ce in certain truths. All these acts are above
all coercion, and are within the ecclesiastical minister's sphere only
in so far as he must instruct and never command.

This soul acts also externally. External actions are under the civil
law. Here coercion may have a place; temporal or corporal pains maintain
the law by punishing those who infringe it.

Obedience to ecclesiastical order must consequently always be free and
voluntary: no other should be possible. Submission, on the other hand,
to civil order may be coerced and compulsory.

For the same reason, ecclesiastical punishments, always spiritual, do
not reach here below any but those who are convinced inwardly of their
fault. Civil pains, on the contrary, accompanied by a physical ill, have
their physical effects, whether or no the guilty recognize their
justice.

From this it results obviously that the authority of the clergy is and
can be spiritual only; that it should not have any temporal power; that
no coercive force is proper to its ministry, which would be destroyed by
it.

It follows from this further that the sovereign, careful not to suffer
any partition of his authority, must permit no enterprise which puts
the members of society in external and civil dependence on an
ecclesiastical body.

Such are the incontestable principles of real canon law, of which the
rules and decisions should be judged at all times by the eternal and
immutable truths which are founded on natural law and the necessary
order of society.

_EMBLEM_

In antiquity everything is symbol or emblem. In Chaldea it starts by
putting a ram, two kids, a bull in the sky, to mark the productions of
the earth in the spring. Fire is the symbol of the Deity in Persia; the
celestial dog warns the Egyptians of the Nile floods; the serpent which
hides its tail in its head, becomes the image of eternity. The whole of
nature is represented and disguised.

In India again you find many of those old statues, uncouth and
frightful, of which we have already spoken, representing virtue provided
with ten great arms with which to combat vice, and which our poor
missionaries have taken for the picture of the devil.

Put all these symbols of antiquity before the eyes of a man of the
soundest sense, who has never heard speak of them, he will not
understand anything: it is a language to be learned.

The old theological poets were in the necessity of giving God eyes,
hands, feet; of announc