ate.
For the same reason she makes usurpation, tyranny, oppression of the
people by civil rulers, offences against God as well as against
society, and cognizable by the spiritual authority.

After the establishment of the Christian church, after its public
recognition, and when conflicting claims arose between the two
powers--the civil and the ecclesiastical--this doctrine of the divine
origin of civil government was abused, and turned against the church
with most disastrous consequences. While the Roman Empire of the West
subsisted, and even after its fall, so long as the emperor of the East
asserted and practically maintained his authority in the Exarchate of
Ravenna and the Duchy of Rome, the Popes comported themselves, in civil
matters, as subjects of the Roman emperor, and set forth no claim to
temporal independence. But when the emperor had lost Rome, and all his
possessions in Italy, had abandoned them, or been deprived of them by
the barbarians, and ceased to make any efforts to recover them, the
Pope was no longer a subject, even in civil matters, of the emperor,
and owed him no civil allegiance. He became civilly independent of the
Roman Empire, and had only spiritual relations with it. To the new
powers that sprang up in Europe he appears never to have acknowledged
any civil subjection, and uniformly asserted, in face of them, his
civil as well as spiritual independence.

This civil independence the successors of Charlemagne, who pretended to
be the successors of the Roman Emperors of the West, and called their
empire the Holy Roman Empire, denied, and maintained that the Pope owed
them civil allegiance, or that, in temporals, the emperor was the
Pope's superior. If, said the emperor, or his lawyers for him, the
civil power is from God, as it must be, since non est potestas nisi a
Deo, the state stands on the same footing with the church, and the
imperial power emanates from as high a source as the Pontifical. The
emperor is then as supreme in temporals as the Pope in spirituals, and
as the emperor is subject to the pope in spirituals, so must the Pope
be subject to the emperor in temporals. As at the time when the
dispute arose, the temporal interests of churchmen were so interwoven
with their spiritual rights, the pretensions of the emperor amounted
practically to the subjection in spirituals as well as temporals of the
ecclesiastical authority to the civil, and absorbed the church in the
state, the