efinite principle in
all government, the Church has at no time understood that it could be
obtained only by particular political forms. She attends to the
substance, not to the form, in politics. At various times she has
successively promoted monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy; and at
various times she has been betrayed by each. The three fundamental forms
of all government are founded on the nature of things. Sovereignty must
reside with an individual, or with a minority, or with the majority. But
there are seasons and circumstances where one or the other is
impossible, where one or the other is necessary; and in a growing nation
they cannot always remain in the same relative proportions. Christianity
could neither produce nor abolish them. They are all compatible with
liberty and religion, and are all liable to diverge into tyranny by the
exclusive exaggeration of their principle. It is this exaggeration that
has ever been the great danger to religion and to liberty, and the
object of constant resistance, the source of constant suffering for the
Church.

Christianity introduced no new forms of government, but a new spirit,
which totally transformed the old ones. The difference between a
Christian and a pagan monarchy, or between a Christian and a rationalist
democracy, is as great, politically, as that between a monarchy and a
republic. The Government of Athens more nearly resembled that of Persia
than that of any Christian republic, however democratic. If political
theorists had attended more to the experience of the Christian Ages, the
Church and the State would have been spared many calamities.
Unfortunately, it has long been the common practice to recur to the
authority of the Greeks and the Jews. The example of both was equally
dangerous; for in the Jewish as in the Gentile world, political and
religious obligations were made to coincide; in both, therefore,--in the
theocracy of the Jews as in the [Greek: politeia] of the Greeks,--the
State was absolute. Now it is the great object of the Church, by keeping
the two spheres permanently distinct,--by rendering to Caesar the things
that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's--to make all
absolutism, of whatever kind, impossible.

As no form of government is in itself incompatible with tyranny, either
of a person or a principle, nor necessarily inconsistent with liberty,
there is no natural hostility or alliance between the Church and any one
of them.