These natural equal rights are the law for the state or civil authority, and every law of the state that violates them violates natural justice, and is by that fact null and void; is, as St. Augustine says, and St. Thomas after him, "Violence rather than law," and can never be binding on the civil courts, though human courts not unfrequently enforce such laws. Not being derived from the state or civil society, these rights are evidently not in the temporal order, or the same order with the state, and therefore must have, as we have seen, their basis in the spiritual order, that is, in theology, or have no basis at all.
The existence of God as the creator and upholder of nature, I do not here undertake to prove; for that has been done in the papers on _The Problems of the Age_, which have appeared in this magazine. I am not arguing against atheism in general, but only against what is called political atheism, or the doctrine that theology, and therefore the church, has nothing to do with politics. The state, with us, is based on the equal rights, not equal privileges, of all men; and if these equal rights have no real and solid basis beyond and independent of civil society, the state itself has no real basis, and is a _chateau d'Espagne_, or a mere castle in the air. Hence political atheism is not only the exclusion of the church from politics, but the denial of the state itself, and the substitution for it of mere physical force. Political atheism cannot be asserted without atheism in general, without, in fact, denying all existence, and, therefore, of necessity, all right. Political atheism is, then, alike destructive of religion and politics, church and state, of authority and liberty. Deny all right independent of the state, and the citizen can have no right not derived from the state, which denies all liberty; deny all right independent of the state, the state itself can have no right to govern, unless the state itself be God, which would be statolatry, alike absurd and blasphemous.
The rights of the state and of the citizen, alike must be derived from God, and have a theological basis, or be no rights at all, but words without meaning. There is then no such separation between politics and theology as European democracy asserts. Such separation is unphilosophical, and against the truth of things. It has been so held in all ages and nations of the world. All the great theologians, philosophers, and moralists of the human race have always held polities to be a branch of ethics, or morals, and that branch which treats of the application of the catholic principles of theology to society, or the social relations of mankind. The permanent, universal, and invariable principles of civil society are all theological principles, for there are no such principles outside of theology, and the office of the state is to apply these principles only to what is local, temporal, and variable. It is evident then that principles, properly so called, lie in the theological order, and come within the province of the theologian, not of the statesman, and are therefore to be determined by the spiritual society, not by the civil.