Page:History of Freedom.djvu/235

 POLITICAL THOUGHTS ON THE CHURCH 19 1

those who thought with St. Augustine that the State had a sinful origin and character: "Primus fuit terrenae civi- tatis conditor fratricida." 1 The Liberals, at the same time, are strong in the authority of many scholastic \vriters, and of many of the older Jesuit divines, of St. Thomas and Suarez, Bellarmine, and Mariana. The absolutists, too, countenanced by Bossuet and the Gal- Hcan Church, and quoting amply from the Old Testa- Inent, can point triumphantly to the majority of Catholic countries in modern times. All these arguments are at the same time serviceable to our adversaries; and those by \vhich one objection is ans\vered help to fortify another. The frequent recurrence of this sort of argument which appears to us as treacherous for defence as it is popular as a weapon of attack, sho\vs that no very dcfinite ideas prevail on the subject, and makes it doubtful whether history, which passes sentence on so many theories, is altogether consistent with any of these. Nevertheless it is obviously an inquiry of the greatest importance, and one on which controversy can never entirely be set at rest; for the relation of the spiritual and the secular power is, like that of speculation and revelation, of religion and nature, one of those problems which remain perpetually open, to receive light from the meditations and experience of all ages, and the complete solution of which is among the objects, and would be the end, of all history. At a time when the whole system of ecclesiastical government \-vas under discussion, and when the temporal power was beginning to predominate over the Church in France, the greatest theologian of the age made an attempt to apply the principles of secular polity to the Church. According to Gerson ( Opera, ii. 254), the fundamental forms into which Aristotle divides all government recur in the ecclesiastical system. The royal power is represented in the Papacy, the aristocracy by the

1 De Civil, Dei, xv. 5. .. The fratricide was the first founder of the secular State',"