Rome by the Emperors; and the abandonment by the Emperors begins not from the time when they ceased to claim it, as our kings claimed the kingdom of France for centuries after they had lost all possession, but from the time when they ceased to exercise the highest of a sovereign's duties-that of protection. Many generations must pass away, many old traditions must wear out, many customs of thought and language must become obsolete, and many claims once valid must by desuetude become pretensions, before the Empire could become extinct in Italy. It took ages to strike its roots, and ages to pull them up again. No human agency could have so soon brought it to pass that the Empire of Rome should vanish away, as if it had never been. Its complete dethronement is visibly the work of God. From the time, then, which may be put, at latest, in the age of St. Leo the Great, the Pontiffs have been the only rulers in Rome. Fourteen hundred years of possession, reaching not only beyond all royalties in the world, but beyond even the existence of Christian Europe, confirms the title of Sovereignty in the Vicars of Jesus Christ. The Count de Maistre, with his wonderful felicity of expression, has said, "There is not a sovereignty in Europe more easily to be justified, if I may use the word, than that of the Sovereign Pontiffs. It is like the Law of God, justificata in semetipsa."* Such, then, are its successive epochs: first, its liberation from all civil subjection; secondly, its passive occupation of the abandoned government of Rome; thirdly, the political necessity which forced its exercise upon the Pontiffs; fourthly, the free suffrage and election of the people, conscious of its benign and beneficent protection; and finally, the unbroken possession of more than a thousand years. I have thus far endeavoured to treat this question as one of evidence and of history, and therefore within the jurisdiction of sense and of reason. But I cannot consent to treat the Temporal Sovereignty of the Vicars of Jesus Christ in the light of the natural order alone, as the history of the Califate or of the twelve Cæsars. There is a supernatural element in the subject, never for a moment to be eliminated. The creation and existence of Christendom, that is, of the mixed and complex spiritual and civil order of Christian nations, is a part of the predestination of God; and God, who willed it, has also accomplished it; and, in accomplishing it, has employed the instrument which He had prepared for that end, the Pontificate of the Vicar of His Incarnate Son; and the Temporal • Du Pape, 1. ii. c. 6. prerogatives of the Pontificate are the divine conditions whereby the Christian order of this world has been created and sustained. It is therefore neither reasonable nor possible to discuss the question of the Temporal Sovereignty as if it were a mere accident of the Spiritual Supremacy, not united with it in the first centuries, and separable from it now. What was united in the predestination of God may not be separated in the speculations of men. It seems also to betray a superficial apprehension of the work of the kingdom of God upon earth, to confine its action to individuals, and to exclude it from the sphere of government, legislation, law, public order, social progress, and from the direction of nations, races, peoples, and the organised and continuous life of human society. I can see little signs of depth, or reflection, or maturity, or comprehensiveness in such reasonings. Neither can I find any evidence of spiritual intuition, or of illumination, in those who can discover in the history we have been reviewing no higher sentiment in the Christian peoples of Rome and Italy than a desire to shelter themselves under a rich and easy, or a merely powerful and successful, ruler. There was assuredly a profounder instinct and a more supernatural impulse moving them to cast themselves at the feet of the Vicar of Jesus Christ, and praying him to be their king. It is the reversal of the sin of those who clamoured to the Lord for a king like the other nations. Of them the Lord said to the Prophet, "They have not rejected thee, but Me, that I should not reign over them."* So would He say to His Pontiffs, "They have not chosen thee, but they have chosen Me, that I should reign over them." If the Jewish people cried, "Non habemus regem nisi Cæsarem," the Christian people answered, "Non habemus regem nisi Christum." In voluntarily subjecting themselves to His Vicar, they chose Him for their King. Faith in the Incarnation would inspire this choice, and devotion to the presence of the Incarnate Word, in the person of His Vicar, would make the inspiration a dictate of the conscience and of the heart. It was the common sense of the faithful which moved them to place themselves under the government of one who governed in the name. and by the laws of the Divine Redeemer of mankind. Is it wonderful that the people of Italy fled from the Pharaos of Constantinople to the "Pontifices almificos," meekest rulers upon earth? In so doing they sought not only a political justice, but the most intimate relation they could attain to St. John xix. 15. * 1 Kings viii. 7. the person of their unseen Lord and Judge: they had made trial of imperial decrees, and in exchange they sought for the equity, stability, and clemency of the Evangelical Law. They sought the sovereignty of the Pontiffs, not only for reasons of a natural prudence, but of a supernatural faith, believing that of all sovereigns they would be the most just and benign, and of all legislation, that of the Vicars of Christ would be the most pure and beneficent to individuals and to society. They knew them to be the guides of men in the way of eternal life, and the guardians and expositors of the only law of peace. Faith and love towards the Divine Redeemer of mankind taught them to desire to be the subjects of the only person who ruled supremely in His name. This I conceive to be the ultimate title of the Temporal Power of the Sovereign Pontiffs over the people whom God had providentially enabled to place themselves under their rule and protection. And this is a principle pregnant with great moral truths. For certainly such a popular election as this, so free and so deliberate, so illuminated in prudence natural and supernatural, and so governed by the highest instincts of faith in the revelation and will of God, is not to be revoked by a sedition, or by a rebellion, or by any act of the popular will |