Nor should people complain because I am so earnest about this matter. If it is a virtue in the Catholics to labor night and day to convert this country to their faith, as they say they are doing, why is it improper in me to try to protect the free institutions of the country? I have not said anything against Catholicism which Cardinal Gibbons has not said against what he calls the infidels. In one of his recent letters he declared that no agnostic or atheist should be given office in this country. Why may a cardinal stand up for his church, and not I for the secular state? If the framers of the Constitution desired only Christians, or believers in a church of some kind as office holders, they would not have left the name of the deity out of the nation's charter. According to the Constitution, the only persons really eligible to office are the infidels, or at any rate, those only who are willing to place the interests of the country above even those of God or church. Are Catholics willing to do that? We ask once more, are Catholics willing to do that? And we do not have to ask the future to answer that question. The past has answered it in unmistakable fashion. What today is the difference between Austria, for instance, and America? In Catholic or religious Austria, the interest of the church is above the rights of man. It is well for religion to be free, but it is not free in Austria; it is well for thought and speech to be free, but they are not free in Austria. Why? Because the interests of the church come first. In secular America, religion is free, thought and speech are free. Why? The rights of man come first in a secular state. The church has the power to make an America out of Austria. But will she do it? Yet if she had the power to make an Austria out of America would she hesitate to do it? Americans beware! But let us return to Napoleon III and Pius IX. Encouraged and emboldened by his successes, and his increasing power over the emperor, as well as by his command of the resources of France for his own throne, Pius IX about this time promulgated the famous dogma of the infallibility of the pope. Until then, the church, or ecclesiastical councils, shared infallibility with the pope, but henceforth the pope alone shall be infallible, and councils and conclaves would no longer be needed to decide religious questions. Thus, to the principle of absolutism was given a new endorsement. As soon as he became infallible, the pope announced a new dogma--the immaculate conception of the virgin. The church had never held that Mary herself, like her divine son, was born of the Holy Ghost, but Pope Pius declared she was, and his word became the belief of the church universal. About this time Mary began to appear to shepherds and young girls in the fields, confirming the word of the pope that she was born of the Holy Ghost.