. 
 
THE MOST REV. WILLIAM H. O’CONNELL, D.D. 
 
 Archbishop of Boston. 
 
SERMON 
 
 BY 
 
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 His Grace Archbishop O’Connell 
 
 AT 
 
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 CATHEDRAL OF THE HOLY CROSS, BOSTON, 
 
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 SUNDAY, AUGUST 9,1908 
 
 BEFORE THE 
 
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 Federation of Catholic Societies 
 
 BOSTON COLLEGE LIBRARY 
 
 ■ CHESTNUT KILL, MASS, 
 
 THE CHURCH—THE STRONG SAFEGUARD OF 
 
 THE REPUBLIC 
 
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 NDOUBTEDLY one of the things which drew 
 the hearts of men towards our Blessed Lord, 
 was the gentle human sympathy which per- 
 whole life and manifested itself in all his deal¬ 
 ings with men. At times, indeed, he showed himself to 
 be the lion of the tribe of Juda. Again and again he 
 withstood the great ones of the world to their very 
 faces. He lashed the vendors from the temple gates, 
 and more mercilessly still he lashed with the scorn of 
 derision and contempt the haughty Pharisee and the proud 
 hypocrites who lorded it over fhe people. When the honor 
 of the Father’s house demanded cleansing and defence He 
 rose in righteous anger and His very countenance struck 
 terror to the hearts of those who beheld Him. 
 
 But such moments were rare, and in this terrifying mood 
 He showed Himself only to the imposter and the hypocrite, 
 the very sight of whom moved Him to lofty scorn. But to 
 the people He was never thus. They knew Him only as a 
 compassionate friend and a gentle benefactor. Upon them 
 His face beamed with sympathy and love. When they 
 suffered He was sad and He bore their importunities and 
 even their fickleness with an unruffled patience. At times 
 as He looked over the land, whose soil His sacred feet were 
 sanctifying, a deep and tender melancholy took possession 
 
 vaded his 
 
2 The Church—The Strong Safeguard of the Republic 
 
 of His soul seeing, as He did, the aridness which it seemed 
 no heavenly dew could soften. In such a mood His sadness 
 was as deep and touching as when before the mighty ones 
 of Judea His bearing was awe-inspiring. 
 
 Today’s gospel pictures Him in one of those touching 
 moments. Seated upon the hills which overlooked the 
 Sacred City He gazed upon it long and wistfully. For 
 Christ loved not only mankind in general but He loved His 
 own people as brother loves brother. With all their faults, 
 and He knew them all profoundly, they were His people, 
 His Mother’s people, and they were dear to Him as the blood 
 which ran in His veins, and this city, Jerusalem, God’s own 
 city, wherein was the temple built by God’s command and 
 the ark, the table of God’s law, how precious they were to Him. 
 
 Over the whole world His vision ranged and before 
 His vision rose the proud citadels of other lands, castles 
 and palaces, powerful and rich and fair to behold. Other 
 temples, too, raised their splendid walls, their white marble 
 turrets glittering in the sunlight and their gilded domes 
 glinting like mirrors of gold. But within them was the 
 abomination of desolation and the worship of false gods and 
 foolish idols. Once more He looked down upon the Holy 
 City. In that Holy of Holies the name of the true God was 
 spoken. Upon those altars sacrifice was offered daily to 
 Jehovah, to his own Father. There, alone, in all the world, 
 was God known and worshipped, and yet as He looked He 
 drooped His head. His face betrayed the awful sadness of 
 His soul, the tears sprang to His eyes and coursed down 
 His sacred cheeks and Jesus wept. 
 
The Church—The Strong Safeguard of the Republic 3 
 
 When at another time, standing near the grave of his 
 beloved friend Lazarus, the great sorrow that filled his soul 
 showed itself in tears, those who stood by him said one to 
 another: “See how He loved him/’ His tears were the 
 marks of His love. And now as he sits solitary on the mount 
 His love for Jerusalem is attested by the same witnesses. 
 Christ was a true patriot. The love of His Fatherland with 
 Him was deep and true and strong. For it doubtless He 
 would have died, indeed He did die for it, and the cause of 
 His weeping now is the thought that even His death will 
 profit it so little, and amid His tears He raises His voice in 
 this lamentation: “Ah, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, if thou didst but 
 know the things which are for thy peace!” 
 
 To establish peace in the world Christ had come among 
 men. “Peace to men of good will,”—that was the burden of 
 the angel’s song when in Bethelehem the Prince of Peace was 
 born into the world. The pagan nations, ignorant as they 
 were of the true God and of His law, had long since lost the 
 secret of that harmony of human and divine rights and duties 
 which is the very groundwork of Peace. There was no law 
 but the law of force. Might alone prevailed. The weak had 
 long since ceased to look for justice; the poor and the little 
 ones of earth had long since accepted degradation, and the 
 voice of complaining had long since been stifled. Tyranny 
 reigned supreme, and among the thousand gods to whom they 
 offered incense and sacrifice there was not one with power 
 enough to aid the weak. There was a God of Riches, and a 
 God of War, and a God of Beauty, and a God of Pleasure; 
 there was no God of poverty, of humility and of pain. The 
 
4 The Church—The Strong Safeguard of the Republic 
 
 rich sacrificed to wealth that they might obtain even greater 
 riches and they went out from its temple to plunder the 
 defenceless. The slaves dragged from their burning hamlets 
 were whipped into the wine vats and their aching feet trod 
 the purple grapes into the rich wine which their drunken 
 and pampered masters were to offer to the Wine God. 
 
 There was no law but the law of force, and hatred of 
 man to man, of tribe to tribe, of nation to nation was the 
 logical and natural consequence. Justice and equity are 
 founded not upon force, but upon the eternal principles which 
 emanate from the God who established His universe. And 
 when He is banished from the nation’s heart justice and 
 equity vanish with Him. 
 
 What a garden of weeds God’s beautiful world had 
 become—weeds, poisonous and loathsome, that grew out of 
 the fetid swamps and which, climbing as they grew, 
 reached even now to where He was sitting on the mountain, 
 and whose tendrils had already gripped the Land of Promise 
 over which God’s representatives had so long reigned. 
 Already within the gates of the Holy City disorder had 
 raised its shrill voice. The atmosphere of paganism all 
 around it had begun to do its work. 
 
 The egotism, the selfishness and the heartlessness of 
 wealth had entered through the gates with the merchandise 
 which Jerusalem had brought from Tyre and Sidon. The 
 gap between the rich and poor was ever widening. The 
 luxury of the farther Orient was fast sapping the moral 
 vigor of the Israelite. The tablets of the law were still 
 revered, but the law itself was fast losing its power over the 
 
The Church—The Strong Safeguard of the Republic 5 
 
 nation; and secretly, step by step, the vices of paganism 
 had crept up the mount of Zion into the very sanctuary of 
 the Lord. The cankerworm of irreligion and infidelity was 
 gnawing at the very vitals of faith in God and in His law. 
 And the thin veil of hypocrisy barely covered the hollowness 
 and the sham with which the Pharisee and the Sadducee 
 strove to hide by empty ceremonial the lack of true 
 observance of God’s commands. 
 
 As Christ looked from the high place where He sat 
 over Jerusalem and Palestine, it seemed as if the sacred 
 cause of God was all but lost. The very citadel of God 
 was now the center of attack. There was force enough and 
 more still within that citadel to rout the whole assembled 
 army of infidelity and idolatry now gathered in battle array 
 up to its very walls. The power of God, the infinite and all 
 powerful, was there in their midst. A hundred times before 
 He had rescued them, when the faith of the people was 
 strong and all that faith was in God. They had but to rise 
 from the lethargy which their indifference and their 
 hypocrisy had brought down upon them to fling off the 
 selfishness which luxury was weaving about them and to 
 stretch out their hands in sincerity toward the Son of God, 
 there seated upon the mountain above them, to accept His 
 sweet yoke of humility and His gentle 'burden of charity, 
 and once more the reign of Jehovah would return, bringing 
 in its train justice and righteousness and the tranquility 
 of order which is blessed pe^ce. 
 
 But alas! pride blinded their eyes and selfishness had 
 hardened their hearts. The humility of the carpenter’s son 
 
6 The Church—The Strong Safeguard of the Republic 
 
 was foolishness to their proud minds and the law of His 
 fraternal love was folly to their selfish and greedy hearts. 
 And He who had come to save them from themselves, He who 
 had brought with Him the power of Heaven to make them 
 again a great nation upon the earth, He who had brought the 
 reality of God’s presence instead of the figure and the shadow 
 which they had possessed, He who was their God and their 
 King, was out there on the hills weeping for the blindness 
 which hid Him from their eyes—a blindness which even He 
 could not heal because they did not wish to see. Christ 
 weeping over Jerusalem will remain as long as the world 
 lasts a picture of that true patriotism of love, of home and 
 country which every follower of Christ should feel. A 
 picture, not of the false and flattering love which cries 
 “Peace, peace,” when there is no peace, which signals “All 
 is well,” even when the enemy is at the gates, which lulls 
 the dozing citizens to sleep with lullabys fit only for babes. 
 There are plenty such now being sung—sweet, meaningless 
 messages of false optimism telling the world how good it 
 is and that it is constantly growing better. 
 
 Not such was Christ’s patriotism, not such may be ours, 
 as we prize at their true value the prosperity and the real 
 happiness of the land we love with truly Christian patriotism. 
 Our duty it is, rather to see, as if with His vision, what are 
 
 i 
 
 the foes which silently and stealthily tend to undermine the 
 strength of our beloved nation; and to raise our voices 
 incessantly against them, not with the wail of pessimism, 
 but with the voice of affectionate warning. 
 
 For this land has been given over by God’s providence 
 
The Church—The Strong Safeguard of the Republic 7 
 
 to the rule of all the people and every citizen must in 
 accepting its benefits accept also the responsibility of 
 guarding its welfare and helping on its prosperity. And first 
 ever in its defence, as first in every civic duty, should be the 
 Catholic Christian; for the Church of Christ has much to be 
 grateful for here, where its liberty is guaranteed and its 
 precious freedom protected; and the Catholic has always 
 shown his gratitude on every field where his country’s honor 
 demanded it. 
 
 Today thousands of her children from every part of 
 this vast land are gathered in this historic city to give new 
 proof of their fidelity to their country’s interests; to sit for 
 a while with Christ upon the mountain and to see as with 
 His eyes what things are for the nation’s peace; and then to 
 go forward and strive as He did to diminish as far as we can 
 the false principles which threaten her very vitality and to 
 make known the doctrine of Christ, in which alone there is 
 life and strength, not only for the individual, but for the 
 whole nation. 
 
 This in brief is the primary motive and reason for the 
 Federation of Catholic Societies—namely, to safeguard the 
 best interests of the nation by endeavoring to bring out 
 into the actual and throbbing life of the people those 
 vivifying principles of Christian civilization upon which 
 Christian society is built; and secondly by denouncing 
 fearlessly whatever endangers the public moral welfare 
 and agitating prudently to bring about a healthy public 
 sentiment. 
 
 No one who knows, even superficially, the national life 
 
8 The Church—The Strong Safeguard of the Republic 
 
 can doubt for an instant that there is great and crying need 
 for activity on the part of all men of good will. And since 
 the impending ills of the body corporate are not physical but 
 moral in their nature, the Church whose field is the moral 
 world must confront them now as she has done in all the 
 ages since the days when Peter and Linus Cletus and 
 Clement faced them in the Roman Empire and by the power 
 of the cross defeated them in their very stronghold. And 
 I daresay that the Catholic Church alone must soon be 
 recognized, not merely as the strongest, but as the only 
 bulwark against the prevalent social evils which seem even 
 now to threaten not only the prosperity, but the very 
 life of the nation. For she is today the only moral body 
 which gives indication of growing vitality and increasing 
 vigor. She has grown in these fifty years past by leaps and 
 bounds, while all around her are strewn the wrecks: of 
 what once appeared to be flourishing sects. The Catholic 
 Church has but just begun to manifest in this young land 
 the undying vitality with which Christ endowed her, while 
 on every side are heard the cries of dissolution and 
 dismemberment of what but a few brief years ago seemed 
 energetic religious organizations. It is not we who now 
 say this, but their own leaders who can no longer deceive 
 themselves when the evidences are so palpable. 
 
 I used to wonder as a boy, beholding our own small 
 number and negligible influence, when I read that Protes¬ 
 tantism contained in itself the germ of dissolution and 
 decay, for facts, around me seemed to offer little proof of 
 the truth of that assertion; but today more rapidly than one 
 
The Church—The Strong Safeguard of the Republic 9 
 
 could ever imagine the proofs have come to hand in the 
 facts under our eyes, and it is the leaders of Protestantism, 
 again I repeat, who are now proclaiming it to the world that 
 unless all signs fail their churches may soon close their doors. 
 Step by step the principle of private judgment and the so- 
 called “higher criticism” have done their havoc. The Bible 
 which half a century ago was a fetich is today a fable, and 
 whatever there was of simple faith in the supernatural is 
 fast being dried up in the hearts of those whose ancestors 
 made faith alone the only condition of eternal salvation. 
 Lutheranism and Anglicanism, as they were a century ago, 
 have disappeared from the face of the earth. All the other 
 “isms” which followed quickly one upon the other have 
 reduced themselves at last to “nothingism.” No faith, no 
 church, no fixed moral law; nothing, in fine, of. all that 
 cannot be touched with the hands and seen with the eyes, 
 even God himself is no longer God, but a first cause or an 
 unseen power or anything but that Eternal Father whose 
 beloved Son was Christ, the Redeemer of the world. 
 
 A few earnest souls outside of the Church already 
 recognize the writing on the wall. They behold with dismay 
 the disintegration of societies, congregations and parishes 
 They are raising their voices now against the debacle but 
 it is like building a wall of sand against an incoming tide—. 
 the tide which four centuries ago started with the rebellion 
 of Luther against his ecclesiastical superiors, and now by 
 the force of its own logic that wave has gone on mounting 
 until rebellion succeeding rebellion in increasing proportions 
 it has submerged those who caused it and has left in its 
 
10 The Church—The Strong Safeguard of the Republic 
 
 wake the utter ruin of the supernatural and scarce a vestige 
 of a revealed religion remains. And with its advance in 
 sympathetic progress the seeds of civic rebellion have been 
 sown, and that, too, was a logical consequence. The 
 king rebelled against Papal supremacy and made himself 
 Pope in his own domain; the people rebelled against the 
 king with perfect logic and assumed to themselves both 
 papacy and royalty; and now as the gaunt form of anarchy 
 and communism stalk abroad the process goes further and 
 wealth and power wherever they exist are assailed. If the 
 first rebellion was justifiable, so is the last. If no rights 
 are sacred, then every revolution is justified. The Church 
 is the only moral body in the whole world which has 
 remained consistent and sternly logical. Whole nations have 
 risen up against her. Her rebellious children have often 
 offered her violence, but she has remained ever the same, 
 serene in the midst of revolutions, confident of the promises 
 of Christ; and she has beheld the dissolution and decay 
 of all that threatened her, while she, ever youthful, ever 
 more vigorous, still flourishes, still teaches the truths which 
 save society and the world. 
 
 Christ warned his Church of the battle and the warfare 
 through which she was to march to her eternal triumph. 
 Each century has verified His prophecy. A century ago 
 Protestantism was in the field against her and the ground of 
 warfare was a few texts of Scripture. Today Protestantism 
 has thrown scripture to the winds and with Protestantism 
 there is no longer any struggle. It has vanished from the field 
 self-destroyed. But a new foe faces the Church, or rather its 
 
The Church—The Strong Safeguard of the Republic 11 
 
 most ancient enemy in a new armor. It is paganism. The 
 paganism of Rome and Greece marching under a standard 
 woven from the last shreds of those Christian principles 
 which have been saved from the ruins. It knows no Christ, 
 no dogma, no leader, no time but the present, no place but 
 the earth. It sneers at all revelation, and scoffs at the super¬ 
 natural. And yet it hails as a new salvation the ravings of 
 half demented prophets and grovels in the stupidity of 
 Oriental superstition. 
 
 And leagued with this foe, who fights with lazy indif¬ 
 ference there is another which is neither lazy nor indifferent, 
 but with a virulence of antipathy and a tireless activity all 
 its own, weilds in season and out of season its sharp 
 weapon with a hate that is almost blind at everything that is 
 left of the Christian name. The aggressiveness of this enemy 
 of Christ is the aggressiveness of the evil one himself. And 
 its cunning is the cunning of him who is the father of lies. It 
 disdains no means, it scorns no assistance that will produce 
 desired results. The press, the stage, the platform, however 
 and wherever it can catch the public ear and the public eye 
 serve its purposes. In France it worked for half a century 
 without showing its true hand; and when at last it was 
 caught red-handed, no lie was too gross, no calumny too 
 vile to cloak its own trickery and deception. 
 
 And so the two foes which face today the cross of Christ, 
 still raised aloft by His Church as the tree of eternal life and 
 the banner of salvation, are first, the last remnants of that 
 negation once called Protestantism and now styling itself 
 queerly enough “The New Religion,” and secondly, the same 
 
12 The Church—The Strong Safeguard of the Republic 
 
 eternal energy, paganism, which the Apostles faced from 
 the first day when to the Gentile world they preached Christ 
 crucified. And the Catholic Church today, holding firm and 
 fast to the same principles and the same doctrine and the 
 same law which Peter and James and John delivered to 
 Jerusalem and Rome and Athens, standing on the ground 
 of the same eternal truths, never changing, yet always 
 moving the whole moral world, remains in spite of new 
 thought and new theories the only permanent strength in 
 all the world, the only reliable moral force upon which 
 all order and law and authority can depend, and therefore 
 the only moral organization and institution which with¬ 
 stands alike the false pretensions of conceited novelties in 
 religion and the turbulent restlessness of all revolutionists 
 against civil order. 
 
 It is wonderful how men can deceive themselves with 
 a little flattery and it is pathetic to see what intellectual 
 vanity can do to cover up the glaring fallacies of new 
 systems. To accept what the experience of ages has proven 
 has for some temperaments little attraction. Newness, 
 originality, is the first requisite for them, and so under the 
 guise of a new need for new conditions they invent for 
 themselves new principles, a new doctrine and call them a 
 new church. And with a blindness which is beyond compre¬ 
 hension they fail to see the double fallacy of their position 
 from the point of view of both history and philosphy. For 
 the profound student of history knows that every so-called 
 new condition of society has been repeated one hundred 
 times before in the story of the race. The names of the 
 
The Church—The Strong Safeguard of the Republic 13 
 
 people and places change, the conditions are identical. There 
 is not a single condition existing today in the whole world, 
 civilized or uncivilized, which the Church of Christ has not 
 faced one hundred times before and settled with the same 
 identical principle. And the student of philosophy knows 
 that truth is always truth and the only originality in the 
 moral order is immorality; and yet we are expected seriously 
 to listen to all this talk about the growth of truth and the 
 new religion. If this growth consists, as we plainly recognize 
 that it does, in a return to the Paganism of twenty centuries 
 ago, we fail to see what the twenty centuries of growth have 
 accomplished. If this so called “new thought” and new 
 religion mean the blotting out of the whole inorality of 
 Christ, as in the end it certainly does, all meaningless 
 phrases to the contrary notwithstanding, prating about 
 progress and intellectual advance is the progress of the crab 
 walking backwards. 
 
 Take away from the Christian religion all that makes 
 it essentially Christian, the divinity of Christ, the reality 
 of the supernatural world, the necessity of grace, the in¬ 
 herent moral weakness of human nature—take them away 
 as the “new thought” and new religion have done and we 
 ask why speak of Christianity at all, except as a mockery 
 and a snare. It is strange that with all their boasting they 
 still fear to call themselves openly the pagans that they are. 
 
 They pretend still to reverence Christ. Strange logic! 
 for if Christ be the man they represent, He is the greatest 
 imposter and criminal the world has ever known. For He 
 has deceived the human race in the most vital matter that 
 
14 The Church—The Strong Safeguard of the Republic 
 
 concerns humanity. Why then this mockery of their 
 allegiance to Christ and the name of Christian? It would 
 seem as if they had a superstitious dread of taking the last 
 and most logical step of all—that of renouncing the entire 
 Christian name and openly joining hands with those who 
 have opposed it from the beginning. And we repeat, driven 
 as we are by the inexorable force of the true logic of their 
 position, that they stand before this only alternative: either 
 to go back to the shadow of the cross upon which the God- 
 Man died for their salvation, back to the rock upon which 
 Christ built His Church, that Church against which neither 
 new religions nor new revolutions can ever prevail; or 
 frankly disavowing His principles and His law, throw off His 
 yoke entirely and take the only other logical stand, the stand 
 which all the world had taken before Christ came, that 
 there is nothing but conjecture in the whole realm of spiritual 
 life, no certainty of hope beyond the tomb, no philosophy of 
 life, but that which bids man to eat, drink and be merry, for 
 tomorrow we die, and death ends all. 
 
 This is the true and logical terminus toward which 
 modern life, rejecting the guidance of divine faith, inevitably 
 is tending. It is unquestionably the final conclusion of the 
 premises which the so called “new thought” has openly 
 espoused. Are they prepared to accept the bitter logic of the 
 situation? A logic which has begun to work itself out under 
 our very eyes and the fruit of which, however unwelcome, 
 is now at their very doors. Why talk about the evils of 
 divorce? Why bewail the diminution of the birthrate and 
 the threatened extinction of family life? Why decry the 
 
The Church—The Strong Safeguard of the Republic 15 
 
 rising discontent visible all around us? Why complain of 
 the social disorders that are rending the civil fabric? Why 
 exclaim in horror at the lawless uprisings of anarchy and 
 riot against constituted authority? Why bemoan the 
 growing divisions between the rich and the poor and the 
 clamor which fills the land of class against class? These 
 are after all only the practical working out of the very 
 principles which for a century and more the apostles of this 
 new religion have been upholding. They are the scourge 
 which infidelity and agnosticism have brought down upon 
 the shoulders of those who have preached them. 
 
 The people are more logical than their leaders, these wise¬ 
 acres with intellects too great to accept historic Christianity. 
 Poor, dull people, with whom these modern philosophers so 
 often have grown impatient because they learn so slowly. 
 They are learning fast enough now—they have seized at last 
 the full meaning of the new principles of salvation which 
 make each man both pope and king, which hand over to the 
 interpretation of each individual the mystery of life to solve 
 according to his own judgment and his own taste. Yes, 
 they are learning fast now—so fast that their teachers are 
 horrified at their aptness. And when at the lightning speed 
 which they now have attained the new principles have 
 arrived at their full application, when all government is 
 threatened, except the government of each man by himself, 
 when at last the only sanction which human law has is force, 
 as it must be when the groundwork of the supernatural is 
 abolished and moral obligations have no more meaning, 
 what will there be left to oppose to force but force, and 
 
16 The Church—The Strong Safeguard of the Republic 
 
 what is that but war. And the war, not of nation against 
 nation, but of man against man; and that is anarchy. 
 
 It is idle for them to imagine that philanthropy will have 
 any power to stem the tide which infidelity and irreligion 
 have started. It is mere folly to attempt to supplant faith by 
 humanitarianism. This is the latest of all their fallacies and 
 will be found as fruitless as its predecessors. The evil is 
 deeper than mere surface ills and the momentary relief of 
 them can never change the radical wrong. There are certain 
 
 appetites that only grow by feeding, and if life is to be 
 
 * 
 
 reduced to the mere process of getting, no amount of material 
 giving will ever satisfy its insatiable hunger. That remedy 
 has been tried before and failed utterly, and that for the 
 simple reason that moral content alone produces real happi¬ 
 ness whether a man be as rich as Croesus or as poor as 
 Lazarus. And there can never be moral content without 
 moral life, and there can never be moral life without spiritual 
 law, and there is no spiritual law that has any lasting 
 foundation, any substantial hope, any universal and eternal 
 motive but the law of Christ living in His Church. 
 
 If there is any form of government which needs for its 
 permanence and prosperity the conserving force of right 
 moral Christian sentiment it is a republic. Under a monarchy 
 loyalty to the reigning house and its traditions and glories, 
 together with the aristocracy of inheritance can, as history 
 has often proven, hold in abeyance the forces of disunion and 
 dismemberment. Today the greatest power which holds 
 together the whole Japanese people is the veneration in which 
 the Japanese rightfully hold the Mikado and the Imperial 
 
The Church—The Strong Safeguard of the Republic 17 
 
 family. In a republic there is no such conservative influence. 
 The principle at least in theory of a democratic form of gov¬ 
 ernment is that the will of the majority of the people is the 
 law. Popular sentiment then is the very groundwork and 
 foundation of its existence, and the moral atmosphere which 
 pervades the mass of the citizens is the only safeguard of 
 its permanence. It is for this reason that, while changes 
 in a monarchy are slow, in a republic they sometimes come 
 with the rapidity of lightning. The germ of disorder, wnich 
 in an empire may take centuries to develop, in a republic 
 may require but a single year. It is for this reason that no 
 one who loves this thrice blessed land of ours can behold 
 with indifference the smallest beginnings of those principles 
 which in these latter days more than ever before have 
 become evident among us—the principles, I repeat, of a 
 new paganism imported from the schools of German agnostic 
 philosophy, finding their way through the universities and 
 the pulpit down among the people. Wait but a little longer 
 and the nation one day will awake startled to find the 
 principles which it once applauded doing such mischief as 
 these myopic teachers never contemplated. 
 
 For the people are merciless in their logic when once 
 they have learned well their lesson. If the whole period of 
 their early education is spent with no instruction in the 
 divine truths which lead towards God, they can hardly be 
 expected later when passion and self-interest have grown 
 stronger to find their way to Him. If all their childhood 
 passes in the effort of merely mental training and no 
 thought is given to instilling into their childish hearts the 
 
18 The Church—The Strong Safeguard of the Republic 
 
 moral curbs and restraints and influences which hold the 
 appetites in check, or if the only basis of moral restraint is 
 human respect, who is to blame if in later life self-will and 
 self-seeking shall burst these weak bonds and sweep before 
 them whatever stands in their way. The lack of religious 
 influence in early years in the home and in the school has 
 begun already to bear its fruit in every phase of our 
 national life. And this unwelcome fact is so palpable that 
 at last the once enthusiastic devotees of a purely secular 
 education cannot close their eyes to the inherent weakness 
 of the system and its vicious effects upon the whole life of 
 the people. 
 
 We Catholics have pointed it out like many another 
 danger for a century past and our only thanks were to be 
 rated as enemies of popular instruction and belittlers of 
 the great panacea of public school training. But we are 
 well accustomed to this kind of gratitude, and having 
 sounded the warning for others, we have done our own duty 
 to our own under circumstances which have proven our 
 sincerity; for while our people are among the poorest of 
 this country in material goods and the least able to bear 
 new burdens they have attested their fidelity to the welfare 
 of the nation in a way that not even the richest have done. 
 Out of their slender means they have erected, at the cost 
 of millions and millions of dollars, schools and institutions 
 wherein their children might be taught that there is a God 
 to whom all men must be responsible, that the moral law 
 emanating from that God binds them during all their lives, 
 that all authority is from God, that civil rulers are sacred 
 
The Church—The Strong Safeguard of the Republic 19 
 
 in that authority, that the law of the land is to be obeyed 
 under penalty of God’s displeasure, that the rights of 
 property are sacred, and all those other inviolable principles 
 of right and duty which stand for order in the world and the 
 peace of humanity. 
 
 What other organization in this whole country is 
 doing at such tremendous sacrifice what we have done? 
 And for all this we have received up to the present nothing 
 but suspicion and distrust. Nay more, while doing for the 
 children of the nation what even the nation itself cannot 
 do, we have been burdened with a double taxation, which 
 is, let us say it boldly and continue to repeat it until the 
 burden is removed, nothing short of outrageous tyranny. 
 For we have been forced, while expending enormous sums 
 which we could little afford in the training of our youth 
 in the sane principles of Christian morality which are the 
 best safeguard of the nation, to pay more than our share of 
 the taxes for the support of schools which, however good 
 they may otherwise be, can never by their very constitution 
 even so much as lay one stone in the moral foundation of 
 civil life. For, I repeat, there is no morality without 
 religion. There may be ethical speculation which the child 
 is free to accept or reject, and surely that is a poor morality. 
 And so this most recent effort to inject into secular education 
 some appearance of moral training is almost worse than 
 none at all, since by its doubtful attitude it must inevitably 
 weaken the whole basis of moral law by making it appear 
 to the child as a matter of choice and selection or even of 
 complete rejection, for its foundation is, not the eternal 
 
20 The Church—The Strong Safeguard of the Republic 
 
 principles of the divine will, but the mere question of human 
 agreement. And I call upon this Federation and upon 
 every Christian in the land to oppose with all his influence 
 this latest attempt of an infidel propaganda to thrust into 
 the schools what appears on the surface to be an innocent 
 system of ethical culture, but which in reality is only another 
 clever ruse to substitute a pagan philosophy for Christianity. 
 Better one hundred thousand times never mention the name 
 of religion, leaving it to the homes and the churches to do 
 what they can in supplementing the moral and religious 
 training of the child than this astute manoeuvre to root out 
 of the child’s life every idea of sentiment of supernatural 
 law. And if this meeting of Federation will have accom¬ 
 plished only this one great achievement—namely, of 
 arousing the whole American people to a knowledge of the 
 awful dangers which the nation must eventually face if this 
 system of irreligious or unreligious training of the young 
 continues, it will have done something to gain the eternal 
 gratitude of all true patriots. Meanwhile we must ourselves 
 stand fast to our own principles. Our growing numbers 
 and influence impose upon us greater responsibilities. As 
 the Christian faith in those around us is flickering out, our 
 own must burn ever more brightly. And the louder the cry 
 is raised of those whose only faith is in their own wisdom, 
 the louder we must raise our voices towards the God who 
 made humanity out of dust and by whose knowledge alone 
 man may hope to learn. The world is clamoring for peace, 
 and yet often they who are seeking it are but unconsciously 
 sowing the seeds out of which discord alone can grow. It 
 
The Church—The Strong Safeguard of the Republic 21 
 
 is our duty to turn their eyes out upon the hills where 
 Christ still sits weeping over the world, blinded by its own 
 folly, its heart still as hard as the people of His own 
 Jerusalem, its mind still as proud as the proud teachers of 
 His time. Let us love our dear land as He did His; and by 
 the knowledge which His faith alone can bring and by the 
 charity which His law alone can kindle, let us by word and 
 example show forth to all who are willing to see those 
 things which are for our country’s peace. 
 

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