last legislative debate, conservatives were intent on sustaining the old régime. The most memorable speech in its defence was made by Alexander H. Everett, who based his argument on the ground of educational necessity.* Nearly all the state constitutions now contain "guarantees of full religious liberty within the limits of public peace and order. And thus it may be regarded as the American theory that church and state should be separate and distinct, each independent in its own sphere, yet not hostile, but equally interested in public morality and national prosperity, the state protecting the church by law, the church self-supporting and self-governing, and strengthening the moral foundations of the state." This separation is not demanded as "the policy of our republic, but as a principle; not a variable matter of expediency, but of unalterable and universal right. Honorable as is the record of federal and state governments in the recognition and guarantee of religious liberty, yet it would be criminally unwise to omit sleepless vigilance or to regard the victory as finally and irrevocably won. Attempts are occasionally made to amend our constitution by religious enactments. Some of the states exclude atheists and preachers from civil offices. Some make belief in Divinity a condition of bearing testimony in court. In municipal governments sectarian appropriations are common, and our whole free-school system is imperilled by a demand for the support of parochial schools from state revenues. It seems of vital importance, as guarding our liberties, that the XVI. Amendment to the federal constitution, proposed by the "National League for the Protection of American Institutions," should be adopted: "No state shall pass any law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibit

*Hague's Life Notes, 139.

Schaff's Progress of Religious Freedom, 82.

A Catholic writer in the New York Sun of August 25 says: "When the pope's letter to Cardinal Gibbons was published, the Catholic world understood its meaning. Abroad they read the letter just as we did, as this quotation from the Bien Public of Ghent, July 4, will clearly establish : "It follows [from the pope's letter] that the decrees of the Plenary Council of Baltimore constitute the rule to be followed always in the matter of schools, and therefore that the denominational school instruction, penetrated by religion and based on religion, is the only one that answers the needs of souls, the only one the church approves, the only one that really merits the confidence of Christian families.""

ing the free exercise thereof, or use its property or credit, or any money raised by taxation, or authorize either to be used, for the purpose of founding, maintaining, or aiding, by appropriation, payment for services, expenses, or otherwise, any church, religious denomination or religious society, or any institution, society, or undertaking which is wholly or in part under sectarian or ecclesiastical control."

RELIGIOUS LIBERTY AND THE PROGRESS OF
THE RACE.

BY BISHOP CHARLES H. FOWLER, D.D., LL.D., OF MINNEAPOLIS.

I. CHRISTIANITY EMBODIES RELIGIOUS LIBERTY.

THE infallible Book projects an equation in which God and love are balanced. Love is the only single word that defines God. His Son comes not to destroy but to save. In the exhaustless tide of his love he laid down his life for the sheep-no mention of wolves. Neither man nor angel shall fight for him. He sheathes Peter's sword, and he does not call for the twelve legions of angels. There is no pretext for restraints upon religious liberty in the utterance of Jesus. The Son makes free indeed. Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. The church was three hundred years old before she lost the purity that was peaceable, or found either a motive or a weapon for coercion. Christianity set forth in biblical rather than ecclesiastical literature embodies religious liberty.

We have not to do with toleration. That is only of policy. It accepts what it does not want, but under the circumstances prefers to something worse. The sultan tolerates Christianity. Looking into the muzzles of the cannon of the Signatory Powers, he rather enjoys tolerating the dogs, and is half tempted to be one himself. Liberty is a principle, it is a new life. It is a life in its own limitations. It is enlarged being. It keeps within the rights of others. It is in society, not in solitude. Man must live in society. In the desert he is in a sling. His faculties wither and die. Sheep-herders become insane, prisoners in solitary confinement become imbecile. Liberty must take man on the plane of his normal being. It is impossible to reverse this current of life. Liberty then has to do with limitations, is under law To secure religious liberty it is only necessary to enlarge

your saints-make them large enough to comprehend their relations, large enough to break off all thongs.

IJ. RELIGIOUS LIBERTY HAS KEPT STEP WITH THE PROGRESS OF THE RACE.

It is a growth, it is not an invention. It is not a discovery. It is an evolution, seldom a revolution. One can usually tell when a boy wears a man's clothes. Sometimes he puts them on prematurely. He may seem to fill them, but there is always something in the way he wrinkles them or sticks through them that shows the boy. So the race comes to this enlargement, this religious enlargement, called religious liberty. It struggles forward irregularly, but makes heading. The Master started his church in its independent life, set it up in the business of character-building and race-building, with a perfect pattern for filling its wardrobe. It took four thousand years to pass from the fig-leaves to the seamless garment. But he who wanted to see humanity clothed and in its right mind wearied not, neither slumbered nor slept.

Intercourse is a great civilizer, enlarger. Look at the map of Europe. See its long and crooked coast line, its bays, inlets, streams. It is full of short cuts from everywhere to everywhere. This helped intercourse. This helped enlargement. Asia stretches in inaccessible planes and deserts. It is centuries behind Europe. The Aryans pouring down from the great table-land in central. Asia flowed into Europe and its advantages, and into its climate, and into its history. In the families of Greeks, Italians, Germans, Slavs, and Celts it made much of its known history. Africa has fallen still further behind. Touching the Mediterranean it has unfolded some early and wonderful civilizations. But liberty has found its best development among the migrants from that old central table-land in the advantages of Europe. continents and deserts, vast barriers in the mind quire many migrations and many ages to master. Some solitary conviction, like an oasis, shows wonderful freshness and vigor. But on every hand stretches the desert. We cannot say that palm or alfalfa are not genuine, vigorous, and beautiful. But the site is small; no great race can dwell and multiply on that half

acre.

So there are itself, that re

Love of liberty is a virtue, an acquisition, not an instinct. We all enjoy freedom from restraints and dictations. But liberty is self-government, that is, war against invasions by the lower propensities. It is picket duty against the animal in us.

virtue, like the race, matures slowly. You cannot put this enlargement, this self-government, this liberty, this religious liberty, upon a man like a cloak; you cannot fill him with it as you can fill a sack with wheat. It must grow up with the increase of his measurements. It must wind its rootlets into the invisible interstices between the fibres, between the cell-tissues of his intellect, of his spiritual nature. Take a Digger Indian from the Yosemite Valley and put him into Baldwin's locomotive works in Philadelphia, and you have not made an engineer or machinist of him. You may grow him up to it, but you cannot hoist him up to it. You cannot hoist men into religious liberty.

The gospel begets liberty. It quickens the spirit in man. God's live-giving Spirit is in his gospel. It liberates all the forces within. If they are kept down, you feel the shock and shiver of the earthquake. They must have vent. It was hard for John Knox to cry out in Scotland, hard for John Wesley to cry out in England. But it would have been harder not to, dangerous not to, fatal not to. Sooner or later these convictions unuttered burn up through a man, leaving him like a charred and blackened volThe gospel begets liberty.

cano.

If I wanted to run a despotism, I would establish a government church, appoint and pay the clergy. I would control the kind of gospel they should preach. The union of church and state is the shrewdest invention of Satan. In it he appears as an angel of light. The hierarch must be not a rebuker, but a manager. The leader of the host is thus armed with forces with which to quiet all rebukers.

III. RELIGIOUS LIBERTY IS A LATE FRUIT OF THE STALK OF HUMANITY.

Our hardest lesson to learn is "to let live." Driven out into the wilderness like the Puritans to find freedom of conscience, we drive everybody out of the wilderness who wants the same freedom cut after another pattern. There are wonderful pages in our