Page:Petri Privilegium - Manning.djvu/98

Rh direction of the supernatural over the natural law, constitutes the Christian order of the world, as expressed in the old formulas of the concord of the Church and the empire, or of the Church and the civil powers. Such is and always will be the Christian and Catholic jurisprudence. If it cease to live in the kingdoms of the world, their public laws and actions, it will always remain indelible in the theology and principles of the Catholic Church. The theory of the separation of Church and State, and the independence of the two, and of free Churches in free states, if enunciated as an absolute truth, is an error at variance with the mission of the Church to mankind. If it be affirmed only as a statement of the tendency of the world, and of the events before our eyes, it is an undoubted fact. The civil powers everywhere for these three hundred years have striven, first, to establish a superiority of the civil over the spiritual, as in France and Austria, and failing this, to separate themselves and to claim an independence of all spiritual authority. The effect of this is to reduce the Christian society of the world to the natural order; to divest the State of all religious character; to make it external to the faith, and to the Church; or, in a word, to desecrate that which the providence of God through the action of His Church had consecrated. I will not stop here to point out the application of all this to the temporal power of the Sovereign Pontiff; nor to show how large and luminous an interpretation it affords of the inflexibility with which he has for