degenerated "of necessity into Machiavelism." In 1842, he said that it was "wrong, wrong," to cite medieval history on the dangers of clerical oppression, as if it were improper for secular authorities to submit to spiritual authority. On the contrary, "it was well for man that there was a power above the brutal tyrants called emperors, kings, and barons, who rode roughshod over the humble peasant and artisan."

The inseparability of politics and religion, as Brownson conceived it, by no means implied the desirability of an official consensus or civic religion. He wanted a "powerful and living synthesis," not an "imbecile eclecticism." In the I830s and I840s, liberal Protestants, most of them Whigs, urged the churches to abandon sectarian squabbles and to unite around a few ethical precepts common to all of them, which could serve as a national creed. They feared that without moral discipline, competitive individualism would tear society apart. The separation of church and state was a highly desirable arrangement, in their eyes, because it kept divisive and inconsequential controversies about doctrine out of politics and allowed the churches to devote themselves to the more important work of moral reform. Temperance, thrift, honesty in business, proper work habits, provision for the poor, prompt payment of debts, respect for women, protection of Indian rights: these were the crying needs of the day, as the Whigs saw them—to which the "conscience Whigs" would have added the gradual emancipation of slaves, followed by their resettlement in Africa. This ambitious program of "improvement" presupposed a basic moral consensus, which Whigs hoped to propagate through charitable organizations and other interdenominational agencies—the "voluntary associations" so highly praised by Tocqueville—and through the common schools. The school system envisioned by Horace Mann and other reformers was meant to serve as the main source of social morality.

In his blistering attacks on Mann's educational reforms, Brownson made very explicit the difference between his own view of the proper relation between politics and religion and the Whigs' conception of a civil religion based on the suppression of doctrinal issues. A state-supported system of education, operated on the principles envisioned by Mann, would enshrine the "opinions now dominant" and reinforce the political status quo. It would amount to a "branch of general police." Mann and his friends promoted education as the "most effectual means possible of checking pauperism and crime, and making the rich secure in their possessions." Having failed to perpetuate the establishment of religion,

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