Donahoes Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 | Page 5

says: "If he will not
hear, tell it to the Church" (Matt. xviii. 17); and again: "Ready to
punish all disobedience" (2 Cor. x. 6); and once more: "I shall act with
more severity, according to the 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 due order. "For the powers that
are ordained by God." (Rom. xiii. 1.) And if this were not so, causes of
rivalries and dangerous disputes would be constantly arising; and man
would often have to stop in anxiety and doubt, like a traveller with two
roads before him, not knowing what he ought to do, with two powers
commanding contrary things, whose authority however, he cannot
refuse without neglect of duty. But it would be most repugnant, so to
think, of the wisdom and goodness of God, Who, even in physical
things, though they are of a far lower order, has yet so attempered and
combined together the forces and causes of nature in an orderly manner
and with a sort of wonderful harmony, that none of them is a hindrance
to the rest, and all of them most fitly and aptly combine for the great
end of the universe. So, then, there must needs be a certain orderly
connection between these two powers, which may not unfairly be
compared to the union with which soul and body are united in man.
What the nature of that union is, and what its extent, cannot otherwise

be determined than, as we have said, by having regard to the nature of
each power, and by taking account of the relative excellence and
nobility of their ends; for one of them has for its proximate and chief
aim the care of the goods of this world, the other the attainment of the
goods of heaven that are eternal. Whatsoever, therefore, in human
affairs is in any manner sacred; whatsoever pertains to the salvation of
souls or the worship of God, whether it be so in its own nature, or on
the other hand, is held to be so for the sake of the end to which it is
referred, all this is in the power and subject to the free disposition of
the Church: but all other things which