otherwise than praiseworthy, to attempt to redress them. It was a sacred duty, imposed alike by charity and philanthropy, to undertake their removal, though of course not by unlawful means, certainly not by a revolution, which could only make matters worse.

Of course we have no confidence even in philanthropy, when acting alone, to effect anything good, for it seldom fails to make matters worse; but we have very little sympathy with the ordinary shallow and selfish declamation of conservatives against modern revolutionary movements. The only conservatism we can respect is that which frankly acknowledges the wrong, and seeks by proper means to redress it wherever it finds it. It is, after all, less against revolutions that we would direct the virtuous indignation of our conservative friends, now that the reaction has become strong, than against the misgovernment, the tyranny, the vices and the crimes, the heartlessness, the cruelty, the neglect of the poor by those who should love and succor them, or the wrongs inflicted on them, which provoke revolutions, and give Satan an opportunity to possess the multitude, and pervert their purest sentiments and their most generous enthusiasm to evil. Revolution was no fitting remedy for the evils which the system of secular government, attained to its full growth in Louis the Fourteenth, had generated. It was the remedy of madness or wild despair. But the evils had grown beyond all reasonable endurance. They outraged alike natural benevolence and Christian charity. Let not the friends of religion and order have censures only for those who sought madly to remove them by revolutions, and none for those whose vices and crimes caused them, lest they render religion and order odious to all men of human hearts.

Philanthropy is a human sentiment, and by no means Christian charity. We know it perfectly well. But it corresponds to charity as the human corresponds to the Divine, copies it as nature copies or imitates God, and we never need persuade ourselves that what is repugnant to it is pleasing to charity. Gratia supponit naturam. How often must we repeat, that grace does not supersede nature? St. Ignatius Loyola did not seek to destroy the natural ambition of young Francis Xavier; he accepted it, and sought simply to direct it from earthly to heavenly glory. No wise master of spiritual life ever seeks to root out nature; his

THIRD SERIES. VOL. III. NO. II.

25

aim is always to accept it, and direct it in right paths towards God, the true end of man. Calvin and Jansenius, those subtle enemies of Christ, have done more injury to religion, a thousand times over, than Voltaire and Rousseau, for they placed nature and grace in opposition, and denied nature in order to assert grace. Not enough have been appreciated the services rendered to religion and humanity by the sons of Loyola, in combating as they did, in the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth, the degrading and demoralizing, though specious, heresy of the Jansenists. Nobly did they defend the freedom, the dignity, and the glorious destiny of human nature. The infamous Maxims of Rochefoucauld, once so celebrated, were Jansenistic, not Catholic, and were conceived in the spirit of Port Royal, not of the Church. They could have been inspired only by a heresy that places grace in opposition to nature, and thinks to exalt the one by degrading and annihilating the other. The Catholic honors nature, and asserts for it a more glorious destiny than do they who madly assert that man in his developments may grow into God. No, we repeat it, God is the similitude of all things, and the human has its type, its exemplar, in the Divine. The Divine is mirrored, reflected, by the human; grace, therefore, by nature. The natural sentiments of the human heart are below the infused graces of the Christian, but they are not opposed to them. Philanthropy, or the natural benevolence of the human heart, cannot rise to the elevation and power of Christian charity, or aspire to its eternal reward; but charity no more opposes it, and can no more dispense with it, than revelation opposes or can dispense with reason. What is opposed to benevolence is even more opposed to Christian charity. It is a great mistake to suppose that simple human benevolence or philanthropy is sufficient of itself to redress either social or individual grievances; but it is a still greater mistake therefore to condemn it, to neglect it, to make no efforts to redress the grievances, or to deny them to be real grievances, because they can be effectually redressed only by benevolence exalted to Christian charity. Not all the works of infidels are sin. Works of humanity, of genuine human benevolence, which are not always wanting in non-Catholic society, cannot indeed merit eternal life, or even the grace of conversion, for gratia est omnino gratis; but they

are not sinful; they are good in the natural order, and merit and shall receive in that order their reward. The men of our times, who have lost the sense of Christian charity and seek to substitute philanthropy for it, do yet honor that charity in its pale and evanescent human reflex, and so far have just sentiments, and are unchristian rather than antichristian.

The doctrine of equal rights, so energetically asserted, a few years since, by "the Workingmen's party," insisted on under one of its aspects by Abolitionists, and by the democratic party throughout the world, is not all false nor all antichristian, and after all faintly mirrors the Christian doctrine of the unity and solidarity of the race. There is truth in the Jacobinical doctrine of "fraternity," and in Kossuth's doctrine of "the solidarity of peoples." The workingmen's party is dead now, and buried in other parties which have absorbed it, but it had a great truth for its basis. It asserted the natural nobility of all men, the nobility of human nature itself, as worthy of our reverence in the humble artisan or laborer as in the titled noble.

"The king can make a belted knight,
A marquis, duke, and a' that;
An honest man 's aboon his might,

Guid faith! he maunna fa' that."

There is something that it will not do to sneer at in that free and noble spirit that seeks to break down the artificial barriers which separate man from man and nation from nation, and melt all into one grand brotherhood. If there is any one thing certain, it is that the Church has always asserted the unity of the race, and the natural equality of all men. Man equals man the world over, and hence, as Pope St. Gregory the First teaches, man, though he has received the dominion over the lower creation, has not received dominion over man, and princes are required to govern as pastors, not as lords; for since all men are equal by nature, the governed are as men the equals and brothers of the governors.

We are a little surprised to find the historian of the United States, in his earlier volumes, disposed to regard Calvin as in some sense the champion of equal rights, and to give Calvinism credit for the principle of political equality on which our American institutions are based,

for his own doctrine is as repugnant to the Calvinistic, as light is to darkness. Calvinism asserts only a negative equality. It reduces all to a common level, we grant, by asserting the total depravity of nature, and therefore the nullity of nature in all men; but this is the equality of death, not of life. All are equal, because all are nothing. But it does not elevate all to a common level by the assertion of a positive equality, an equality founded on what all men are and have by nature. Moreover, Calvinism is unfavorable, nay, decidedly hostile, to that doctrine of equality which Mr. Bancroft so strenuously maintains. By its doctrine of the nullity of nature and particular election and reprobation, whereby only a certain definite number can be elevated by grace, it founds an aristocracy, the aristocracy of the saints, or the elect. Asserting the moral nullity of nature, it necessarily founds the political order on grace, as it did in Geneva and the early Colony of Massachusetts, and excludes from all political rights all whom it does not count among the saints. Maintaining the total depravity of nature, it must deny to nature all rights, and can assert rights only for those who are assumed to be in grace; and hence only the saints have or can have the right to govern, one of the heresies of Wiclef, condemned by the Council of Constance. Nature being null, there can be no rights under the law of nature, and if no rights, no possessions. Consequently, they who are counted among the non-elect have nothing which the elect are bound to hold sacred and inviolable. They are at the mercy of the saints, who may at pleasure despoil them of all they call their own, and take possession of their political and civil powers, their houses and lands, their goods and chattels, their wives and children, and even their very persons. Logically and consistently carried out, Calvinism therefore founds, not monarchy indeed, but the aristocracy of the saints, that is, of Calvinists, the most absolute and the most odious aristocracy that it is possible to conceive.

Undoubtedly the regenerate, those who are in grace, alone have rights in regard to eternal salvation, for certainly no man can have a natural right to supernatural beatitude. We are saved not by our natural merits, or merits under the law of nature, but by grace merited for us by Christ our head. The error of the Calvinist does not lie

in founding our titles to eternal life on grace and grace alone, but consists in denying the natural law, that man retains all his original rights in the natural order, and that in the natural order all men have equal rights, which even the elect or those elevated by grace must respect as sacred and inviolable. God in promulgating the law of grace does in no respect abrogate the law of nature, nor in the least modify the rights or obligations of men under that law. Hence the Apostle recognizes the legitimacy of the temporal power of his time, and bids the faithful to obey for conscience' sake the Roman Emperor, though a Pagan, in all things temporal. Hence the Church recognizes and always has recognized the rights of infidel and even heretical princes to the temporal obedience of their subjects, even when those subjects are Catholics, who can be absolved from their allegiance only in case their princes forfeit their rights by the law under which they hold. Hence the Church forbids infidels, Jews, or persons who have not come under her spiritual jurisdiction, to be forced to accept the faith. Hence, too, she recognizes the natural rights of life, liberty, and property as fully in infidels and heretics as in the faithful themselves. Here is the grand difference between a positive and a negative natural equality, between the natural equality asserted by Catholicity and that favored by Calvinism. Calvinism asserts the natural equality of all men, by denying alike to all men all natural rights, assuming all rights to have been forfeited by the Fall; Catholicity asserts the natural equality of all men, by asserting that all have equal natural rights, and denies that any natural rights were forfeited or lost by the transgression of our first parents. The rights lost by the Fall were supernatural, not natural rights, — rights held under the law of grace, not rights held under the law of nature; for it was by grace, not nature, that man was placed prior to the Fall on the plane of his supernatural destiny. Hence Catholicity recognizes in nature something sacred and inviolable, which even the Church must respect. Hence Catholicity must always respect the natural liberty of man, and can no more tyrannize over the infidel than over the believer, must, in fact, as to the natural order, place both on the same footing of equality. Calvinism begins by denying all natural rights, nullifying nature, and therefore all natural liberty, and asserts