hurch.
Though operating in different spheres, both are, in their respective
spheres, developing and applying to practical life the one and the same
Divine Idea. The church can trust the state, and the state can trust
the church. Both act from the same principle to one and the same end.
Each by its own constitution co-operates with, aids, and completes the
other. It is true the church is not formally established as the civil
law of the land, nor is it necessary that she should be; because there
is nothing in the state that conflicts with her freedom and
independence, with her dogmas or her irreformable canons. The need of
establishing the church by law, and protecting her by legal pains and
penalties, as is still done in most countries, can exist only in a
barbarous or semi-barbarous state of society, where the state is not
organized on catholic principles, or the civilization is based on false
principles, and in its development tends not to the real or Divine
order of things. When the state is constituted in harmony with that
order, it is carried onward by the force of its own internal
constitution in a catholic direction, and a church establishment, or
what is called a state religion, would be an anomaly, or a superfluity.
The true religion is in the heart of the state, as its informing
principle and real interior life. The external establishment, by legal
enactment of the church, would afford her no additional protection, add
nothing to her power and efficacy, and effect nothing for faith or
piety--neither of which can be forced, because both must, from their
nature, be free-will offerings to God.

In the United States, false religions are legally as free as the true
religion; but all false religions being one-sided, sophistical, and
uncatholic, are opposed by the principles of the state, which tend, by
their silent but effective workings, to eliminate them. The American
state recognizes only the catholic religion. It eschews all
sectarianism, and none of the sects have been able to get their
peculiarities incorporated into its constitution or its laws. The
state conforms to what each holds that is catholic, that is always and
everywhere religion; and what ever is not catholic it leaves, as
outside of its province, to live or die, according to its own inherent
vitality or want of vitality. The state conscience is catholic, not
sectarian; hence it is that the utmost freedom can be allowed to all
religions, th