It is the peculiar mission of the Church to be the channel of grace to each soul by her spiritual and pastoral action – she alone has this mission; but it is not her only work. She has also to govern and educate, so far as government and education are needful subsidiaries to her great work of the salvation of souls. By her discipline, her morality, her law, she strives to realize the divine order upon earth; while by her intellectual labor she seeks an even fuller knowledge of the works, the ideas, and the nature of God. But the ethical and intellectual offices of the Church, as distinct from her spiritual office, are not hers exclusively or peculiarly. They were discharged, however imperfectly, before she was founded; and they are discharged still, independently of her, by two other authorities – science and society; the Church cannot perform all these functions by herself, nor, consequently, can she absorb their direction. The political and intellectual orders remain permanently distinct from the spiritual. They follow their own ends, they obey their own laws, and in doing so they support the cause of religion by the discovery of truth and the upholding of right. They render this service by fulfilling their own ends independently and unrestrictedly, not by surrendering them for the sake of spiritual interests. Whatever diverts government and science from their own spheres, or leads religion to usurp their domains, confounds distinct authorities, and imperils not only political right and scientific truths, but also the cause of faith and morals. A government that, for the interests of religion, disregards political right, and a science that, for the sake of protecting faith, wavers and dissembles in the pursuit of knowledge, are instruments at least as well adapted to serve the cause of falsehood as to combat it, and never can be used in furtherance of the truth without that treachery to principle which is a sacrifice too costly to be made for the service of any interest whatever. – from “Cardinal Wiseman and the Home and Foreign Review” in The History of Freedom (1907)