the Messianic teaching assumed no sovereignty, but relegated to Cæsar that form of government and order which was his peculiar appanage. It claimed for itself only the preaching of the Word and the administration of the sacraments of Christ, as the things of God, under a dispensation of divine love through a private and voluntary association of believers.10 But the environment of Roman Imperialism and the Roman legacy of public law and political conceptions, in less than four centuries did much to transform the constitution of the Christian Society.11 Great changes began with the conversion of the Emperor Constantine when the Christian religion became the religion of the Emperor.12 The Church adopted the institutional life and the legal and political concepts of the Roman Empire. The accidents of history and the exigencies of time imposed upon the Scriptural primacy of the Bishop of Rome a factitious pontifical sovereignty.13

10"... the grouping of Churches throughout the empire as a whole, could only represent, when compared with the State, a private society." L. Duchesne, Early History of the Christian Church, vol. ii, p. 517.

...

"Before the conversion of Constantine . . . there was little question about the relation between the State and the Church . . . The Church was a voluntary society within the Empire, dependent for every public right that it might enjoy . . . Christians asked for toleration, and maintained that they could not give up their faith and worship at the command of any earthly power; but toleration was all that they asked." . . R. W. & A. J. Carlyle, A History of Mediaval Political Theory in the West, vol. i, p. 176.

...

11 J. P. Davis, Corporations, vol. i, p. 37; vol. ii, p. 236; A. T. Wirgman, The Constitutional Authority of Bishops in the Catholic Church, p. 54.

12 Acton, The History of Freedom and other Essays, pp. 31, 33, 196-197; Duchesne, Early History of the Christian Church, vol. ii, pp. 518, 522; Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. viii, p. 26 d.

13 De Maistre, p. 139, says that the Popes became "sovereigns by compulsion."

A Scriptural exegesis was developed, giving to the metaphor of the Keys and to the Power to Loose and to Bind a significance that supported that sovereignty. At the opening of the medieval era the theory of the Two Powers had been adopted, and the life of the Western world was thereafter dominated by the two [sovereignties of the Latin Church and the State united in a partnership of power that was disastrous in the life of both.

In the sixteenth century the medieval dream was at an end. The Emperor was a mere figure of imperial power, and in the seventeenth century the Treaty of Westphalia divested a protesting Pope of sovereign rights over Christians within the Empire. The national states of a New Europe took the place of the decrepit Empire in the political world. They repudiated that unity that was basic in the medieval conception, and drove the fragments of the shattered Church of Christ to unholy unions with national monarchs under whom the religious life of man fared as sadly as in the day of contending Pope and Emperor. In the eighteenth century, the United States of America, which the environment of the New World freed from medieval obstructions, repudiated, not only in principle but in fact, the union of Church and State, and inaugurated their final separation by the declaration of the Constitution: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. . ." 14 The provision did "... The Church of Rome, confounding in itself two governments, falls in the mire, and soils itself and burden." Dante, Purgatorio, Canto xvi, lines 127-129; see also E. Moore, Studies in Dante, p. 17. 14 Constitution of the United States, Amendment 1.

but embody the wisdom gleaned from the blood-stained pages of the history of Church and State. It ignored and implicitly repudiated the claim to Divine Revelation as a basis for political authority and rights. It recorded the conclusion of the American people against the sovereignty of the Church of Rome and of every church, and against the union of the Church of Rome and every church with the State in all forms and at all times. Mr. Taft made a clear statement of the results thus achieved in the words which he addressed to Pope Leo XIII on his special mission to the Vatican as Governor of the Philippine Islands:

"The transfer of sovereignty and all governmental property rights and interests from the Crown of Spain to the United States, in the Philippine Islands contained in the Treaty of Paris was a transfer from a government between which and the Church of Rome there had been in those islands the closest association in property, religion, and politics, to a government which by the law of its being is absolutely prevented from having such associations with any Church.” 15

The Church of Rome refuses to accept, as objective truth, the principle of separation. It still asserts a sovereignty that can only function satisfactorily to *itself when united with the sovereignty of the State— according to the theory of the Two Powers-in a relation that concedes the supremacy of the Church at all vital points. It is this doctrine that arouses the anxiety and invites the condemnation of those outside its

15 See Ponce vs. The Roman Catholic Church, 210 U. S. 296.

membership. In virtue of the organic conception of society 16 the omnipotence of State government is gradually declining under constitutions enacted in the right of the Civic Primacy of the People; but the social life of man is still confronted with an omnipotent sovereignty in the Roman Church and its Supreme Pontiff exalted to the highest expression in the Constitution Pastor Eternus of the Vatican Council of 1870,1 and proclaimed as the creation of Almighty God and therefore as unalterable by the power of

man.

Roman Catholic claims obtain respect because they are known to be sincere, and because those who press them are sincere in believing them to be supported by a Divine Revelation known to them. Yet history proves that convictions which are sincere and revelations believed to be divine cannot be safely made the basis of a social or political order. To this the development of the Papacy under the Cross bears witness no less than the history of Islam under the Crescent. Sincere convictions and Divine Revelations as the basis for a social or political order have been effectually disposed of in this country by the Supreme Court of the United States in its far-reaching declaration:

"That the State has a perfect right to prohibit polygamy, and all other open offences against the enlight

16 Autobiography and Life of George Tyrrell, vol. ii, p. 191: "The growth of organic, as opposed to mechanical conceptions of society, will reconcile his (the Pope's) headship with the fundamentally democratic character of the Church, and will relax an impossible centralisation in favour of a freer and more spiritual unity." Father Tyrrell was excommunicated in 1907.

17 See infra, chapter IV, pp. 59-62,

ened sentiment of mankind, notwithstanding the pretence of religious conviction by which they may be advocated and practiced.” 18

It will be urged that all religious societies have political points of contact and may present claims in conflict with the State. Dr. Laski points out that the Scottish Church claimed to be no less a societas perfecta than the State; 19 that the Encyclical Letter Immortale Dei of Pope Leo XIII is very akin to the Presbyterian theory,20 (minus, we assume, the Pope), and that an Apostolic Episcopate, having a doctrinal relation to Christ, argues that State interference is without justification.21 Cardinal Newman held that the powers which Roman Catholics give to the Holy See, the Church of England lodges in her bishops and priests, corporately or individually.22 But neither Calvinism in its absorption of the State, nor Anglicanism in its adulterous union with it, nor the Apostolic Episcopate outside of Rome, ever declared a sole and individual sovereignty an article of faith or denied in the Church the principle of government by consent of the governed. Cardinal Newman made due recognition of the unique claims of the Roman Church in these respects in his reference to

". . . the distinctive doctrine of the (Roman) Cath

18 The Late Corporation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints vs. United States, 136 U. S. 1.

19 H. J. Laski, Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty, pp. 38, 55.

20 Ibid., p. 50, note 86.

21 H. J. Laski, Authority in the Modern State, p. 197.

22 Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching, vol. ii, p. 200,