Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/142

Rh meeting-house, and the ballot-box; nay, oppose temperance and religion, if he likes. If, with truth and justice on our side, the few Catholics can overcome the many Protestants, we deserve defeat. We should be false to the first principles of democratic theory, if we did not grant them their unalienable rights. Let there be no tyranny; let us pay the Catholics good for ill; and cast out Satan by the finger of God, not by the Prince of Devils. This peril is easily mastered. The Catholic Church has still many lessons to offer the Protestants.

III. Of late years, it has been industriously taught in America that there is no law of nature superior to the statutes which men enact; that politics are not amenable to conscience or to God. Accordingly, the American Congress knows no check in legislation but the Constitution of the United States and the will of the majority; none in the Constitution of the Universe and the will of God. The atheistic idea of the Jesuits, that the end justifies the means, is made the first principle in American politics. Hence it has been repeatedly declared by "prominent clergymen" that politics should not be treated of in the pulpit ; they are not amenable to religion; Christianity has nothing to do with making or administering the laws. When the Pharisees and Sadducees have silenced the prophet and the apostle, it is not difficult to make men believe that Machiavelli is a great saint, and Jesuitism the revealed religion of politics! Let the legislators make what wicked laws they will against the rights of man; the priest of commerce is to say nothing. Nay, the legislators themselves are never to refer to justice and the eternal right, only to the expediency of the hour.

Then when the statute is made, the magistrate is not to ask if it be just, he is only to execute it; the people are to obey and help enforce the wicked enactment, never asking if it be right. The highest virtue in the people is—"unquestioning submission to the Constitution;" or, when the statute violates their conscience, to do "a disagreeable duty!" Thus the political action of the people is exempted from the jurisdiction of God and His natural