These relations really existed, and they gave the Pope certain temporal rights in certain states, even the temporal supremacy, as he has still in what is left him of the States of the Church;but they were exceptional or accidental relations, not the universal and essential relations between the church and the state.The rights that grew out of these relations were real rights, sacred and inviolable, but only where and while the relations subsisted.They, for the most part, grew out of the feudal system introduced into the Roman empire by its barbarian conquerors, and necessarily ceased with the political order in which they originated.Undoubtedly the church consecrated civil rulers, but this did not imply that they received their power or right to govern from God through her; but implied that their persons were sacred, and that violence to them would be sacrilege; that they held the Christian faith, and acknowledged themselves bound to protect it, and to govern their subjects justly, according to the law of God.
The church, moreover, has always recognized the distinction of the two powers, and although the Pope owes to the fact that he is chief of the spiritual society, his temporal principality, no theologian or canonist of the slightest respectability would argue that he derives his rights as temporal sovereign from his rights as pontiff.His rights as pontiff depend on the express appointment of God; his rights as temporal prince are derived from the same source from which other princes derive their rights, and are held by the same tenure.Hence canonists have maintained that the subjects of other states may even engage in war with the Pope as prince, without breach of their fidelity to him as pontiff or supreme visible head of the church.
The church not only distinguishes between the two powers, but recognizes as legitimate, governments that manifestly do not derive from God through her.St.Paul enjoins obedience to the Roman emperors for conscience' sake, and the church teaches that infidels and heretics may have legitimate government; and if she has ever denied the right of any infidel or heretical prince, it has been on the ground that the constitution and laws of his principality require him to profess and protect the Catholic faith.She tolerates resistance in a non-Catholic state no more than in a Catholic state to the prince; and if she has not condemned and cut off from her communion the Catholics who in our struggle have joined the Secessionists and fought in their ranks against the United States, it is because the prevalence of the doctrine of State sovereignty has seemed to leave a reasonable doubt whether they were really rebels fighting against their legitimate sovereign or not.
No doubt, as the authority of the church is derived immediately from God in a supernatural manner, and as she holds that the state derives its authority only mediately from him, in a natural mode, she asserts the superiority of her authority, and that, in case of conflict between the two powers, the civil must yield.
But this is only saying that supernatural is above natural.
But--and this is the important point--she does not teach, nor permit the faithful to hold, that the supernatural abrogates the natural, or in any way supersedes it.Grace, say the theologians, supposes nature, gratia supponit naturam.The church in the matter of government accepts the natural, aids it, elevates it, and is its firmest support.
VII.St.Augustine, St.Gregory Magnus, St.Thomas, Bellarmin, Suarez, and the theologians generally, hold that princes derive their power from God through the people, or that the people, though not the source, are the medium of all political authority, and therefore rulers are accountable for the use they make of their power to both God and the people.
This doctrine agrees with the democratic theory in vesting sovereignty in the people, instead of the king or the nobility, a particular individual, family, class, or caste; and differs from it, as democracy is commonly explained, in understanding by the people, the people collectively, not individually--the organic people, or people fixed to a given territory, not the people as a mere population--the people in the republican sense of the word nation, not in the barbaric or despotic sense; and in deriving the sovereignty from God, from whom is all power, and except from whom there is and can be no power, instead of asserting it as the underived and indefeasible right of the people in their "own native right and might." The people not being God, and being only what philosophers call a second cause, they are and can be sovereign only in a secondary and relative sense.It asserts the divine origin of power, while democracy asserts its human origin.
But as, under the law of nature, all men are equal, or have equal rights as men, one man has and can have in himself no right to govern another; and as man is never absolutely his own, but always and everywhere belongs to his Creator, it is clear that no government originating in humanity alone can be a legitimate government.Every such government is founded on the assumption that man is God, which is a great mistake--is, in fact, the fundamental sophism which underlies every error and every sin.
The divine origin of government, in the sense asserted by Christian theologians, is never found distinctly set forth in the political writings of the ancient Greek and Roman writers.
Gentile philosophy had lost the tradition of creation, as some modern philosophers, in so-called Christian nations, are fast losing it, and were as unable to explain the origin of government as they were the origin of man himself.
