ention or permission.
The suzerainty of the Holy See over Italy, Naples, Aragon, Muscovy,
England, and other European states, was by virtue of feudal relations,
not by virtue of the spiritual authority of the Holy See or the
vicarship of the Holy Father. The right to govern under feudalism was
simply an estate, or property; and as the church could acquire and hold
property, nothing prevented her holding fiefs, or her chief from being
suzerain. The expressions in the papal briefs and bulls, taken in
connection with the special relations existing between the Pope and
emperor in the Middle Ages, and his relations with other states as
their feudal sovereign, explained by the controversies concerning
rights growing out of these relations, will be found to give no
countenance to the theory in question.

These relations really existed, and they gave the Pope certain temporal
rights in certain states, even the temporal supremacy, as he has still
in what is left him of the States of the Church; but they were
exceptional or accidental relations, not the universal and essential
relations between the church and the state. The rights that grew out
of these relations were real rights, sacred and inviolable, but only
where and while the relations subsisted. They, for the most part, grew
out of the feudal system introduced into the Roman empire by its
barbarian conquerors, and necessarily ceased with the political order
in which they originated. Undoubtedly the church consecrated civil
rulers, but this did not imply that they received their power or right
to govern from God through her; but implied that their persons were
sacred, and that violence to them would be sacrilege; that they held
the Christian faith, and acknowledged themselves bound to protect it,
and to govern their subjects justly, according to the law of God.

The church, moreover, has always recognized the distinction of the two
powers, and although the Pope owes to the fact that he is chief of the
spiritual society, his temporal principality, no theologian or canonist
of the slightest respectability would argue that he derives his rights
as temporal sovereign from his rights as pontiff. His rights as
pontiff depend on the express appointment of God; his rights as
temporal prince are derived from the same source from which other
princes derive their rights, and are held by the same tenure. Hence
canonists have maintained that the subjects of other states may even