Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/139

126 thriving man who gets rich fast, and thinks more than he ought of his money, and less of his manhood. Some misfortune, the ruin of a prodigal son perishing in quicksands of gold, will, by-and-by, convince him that riches is not the only thing in life.

II. The Roman Catholic Church claims infallibility for itself, and denies spiritual freedom, liberty of mind or conscience, to its members. It is therefore the foe to all progress; it is deadly hostile to democracy. To mankind this is its first command—Submit to an external authority; subordinate your human nature to an element foreign and abhorrent thereto! It aims at absolute domination over the body and the spirit of man. The Catholic Church can never escape from the consequences of her first principle. She is the natural ally of tyrants, and the irreconcileable enemy of freedom. Individual Catholics in America, as elsewhere, are inconsistent, and favour the progress of mankind. Alas! such are exceptional; the Catholic Church has an iron logic, and consistently hates liberty in all its forms—free thought, free speech.

I quote the words of her own authors in America, recently uttered by the press. "Protestantism … has not and never can have any rights where Catholicity is triumphant." "We lose all the breath we expend in declaiming against bigotry and intolerance, and in favour of religious liberty." "Religious liberty [in America] is merely endured until the opposite caa be carried into execution without peril to the Catholic world." "Catholicity will one day rule in America, and then religious liberty "at an end." "The very name of Liberty… ought to be banished from the very domain of religion." "No man has a right to choose his religion." "Catholicism is the most intolerant of creeds. It is intolerance itself, for it is the truth itself."

The Catholic population is not great in numbers. In 1863, there were in America 1,712 churches, 1,574 priests,