reasoning was denied, and churchmen replied: The Pope
represents the spiritual order, which is always and everywhere supreme
over the temporal, since the spiritual order is the divine sovereignty
itself. Always and everywhere, then, is the Pope independent of the
emperor, his superior, and to subject him in any thing to the emperor
would be as repugnant to reason as to subject the soul to the body, the
spirit to the flesh, heaven to earth, or God to man.

If the universal supremacy claimed for the Pope, rejoined the
imperialists, be conceded, the state would be absorbed in the church,
the autonomy of civil society would be destroyed, and civil rulers
would have no functions but to do the bidding of the clergy. It would
establish a complete theocracy, or, rather, clerocracy, of all possible
governments the government the most odious to mankind, and the most
hostile to social progress. Even the Jews could not, or would not,
endure it, and prayed God to give them a king, that they might be like
other nations.

In the heat of the controversy neither party clearly and distinctly
perceived the true state of the question, and each was partly right and
partly wrong. The imperialists wanted room for the free activity of
civil society, the church wanted to establish in that society the
supremacy of the moral order, or the law of God, without which
governments can have no stability, and society no real well-being. The
real solution of the difficulty was always to be found in the doctrine
of the church herself, and had been given time and again by her most
approved theologians. The Pope, as the visible head of the spiritual
society, is, no doubt, superior to the emperor, not precisely because
he represents a superior order, but because the church, of which he is
the visible chief, is a supernatural institution, and holds immediately
from God; whereas civil society, represented by the emperor, holds from
God only mediately, through second causes, or the people. Yet, though
derived from God only through the people, civil authority still holds
from God, and derives its right from Him through another channel than
the church or spiritual society, and, therefore, has a right, a
sacredness, which the church herself gives not, and must recognize and
respect. This she herself teaches in teaching that even infidels, as
we have seen, may have legitimate government, and since, though she
interprets and applies the law of God, both nat