And yet (oh! pray thee, think of it with pride,
With joyful pride and gratitude to God,

That He has dowered thee with so fair a soul),
If thou hadst been less perfect than thou wert---
If, as thy spirit opened to my sight,

I'd found in thee the faults that I had found

In every other creature I had met

If thou hadst been less patient or less kind-
If thou hadst e'er been aught but good to me-
I fear to think upon what might have been.
But thou wert like to none-at least to me
None other ever seemed so fair or good;
For thou didst never, from the very first,
Say but one word, or look one passing glance,
That cast a shadow on my thoughts of thee.
And yet whenever I recall to mind

The disappointments thou must oft have felt
At vain, unworthy act and speech of mine,
I cannot think what thou hast seen in me
To wake the gentle favour thou hast shown,
Unless it be, as I have said, that God
Made thee the medium of His love to me.

So passed the days and years-for it is years
Since that first evening when my new life dawned-
And day by day, in ever-widening stream,
God's peace came pouring in upon my soul.
I saw the weeds, that selfishness and sloth
Had suffered to grow up within my heart
And crush the flowers that God had planted there,
Relax their baneful clutches more and more,
And felt the sacred blossoms of my youth
Beginning slowly to revive again;
And all my heart went out in thanks to God.
And so I learned to pray; for until then,
I grieve to think, I knew not how to pray.
And the first use I made of my new power,
Was this to pour myself in prayer for thee-
To try to pay a part of what I owed.
And faithfully I've kept my fealty since;
For as my prayers more long and happy grew
Thy share I've never failed to give to thee.

And, in his mercy, God has blessed my prayers
A hundred thousand times beyond their worth,
For His great longing heart, that pines for love,
Grasps at the little that our hearts contain,
And makes of it as though it were a world.
Yes! God has blessed my prayers, nor could I give

A proof of what I say more strong than this :-
Though thou hast never seemed more fair to me
Than thou dost seem to-night, as all the years
Go passing in review before my mind,
O'erflowing it with tender thoughts of thee,
Yet oh! believe me truthful, when I say,
That if to-morrow all the gentle dreams

That lured my heart from doubt and strife should end
If thou shouldst never smile on me again-

I do not think the shock would move my peace
Or make me for one single moment doubt
That God had so ordained it for the best.

I do believe that I would rather feel

A greater love and confidence in Him,

That He should have, in mercy, held the blow
Until it could no longer work its ill-

And though the future should look blank and drear
Yet I would still go smiling on my way,

Happy at heart and rich for evermore

In that great gift which thou didst bring to me,
And now which nought on earth can take away.

W. S. R.

THE RELATIONS OF THE CHURCH TO SOCIETY.

BY THE REV. EDMUND J. O'REILLY, S.J.

XXVI. THE CHURCH AND POLITICS.

WHEN I first undertook to treat of the Relations of the Church to Society, expecting to be more brief than I have been, une idea rather prominent in my mind was the right of the Church to deal with what are called political questions. I am not alluding to the interference of priests in politics, though there is some connection between the two things. I speak of the authority of the Church to pronounce on the soundness or unsoundness of certain political maxims, and to insist, as far as in her lies, on their being respectively followed or disregarded. I have, perhaps, said enough in different contexts throughout the preceding papers to indicate and establish this authority; yet I do not wish to omit treating of it expressly, though in a very compendious way.

There are those, not only among Protestants but among Catholics, who would readily applaud and adopt the assertion that the Church has no business to meddle with politics. The grounds of this state

ment are that the Church-if divinely established at all, which many Protestants would deny, at least in our meaning of Church, and of its Divine establishment—that the Church, I say, has been established for the spiritual and not for the temporal government of men ; that the Church has one sphere of action, and the State another; that even if, in a case of collision on common or disputed territory, the Church should be allowed the prerogative of deciding, she has no power in avowedly civil and temporal matters. Further, the great motive of merely political action is expediency, either as regards a particular nation or as regards international interests. Whatever is found to suit men best is the best to be done. Now, in all this there is nothing supernatural, nothing spiritual. It is a kind of matter, too, which the Church and its prelates are not bound to understand, and do not understand. There may, perchance, be individual churchmen who are good politicians as there may be individual laymen who are good theologians, but when this happens it is perchance. Men of the world, as a rule, know much better what are their own temporal rights, and what turns most to their account as citizens than bishops and priests. Besides, the very rights themselves, which are to be exercised or controlled, are the creation of men viewed in their civil capacity; they are, so to speak, the property of citizens as such. The intervention, therefore, of the Church in these things is an aggression on a domain which does not belong to her.

These are the notions, plausible at least in part, which prevail in the minds of many who do not altogether deny the Divine institution of the Church, or who even zealously maintain that institution. These notions are thoroughly inaccurate, though not without some admixture of truth, but truth distorted and made subservient to error. Let us try to unravel the system and discover its flaws. In the first place, I freely admit that the Church is not charged with the temporal government of men. This has been placed by the Almighty primarily in the hands of the human community and its different sections throughout the world; secondarily, but really, in the hands of those to whom the people have entrusted it, with the modifications and reservations wherewith they-the people-have affected it. The authority of all kings and rulers of whatever kind is derivatively Divine. It has come to them through the people. In every supposition, even that of the immediate Divine right of kings, which I do not maintain, the people do not cease to have rights. The nature, and qualities, and limits of these rights depend on natural principles and on circumstances; not that the principles are created or altered by circumstances, but that their application is varied according to the moral condition of things, as is that of particular physical laws by the physical condition of things. All this is independent of the Church, as to its existence and force, but is cognisable by the Church as to its truth and the obligations which arise from it, in the same way that the natural precepts binding to the observance of ordinary contracts, and forbidding murder, theft, &c., are quite beyond the Church's control, but belong to the matter of her teaching, and can be insisted on by her under pain of ecclesiastical censures. Again,

the mere expediency of political arrangements, that is to say, their convenience and worldly advantages are not even within the cognizance of the Church. She has nothing to do with them. So long as the arrangements are not morally due on the one hand, and not morally wrong on the other, they are outside the bounds of ecclesiastical authority. But the doctrine that all right is resolvable into expediency is an impious doctrine, which the Church cannot accept, and is warranted and compelled to condemn. Expediency has its own place, and the place it legitimately occupies is not small. There is a wide field for satisfying its demands, but those demands must not be opposed to Divine Law.

The summary of the doctrine which fixes the Church's position towards human politics may be given in a few words. Political measures may be, in many cases, commanded, and in many more forbidden by Natural Law. They have a moral as well as a political bearing. This moral bearing belongs to what is called Morals, for Christians to Christian morals. Of Christian morals the Church has from God the charge, not as their framer, but as their exponent and guardian. It belongs to the Church in this capacity to teach authoritatively the truth regarding political maxims and doctrines, and to require, so far as she can, conformity and adhesion to her teaching in this, as in other matters which fall within her competence. Whatever appertains to faith or morals appertains to the Church as their depositary and their vindicator. As to ecclesiastics being conversant or not with politics; in the first place, they are professionally conversant with morals, and, wherever morals enter, ecclesiastical science enters. With the other aspects of politics, it is not the special business of ecclesiastics to concern themselves. Yet, there is no reason why they may not be acquainted with these too as well as, and better than, the mass of those who are freely allowed to take a part in political discussion and action.

As we are on the subject of the Church's teaching in the domain of politics, it will be well to glance, by way of illustration, at one or two of the points of that teaching in our own days. Pius IX., in the well-known Encyclical Quanta cura, after treating of liberty of conscience, of which I have said something in a preceding paper,* goes on to speak as follows: "And since, where religion has been withdrawn from civil society, and the doctrine and authority of Divine Revelation have been repudiated, even the genuine notion itself of justice and human right is obscured and lost, and material force is substituted in the place of true justice and legitimate right; hence it becomes clear why some men, neglecting entirely, and passing by, the most certain principles of sound reason venture to proclaim: 'That the will of the people, manifested either by public opinion, as they call it, or otherwise, constitutes the supreme law freed from all Divine and human right, and that in the political order consummated facts, precisely on the ground of their being consummated, have the force of right.'" This last statement, attributed to some men, consti

IRISH MONTHLY, Vol. IV., pp. 163 and following.

*

tutes one of the bad opinions and doctrines condemned in the close of the Encyclical, the opposite doctrine being thereby taught as I have explained in an earlier paper. Here we consequently find asserted the existence and binding force of superior right not arbitrarily created by men. I may observe that the Latin word jus which I have translated right may also mean law; but in the present context both come pretty much to the same thing, and the word lex is also used, which I have translated in the only way it can be translated, namely, by the English word law.

In innumerable cases, rights depend immediately on men's own acts, which acts being set aside, the rights would not exist at all. For instance, if I sell my horse to another, his right to the horse comes from our mutual act. But the foundation of this right is the natural principle of the efficacy and binding character of contracts, and over this principle neither of us has the least control. Or-putting it another way-his right to the horse, in the supposition of the contract duly entered into by me with him, is not created by either of us, but comes from God the author of nature. Even after the contract, he can annul his own right by renouncing it, but I cannot do so by myself, nor can he annul my right to the price; but, by common consent we may rescind the bargain and let things be as they were before it was made. In all this we are proceeding in conformity with the supreme law over which in itself we have no power. What is true of this ordinary private transaction is true of all other rights, on a small or on a large scale, among men. All rights are based on the law of God, whatever part the acts of men may have by way of conditions.

In the proposition here condemned we may notice two parts, connected, no doubt, with each other, but still distinct. The first, asserting that the will of the people is the supreme law discharged of all restraint and unshackled by Divine or human claims, is obviously subversive of Natural Law; the other, regarding those accomplished facts of which we hear so much now-a-days, does not display such manifest wickedness at first sight, but is, notwithstanding, a detestable error. Assuredly in private life, when a thief carries off property, the owner's title to it is neither extinguished nor diminished in the eyes of civil society, whatever be the religion of its members. But in public and political relations, this principle, though equally applicable, is too little regarded. No matter how unjust the change effected may be, it is the political maxim of many that once made it is to be looked on as legitimate. This is an immoral maxim, and as such condemned; its advocates may contend that, after all, without going so far as to oust God's rule, the people are to be recognised as supreme on earth in matters of government: for are they not the source of all legitimate power? I reply that, in the first place, when the people have once constituted a depositary of civil power, they cannot abitrarily withdraw the deposit or violate the contract. Nor can they decline to obey the just laws of those whom

* IKISH MONTHLY, Vol. III., p. 336.