held under a higher law than its own, and therefore rights prior to and above itself, which it is bound by the law constituting it to respect, obey, and, whenever necessary, to use its physical force to protect and vindicate. The original settlers of the Anglo-American colonies were not infidels, but, for the most part, sincerely religious and Christian in their way, and in organizing society aimed not simply to escape the oppression of conscience, of which they had been the victims in the mother country, but to found a truly Christian commonwealth; and such commonwealth they actually founded, as perfect as was possible with their imperfect and often erroneous views of Christianity. The colonies of New England inclined, no doubt, to a theocracy, and tended to absorb the state in the church; in the Southern colonies, the tendency was, as in England, to establish the supremacy of the civil order, and to make the church a function of the state. These two opposite tendencies meeting in the formation of American society, to a great extent, counterbalanced each other, and resulted in the assertion of the supremacy of the Christian idea, or the union and distinction under the law of God, of the two orders. In principle, at least, each order exists in American society in its normal relation to the other; and also in its integrity, with its own distinctive nature, laws, and functions, and therefore the temporal in its proper subordination to the spiritual. This subordination is, indeed, not always observed in practice, nor always even theoretically admitted. Many Americans, at first thought, when it is broadly stated, will indignantly deny it. We shall find even Catholics who do not accept it, and gravely tell us that their religion has nothing to do with their politics; that is, their politics are independent of their religion; that is, again, politics are independent of God, and there is no God in the political order; as if a man could be an atheist in the state, and a devout Catholic in the church. But too many Catholics, at home and abroad, act as if this were indeed possible, and very reasonable, nay, their duty; and hence the political world is given over to the violence and corruption in which Satan finds a rich harvest. But let the state pass some act that openly and undisguisedly attacks the rights, the freedom, or independence of the church, in a practical way, it will be hard to find a single Catholic, in this country at least, who would not denounce it as an outrage on his conscience, which shows that the assertion of the separation of politics from religion so thoughtlessly made, really means only the distinction, not the separation of the two orders, or that politics are independent, so long as they do not run counter to the freedom and independence of religion, or fail to respect and protect the rights of the church. Inexactness of expression, and bad logic do not necessarily indicate unsound faith.