the case only to leave full freedom to the virtue, and to punish the intemperance only in so far as it deprives some one of his rights. In that it is a sin or a vice, the state is not competent to deal with it, either by way of prevention or of punishment; it can take cognizance of it only in that it is an injury, or deprives some one of his rights, natural or acquired. The state cannot punish the simple vice of drunkenness; it can punish drunkenness only when it interferes with the rights of others, or disturbs the public peace. Hence the principle of the Maine Liquor Law is indefensible. A man has a natural right to drink wine, beer, cider, gin, rum, brandy, or whiskey, if he chooses, and can honestly procure it. He has a right to use intoxicating drinks so long as he does not abuse them. That right is and must be sacred and inviolable for the state. The state can have the right to deal only with the abuse. But the Maine Liquor Law proceeds on the principle that the state has the right to guard against the abuse by prohibiting the use, or by declaring the use itself an abuse. This, as it assumes for the state the right to alter the moral law or to introduce a new principle into morals, cannot be admitted, unless we are prepared to assert civil despotism. The office of the state is not to teach morals, or to interpret the moral law, but to execute it; not to define right, but to protect and vindicate it. To teach morals, to define what is or is not right, is not within the competency of the civil power. That belongs to the spiritual or moral power, distinct from the civil power, and moving in another orbit. The equality, if the Workingmen had understood it, which they wanted, they would have sought from love, not law, and by means of the Church, not the state; for the Church alone can introduce equality in the matters of acquired rights, by teaching the doctrine of love, and bringing home to the consciences of rich possessors, that they are stewards, and not absolute proprietors, of their estates, and therefore are to use them for the good of their neighbor, not for their own private good alone, on the principle that each is bound for all and all for each, or that all are members of one body, and members of one another, and that the body cannot suffer without the members, nor a member without the body. It was on this principle that St. Chrysostom told the rich of Constantinople that they were murderers of the poor who died for the want of the

means wherewith to live. But it would be perfect madness to attempt to carry out this principle by political organization or legislative action. The right to acquire and to hold property independent of the civil power must be recognized and protected, or the whole community will die of starvation. The evil which the state must tolerate for the sake of the good, the moral power operating on conscience and love must redress.

The doctrine of the solidarity and communion of the race, which Leroux makes the basis of his socialism and the principle of his explanation of Christianity, has something which, perhaps, a Christian may, and even must, accept. If we may be permitted to refer to our personal experience, we must say that it was through that doctrine, as set forth by Leroux in his work on Humanity, that by the grace of God we were led to the Catholic Church; and we may add, that the same was true of several of our friends, one at least of whom is now a most worthy member of the Catholic priesthood, and one of the most indefatigable and successful Catholic missionaries in the country. We thought we saw a great and important truth in the doctrine, but also that, as Leroux laid it down, it was incomplete; and if theoretically and practically completed anywhere, it must be in the Catholic Church. We seized the doctrine with our accustomed ardor, and, developing it in our own way, found ourselves knocking at the door of the Church, and demanding entrance. Having been admitted into the Church, and commenced the study of Catholic theology in the scholastic authors, in whom we found nothing which seemed to us a recognition of it, we felt that it was our duty to waive its public consideration till we could have time and opportunity of re-examining it in the light of Catholic faith. We saw at once that the doctrine pertained to an order of thought far below Catholic dogma, and that we had erred in supposing it to be the explication and expression of the real sense of the Catholic mysteries; but how far it was or was not in harmony with them, we felt unable to say. It was a problem to be solved, and not by us till we had become somewhat more familiar than we were at the time with Catholic theology. The form under which we had entertained it was, in regard to scholastic theology, a novelty, and therefore to be suspected. It might conceal an error, and even a dangerous error. It was certainly

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prudent, nay, it was our duty, not to insist on it, and to be content with using the language, arguments, and illustrations which we knew to be safe. Hence the trains of thought with which we made our readers so familiar during our transition state, and which had played so important a part in the process of our conversion, were suddenly interrupted the moment we entered the Church and began to write as a Catholic. They who had watched our course, and taken some interest in our progress from a low form of rationalism to Catholicity, were unable to trace in our writings any continuity of thought between what was published the day before we entered the Church and what we wrote and published the day after. So abrupt and complete a change seemed to them inexplicable on any rational principles, and was of course ascribed to our fickleness, or to our no longer being suffered to have a mind of our own. People outside of the Church lost confidence in us, and if they continued to read us at all, it was mainly to amuse themselves with what they were pleased to look upon as our "feats of intellectual gladiatorship." This of course had its unpleasantness and its inconveniences, but it was not unendurable.

But we may say now, after more than ten years of silent thought and reflection on the subject, that, though not free from trifling errors, and much exaggerated as to their importance in our own mind, the principles which we learned from Leroux and developed and applied in our own way were substantially true, and we can without lesion to our Catholicity resume the train of thought which appeared to be so abruptly terminated on our entering the Church. The views which we set forth in our Letter to Dr. Channing, in 1842, on the Mediatorial Life of Christ, as far as they went, we can accept now, and not without advantage. They were not what we thought them, and did not attain, as we supposed, to Catholic doctrine; yet they embraced elements of natural truth which help us in some respects to understand the Catholic dogma, and which the dogma may accept as charity accepts philanthropy. The basis of the doctrine we set forth in that letter was, that man lives by communion with God, humanity, and nature, and that his life partakes of the qualities of the object with which he communes. Man cannot live by himself alone, and every fact

of life is the resultant of two factors, of the concurrent activity of subject and object, and partakes of the character of each. The individual can live and act only by virtue of communion with that which is not himself, and which we call his object, because it is set over against him. This does not mean that he cannot act without some object, or end to which he acts, although that is undoubtedly the case, but without another activity than his own, which meets and concurs with it. The fact of life results from the intershock of the two activities, and is their joint product. The subject is living subject, or subject in actu, only by virtue of communion with its object. Thus it cannot think without the active presence of the intelligible, or love without the active presence of the amiable, which is really only what St. Thomas teaches when he says the intellect is in ordinem ad verum, and the will in ordinem ad bonum; that the intellect is never false, and the will can never will only good. Therefore we have frequently brought out the doctrine in order to refute the modern psychologists, and those philosophers who would persuade us that it is not the mundus physicus, but an intermediary world, which they call the mundus logicus, that the mind in its perceptions immediately apprehends. The mind cannot think without thinking some object, and as to the production of thought, the object must act on or with the subject, because if purely passive it is as if it were not, for pure passivity is mere potentiality, - the object must be real, being or existence, since what neither is nor exists. cannot act or produce any effect. Consequently, either we perceive nothing and perform no act of perception, or the world perceived is the real world itself, not a merely abstract or logical world, or a mere species or phantasm.

But thought is an effect, and whoever thinks at all produces or generates something. Every theologian must admit this, or how else can he hold the mystery of the Trinity, and believe in the only begotten Son of God? In God, who is actus purissimus, or pure act, as say Aristotle, and the Schoolmen after him, as he is infinite and contains no passivity, he enters with his whole being into his thought, the word generated is and must be exactly his equal, and identical in nature, consubstantial with himself. But man, not being pure act, nor intelligible in himself, cannot think without another activity that

supplies the object necessary to reduce his passivity to act; and as he cannot enter with his whole being into his thought, he cannot, as God, generate the exact image of himself. Nevertheless, in conjunction with the object, since he imitates in his degree the divine intellect, he generates something, and this something we call a fact of life, or life itself considered as the product of living activity. Now, since to production or generation of thought or the fact of life subject and object must concur, it is their joint product, and must participate of the character of each. Here is the basis of what is called the solidarity of the race, under the point of view of intellect.

But man is not pure intellect. He has a heart as well as a head, and can love as well as think. What we have asserted of thought is equally true of love, as we learn from the same adorable mystery of the Trinity. For the Father, the Unbegotten, loves the Son, the begotten, and from their mutual love proceeds the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Ghost. Only like can commune with like, and love properly so called can be only of like to like, and therefore under the relation of love man only can be the object of man. By virtue of the unity of the race every human being is the object of every other human being. But by the law of all communion of subject and object, the result generated or proceeding is the joint product of the two factors, and therefore the life of any one man is the joint product of him and every other man; and thus is produced a solidarity of the life of all men, by which it is one and the same life for all and for each, and for each and for all. But as every generation, so to speak, overlaps its successor, and each new generation communes with its predecessor, the solidarity of the race is not only a solidarity of all men in space, but of all men in time, linking together, in one indissoluble life, the first man with the last, and the last man with the first.

Taking this doctrine, but giving a different application from that of Leroux, in order to escape his denial of the personality of God and the personal immortality of the soul, and to be able to assert the Incarnation in the individual man Jesus, instead of the race, we thought we could bridge over the gulf between the Unitarian and the Trinitarian, and accept and explain the Christian Church and Christian mysteries. In this respect our