic religion. We should prove ourselves decidedly un-American in so doing. Yet, we regret to say, this is precisely what the non-catholic majority, inconsiderately we trust, are doing; and, if the popular ministers of the several sects, like Dr. R. W. Clark, Dr. Sheldon, Dr. Bellows, Henry Ward Beecher, and the sectarian and secular press have their way, they will continue to do to the end of the chapter to us Catholics. They probably are not aware that they belie the Americanism they profess, and abuse the power their superiority of numbers gives them to tyrannize over the consciences of their fellow-citizens. This strikes us as very un-American, as well as very unjust. We place our demand for separate schools on the ground of conscience, and therefore of right--the right of God as well as of man. Our conscience forbids us to support schools at the public expense from which our religion is excluded, and in which our children are taught either what we hold to be a false or mutilated religion, or no religion at all. Such schools are perilous to the souls of our children; and we dare avow, even in this age of secularism and infidelity, that we place the salvation of the souls of our children above every other consideration. This plea of conscience, which we urge from the depth of our souls, and under a fearful sense of our accountability to our Maker, ought to suffice, especially in an appeal to a state bound by its own constitution to protect the rights of conscience for each and all of its citizens, whether Protestant or Catholic.