Page:The Great Encyclical Letters of Pope Leo XIII.djvu/577



REVIEW OF HIS PONTIFICATE. 571

which eternal justice has established? That hberty which is the only hberty worthy of man, the only one useful to society, none favors or encourages or protects more than the Church. By the force of its doctrine and the effica- ciousness of its action the Church has freed humanity from the yoke of slavery in preaching to the world the great law of equaUty and human fraternity. In every age it has defended the feeble and the oppressed against the arrogant domination of the strong. It has demanded liberty of Christian conscience while pouring out in torrents the blood of its martyrs; it has restored to the child and to the woman the dignity and the noble prerogatives of their nature in making them share by virtue of the same right that reverence and justice which is their due, and it has largely contributed, both to introduce and maintain civil and political liberty in the heart of the nations.

The Church the usurper of the rights of the State ! The Church invading the political domain! Why, the Church knows and teaches that her divine Founder has commanded us to give to Csesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's, and that He has thus sanctioned the immutable principle of an enduring distinction between those two powers which are both sovereign in their respective spheres, a distinc- tion which is most pregnant in its consequences and emi- nently conducive to the development of Christian civiliza- tion. In its spirit of charity it is a stranger to every hostile design against the State. It aims only at making these two powers go side by side for the advancement of the same object, namely, for man and for human society, but by different ways and in conformity with the noble plan which has been assigned for its divine mission. Would to God that its action were received without mistrust and without suspicion. It could not fail to multiply the numberless benefits of which We have already spoken. To accuse the Church of ambitious views is only to repeat the ancient calumny, a calumny which its powerful enemies