flict, either has been or will be made. The declining to accept a scheme of education based on principles dangerous to Catholic Faith is certainly no such cause. To reject a tempting gift is no aggression. If we are again to be distracted by religious conflicts, the responsibility will rest undividedly upon the head of anyone who shall break our present public confidence and peace. And that misdeed would be indelibly written in our history.

CHAPTER IV.

TRUE AND FALSE PROGRESS.

I WILL now go on to the fourth proposition—that by these collisions with the Church the Civil Powers everywhere are at this time destroying the first principle of their own stability.

Mr. Gladstone has represented me as saying that 'the civil order of all Christendom is the offspring of the Temporal Power, and has the Temporal Power for its keystone; that on the destruction of the Temporal Power "the laws of nations would at once fall in ruins.'

Understood as I wrote these words I fully affirm them; understood as they may be in this garbled form, they have an exaggeration which is not mine. I was speaking strictly of the Temporal Power of the Pope over his own State: whereby, as a King among Kings, he sustained the Christian character of Sovereignty. I was not speaking of Temporal power over the Temporal Government of Princes. And I was speaking in defence at a time when every journal in the country, with hardly an exception, was day after day assailing, and I must add misrepresenting, the origin and office of the Temporal Government of the Pope. My own words were as follows:

Now, the last point on which I will dwell is this: that as the Church of God has created-and that specially through

the action of the Supreme Pontiffs in their civil mission to the world this vast and fair fabric of Christian Europe, so it has perpetually sustained it. I ask, what has given it coherence? What is it that has kept alive the governing principle among men, but that pure faith or knowledge of God which has gone forth from the Holy See, and has filled the whole circumference of Christendom? What has bound men together in the respect due to mutual rights, but that pure morality which was delivered to the Church to guard, and of which the Holy See is the supreme interpreter? These two streams-which, as St. Cyprian says in his treatise on the unity of the Church, are like the rays that flow from the sun, or like the streams that rise and break from the fountain-illuminated and inundated the whole Christian world. Now, I ask, what has preserved this in security, but the infallibility of the Church of God vested chiefly and finally in the person of the Vicar of Jesus Christ? It will rather belong to the next lecture to note how, by contrast, this may be proved, and how those nations, which have separated themselves from the Unity of the Catholic Church, and therefore are in opposition to the temporal sovereignty of Rome, have lost these two great principles of their preservation. I ask, then, what has preserved Christian Europe, but the principle of obedience-the precept of submission, which has been taught throughout the whole of its circuit by the Church of God, especially through the mouths of its Pontiffs? By them subjects have been taught obedience and rulers have learned justice. What, I ask, has limited monarchy? What has made monarchy a free institution, and supreme power compatible with the personal liberty of the people, but the limitations which the Holy See, acting through its Pontiffs, has imposed upon the Princes of the world? Does anybody doubt these two propositions? To them I would say, the Pontiffs, with their temporal power, have been accused of despotism; at least, then, let us give them the

credit of having taught the people to submit. They have been also accused of tyranny over Princes; at least let us give them the honor of having taught Kings that their power is limited. The dread chimera at which the English people especially stands in awe, the deposing power of the Pope,-what was it but that supreme arbitration, whereby the highest power in the world, the Vicar of the Incarnate Son of God, anointed high-priest and supreme temporal ruler (i.e. as Sovereign in his own State), sat in his tribunal impartially to judge between nation and nation, between people and prince, between sovereign and subject? The deposing power grew up by the providential action of God in the world, teaching subjects obedience and princes clemency.

'Now, in this twofold power of the Popes, which has been, may say, the centre of the diplomacy of Christian Europe, we see the sacerdotal and royal powers vested in one person, the two powers of king and priest, which are the two conservative principles of the Christian world. All Christian kings and all Christian priests stand related to the one person who bears in fulness that twofold character; and it is by adherence to that one person as the centre of the civil and spiritual system, which grew up under his hand, that Christian Europe is preserved. .I should say further, that, vast and solid as Christendom may seem, like a vault of stone, the temporal power of the Pope is the keystone; strike it out; and the family of nations would at once fall in ruins.'

91

In the very same chapter from which Mr. Gladstone has quoted, at page 46, the following statements occur at pages 32 and 33:

(1) 'Our Divine Lord committed to His Church and to His Vicar--the head on earth of that Church-

1

Temporal Power of the Popes, lecture ii. pp. 44-47. (Burns, 1862.)

His Spiritual sovereignty, reserving to Himself His Temporal or providential sovereignty.

There

fore the Spiritual sovereignty of the Church is a Divine. institution, and has a power directly ordained of God. (2) There are other powers in the world which are indirectly ordained of God-viz. all temporal sovereignties. (3) By an indirect but Divine providence our Divine Lord has liberated His Vicar upon earth, in the plenitude of His Spiritual sovereignty, from all civil subjection. (4) By the same Providence -indirect, indeed, but nevertheless Divine-our Lord clothed His Vicar with the possession of a patrimony.

(5) Upon the basis of this temporal possession our Lord has raised a temporal power by His indirect operation, and therefore the temporal power of the Pope is a Divine ordinance, having a Divine sanction, at least equally with every other sovereignty in the world.' It may not be amiss to add, lest it should be thought that this statement is merely a private opinion, that the text from which I quote was translated into Italian, in Rome, in 1862, was examined by the censorship, and printed at the Propaganda press.

1

This is still my unchanged belief, confirmed by the twelve years since these words were spoken, and by the shattered state of Christian Europe in 1875. Now I am not afraid of defending the condensed statement of Donoso Cortes: The history of Civilisation is the history of Christianity; the history of Christianity is the history of the Church; the history of the Church is the history of the Pontiffs.' St. Augustine's work De

1 Temporal Power of the Popes, pp. 32, 33.