Territory of Utah in which the properties of the Mormon Church were located, dissolving the Church corporation and sequestrating all its property. In the suit by the Mormon Church against the United States, the Supreme Court held the Congressional legislation constitutional.

"The State," [said the Court] "has a perfect right to prohibit polygamy and all other open offences against the enlightened sentiment of mankind notwithstanding the pretence of religious conviction by which they may be advocated and practiced."

The cases we have adverted to above, all rest on the principle affirmed by Cardinal Gibbons:

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"... the Government should leave as large a liberty as possible to individuals . . . only intervening in the interests of morality, justice and the common weal."

Such is the Police Power in the modern State. It is a power of sovereign nature and of paramount importance against that tyranny in majorities, and that intolerance in mass movements, which under the associative life in modern States threaten minorities, alike in economic, social, moral and political life. For life in the modern State consists in a ceaseless effort at an equilibrium among contending interests represented by groups or parties. A change in the numerical strength of any group or party may at any time destroy that equilibrium and affect adversely the constitutional rights of citizens, or even alter the constitution in harmony with the views of a political majority. The

system is intricate, the adjustment delicate, and most important in it is the Police Power. It is in virtue of that power that constitutional guarantees of liberty and property are restrained, that they may not be used to defeat those ends which the State exists to secure. Its exercise would seem to be nowhere more justified than in curbing the claims and restraining the acts of a sovereignty foreign to the State, when carried beyond the limits of public opinion, be such sovereignty secular or religious. Such sovereignty is no less obnoxious because its obedience is limited to a solidarity within the State in matters affecting interests that because they are moral are no less political.

The Police Power is sui generis, and has obviously a political as well as a legal relation. Its animating power is public opinion, and for that to function constitutionally it must be free. When it is divided between two sovereignties within the same State on questions that are both civic and moral, it is obvious that the Police Power on which the very life of the State depends is potentially nullified. From the time that the Civic Primacy of Peoples became the recognized authority of political life, and the attainment of religious and intellectual liberty the chief concern of government, the modern State has availed itself of the Police Power to curb, in the interest of its own safety, the abuse of liberty. Frequently the sovereignty of the Church of Rome has challenged the sovereignties of modern States, and demanded in virtue of its alleged Divine Constitution rights and privileges for itself which the State denied to other churches and religious societies. Such demands of the Church have threatened

the very existence of the State itself. Against them it has invoked the Police Power in drastic legislation that the Church of Rome has called "usurpation and revolution." 25 Where such legislation has not been formally enacted the inherent antagonism between the Roman Church and the modern State has been, and is, shown all over the world in the drawing of party lines in political life. The status claimed by that Church as a sovereignty, in nature like the State, is shown in the tension that develops between them where the Church numbers among its subjects a sufficient proportion of the State's electorate to affect the balance of power. It is the same tension that exists between two secular States standing at bay over a matter of disputed political right; on the one side the State resting on the Police Power and, on the other side, the Church of Rome resting on an alleged Divine Constitution and alleged rights of sovereignty, in its theory guaranteed by God Himself. Where such conditions exist it is true that many generations may go by without a disruptive collision between the "Two Powers," but nevertheless the existence of the tension develops within the Twilight Zone an endless antagonism destructive of religious peace and civic order. Four subjects throughout history have been the centers of activity within that Zone, and are especially noticeable today in Italy, in Mexico, in France, and in the United States. They are (1) the claim by the Roman Catholic

25 Reference may be made to the laws of the kingdom of a United Italy as the result of which the Pope still insists that he is a prisoner in the Vatican; to the Laws of Separation and against Congregations in France, and to the recent church legislation in Mexico. To these further reference will be made in the following pages.

Church, in virtue of an alleged Divine Constitution, notwithstanding the sovereignty of the State, to possess inherent rights; (2) its claim to jurisdiction over marriage; (3) its claim to control over political conduct in matters belonging to morals; and (4) its claim to control over education.

CHAPTER XI

THE TWILIGHT ZONE OF INHERENT RIGHTS

THE subject of inherent rights includes the claim of the Roman Church to be a legal or juristic personality in virtue of Divine Right, exclusive and unique, which the State in objective truth and duty should recognize as Divine and, therefore, as fundamental in the political order; incidental to such juristic personality are the right of propaganda and the right to acquire property within the State. The claim to these rights means that, in the theory of the Church of Rome, its relations to and with the State are those of one sovereign power with another.

These rights which the Church of Rome claims as inherent, other associative bodies or corporations, religious as well as secular, acknowledge to be created by and received from the State. The Roman claims date far back in history, to the Imperial Edicts 2 of A. D. 313 and 321 when the Emperor Constantine after his conversion gave political recognition to the rights of the Church to propaganda and ownership of property with freedom of taxation. Prior to that time the Roman Empire would have laughed to scorn these claims of the

1"... in principle, as a matter of objective duty, the State is bound to recognize the juridical rights of the (Roman) Church in all matters spiritual, whether purely so or of mixed character, and its judicial right to determine the character of matters of jurisdiction, in regard, namely, to their spiritual quality." C. E., vol. xiv, p. 252 c. 2 Ibid., vol. iv, p. 299 c; vol. xii, pp. 466, 467 d.