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.
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