Page:True and False Infallibility of Popes.pdf/389

44 The forty-second implies that Cæsar is above God and His representatives.

The forty-third (one of the craziest of all) will have it that in agreements entered into between the State and the Church, the latter only is bound to abide by them, the State being at liberty to cast them to the winds when its pleases.

The forty-fourth claims for the State the episcopal rights given by Christ to the successors of the Apostles.

The forty-fifth denies the right of parents and the Church to see that the minds of youth under education are not to be tainted with impious or immoral teaching.

The forty-sixth carries the same monstrous pretension a step further.

The forty-seventh and forty-eighth are developments of the same absurdity, and deny to theology her place in the cycle of sciences.

The forty-ninth, fiftieth, and fifty-first, advocate that interference of laymen in the appointment of ecclesiastical rulers, which even Anglicanism has felt most intolerable, and which is one of the curses of the Russo-Greek schism. That the detestation of this offspring of Cæsarism is shared outside the Church of Rome appears from the secession, thirty years ago, of the Free Kirk of Scotland.

The principles upheld in the fifty-second and fifty-third propositions, of interfering with the sacrifice which religious choose to make of themselves to God by vows, surpass in extravagance the wildest accusations ever brought against the Church, of meddling with affairs of the State.