1. I beseech the pious reader not to be shocked and scandalised by the
conclusions of this section. He will find them in the end a valuable
support to theology. The most religious mind can have no difficulty in
allowing that cookery, as such, is a business of this world only: that
you retain your cook, not to save your soul, but to prepare palatable
and wholesome nourishment for your body; that honesty, sobriety, and
good temper are officially requisite qualifications, simply inasmuch
as the contrary vices would be the plague of your kitchen and the
spoiling of your dinner. In a Catholic house the soup on a Friday is
made without meat. That restriction is observed, not as a point of
culinary art, but because, whereas eternal salvation is the main end
of life, and cookery a subordinate end, the latter must be so
prosecuted as not to interfere with the former. She who uses
ingredients forbidden by the Church, is the worse Christian, but she
may be the better cook. Now, to compare a great thing with a little,
the State equally with the kitchen is a creation of this world,--there
are no nationalities, nor kitchen-ranges either, beyond the grave.
Civil government is a secular concern. The scope and aim intrinsic to
it, and attainable by its own proper forces, is a certain temporal
good. Suarez (_De Legibus_, III., xi., 7) sets forth that good to
be,--"the natural happiness of the perfect human community, whereof
the civil legislature has the care, and the happiness of individuals
as they are members of such of a community, that they may live therein
peaceably and justly, and with a sufficiency of goods for the
preservation and comfort of their bodily life, and with so much moral
rectitude as is necessary for this external peace and happiness of the
commonwealth and the continued preservation of human nature."
2. The intrinsic scope and aim of civil government is the good of the
citizens as citizens. That, we have to show, is not any good of the
world to come; nor again the full measure of good requisite for
individual well-being in this world. The good of the citizens as such
is that which they enjoy in common in their social and political
capacity: namely, security, wealth, liberty, commerce, the arts of
life, arms, glory, empire, sanitation, and the like, all which goods,
of their own nature, reach not beyond this world. True, a certain
measure of moral rectitude also is maintained in common, but only "so
much as is necessary for the external peace and happiness of the
commonwealth," not that rectitude of the whole man which is required
in view of the world to come. (Ethics, c. x., n. 4 [3], p. 182.) The
intrinsic aim of the State, then, falls short of the next life.
Neither does it cover the entire good of the individual even for this
life. The good of the State, and of each citizen as a citizen, which
it is the purpose of civil government to procure, is a mere grand
outline, within which every man has to fill in for himself the little
square of his own personal perfection and happiness. Happiness, as we
have seen, lies essentially in inward acts. The conditions of these
acts, outward tranquillity and order, are the statesman's care: the
acts themselves must be elicited by each individual from his own
heart. Happiness also depends greatly on domestic life, the details of
which, at least when they stop short of wife-beating, come not within
the cognisance of the civil power. It remains, as we have said, that
the scope and aim of the State, within its own sphere and the compass
of its own powers, is the temporal prosperity of the body politic, and
the prosperity of its members as they are its members and citizens,
but not absolutely as they are men. We cannot repeat too often the
saying of St. Thomas: "Man is not ordained to the political
commonwealth to the full extent of all that he is and has." (1a 2æ, q.
21, art. 4, ad 3.)
3. From this view it appears that the end for which the State exists
is indeed an important and necessary good, but it is not all in all to
man, not his perfect and final happiness. To guide man to that is the
office of the Christian Church in the present order of Providence.
Cook and statesman must so go about the proper ends of their several
offices, as not to stand in the way of the Church, compassing as she
does that supreme end to which all other ends are subordinate. This
limitation they are bound to observe, not as cook and statesman, but
as men and Christians. A perfectly Christian State, as Christian, has
a twofold duty. First, it has a _positive_ duty, at the request of the
Church, to follow up ecclesiastical laws with corresponding civil
enactments, _e.g_., laws against criminous clerks and excommunicates.
On this spiritual ground, being beyond its jurisdiction, the State
must be careful not to forestall but to second the precept of
spiritual authority. It is no business of the State, as such, to
punish a purely religious offence. The second duty of a Christian
State, and a more urgent duty even than the former, is the _negative_
one of making no civil enactment to the prejudice of the Church:
_e.g._, not to subject clerics to the law of conscription. Useful as
their arms might be for the defence of the country, the State must
forego that utility for the sake of a higher end.
4. In the order of pure nature, which is the order of philosophy,
there is of course no Church. Still there would be, as we have seen
(c. i., s. i., n. 8, p. 197), erected on the same lines as the civil
power, and working side by side with it, a religious power competent
to prescribe and conduct divine worship. This power the State would be
bound to abet and support, both positively and negatively; something
in the same manner, but not to the same degree, as the Christian State
is bound to abet the Church. The supreme direction of the natural
religious power would conveniently be vested in the person of the
Civil Ruler. Thus the Roman Emperor was also Chief Pontiff.
5. How in the mere natural, as distinguished from the Christian order,
the provinces of marriage and education should be divided between the
civil and the religious power, is perhaps not a very profitable
enquiry. The only use of it is a polemic use in arguing with men of no
Christianity. Among all men of any religion, marriage has ever been
regarded as one of those occasions of life that bring man into special
relation with God, and therefore into some dependence on God's
ministers. Education, again, has a religious element, to be
superintended by the religious power. Education has a secular element
also, the general superintendence of which cannot be denied to the
State. Though children are facts of the domestic order, and the care
and formation of them belongs primarily to their parents, yet if the
parents neglect their charge, the State can claim the right of
intervention _ab abusu_. It certainly is within the province of the
State to prevent any parent from launching upon the world a brood of
young barbarians, ready to disturb the peace of civil society. The
practical issue is, who are _barbarians_ and what is understood by
_peace_. The Emperor Decius probably considered every Christian child
an enemy of the _Pax Romana_. But the misapplication of a maxim does
not derogate from its truth. It also belongs to the State to see that
no parent behaves _like a Cyclops_ ([Greek: kyklopikos], Ar., _Eth_.,
X., ix., 13) in his family, ordering his children, not to their good,
as a father is bound to do, but to his own tyrannical caprice. For
_instruction_, as distinguished from _education_, it is the parent's
duty to provide his child with so much of it as is necessary, in the
state of society wherein his lot is cast, to enable the child to make
his way in the world according to the condition of his father. In many
walks of life one might as well be short of a finger as not know how
to read and write. Where ignorance is such a disadvantage, the parent
is not allowed to let his child grow up ignorant. There, if he
neglects to have him taught, the State may step in with compulsory
schooling. Compulsory schooling for all indiscriminately, and that up
to a high standard, is quite another matter.
_Readings_.--Suarez, _De Legibus_, III., xi.; _ib_., IV., ii., nn. 3,
4: St. Thos., 1a 2æ, q. 93, art. 3, ad 3; _ib_., q. 96, art. 2; _ib_.,
q. 98, art. 1, in corp.;_ib._, q. 99, art. 3, in corp.; _ib_., q. 100,
art. 2, in corp.