; but constitutions are generated,
not made--providential, not conventional. Statesmen can only develop
what is in the existing constitutions of their respective countries,
and no European constitution contains all the elements of the American.
European Liberals mistake the American system, and, were they to
succeed in their efforts, would not introduce it, but something more
hostile to it than the governments and institutions they are warring
against. They start from narrow, sectarian, or infidel premises, and
seek not freedom of worship, but freedom of denial. They suppress the
freedom of religion as the means of securing what they call religious
liberty--imagine that they secure freedom of thought by extinguishing
the light without which no thought is possible, and advance
civilization by undermining its foundation. The condemnation of their
views and movements by the Holy Father in the Encyclical, which has
excited so much hostility, may seem to superficial and unthinking
Americans even, as a condemnation of our American system--indeed, as
the condemnation of modern science, intelligence, and civilization
itself; but whoever looks below the surface, has some insight into the
course of events, understands the propositions and movements censured,
and the sense in which they are censured, is well assured that the Holy
Father has simply exercised his pastoral and teaching authority to save
religion, society, science, and civilization from utter corruption or
destruction. The opinions, tendencies, and movements, directly or by
implication censured, are the effect of narrow and superficial
thinking, of partial and one-sided views, and are sectarian,
sophistical, and hostile to all real progress, and tend, as far as they
go, to throw society back into the barbarism from which, after
centuries of toil and struggle, it is just beginning to emerge. The
Holy Father has condemned nothing that real philosophy, real science
does not also condemn; nothing, in fact, that is not at war with the
American system itself. For the mass of the people, it were desirable
that fuller explanations should be given of the sense in which the
various propositions censured are condemned, for some of them are not,
in every sense, false; but the explanations needed were expected by the
Holy Father to be given by the bishops and prelates, to whom, not to
the people, save through them, the Encyclical was addressed. Little is
to be hoped, and mu