The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1870-04-09

course is Cue not TO their fear that he will
reduce the Catholic world to slavery, but to
their fear that he will ALLEVIATE the Catholic
world from religion itself. Nothing can be
more preposterous than the assumption that
any government is afraid that the Syllabus
will weaken its authority, though many Ca
tholic Governments do fear that it may COM
plcate their relations with the Catholic
clergy already made very troublesome by the
process of secularization through which even
the most bigoted Catholic States are passing
before our eyes. In no countries is the Papal
authority so weak at this moment as in Ca
tholic countries-countries which the Pope
has had for ages at his feet. If the Syl-
labus be q laughing-stock in France
and Austria and Bavaria, and even
in Spain, and the greatest Catholic theolo-
gians of the European continent make light
of Papal pretensions, it is a little too bad to
have it used as a red rag in American pulpits
to rouse the Protestant bull into fury. The
Catholic laity have never in any country, or
in any age, accepted the ecclesiastical mea-
sure either of the province of the church or of
the dues of the state, and they are not likely
to make o beginning in the United States.
But there is one striking example in history
perhaps the most awful of all the lessons his
tory has to offer-of the folly of treating
Catholics as if they did believe all the worst
and widest doctrines that could be dug out
by controversialists from the ponderous tones
of Catholic theologians and canonists, and
that is Ireland. Ireland is what she is to-day
because Protestant England has persisted
for two centuries in legislating for her on
the hypothesis that everything the Pope
said, Irish Catholics believed, and that
any order he chose to issue they would
surely execute. We all see the result;
pleasant and successful, is it not?
We do not believe that true and satisfac-
tory reconciliation of the Catholic Church,
as its doctors define it, with modern society
will ever be effected. This reconciliation is
a dream in which many great Catholics of
recent times, from Lammenais to Montalem
bert and Father Hyacinthe, have sought refuge
from distressing internal doubts and con-
flicts; but one has only to read even a mode
rate statement of the church's claims, and
take even an imperfect view of the condition
of modern States, to feel that a dream it
must forever remain. The relations of the
Catholic clergy to the state must always be,
as they are now, marked by hostility and
aggressiveness on the one side and suspicion
on the other; but this furnishes no excuse
for attempts to drive the Catholic laity into
their arms, by pretending to re-
gard them as being in all things
the humble and submissive sheep the priests
Catholic Church gets along in modern society
is by letting the laymen manage politics
pretty much as they please and the only
true and statesmanlike course for American
Protestants to adopt in dealing with the
Catholic laymen is to treat them as men like
ourselves, permeated like us by the modern
spirit, treading the solid ground of utility in
dealing with secular affairs, ready to argue
and open to conviction, and not as parcel
of devotees, led by the hand by the monks,
fed on legends, and requiring to be followed
to the polls by spiritual director.
We say this on the supposition that no
Protestant gentleman has as yet discovered
any short and speedy method of getting rid
of the Catholics, and that we have to live
with and make the best of about 5000, 900 OF
them, who, if not educated or attached to the
Government somehow, are pretty certain to
furnish considerable supply of robbers and
murderers, and disturbing element in oul
politics of no mean power. But, if anybody
has hit on any plan of roofing them out be
fore the next Presidential election, of course
we are willing to see it tried, provided it bt
not too inhuman or treacherous, or does no
involve the slaughter of young children
These can, of course, be saved and brough
up in the common schools as indomitabl
Protestants.