Chapter XXV: The Mistress of a Poor Man's Household (3)

We did not meet this statement for the first time in _Putnam's Magazine_. It had been previously made, and we supposed sufficiently refuted in the journals, especially in the _Utica Herald_, whose editor, Mr. Roberts, had been a member of the Legislature and of the committee of ways and means in 1866. Mr. Roberts under his own name, pronounced it a forgery. For honest and fair-minded men this was conclusive. But the charge was embodied in an anonymous memorial, and laid on the desks of the members of the New York State Convention, held in 1867 and 1868, and was again pronounced in open debate a forgery, without a single voice being raised in its defence. The Hon. Mr. Cassidy, of the Albany _Atlas and Argus_, declared it false from beginning to end. The Hon. Mr. Alvord, the distinguished member from Onondaga County, did the same. The Hon. Erastus Brooks, member of the Convention from Richmond, and one of the editors of the New York _Evening Express_, would not go quite so far, but regarded it as an admirable example of one of the many ways of telling a lie. He exposed its disingenuous character, by showing that the $8000 stated in it to be appropriated to St. Mary's Hospital, Rochester, was expressly declared in the statute making the appropriation to be for the support of soldiers under the supervision of Dr. Backus, the surgeon of the post. The soldiers were supported and taken care of in St. Mary's Hospital, as the only proper place, in the judgment of the military authorities, that could be obtained. Mr. Brooks also gave, as another instance of the disingenuousness of the statement, its omission to count $25,000, appropriated to a Protestant institution in Elmira, we suppose for a similar purpose. Mr. Alvord not only pronounced it false from beginning to end, but, statute in hand, showed from the act of the Legislature itself, which he read, that instead of appropriating for charitable purposes nearly $130,000, it appropriated only $80,000, to be divided among the several counties according to their assessed valuation.[143] What has become of our friend, the Rev. Leonard W. Bacon, who sometimes writes for _Putnam_, and who has such delicate scruples about Protestants using forged documents against Catholics?

So much has been said about the partiality of the Legislature to the Catholic Church that it may be well to look at the conditions on which it grants and distributes its aid to charitable institutions. The act of 1866, so bitterly denounced, appropriates from the State treasury $80,000 for orphan asylums, to be apportioned to the several counties according to their assessed value, and distributed to the several asylums according to the number of inmates received and cared for in them respectively, without the slightest reference to the fact whether they were Catholic or Protestant. Nothing could be fairer, and if Catholic asylums received more of the benefaction than those under the charge of non-Catholics, it was simply because they received and cared for a larger number of orphans. We see no ground of complaint here against either the Legislature or the church. It is very possible that Catholics have a larger number of orphans in proportion to their population than have non-Catholics, and it is not unlikely, also, that they are more ready to make sacrifices for their support.

In the list of benefactions of the State to Catholic institutions in 1866, the _Magazine_ places the item of $78,000 to the Catholic Protectory. This was a special grant to enable the society to purchase a site and erect suitable buildings for its purpose. This protectory corresponds very nearly to the Protestant societies for the protection and reformation of juvenile delinquents, and which the State is accustomed to aid by its benefactions. The appropriations for its support are justified on the ground that it is of great public utility and protection of the public from a class of destitute children not unlikely, if not taken care of, to grow up vicious and criminal, to fill our alms-houses, our jails and penitentiaries. The community at large, rather than the church specially, is benefited, and there is no good reason why grants for its support should be objected to or regarded as made for special Catholic purposes. The only thing that a Protestant can object to, if any charitable institution is to receive aid from the State, is, that by aiding a Catholic protectorate to take care of and reform destitute children of Catholics without the loss of their Catholic faith, it so far fails to aid Protestants to bring them up in Protestantism, or, what is perhaps worse, in no religion.

As a matter of course, _Putnam's Magazine_ dwells on the public grants to certain Catholic schools in this city. We do not deny those grants. We conceded and defended them in our former article, and the _Magazine_ has in no respect invalidated our defence; it has only stared and sneered at it. Give us either schools to which we can send our children, or divide the schools equitably between Catholics and Protestants, and we will solicit no special grants of the sort. As it is, neither the city nor the State gives back by way of subvention to our schools more than a pittance of what it takes from us for the support of schools to which we cannot with our Catholic conscience send our children. If the State taxes the whole community alike for the support of public schools, it is bound to provide schools for Catholics as well as Protestants, and for both such as leave the conscience of each free, sacred, and inviolable. If it refuses to do so, the least that it can do is to make liberal grants to the schools Catholics are obliged to establish for themselves.

What we have thus far said disposes of the _Magazine's_ statistics, and sufficiently relieves the State from the charge of discriminating in favor of Catholics, as well as the church from the charge of intriguing for special favors. She has never asked or received any special favors from the Legislature. The other matters in the article merit no special reply. The writer attempts to be witty, but succeeds only in being abusive. Wit does not appear to be his strong point, and his attempts at it only provoke a smile at his expense. His strong point is hatred of the church. He hates her with a hatred equal to that of the wicked Jews for our Lord whom they crucified between two thieves. Her very presence annoys him; her independence enrages him; and nothing appears able to appease him but her subjection to the state, and the subjection of the state to the intolerant Protestantism of which he is a mouth-piece.

The _Magazine_ is hard to please. It condemned, in July last, the church as our established church; we made answer that she neither is nor wishes to be the established church. It now, in December, condemns her no less as the unestablished church. It blames us both for opposing and for not opposing the common schools, for agreeing and for not agreeing with our own church, and for opposing and for not opposing religious liberty. Both the church, and we, personally, must be wrong anyhow. If its specific charges against her are false, then the contrary must be true and equally charges against her. If she is not the synagogue of Satan, she is the church of God, which is just as bad. Nothing can disconcert it or prove it in the wrong, since it sees no inconsistency in urging charges that refute each other. Yet it represents and speaks for the _enlightened_ portion of mankind!

The _Magazine_ labors at length to prove that the church opposes, and quotes the _Syllabus_ to prove that she must oppose, the common school system as it is; and yet sees in this fact no reason why Catholics cannot, with a good conscience, send their children to them. We are opposed to the common schools as they are, because our church condemns them; that is, because founded on what we hold to be a false principle, and hostile alike to religion and society; but if Protestants want them for themselves, they can have them; for the church legislates only for Catholics, not for non-Catholics who reject her authority. Hence, we oppose the system as a system for Catholics, not as a system intended for Protestants. We do not approve the system even for them, any more than we do their heresy and schism, which we account "deadly sins;" but if they insist on having godless schools for their children, they can have them; we cannot hinder them. The system might be modified so that we could accept it; but it depends on them so to modify it or not, for they have the power.

The _Magazine_ withdraws its false statement as to the millions of property held in fee-simple by the five bishops in the State, but blames the law of 1863, which incorporates the church in the several New York dioceses, as securing to her advantages of which the non-Catholic religious denominations are deprived. This is a mistake. It only secures to her the rights secured to these under the general law for creating, continuing, and reviving religious societies and parishes, and which are not secured to her under that general law. That law proceeds on the assumption that in ecclesiastical organizations the parish is the unit, which is not true with regard to the church. With us the unit is the diocese, and the bishop, not the parochus, is, strictly speaking, the pastor. To proceed on the contrary supposition would be to interfere with the internal constitution and discipline of the church, and to deprive her of that control over her own temporalities which is possessed by every Protestant denomination in the State. The law objected to only secures to the church equal rights with the sects--only it does it by another method made necessary by the fact that the diocese, not the parish, in her constitution, is the unit. The law only places the church on a footing of equality, before the state, with the Protestant sects, and no friend of religious liberty can reasonably object to it. It secures the public against abuses, the application of the property held to church purposes, and the church the free management of her own temporalities.

The _Magazine_ complains that the law is no longer equal, because it is not the same for all religious denominations. Has it never occurred to it that one and the same law for all would operate unequally, for all have not the same internal constitution? The law very proper and just for Presbyterians, whose organic unit is the parish, could in no manner secure the same rights to the church, whose organic unit is the diocese. Here is precisely where Protestants usually err in their legislation, and violate the equal rights they profess to approve. They overlook the fact that the same law can bear equally only on denominations that are organized after one and the same model, and that for the state to set up a model, and outlaw all denominations that do not, or in so far as they do not conform to it, is a violation of religious liberty and of equal rights. It is practically to establish one form of church organization and deny its protection to all churches that do not see proper to adopt it. Religious liberty requires that each denomination be left free, so far as the civil power is concerned, to adopt such form of church organization in relation to its own temporalities as well as spirituals as it chooses; and the equal rights of all require the state to respect and protect each in the full possession and enjoyment of its own particular form of organization. The law must not be simply the same for the Catholic and the Congregationalist, but must be so framed as to give each the same rights; to the church, with her constitution and discipline, all the freedom and protection that it does to the Congregationalist, with his congregational organization and discipline. This is what the law of this State enacted in 1863 attempts to secure, and partially, if not wholly, succeeds in doing. The Protestant, that is, the rabid Protestant, objects to that law, not because it discriminates in favor of Catholicity, but because it gives to the church the same legal protection that it does to non-Catholic churches, and does not discriminate in favor of Protestantism as all previous legislation on the subject had done, at least in its practical operation.

We are accused, because we say the church here desires no establishment by law--for she has what is better than such establishment--of contradicting the _Syllabus_, and going against the supreme pontiff. We accept the _Syllabus_ without the slightest reserve, though probably not the _Magazine's_ sense. The _Syllabus_ condemns those who demand the separation of church and state in the sense of the European liberals; but not us for not requiring the church to be established by law as the state church. Those liberals mean by the separation of church and state the independence of the state, and its right to pursue its own policy irrespective of the rights and interests of religion. In that sense we also condemn the separation, and are continually warring against it as political atheism. But we deny that in that sense, or in the sense of the _Syllabus_, we do or ever have advocated the separation of church and state. That separation does not and ought not to exist in this country. This is not an infidel, a godless country, though it may be fast becoming so; and Christianity is, as it should be, the supreme law of the land, as it is part and parcel of the Common Law. An act of the Legislature of the State or the nation forbidding Christianity or authorizing acts directly against it would be null and void from the beginning, and be treated by the courts as would be a _jus muncipium_ in violation of the _jus gentium_.

The rights of Christianity are by our civil institutions recognized as paramount to all others. They are called by us the rights of man, rights which are held not from the state, but immediately from the Creator, and therefore are more properly called the rights of God than the rights of man. These rights limit the rights and authority of the state; for it is bound to respect them as sacred and inviolable, and to protect and defend them for each and every person within its jurisdiction to the full extent of its power. Among these rights is the right of conscience, which, in fact, is the chief, the very basis of all our so-called natural and inalienable rights. My right of conscience is the law for the state, and prohibits it from enacting any thing that violates it. My conscience is my church, the Catholic Church; and any restriction of her freedom, or any act in violation of her rights, violates or abridges my right or freedom of conscience, which, where equal rights are recognized, the state has no right to do in my case any more than in that of any other.

My church, the Catholic Church, is, by virtue of my citizenship and my right of conscience, the law of the state so far as her own freedom is concerned, and as is necessary to protect and defend her in the free and full enjoyment of her rights. The church is free in and to the full extent of my freedom of conscience; and though I have no right to impose my conscience on another, I have the right to protest against any and every act of the state that is repugnant to it or contrary to my church. The state is just as much bound to respect, protect, and defend the Catholic Church in her faith, her constitution, her discipline, and her worship, as if she were the only religious body in the nation. Other religious bodies exist and have, not before God, but before civil society, equal rights with her; and if the state can do nothing to violate their rights of conscience, it can do nothing to violate hers, as it in fact does in its legislation in regard to marriage and divorce, both here and in nearly all European states and empires. It cannot violate the Catholic conscience in order to conform to the Protestant conscience.

Here is the way in which we understand the separation of church and state, as it exists in this country, and we feel quite sure that we do not incur the censure of the _Syllabus_. We have here done nothing but set forth in its true light the religious liberty recognized by our American system of government, and which forms the basis of our civil liberty. Our church is here with all her freedom, in all her integrity, by right, not merely tolerated; and by a right which is not a civil grant and revocable at will, but by the irrevocable grant of God. Her full and entire freedom is recognized by the fundamental principle of the American state, and we demand that the civil law respect and protect her freedom against all gainsayers. So much we demand on the ground of equal rights and in the name of inviolable conscience. When we go farther and ask more from the state than equality with the sects, we give _Putnam's Magazine_ full liberty to denounce us, and to condemn us as the enemies of religious liberty.

FOOTNOTE:

[143] See Debates in the New York State Convention, 1867 and 1868, vol. iii. pp. 2736-2744.

A POLISH PATRIOTIC HYMN.

In an obscure corner of the Mazarine Library, at Paris, was lately discovered by its director or librarian in chief, Mr. Philarète Chasles, a small black prayer-book; an oblong duodecimo, gilt-edged, although printed on poor gray paper. It was in the Polish tongue, with the exception of the vesper-hymns and some canticles of the church in Latin. No catalogue chronicled its existence, and it was, evidently, a despised waif, rejected as of too little importance to be entitled to a place in the dignified alcoves.

On examination, it was found to contain the following original Latin ode--a remarkable composition in many respects, touchingly beautiful in a simplicity at once tender and vigorous, and an exquisite combination of piety and patriotism.

It was doubtless sung in the churches of Poland about the year 1740, when Europe stood aloof in silent ingratitude to those who, following Sobieski's sword, had saved her from the Turk; when England was of course indifferent to the fate of a Catholic nation; when France was without sympathy for the faithful, and her kings proved then, more than ever, that Catholicity would have been better off without their aid; when Catharine of Russia gilded her cupidity with philosophical maxims, and Frederick of Prussia, called the Great, calumniated those he robbed.

As we read the hymn, we can well imagine the crowd in front of the altar, covered with flowers, in some rude, white-walled village church. They kneel before the infant Jesus in his mother's arms. Peasants in their national costume--a long, white blouse reaching to the knee, the curved sabre in the belt--children, soldiers, women, young girls. They chant one of those peculiarly wild Slavonic rhythms in 6/8 or 3/8. There, prostrate, with clasped hands, their weeping eyes on the infant Saviour, the child Liberator, they intone these beautiful Latin strophes, a rare specimen of spontaneous and popular poetry:

AD PARVULUM CHRISTUM CONTRA HOSTES PATRIÆ.

1.

Benevolus audi
Quæ tuæ sunt laudi,
O Parvule delicate!
Patriam defende!
Tu solus es agnus
Et fortis et magnus!
Qui perfidum Turcam
Compellis ad furcam!
Patriam! patriam! patriam
Defende!

Mercifully listen to those who praise and implore thee, O tender
Infant! Defend our country. Thou alone art the Lamb, alone
powerful! alone great! Exterminator of the treacherous Turk. Our
country, our country, ah! defend our country.

Barbarous and artificial strophes, perhaps you think? Yes, measured by Lucretius and Virgil, they may be; poor, thin, leonine verses like those of the twelfth century Benedictine monk who wrote,

Gloria factorum temere conceditur horum,

singing verses without prosodial measure, their vehement and rapid rhyme answering for every thing. And yet this learned barbarism, borrowed from the seventh century, from a poetry in ruins, gives life to the ardent flame and the tragic sorrow it expresses. It is a deep cry of anguish from the innermost depths of a stricken people's heart.

We hear the divine and child-like victim invoked in his feebleness by a vanquished nation, and appealed to in his shivering nakedness (_et friges et taces_) by the oppressed in tears, and these cries form a sad though sublime harmony. The unknown ecclesiastical minstrel--for the poetry is anonymous--continues:

2.

O nefas! O crimen!
Mors transit limen!
O Parvule delicate!
Patriam defende!
Jam victima sumus,
Et pulvis et fumus.
Patriam!
Patriam!
Patriam defende!

O injustice! O crime! Death advances! O tender Infant! defend our
country. Already are we victims, naught but smoke and dust. Our
country, etc., etc.

3.

Tu nudus hic jaces
Et friges et taces!
O Parvule delicate!
Patriam defende!
Minusculum pectus,
Duriusculus lectus!
Nihilominus telo
Pugnabis e coelo!
Patriam!
Patriam!
Patriam defende!

All naked as we see thee, and cold and silent! O tender Infant!
defend our country. Delicate is thy breast. Hard is thy couch! And
yet, from heaven on high, wilt thou combat for us! Our country,
etc., etc.

This people's poet and clever Latinist is liberal of his diminutives, _minusculum_, _duriusculus_, and displays, withal, a curious affectation of rhyming richness, _Turcam, furcam_; _lectus, pectus_; _laudi, audi_; _magnus, agnus_. And yet there is deep emotion and profound lyric agitation compressed into the shortest possible strophes, all vigorously concise and eloquently expressive. We omit several beautiful verses:

4.

Grassantur,
Furantur,
Prædantur,
Bacchantur!
O Parvule delicate!
Patriam defende!
Nil tutum
Nil ausum,
Nil satis est clausum!
Nil foedera valent.
Cum hæreses calent.
Patriam!
Patriam!
Patriam defende!

Devastating, raging, slaying, in orgies they ruin. O tender
Infant! defend our country. Naught is safe with us, naught
withholds them. Heresy triumphs! Treaties are trampled upon! Our
country, etc., etc.

5.

Polonia perit
Et spolium erit.
O Parvule delicate!
Patriam defende!
Tu fregeris nisi
Vim hostis invisi,
Oppresseris facem
Et dederis pacem!
Patriam!
Patriam!
Patriam defende!

Poland perishes. A prey she becomes. O tender Infant! defend our
country. Sealed is her fate, unless thou breakest the force of the
enemy that crushes her; unless thou givest peace. Our country,
etc., etc.

6.

Est tempus, est hora
Ne, quæso, sit mora!
Parvule delicate!
Patriam defende!
Vicini laborant,
Et aliud orant!
Quod perfidus hostis
Nos, superi, nostis!
Patriam!
Patriam!
Patriam defende!

The time and the hour have come. Oh! delay not, I implore. O
tender Infant! save our country. With other things our neighbors
are occupied. Thou, O God supreme! knowest the designs of the
enemy. Defend, defend our country!

How admirable the popular simplicity preserved here--an infantine tenderness, a Slavonian murmur, a solemn melody resembling the moaning sigh of weeping willows, an echo of those charming Lithuanian ballads finding voice in the grand old ecclesiastical Roman idiom.

THROUGH DEVIOUS WAYS.