e solved, or this contribution be made, and what the
Graeco-Roman republic began be completed.

But the United States have a religious as well as a political destiny,
for religion and politics go together. Church and state, as
governments, are separate indeed, but the principles on which the state
is founded have their origin and ground in the spiritual order--in the
principles revealed or affirmed by religion--and are inseparable from
them. There is no state without God, any more than there is a church
without Christ or the Incarnation. An atheist may be a politician, but
if there were no God there could be no politics, theological principles
are the basis of political principles. The created universe is a
dialectic whole, distinct but inseparable from its Creator, and all its
parts cohere and are essential to one another. All has its origin and
prototype in the Triune God, and throughout expresses unity in
triplicity and triplicity in unity, without which there is no real
being and no actual or possible life. Every thing has its principle,
medium, and end. Natural society is initial, civil government is
medial, the church is teleological, but the three are only distinctions
in one indissoluble whole.

Man, as we have seen, lives by communion with God through the Divine
creative act, and is perfected or completed only through the
Incarnation, in Christ, the Word made flesh. True, he communes with
God through his kind, and through external nature, society in which he
is born and reared, and property through which he derives sustenance
for his body; but these are only media of his communion with God, the
source of life--not either the beginning or the end of his communion.
They have no life in themselves, since their being is in God, and, of
themselves, can impart none. They are in the order of second causes,
and second causes, without the first cause, are nought. Communion
which stops with them, which takes them as the principle and end,
instead of media, as they are, is the communion of death, not of life.
As religion includes all that relates to communion with God, it must in
some form be inseparable from every living act of man, both
individually and socially; and, in the long run, men must conform
either their politics to their religion or their religion to their
politics. Christianity is constantly at work, moulding political
society in its own image and likeness, and every political system
struggles to