The enemy which the state, which Catholics, and which Protestants have alike to resist and vanquish by education is the irreligion, pantheism, atheism, and immorality, disguised as secularism, or under the specious names of science, humanity, free-religion, and free-love, which not only strike at all Christian faith and Christian morals, but at the family, the state, and civilized society itself. The state has no right to regard this enemy with indifference, and on this point we accept the able arguments used by the serious Protestant preachers and writers cited in the number of _The Christian World_ before us against the exclusion of the Bible and all recognition of religion from the public schools. The American state is not infidel or godless, and is bound always to recognize and actively aid religion as far as in its power. Having no spiritual or theological competency, it has no right to undertake to say what shall or shall not be the religion of its citizens; it must accept, protect, and aid the religion its citizens see proper to adopt, and without partiality for the religion of the majority any more than the religion of the minority; for in regard to religion the rights and powers of minorities and majorities are equal. The state is under the Christian law, and it is bound to protect and enforce Christian morals and its laws, whether assailed by Mormonism, spiritism, free-lovism, pantheism, or atheism. The modern world has strayed far from this doctrine, which in the early history of this country nobody questioned. The departure may be falsely called progress, and boasted of as a result of "the march of intellect;" but it must be arrested, and men must be recalled to the truths they have left behind, if republican government is to be maintained, and Christian society preserved. Protestants who see and deplore the departure from the old landmarks will find themselves unable to arrest the downward tendency without our aid, and little aid shall we be able to render them unless the church be free to use the public schools--that is, her portion of them--to bring up her children in her own faith, and train them to be good Catholics. There is a recrudescence of paganism, a growth of subtle and disguised infidelity, which it will require all that both they and we can do to arrest. Fight, therefore, Protestants, no longer us, but the public enemy.[14] FOOTNOTES: [13] _The Christian World._ The Bible in the Schools. February, 1870. New York: Bible House.