in reference to the service of
Catholics in the late war. "Never," it says, "was any company or any
regiment or brigade that entwined on its colors emblems of the Catholic
faith, and on the eve of a battle knelt to receive absolution from a
Catholic priest, recorded but as first to advance and last to retreat.
And since then, whether in barracks or in camp, ... you look in vain for
any disgraceful record of Catholic privates and officers." We submit
that neither caste nor class nor sect has any place in determining the
relative merits of the brave soldiers who fought in the Civil War. In
camp, and upon the field of battle, they stood side by side, not as New
Yorkers, Vermonters, Germans, Irishmen, Catholics, or Protestants, but
as patriotic Americans. Some of these, perhaps, were better soldiers
because they were devout Catholics, and others because they were earnest
Presbyterians or Methodists, and this for the reason that those who fear
God are the readier to face duty, brave danger, and die for country. No:
our army is not an army of Catholics, Baptists, etc., but an army of
Americans.

* * * * *

Is it true that "a very large part of our free education system is
devoted to teaching the principles of Nihilism, the absurdities of
evolution, the crudities of the nineteenth-century philosophy, weakest
and most watery of all the philosophies of the ages"? Dr. William C.
Prime makes this claim in the New-York _Journal of Commerce_, and then
says, "Of what use it is to read the Bible in the morning, and teach in
the afternoon that the Bible is a poor fiction, perhaps some one can
explain. That this is precisely what many common schools and free
educational institutions are doing, may be discovered with little
difficulty." With due deference to the opinion of our genial _confrere_,
we cannot accept his conclusions. We have yet to learn of any public
school in which flouting at the Bible or religion enters into the matter
of instruction, and we apprehend that the number of teachers who thus
misuse their office really constitutes so small a fraction of the
teaching community as to be hardly worthy the learned doctor's
attention. As a matter of fact, by far the greater number of American
teachers in public schools and private schools, whatever their faults
otherwise, are men and women who are either Christians, or filled with a
reverent regard for the Bible and its teachings.

*