Secular affairs

“ Controlled by superstition, and exalting a servile obedience to human authority, he became a very unsafe guide in political affairs. He could not consistently labor for secular progress, because he had forsaken a world in which secular interests were prominent. ”

“ For here, after he has claimed credit for his church as the champion of a secular education, he tells the Congress that secularism is one of the great dangers of the age, against which the church must fight with all her strength. “The battle with secularism has to be fought out.” It must be fought “by the church, and eminently by our own church. Our duty therefore is to fit ourselves for the encounter, and we must do this with the cause of religion, undertaking in its breadth and embracing all branches of religious, spiritual, and ethical culture.” ”

“ The Church may not wish to interfere in the purely secular concerns of other States, or in the enactment of purely secular laws, for the government of foreign subjects, but she claims a right, and a right divine, to prevent any secular law, or power, being exercised for the injury of religion, the destruction of morals, and the spiritual ruin of her children. ”

“ No one had heard or taught, nor did anyone know anything concerning the secular authority, whence it came, what its office or work was, or how it should serve God. The most learned men—I will not name them—looked upon the secular power as a heathen, human and ungodly thing, as a state dangerous to salvation.... ”

“ This State can only redeem itself from its inner torment by becoming the hangman of the Catholic Church. As against the latter, which declares the secular power to be its serving body, the State is impotent. Impotent is the secular power which claimed to be the rule of the religious spirit. ”

“ Because, it will destroy that moderation and harmony which the forbearance of our laws to intermeddle with Religion, has produced amongst its several sects. Torrents of blood have been spilt in the old world, by vain attempts of the secular arm to extinguish Religious discord, by proscribing all difference in Religious opinions. Time has at length revealed the true remedy. ”

“ When the secular and religious institutions become involved in such a manner, there inhere in the relationship precisely those dangers -- as much to church as to state -- which the Framers feared would subvert religious liberty and the strength of a system of secular government. ”

“ I want you to know and feel it that I want to do everything I can to get every one of these statutes off our books that discriminates against a man because of his religious belief—that I am in favor of a secular government, and of all these rights. ”

“ The secular ought to be only secular; but this whole secular government of the Church claims at the same time the dignity and authority of the divine. This mingling of the sacred, divine, inviolable, with temporal interests, begets, on the one hand, fanaticism, as among the Turks, and on the other hand, the humility and obedientia passiva of the laity against this dread power. ”

“ Cultural history establishes not a few practices and prohibitions religious in origin which are retained as secular institutions and ways long after their religious sanctions and justifications are gone. ”

“ Accordingly, the Catholic Church has always, and in the most positive manner, inculcated obedience to secular authority as a duty and a matter of conscience, and has opposed and condemned those who taught the contrary. Only if the secular authority commands anything which is actually sinful, one must obey God and the Church rather than men. ”

“ To every social gathering around the religious idea that explains and sustains it, what a disturbance in the secular system formed by the co-ordination and mutual adaptation of laws, customs, morality, and institutions! ”

“ If men fought for political freedom, they encouraged themselves in the struggle with religious motives, and strove to sanctify their claims to secular rights, by insisting that these rights were derived from the rightful interpretation of the Bible. ”

“ We do not assert that they must remove their religious handicap as soon as they cast off their secular fetters. We do not transform secular questions into theological questions. We transform theological questions into secular questions. ”

“ So also the teachings of Christ, which were at first practised and developed by a small coterie of religious-minded men, acquired, under the conditions of the world, such secular and political influence, that about the time of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the Church organisations of the Christian society alone were the real political authorities, and discharged all the important functions of the secular states. ”

“ It is difficult to say whether new teachings were bringing to light a new attitude toward life, or whether on the other hand a new trend toward the secular, toward the independence of secular culture, created its own new dicta. ”

“ We must feel astonishment at him who declares the Secular right to be essentially a Christian right, when it is quite a different thing, is understood in an entirely different sense, and has an application unknown and unadmitted by Christianity. ”

“ I conclude that, in using sectarian institutions to further goals in secular education, the three statutes do violence to the principle that
government may not employ religious means to serve secular interests, however legitimate they may be, at least without the clearest demonstration that nonreligious means will not suffice. ”

“ All laws defining and punishing blasphemy—making it a crime to give your honest ideas about the Bible, or to laugh at the ignorance of the ancient Jews, or to enjoy yourself on the Sabbath, or to give your opinion of Jehovah, were passed by impudent bigots, and should be at once repealed by honest men.
70. Government Secular
Our government should be entirely and purely secular. The religious views of a candidate should be kept entirely out of sight. ”

“ The Imperial Edicts issued against the innovations led him to speak more fully of the interference of the secular authorities on behalf of religious doctrine generally. “God,” he declares, “will permit none to rule over the soul but Himself alone.... Hence, when the secular power takes upon itself to make laws for the soul it is trespassing upon God’s domain and merely seducing and corrupting souls. ”

“ The problems of the wayward mind concern the clerics, the psychiatrists, and the philosophers. Few groups have hesitated to create the political pressures that translate into secular law their notions of morality. ”

“ They become the tools of all sorts of secular ambitions which promise support in return for their co-operation. And the result may be read by any one not blinded by prejudice in the futility and incompetence of modern religions of all sorts. It is seen perhaps most of all in the pride of opinion which keeps the Christian world in a fragmentary condition, and which approaches the undoing of the sin of a divided Christendom with the preliminary announcement that no separated body must be required to admit that it has been in the wrong. ”

“ No secular government, worthy of mention in history, has ever been instituted in a region so dreary and inhospitable as that from whence the most powerful and practical forms of faith that have ever enthralled humanity deduce their origin. ”

“ Any suggestion, however indirect and unobtrusive, that Secularists were entitled to the rights of other citizens, was sure in those days to elicit some display of animosity from the majority of those who call their creed a religion of love. ”

“ There should be no secular interference in sacred things; no laws to suppress or establish any church or sect in religion, no religious persecutions, tests, or disqualifications; the different sects should be left to inveigh and hate each other as much as they please ”

“ What means the spread of secularism amongst the working classes of the present day, the contempt for religion and parsons which most of them display? Is it not a most ominous indication of future trouble for serene lord bishops and their brood when events bring them face to face with the people? ”

“ But, while seeking to enforce its laws in opposition to the laws of the State, the teaching of the Church seems somehow not to have been able to retain much hold over the general conscience which, ever since the first secular law came into being, has availed itself of the relief so afforded to free itself from galling shackles. ”

“ That is the line we draw, and when men step beyond that, then the secular law ought to step in and protect people in the exercise of their rights, and from the designs and wicked acts of those who seek to infringe upon them. ”

“ The Church had become respectable, comfortable, sensible, temperate, liberal; jealous about the forms of its creeds, equally jealous of its secular rights, interested in the discussion of subordinate questions, and becoming more and more tolerant of differences; ready for works of benevolence and large charity, in sympathy with the agricultural poor, open-handed in its gifts; a willing fellow-worker with society in kindly deeds, and its accomplice in secularity. ”

“ If we are told to "fear God and keep His commandments," lest His judgments overtake us, the indirect action of this doctrine on human character may make a vicious timid man better in this life, supposing the interpretation of the will of God, and the commandments selected to be enforced, are moral; but such teaching is not Secular, because its main object is to fit men for eternity. ”

“ This struggle between spiritual and secular powers, owing to the tremendous sensation which it created throughout Christendom, showed the nations that at the head of the Church there was a great force for justice, always able to combat iniquity and oppression, and sometimes to defeat them, however powerful the evil and the tyrants might seem. ”

“ That where, owing to existing methods of denominational education, it was necessary for the State to make the various sects its allies to effect the common object of secular education, it should deal to all denominations even-handed justice. ”

“ It may be added that America affords the one conspicuous example of the Secular State completely succeeding. In France, where the same principles were applied under the same inspiration, the ultimate result was something wholly different: an organized Atheism persecuting the Christian Faith. ”

“ With the emancipation of Man's higher activities from ecclesiastical control, the distinction between the religious and the secular life has gradually established itself. That this should happen was inevitable. ”

“ When benevolent societies, ecclesiastical bodies, an influential press, churches professing to be Christian, unite with a demoralized public opinion, and an oppressive secular authority, to perpetuate or extend a system of iniquity, there is created a force for evil, against which even millions of free Christian men find it difficult to contend. ”

“ There are too many instances in which no such course can be charted, too many areas in which the pervasive activities of the State justify some special provision for religion to prevent it from being submerged by an all-embracing secularism. ”

“ To promote in good faith and good temper the immediate and material welfare of humanity, in accordance with the laws of Nature, is the study and duty of a Secularist, and this is the unity of principle which prevails amid whatever diversity of opinion may subsist in a Secular Society, the bond of union being the common convictions of the duty of advancing the Secular good of this life, of the authority of natural morality, and of the utility of material effort in the work of human improvement. ”

“ Secularism declares that theology is condemned by reason as superstitious, and by experience as mischievous, and assails it as the historic enemy of Progress.
Secularism accordingly seeks to dispel superstition; to spread education; to disestablish religion; to rationalize morality; to promote peace; to dignify labour; to extend material well-being; and to realize the self-government of the people. ”

“ Disputation becomes a passion and the higher state of life, of which criticism is the necessary precursor, is lost sight of, and many remain at this stage when it is reached and go no further.
The third stage is that where ethical motives of conduct apart from Christianity are vindicated for the guidance of those who are indifferent about theology, or who reject it altogether. Supplying to such persons Secular reasons for duty is Secularism, the range of which is illimitable. ”

“ The olden Church had, on the contrary, exalted the secular power by permitting its representatives to share in many ways in the spiritual work of the Church, and by desiderating the harmonious co-operation of the two powers, spiritual and secular, in the interests of the ultimate end of mankind. ”

“ That secular authority has no concern with religious belief; that the Christian resists no evil and therefore needs no law-courts; nor should ever make use of the tribunals; that Christians do not kill or punish with imprisonment or the sword, but only with exclusion from the body of believers; that no man should be compelled by force to believe, nor should any be slain on account of his faith; that Christians do not resist, and hence do not go to war; that Christians may not swear; that all oaths are sinful; that infant baptism is of the pope and devil ”

“ Many foreigners, carried away by the reasonableness of this argument, severely condemned the Orthodox Church for continuing to resist the encroachments of the new Government upon its secular privileges—secular in both senses of the word. ”

“ But though the point may be conceded in regard to secular government, in ordering of which the constitutions and customs and mere pleasure of communities may be allowed to establish what is not morally evil ”