train, the Church encourages her children to regard this earth as a vale of tears. But side by side with our sorrow there should always be a deep-seated element of joy in our service of God, and a sustaining hope of happiness in the life to come. In fact, however unsatisfactory the general aspect of the world may be, however far others may be wandering from their true destiny, and however poorly equipped we ourselves may seem for the battle of life, it is nevertheless true that the order of things into which each one of us has been born is perfectly well adapted for his own particular trial. We shall be held answerable only for the badness of our will, and whatever is the inevitable result of the circumstances in which we are placed will not be imputed to us as a fault. The destiny of an unevangelized bushman is not as high, perhaps, as that of an instructed Christian, but he will not be punished for his sins of blameless ignorance, while his virtues will receive their due reward. Every man's salvation is in his own hand, and each one who is faithful to his particular mission in life, has the joy of knowing that to him, at least, the evil of the world has not been a stumbling-block. For every man born into the world there is an attainable ideal, and that is his own true self, such as God intended him to be in view of his environment. No one who corresponds with the opportunities and the wealth of grace that lie in every act and circumstance of daily life can fail to be an optimist as regards his own career in the world. The trial of a soul whose lot has been cast upon degenerate days must consist largely in coping with the evil of his surroundings, and his failure in life is in proportion to his acquiescence in what is unsound in the spirit of his times but it is his own fault if he succumbs in the struggle.

The history of the Church is a constant struggle against degeneracy, and the miracle of her divine institution manifests itself most clearly in her great historic revivals. She knows that, however low the world may sink in degradation, there is a point beyond which the "gates of hell" will not prevail, and that she herself will remain as a powerful renovating influence until the end of time. She knows, too, that the fruits of her struggle against evil, though not always manifest, are always abundant; that life within the pale of her active membership is never thrown away, and can be made as profitable now as at any period of her history. The spirit of the church is active and practical. She would have her children live in the present, and not in the past or the future. Her bidding to them is: "Say not: What thinkest thou is the cause that former times are better than they are now? for this manner of question is foolish." Her activity and the conscious

1 Eccles., vii., II.

ness that she is doing good in the world, produce in her a character of cheerfulness and joy, while pessimism in her children is prevented by the knowledge that all personal sin may be remedied. by a change of heart.

This healthy and prudent optimism which the Church endeavors to foster in her sons is a preservative against another form of despondency which comes from contemplating and taking to heart the essential impotence of man and the want of permanence of his work. Our hopes, it may be, in the progress of the race are shaken by the only too frequent demonstration of the truth of the saying:

"The evil that men do lives after them,

The good is oft interred with their bones."

The work of a wise monarch or statesman is always liable to be undone by an incompetent successor, and when a Pericles has raised his country to a high level of power and prosperity, there is but too often no one left to take his place or to avert threatening ruin from the state. The results, moreover, of human effort seem to bear no proportion to the toil and expense incurred in producing them. That outburst of patriotism and national vigor which was swayed by the First Napoleon, ended only in depriving France of the flower of her manhood. In the domain of art, too, monuments worthy of the admiration of all time have been continually swept away by man's energy for destruction. Mr. Ruskin, speaking of the loss of such treasures, says:

Fancy what Europe would be now, if the delicate statues and temples of the Greeks -if the broad roads and massy walls of the Romans-if the noble and pathetic architecture of the middle ages, had not been ground to dust by mere human rage. You talk of the scythe of time and the tooth of time. I tell you, time is scytheless and toothless; it is we who gnaw like the worm-we who smite like the scythe. It is ourselves who abolish, ourselves who consume; we are the mildew and the flame, and the soul of man is to its own work as the moth, that frets when it cannot fly, and as the hidden flame that blasts where it cannot illumine. All these lost treasures of human intellect have been wholly destroyed by human industry of destruction; the marble would have stood its two thousand years as well in the polished statue as in the Parian cliff; but we men have ground it to powder, and mixed it with our own ashes. The walls and ways would have stood-it is we who have left not one stone upon another, and restored its pathlessness to the desert; the great cathedrals of old religion would have stood-it is we who have dashed down the carved work with axes and hammers, and bid the mountain grass bloom upon the pavement, and the sea-winds chaunt in the galleries."

Yet there is another side to the picture which will be revealed when the hand of man is no longer lifted to destroy, when every chosen soul, chiselled into a temple of perfect beauty by the hand of divine love, shall stand eternally exempt from the wearing en

The Political Economy of Art. Lecture II. Accumulation, p. 98.

ergies of time. As long as time shall last the fruits of human effort will indeed continue to decay; the noblest performances of genius will gradually disappear from the earth; nations will become decivilized and lost to all sense of what is beautiful in art, while thousands of their children will be born and bred in an atmosphere of smoke and bustle and blasphemy. Yet the influence of the Church will still remain, and the souls of the suffering poor, instructed where to find their truest riches, will be chastened and refined by the sufferings which shall be born of the injustice and luxury of their oppressors. A diamond is still a diamond though it lie hidden in a sewer, and a human soul in the state of grace, though its lot be cast in the foulest purlieus of a corrupt city, is an object of greater importance and a thing of greater beauty to contemplate than the outward splendor of the wisest and greatest of nations. The durable monuments of the Romans and the perfect art-works of the Greeks were a product and an image of what was virtuous and noble in their producers, just as the great cathedrals of the age of St. Louis and the political splendor of the nation which produced them, were due to the practice of civic virtue by the French people in accordance with the precepts of the Gospel. But the essential life of Christianity and a plenteous realization of the Gospel ideas is not necessarily connected with external grandeur, and may conceivably exist without it. The Church

scorns to have the success of her mission in the world measured by the standards of material progress or even of intellectual culture, though a sufficient measure of these will always be found where her teaching is faithfully carried out; indeed, as has been said before, a complete subjugation of the world to the doctrines of the Gospel would produce a reign of universal peace and material happiness, and a republic of saints would constitute an ideal state. But the world being as it is, the temporal estate and condition of men cannot show us whether their life is a success in the only true sense of the word, or whether it is, as far as their real interests are concerned, a complete and disastrous failure. Many a noble life is brought down by sorrow to the grave; and the victim of oppression and injustice has passed into another order of things where his works follow him. Many a time upon the earth does the curtain fall over some great and soul-stirring tragedy; but the true finale of the play takes place upon a stage which we cannot see, and where the works of men are weighed in a new balance of justice and retribution.

In conclusion, the good which the Church of God looks for is a good which is unseen. Even in the domain of poetry and art the greatest beauties are often least upon the surface and are invisible to all but the trained observer. But it is still more strictly true in

the spiritual order that the greatest goods lie behind a veil and are but dimly apprehended even by the eye of faith. Vast as is the gulf between the intellectual and sensitive orders among living creatures, there is a still wider separation between the gifts of intellect and those of grace among mankind; and it is her knowledge of this difference which influences the Church in her relations with the natural and supernatural life of her children, and in her estimate of the relative greatness of moral and physical evil in the world. With her the primary and all-important question is not whether man can be perfected as a social being, or whether the sum of our present joys does or does not exceed that of our sufferings. Humanity can never attain its highest aspirations in this world, and the words good and evil can be rightly interpreted only with reference to a life that is yet to come. To many of us life is a period of continuous suffering, and the natural end of it a blessing, and to those who ask whether it is worth living, the true answer is that, whether joyous or sorrowful, it carries with it the most solemn of all responsibilites, and that in the noble words of the "Psalm of Life:"

"Life is real, life is earnest

And the grave is not its goal; 'Dust thou art, to dust returnest' Was not spoken of the soul."

ST. BEUNO'S College,

VOL. XXII.-7

JAMES KENDAL, S.J.

CHURCH AND STATE.

"Præterea, libet enim id fateri quod est, sua debetur gratia æquitati legum, quibus America vivit, moribusque bene constitutæ rei publicæ. Hoc enim Ecclesiæ apud vos concessum est, non repugnante temperatione civitatis, ut nullis legum præpedita vinclis, contra vim defensa jure communi justitiaque judiciorum, tutam obtineat vivendi agendique sine offensione facultatem. Sed quamquam hæc vera sunt, tamen error tollendus, ne quis hinc sequi existimet, petendum ab America exemplum optimi ecclesiastici status: aut universe licere vel expedire, rei civilis reique sacræ distractas esse dissociatasque, more Americano, rationes. Quod enim incolumis apud vos res est Catholica, quod prosperis etiam auctibus crescit, id omnino fecunditati tribuendum, qua divinitus pollet Ecclesia, quæque si nullus adversetur, si nulla res impedimento sit, se sponte effert atque effundit; longe tamen uberiores editura fructus, si præter libertatem, gratia legum fruatur patrocinioque publicæ potestatis."—Encyclical Longinqua oceani addressed to the American hierarchy, January 6, 1895.

OME persons who have never learned to doubt of their own infallibility, are very fond of declaiming against "Union of Church and State" as against an unmixed evil, and of extolling "Separation of Church and State" as one of the special blessings of modern times. They evidently imagine that they are giving utterance to some axiomatic truths, seen intuitively under the strong light of civilization-to some first principles of ethics, which it were an insult to our cultured age to explain—or, at the very least, to some immediate deductions from the natural law, which no one is permitted to call in question, at the risk of being placed under a social ban. If you venture to suggest a doubt upon the subject they will stare at you, as at an intellectual curiosity preserved by a strange fate since the days of mediæval darkness; or, maybe, they will denounce you to the high inquisitor of vulgar prejudice as holding un-American doctrine and harboring treasonable designs against the liberties of your country.

Yet the truth of the matter is, few expressions in the whole range of human language are more vague and undefined. In fact, on the lips of the crowd they may mean almost anything, and they may mean nothing. The majority come to them only at second hand, and repeat them by rote, with little more than a confessed notion that they are popular and serve as the shibboleth of liberalism.

This circumstance alone is sufficient to arouse suspicion. In this country, as is well known, even the soundest and staunchest Catholics are sometimes praised for their liberalism, because the word liberalism, as used among us, is susceptible of a good mean