he powers which our Lord has given me unto
edification and not unto destruction._" (2 Cor. xiii. 10.)

So then it is not the State but the Church that ought to be men's guide
to heaven; and it is to her that God has assigned the office of watching
and legislating for all that concerns religion, of teaching all nations;
of extending, as far as may be, the borders of Christianity; and, in a
word, of administering its affairs without let or hindrance, according
to her own judgment. Now this authority, which pertains absolutely to
the Church herself, and is part of her manifest rights, and which has
long been opposed by a philosophy subservient to princes, she has never
ceased to claim for herself and to exercise publicly: the Apostles
themselves being the first of all to maintain it, when, being forbidden
by the readers of the Synagogue to preach the Gospel, they boldly
answered, "_We must obey God rather than men._" (Acts v. 29.) This same
authority the holy Fathers of the Church have been careful to maintain
by weighty reasonings as occasions have arisen; and the Roman Pontiffs
have never ceased to defend it with inflexible constancy. Nay, more,
princes and civil governors themselves have approved it in theory and in
fact; for in the making of compacts, in the transaction of business, in
sending and receiving embassies, and in the interchange of other
offices, it has been their custom to act with the Church as with a
supreme and legitimate power. And we may be sure that it is not without
the singular providence of God that this power of the Church was
defended by the Civil Power as the best defence of its own liberty.

God, then, has divided the charge of the human race between two powers,
_viz._, the ecclesiastical and the civil, the one being set over divine,
and the other over human things. Each is the greatest in its own kind:
each has certain limits within which it is restricted, and those limits
defined by the nature and proximate cause of each; so that there is, as
we may say, a world marked off as a field for the proper action of each.
But forasmuch as each has dominion over the same subjects, since it
might come to pass that one and the same thing, though in different
ways, still one and the same, might pertain to the right and the
tribunal of both, therefore God, Who foreseeth all things, and Who has
established both powers, must needs have arranged the course of each in
right relation to one another, and in du