RELIGION AND EDUCATION UNDER THE CONSTITUTION,

by J. M. O'Neill '07. Harper Bros. 1949. 338 pp. $4.00.

Mr. O'Neill is a tough-minded liberal into whose education the granite of New Hampshire has indeed entered. He is fighting on two fronts, like Maritain himself; he is defending the liberal and Catholic position against both the secularist misinterpretation of the Constitution and the sacral misinterpretation of religion. It is plain from now on, to all who can read, that the First Amendment does not prohibit the use of public funds in support of religion "in any guise, form or degree"; it is also plain that Ryan and Boland's Catholic Principles of Politics is far from authoritative. Catholics can and do assent to Jefferson's inclusion among his Services to His Country of the claim that he proposed "the demolition of the church establishment, and the freedom of religion."

The only trouble with all this is that the eighteenth-century intellectual separation of religion and church (or for that matter synagogue) is almost meaningless both to the man in the street and those men on the bench. Religion meant Deism, which is deader than the dodo. No one today has the eighteenth century conception of Nature; and so no one has the conception of that Nature's God. Mr. O'Neill shows us how to win two battles; but he does not envisage the nature of the coming campaign.