h the English Parliament and monarch, and the Russian
Czar, are as if they were infallible. But let us not argue so much about
this, which is only secondary. The main question is whether without the
Pope there can be a true Christianity, 'that is to say, a Christianity,
active, powerful, converting, regenerating, conquering, perfecting.'

De Maistre was probably conducted to his theory by an analogy, which he
tacitly leaned upon more strongly than it could well bear, between
temporal organisation and spiritual organisation. In inchoate
communities, the momentary self-interest and the promptly stirred
passions of men would rend the growing society in pieces, unless they
were restrained by the strong hand of law in some shape or other,
written or unwritten, and administered by an authority, either
physically too strong to be resisted, or else set up by the common
consent seeking to further the general convenience. To divide this
authority, so that none should know where to look for a sovereign
decree, nor be able to ascertain the commands of sovereign law; to
embody it in the persons of many discordant expounders, each assuming
oracular weight and equal sanction; to leave individuals to administer
and interpret it for themselves, and to decide among themselves its
application to their own cases; what would this be but a deliberate
preparation for anarchy and dissolution? For it is one of the clear
conditions of the efficacy of the social union, that every member of it
should be able to know for certain the terms on which he belongs to it,
the compliances which it will insist upon in him, and the compliances
which it will in turn permit him to insist upon in others, and therefore
it is indispensable that there should be some definite and admitted
centre where this very essential knowledge should be accessible.

Some such reflections as these must have been at the bottom of De
Maistre's great apology for the Papal supremacy, or at any rate they may
serve to bring before our minds with greater clearness the kind of
foundations on which his scheme rested. For law substitute Christianity,
for social union spiritual union, for legal obligations the obligations
of the faith. Instead of individuals bound together by allegiance to
common political institutions, conceive communities united in the bonds
of religious brotherhood into a sort of universal republic, under the
moderate supremacy of a supreme spiritual power. As a matter