rians were brought into the communion of the church. This process is still going on, and has gone furthest in France and our own country.

The barbarian chiefs sought to unite in themselves all the powers that had been aggregated to the Roman emperor, and to hold them not from the political community, but in their own personal right, which, had they succeeded, would have made them monarchs in the full and absolute sense of the term. Charlemagne tried to revive and reëstablish Roman imperialism, but his attempt was premature; the populations of the empire were in his time not sufficiently romanized to enable him to succeed. He failed, and his failure resulted in the establishment of feudalism-the chief elements of which were brought from Germany. The Roman element, through the influence of the church and the old population of the empire, had from the close of the fifth century to the opening of the ninth acquired great strength, but not enough to become predominant. The Germanic or barbarian elements, reënforced as they were by the barbarians outside of both the church and the empire, were too strong for it, and the empire of Charlemagne was hardly formed before it fell to pieces. But barbarism did not remain alone in feudalism, and Roman principles, to some extent, were incorporated into feudal Europe, and the Roman law was applied, wherever it could be, to the tenure of power, its rights and obligations; to the regulation, forfeiture, and transmission of fiefs, and to the administration of justice between man and man, as we apply the common law in our own country. But the constitution of the feudal society was essentially anti-Roman and at war with the principles of the civil or Roman law. Hence commenced a struggle between the feudal law and the civil-feudalism seeking to retain its social organization based on distinctions of class, privileges, and corporations; and the civil law, based on the principle of the equality of all men by the natural law, seeking to eliminate the feudal elements from society, and to restore the Roman constitution, which makes power a trust derived from the community, instead of a personal right or privilege held independently of the community.

In this struggle the church has always sympathized with the romanizing tendencies. It was under the patronage of pope that Charlemagne sought to revive imperial Rome, and to reestablish in substance the Roman constitution of

the

society; but his generous efforts ended only in the systematization and confirmation of feudalism. The Franconian and especially the Suabian emperors attempted to renew the work of Charlemagne, but were opposed and defeated by the church, not because she had any sympathy with feudalism, but because these emperors undertook to unite with the civil and military powers held by the Roman emperors the pontifical power, which before the conversion of the empire they also held. This she could not tolerate, for by the Christian law the imperial power and the pontifical are separated, and the temporal authority, as such, has no competency in spirituals. The popes, in their long and severe struggles with the German emperors, or emperors of the holy Roman empire, as they styled themselves, did not struggle to preserve feudalism, but the independence of the church, threatened by the imperial assumption of the pontifical authority held by the emperors of pagan Rome. This is the real meaning of those struggles which have been so strangely misapprehended, and so grossly misrepresented by the majority of historians, as Voigt and Leo, both Protestants, have conclusively shown. St. Gregory VII., who is the best representative of the church in that long war, did not struggle to establish a theocracy, as so many foolishly repeat, nor to obtain for the church or clergy a single particle of civil power, but to maintain the spiritual independence of the church, or her independent and supreme authority over all her children in things spiritual, against the emperor, who claimed, indirectly at least, supreme authority in spirituals as well as in temporals. For the same reason Gregory IX. and Innocent IV. opposed Frederic II., the last and greatest of the Hohenstaufen, the ward in his childhood of Innocent III. Frederic undertook to revive Roman imperialism against mediæval feudalism, but unhappily he remembered that the pagan emperor was pontifex maximus, as well as imperator. Had he simply labored to substitute the Roman constitution of society for the feudal without seeking to subject the church to the empire, he might have been opposed by all those Catholics, whether lay or cleric, whose interests were identified with feudalism, but not by the church herself; at least nothing indicates that she would have opposed him, for her sympathies were not and have never been with the feudal constitution of society.

In the subsequent struggles between the two systems, the

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church, as far as I have discovered, has uniformly sympathized with kings and kaisers only so far as they simply asserted the republican principles of the Roman constitution against feudalism, and has uniformly opposed them, whenever they claimed or attempted to exercise pontifical authority, or to make the temporal supreme over the spiritual, that is to say, to subject conscience to the state. But in this she has been on the side of liberty in its largest and truest sense. Liberty, as commonly understood, or as it enters into the life, the thought, and conscience of modern Christian nations, is certainly of Greek and Roman, not barbarian origin, enlarged and purified by Christianity. The pagan republic united in the sovereign people both the pontifical and imperial powers as they were in the pagan emperors, and hence subjected the individual, both exteriorly and interiorly, to the state, and left him no rights which he could assert before the republic. The Christian republic adds to the liberty of the state, the liberty of the individual, and so far restricts the power of the state over individuals. This personal or individual freedom, unknown in the Græco-Roman republic, Guizot and many others tell us was introduced by the German invaders of the Roman empire. They assign it a barbarian origin; but I am unable to agree with them, because I cannot find that the German barbarians ever had it. The barbarian, as the feudal, individual freedom was the freedom of the chief or noble, not the freedom of all men, or of all individuals irrespective of class or caste. This universal individual freedom, asserted and in a measure secured by the Christian republic, could not be a development of a barbarian idea, or come by way of logical deduction from the barbarian individual freedom, for it rests on a different basis, and is different in kind. The only ancient people with whom I can find any distinct traces of it are the Hebrew people. It is plainly asserted in the laws of Moses for the Jewish people. Christianity asserts it for all, both Jews and gentiles, in that noble maxim, We must obey God rather than men. Every martyr to the Christian faith asserted it, in choosing rather to be put to death in the most frightful and excruciating forms than to yield up the freedom of conscience at the command of the civil authority, and the church shows that she approves it by preserving the relics of martyrs, and proposing them to the perpetual veneration of the faithful. The martyr witnesses alike to faith and the freedom of conscience.

To this individual freedom, as the right of manhood, the real enemy is the feudal society, which is founded on privilege; and where then should the church be found but on the side of those who asserted Græco-Roman civilization as enlarged, purified, and invigorated by Christianity against the barbarian elements retained by the feudal society? It was her place as the friend of liberty and civilization. There can be no question that since the beginning of the fifteenth century the interests of humanity, liberty, religion, have been with the kings and people, as against the feudal nobility. It is owing to this fact, not to any partiality for monarchy, even in its representative sense, that the church has supported the monarchs in their struggle against feudal privileges and corporations.

But it is said that she has favored Roman imperialism not only against feudalism, but also against democracy. This is partially true, but she has done so for the very reason that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries she opposed the German emperors, because everywhere, except in the United States, it seeks to unite in the republic or state, after the manner of the pagan republic, both the imperial and the pontifical powers. In the United States this has not been done; our republic recognizes its own incompetency in spirituals, protects all religions not contra bonos mores, and establishes none; and here the church has never opposed republicanism or democracy. In Europe she has done so, not always, but generally since the French revolution assumed to itself pontifical authority. In the beginning of the French revolution, while it was confined to the correction of abuses, the redress of grievances, and the extension and confirmation of civil liberty, the pope, Pius VI., the cardinals, prelates, and people of Rome, encouraged it; and the pope censured it only when it transcended the civil order, made a new distribution of dioceses, enacted a civil constitution for the clergy, and sought to separate the Gallican church from the Catholic Church, precisely as the popes had previously censured Henry IV., Frederic Barbarossa, Frederic II., Louis of Bavaria, and others. She opposes today European democrats, not because they are democrats, but because they claim for the people the pontifical power, and seek to put them in the place of the church, nay in the place of God. The more advanced among them utter the words, people-pontiff and people-God, as well as people-king, and your German democrats assert almost to a man human

ity as the supreme God. She opposes them not because they make deadly war on monarchy and aristocracy, and assert the sovereignty, under God, of the people, but because they war against catholic truth, the great eternal, universal, and immutable principles of the divine government, which lie at the basis of all government, and indeed of society itself, and of which she is the divinely appointed guardian in human affairs. If she supports the European governments against them, it is not because those governments are monarchical or aristocratic in their constitution, but because they represent, however imperfectly, the interests of humanity, social order, civilization, without which there is and can be no real progress. She cannot oppose them because they seek to establish democratic government, unless they seek to do so by unlawful or unjust means, because she prescribes for the faithful no particular form of civil government, and cannot do it, because no particular form is or can be catholic. She offers no opposition to American democracy.

The church opposes, by her principles, however, what is called absolutism, or what is commonly understood by oriental despotism, that is, monarchy as understood by Bishop England, under which the monarch is held to be the absolute owner of the soil and the people of the nation, and may dispose of either at his pleasure. This is evident from the fact that when she speaks officially of the state generally, without referring to any particular state, she calls it respublica, the republic; especially is this the case when she speaks of the civil society in distinction from the ecclesiastical society. Our present Holy Father, in his much misapprehended and grossly misrepresented encyclical of December 8, 1864, calls the civil community respublica, or commonwealth. St. Augustine denies that God has given to man the lordship of man. He gave man the lordship or dominion over irrational creatures, but not of the rational made in his own image, Rationalem factum ad imaginem suam noluit nisi irrationabilibus dominari: non hominem homini, sed hominem pecori. Inde primi justi, pastores pecorum magis quam reges hominum constituti sunt.* Hence he denies that the master has the lordship of his servants or slaves, and admits slavery only as a punishment, as does the civil law itself. For the same reason we may conclude against despotism. If the master has not the abso

*De Civit. Dei, lib. xix, cap. xv.