The educational question ought not to present any serious difficulty, and would not if our Evangelicals and humanitarians did not wish to make education a means of preventing the growth of the church and unmaking the children of Catholics, as Catholics; or if they seriously and in good faith would accept the religious equality before the state which the constitution and laws, both of the Union and the several states, as yet recognize and protect. No matter what we claim for the Catholic Church in the theological order--we claim for her in the civil order in this country only equality with the sects, and for Catholics only equal rights with citizens who are not Catholics. We demand the freedom of conscience and the liberty of our church, which is our conscience, enjoyed by Evangelicals. This much the country in its constitution and laws has promised us, and this much it cannot deny us without breaking its faith pledged before the world. As American citizens, we object to the assumption of the control of education, or of any action in regard to it, by the general government; for it has no constitutional right to meddle with it, and so far as civil government has any authority in relation to it, it is, under our system of government, the authority of the states severally, not of the states united. We deny, of course, as Catholics, the right of the civil government to educate, for education is a function of the spiritual society, as much so as preaching and the administration of the sacraments; but we do not deny to the state the right to establish and maintain public schools. The state, if it chooses, may even endow religion, or pay the ministers of religion a salary for their support; but its endowments of religion, when made, are made to God, are sacred, and under the sole control and management of the spiritual authority, and the state has no further function in regard to them but to protect the spirituality in the free and full possession and enjoyment of them. If it chooses to pay the ministers of religion a salary, as has been done in France and Spain, though accepted by the Catholic clergy only as a small indemnification for the goods of the church seized by revolutionary governments and appropriated to secular uses, it acquires thereby no rights over them or liberty to supervise their discharge of their spiritual functions. We do not deny the same or an equal right in regard to schools and school-teachers. It may found and endow schools and pay the teachers, but it cannot dictate or interfere with the education or discipline of the school. That would imply a union of church and state, or, rather, the subjection of the spiritual order to the secular, which the Catholic Church and the American system of government both alike repudiate.