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of De Maistre's central idea, the historical corroboration of a truth to which he conducts us in the first instance by general considerations. Assuming, what it is less and less characteristic of the present century at any rate to deny, that Christianity was the only actual force by which the regeneration of Europe could be effected after the decline of the Roman civilisation, he insists that, as he again and again expresses it, 'without the Pope there is no veritable Christianity.' What he meant by this condensed form needs a little explanation, as is always the case with such simple statements of the products of long and complex reasoning. In saying that without the Pope there is no true Christianity, what he considered himself as having established was, that unless there be some supreme and independent possessor of authority to settle doctrine, to regulate discipline, to give authentic counsel, to apply accepted principles to disputed cases, then there can be no such thing as a religious system which shall have power to bind the members of a vast and not homogeneous body in the salutary bonds of a common civilisation, nor to guide and inform an universal conscience. In each individual state everybody admits the absolute necessity of having some sovereign power which shall make, declare, and administer the laws, and from whose action in any one of these aspects there shall be no appeal; a power that shall be strong enough to protect the rights and enforce the duties which it has authoritatively proclaimed and enjoined. In free England, as in despotic Turkey, the privileges and obligations which the law tolerates or imposes, and all the benefits which their existence confers on the community, are the creatures and conditions of a supreme authority from which there is no appeal, whether the instrument by which this authority makes its will known be an act of parliament or a ukase. This conception of temporal sovereignty, especially familiarised to our generation by the teaching of Austin, was carried by De Maistre into discussions upon the limits of the Papal power with great ingenuity and force, and, if we accept the premisses, with great success. It should be said here, that throughout his book on the Pope, De Maistre talks of Christianity exclusively as a statesman or a publicist would talk about it; not theologically nor spiritually, but politically and socially. The question with which he concerns himself is the u
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