Now, the political destiny or mission of the United States is, in common with the European nations, to eliminate the barbaric elements retained by the Roman constitution, and specially to realize that philosophical division of the powers of government which distinguish it from both imperial and democratic centralism on the one hand, and, on the other, from the checks and balances or organized antagonisms which seek to preserve liberty by obstructing the exercise of power.No greater problem in statesmanship remains to be solved, and no greater contribution to civilization to be made.Nowhere else than in this New World, and in this New World only in the United States, can this problem be solved, or this contribution be made, and what the Graeco-Roman republic began be completed.
But the United States have a religious as well as a political destiny, for religion and politics go together.Church and state, as governments, are separate indeed, but the principles on which the state is founded have their origin and ground in the spiritual order--in the principles revealed or affirmed by religion--and are inseparable from them.There is no state without God, any more than there is a church without Christ or the Incarnation.An atheist may be a politician, but if there were no God there could be no politics.theological principles are the basis of political principles.The created universe is a dialectic whole, distinct but inseparable from its Creator, and all its parts cohere and are essential to one another.All has its origin and prototype in the Triune God, and throughout expresses unity in triplicity and triplicity in unity, without which there is no real being and no actual or possible life.
Every thing has its principle, medium, and end.Natural society is initial, civil government is medial, the church is teleological, but the three are only distinctions in one indissoluble whole.
Man, as we have seen, lives by communion with God through the Divine creative act, and is perfected or completed only through the Incarnation, in Christ, the Word made flesh.True, he communes with God through his kind, and through external nature, society in which he is born and reared, and property through which he derives sustenance for his body; but these are only media of his communion with God, the source of life--not either the beginning or the end of his communion.They have no life in themselves, since their being is in God, and, of themselves, can impart none.They are in the order of second causes, and second causes, without the first cause, are nought.Communion which stops with them, which takes them as the principle and end, instead of media, as they are, is the communion of death, not of life.As religion includes all that relates to communion with God, it must in some form be inseparable from every living act of man, both individually and socially; and, in the long run, men must conform either their politics to their religion or their religion to their politics.Christianity is constantly at work, moulding political society in its own image and likeness, and every political system struggles to harmonize Christianity with itself.If, then, the United States have a political destiny, they have a religious destiny inseparable from it.
The political destiny of the United States is to conform the state to the order of reality, or, so to speak, to the Divine Idea in creation.Their religious destiny is to render practicable and to realize the normal relations between church and state, religion and politics, as concreted in the life of the nation.
In politics, the United States are not realizing a political theory of any sort whatever.They, on the contrary, are successfully refuting all political theories, making away with them, and establishing the state--not on a theory, not on an artificial basis or a foundation laid by human reason or will, but on reality, the eternal and immutable principles in relation to which man is created.They are doing the same in regard to religious theories.Religion is not a theory, a subjective view, an opinion, but is, objectively, at once a principle, a law, and a fact, and, subjectively, it is, by the aid of God's grace, practical conformity to what is universally true and real.The United States, in fulfilment of their destiny, are making as sad havoc with religious theories as with political theories, and are pressing on with irresistible force to the real or the Divine order which is expressed in the Christian mysteries, which exists independent of man's understanding and will, and which man can neither make nor unmake.
The religious destiny of the United States is not to create a new religion nor to found a new church.All real religion is catholic, and is neither new nor old, but is always and everywhere true.Even our Lord came neither to found a new church nor to create a new religion, but to do the things which had been foretold, and to fulfil in time what had been determined in eternity.God has himself founded the church on catholic principles, or principles always and everywhere real principles.
His church is necessarily catholic, because founded on catholic dogmas, and the dogmas are catholic, because they are universal and immutable principles, having their origin and ground in the Divine Being Himself, or in the creative act by which He produces and sustains all things.Founded on universal and immutable principles, the church can never grow old or obsolete, but is the church for all times and Places, for all ranks and conditions of men.Man cannot change either the church or the dogmas of faith, for they are founded in the highest reality, which is above him, over him, and independent of him.Religion is above and independent of the state, and the state has nothing to do with the church or her dogmas, but to accept and conform to them as it does to any of the facts or principles of science, to a mathematical truth, or to a physical law.
