found to be spreading even among Catholics both at home and abroad, than it was to direct his efforts to the conversion of non-Catholics. He was often rebuked when he insisted on the absolute necessity of the Catholic faith to salvation, and he found even dignitaries of the church "abusing the pope hypothetically in their sermons," and apparently more intent on asserting the independence of the temporal order than on defending the rights of the papacy and the supremacy of the spiritual order. He often said he could scarcely meet a Catholic layman who would not assert the total separation of church and state, that his religion had nothing to do with his politics, that he would reverence and obey his pastor so long as he remained in the sanctuary, and did not step beyond his sphere; but let him interfere in politics, even if he were the pope himself, he would resist him as he would any other man. This was in principle, simply political atheism, or the assumption that the political order is independent of the law of God; that is, that God is not sovereign in the state, that for the state there is no God. Hence he found Catholics at home and abroad sympathizing with the revolutions of 1848 and praying for their success, though those revolutions, republican in name, were led on by infidels and were aimed less at the overthrow of monarchy than the destruction of the papacy and the church.

This political atheism among Catholics can be traced to the prevalence of Gallicanism, or of the spirit that dictated the four articles adopted by the assembly of the Gallican clergy by order of the king in 1682. Those articles emancipated kings and princes from the power of the keys, declared their independence in temporals, placed the temporal order on the same plane with the spiritual, and made the state independent of the church, and free to pursue its own policy in defiance of her remonstrance. This could be true only on the Manichean doctrine of two eternal principles, or on the supposition that there is no God but Cæsar in the political order.

To meet this doctrine of the independence of the temporal order he saw no other way than that of asserting the supremacy of the spiritual order, which means only the sovereignty of God, and of the pope as the representative of that order. The four articles never had any authority in the church for Catholics, but were condemned and annulled by Innocent XI. as soon as published, and the king, when humbled by the reverses of his arms, promised the pope to rescind the edict he had issued enjoining them upon the clergy and seminaries of France. The fact is, Gallicanism was the doctrine of the political sovereigns, their lawyers

and courtiers, never of the church, and every Catholic was always free, if not bound, to oppose it and to maintain the supremacy of the church and the subordination of the state. Gallicanism, if not condemned as a heresy, and Gallicans could receive absolution without retracting it, was always suspect, and never favored by the church. It was, as we now know, barely tolerated till the church was ready to pronounce definitive judgment against it.

The author defended the deposing power as held and exercised jure divino, against those who maintained that the popes held and exercised it only jure humano, because, if the spiritual order be supreme, and the pope its representative, or the vicar of Christ on earth, it is a necessary consequence that he has the divine right to deprive sovereigns and to absolve their subjects from their allegiance whenever the rights and interests of the spiritual order, that is, of truth and justice, in his judg ment, render it necessary or expedient, and because the sovereign pontiffs who practically exercised the power, claimed to possess it by divine right and to exercise it by divine right.

But it is impossible to slur over the fact that after the removal of Brownson's Quarterly Review to New York, in 1855, a change gradually came, not over its doctrine, but over what may be called its tone and policy. Highly esteemed friends, contemplating a special movement for the conversion of non-Catholic Americans, invited Dr. Brownson to remove his Review to New York and make it an auxiliary to them in their proposed movement. As he had done pretty much all he could do in opposition to latitudinarianism, liberalism, socialism, revolutionism, and political atheism, he accepted the invitation. Turning now to address those without, and laboring, as he had not done before, to present the church in a light as little offensive to their prejudices as he could without sacrificing orthodoxy, he felt obliged to confine himself to what was strictly of faith, and to insist on nothing that had not been formally defined to be de fide. He could not assert the papal infallibility, or the absolute papal supremacy as since defined by the Vatican Council, and was obliged to content himself with insisting on the minimum instead of the maximum of Catholic doctrine, -the very opposite of what he had begun by asserting,-and fell insensibly into the poor policy of presenting Catholicity in its weakness, instead of its strength, which he had previously rejected and even ridiculed. This lost him, to a great extent, the confidence of the Catholic public, and inspired in many of them a

conviction, which they were not slow to express, that he was on the point of returning to Protestantism or infidelity.

In October, 1864, the Review was suspended. The attempt to make it the organ of a movement for the conversion of the country to the church by converting the church to the country had not succeeded. It is true that the decrees of the Council of the Vatican, or even the Syllabus, had not then been published, but Dr. Brownson had never ceased to believe as true the doctrines they define. He knew that there are many things which have never been defined that no one is at liberty to deny,-that, in fact, nothing is judicially defined till it has been controverted, as he had maintained against Cardinal Newman's theory of the development of Christian doctrine, which assumes that nothing is of faith till it is defined. The definition does not make the faith, and really only opposes the faith to the error that contradicts it.

After all, it is very probable that Dr. Brownson was led into this mistake by his politics, especially his hatred of great centralized states, whether democratic or imperial. This was the bond of sympathy between him and the illustrious Count Montalembert: All centralism in the state, he held, is despotism; to maintain liberty, power must be divided, and each division given a separate organization of its own, so that each may operate as a veto on the others. In human governments the principle is certainly sound, but is not always and everywhere prac ticable. Indeed, power cannot ever be so organized as not to be abused, and no civil government alone ever does or can suffice for the double office of maintaining order and liberty. It is only by the aid of the spiritual, divinely organized and sustained, that the opposites, order and liberty, can be reconciled and made one.

Yet there is little doubt that the opposition to the centralization of power in the civil order led him, as it did so many others, to oppose the tendency to it in the church. His Americanism unconsciously influenced his theology. Even those who call for decentralization are forced to demand unity, and it is hard for the human mind to assert one principle in civil organization and another in ecclesiastical organization. The democrat seeks to democratize the church, the monarchist to mon archize, and the Englishman would organize her after the model of his civil constitution, with an upper and a lower house, and the king or queen for nominal head.

Born and bred in a republic, and required by his religion to be loyal

to the republican government of his country, Dr. Brownson was naturally a liberal in politics, and it was no easy matter in the atmosphere of New York, the Paris of the New World, to be a liberal in politics and not also a liberal in religion. But in the leisure that followed the suspension of his Review in 1864, he resumed the old Boston tone and wrote, in June, 1872: "Whatever else I may be, I am not a liberal Catholic, but heartily accept the Syllabus and the decrees of the Vatican.

"I am content with the church as she is. I came to the church in 1844 in order to be liberated from my bondage to Satan, and to save my soul. It was not so much my intellectual wants as the need of moral helps, of the spiritual assistance of supernatural grace, in recovering moral purity and integrity of life, that led me to her door to beg admission into her communion. I came not to reform her, but that she might reform me. If I have even for a moment seemed to forget this, it has been unconsciously, and I ask pardon of God and man.”