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VII. St. Augustine, St. Gregory Magnus, St. Thomas, Bellarmin,
Suarez, and the theologians generally, hold that princes derive
their power from God through the people, or that the people,
though not the source, are the medium of all political authority,
and therefore rulers are accountable for the use they make of
their power to both God and the people.

This doctrine agrees with the democratic theory in vesting
sovereignty in the people, instead of the king or the nobility, a
particular individual, family, class, or caste; and differs from
it, as democracy is commonly explained, in understanding by the
people, the people collectively, not individually--the organic
people, or people fixed to a given territory, not the people as a
mere population--the people in the republican sense of the word
nation, not in the barbaric or despotic sense; and in deriving
the sovereignty from God, from whom is all power, and except from
whom there is and can be no power, instead of asserting it as the
underived and indefeasible right of the people in their "own
native right and might." The people not being God, and being
only what philosophers call a second cause, they are and can be
sovereign only in a secondary and relative sense. It asserts the
divine origin of power, while democracy asserts its human origin.
But as, under the law of nature, all men are equal, or have equal
rights as men, one man has and can have in himself no right to
govern another; and as man is never absolutely his own, but
always and everywhere belongs to his Creator, it is clear that no
government originating in humanity alone can be a legitimate
government. Every such government is founded on the assumption
that man is God, which is a great mistake--is, in fact, the
fundamental sophism which underlies every error and every sin.

The divine origin of government, in the sense asserted by
Christian theologians, is never found distinctly set forth in the
political writings of the ancient Greek and Roman writers.
Gentile philosophy had lost the tradition of creation, as some
modern philosophers, in so-called Christian nations, are fast
losing it, and were as unable to explain the origin of government
as they were the origin of man himself.

Even Plato, the profoundest of all ancient philosophers, and the
most faithful to the traditionary wisdom of the race, lacks the
conception of creation, and never gets above that of generation
and formation. Things are produced by the Divine Being
impressing his own ideas, eternal in his own mind, on a
pre-existing matter, as a seal on wax. Aristotle teaches
substantially the same doctrine. Things eternally exist as
matter and form, and all the Divine Intelligence does, is to
unite the form to the matter, and change it, as the schoolmen say,
from materia informis to materia formata. Even the Christian
Platonists and Peripatetics never as philosophers assert creation;
they assert it, indeed, but as theologians, as a fact of
revelation, not as a fact of science; and hence it is that their
theology and their philosophy never thoroughly harmonize, or at
least are not shown to harmonize throughout.

Speaking generally, the ancient Gentile philosophers were
pantheists, and represented the universe either as God or as an
emanation from God. They had no proper conception of Providence,
or the action of God in nature through natural agencies, or as
modern physicists say, natural laws. If they recognized the
action of divinity at all, it was a supernatural or miraculous
intervention of some god. They saw no divine intervention in any
thing naturally explicable, or explicable by natural laws.
Having no conception of the creative act, they could have none of
its immanence, or the active and efficacious presence of the
Creator in all his works, even in the action of second causes
themselves. Hence they could not assert the divine origin of
government, or civil authority, without supposing it
supernaturally founded, and excluding all human and natural
agencies from its institution. Their writings may be studied
with advantage on the constitution of the state, on the practical
workings of different forms of government, as well as on the
practical administration of affairs, but never on the origin of
the state, and the real ground of its authority.

The doctrine is derived from Christian theology, which teaches
that there is no power except from God, and enjoins civil
obedience as a religious duty. Conscience is accountable to God
alone, and civil government, if it had only a natural or human
origin, could not bind it. Yet Christianity makes the civil law,
within its legitimate sphere, as obligatory on conscience as the
divine law itself, and no man is blameless before God who is not
blameless before the state. No man performs faithfully his
religious duties who neglects his civil duties, and hence, the
law of the church allows no one to retire from the world and
enter a religious order, who has duties that bind him or her to
the family or the state; though it is possible that the law is
not always strictly observed, and that individuals sometimes
enter a convent for the sake of getting rid of those duties, or
the equally important duty of taking care of themselves. But by
asserting the divine origin of government, Christianity
consecrates civil authority, clothes it with a religious
character, and makes civil disobedience, sedition, insurrection,
rebellion, revolution, civil turbulence of any sort or degree,
sins against God as well as crimes against the state. 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 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
natural and revealed, she makes neither.

Nevertheless, the imperialists or the statists insisted on their
false charge against the Pope, that he labored to found a purely
theocratic or clerocratic government, and finding themselves
unable to place the representative of the civil society on the
same level with the representative of the spiritual, or to
emancipate the state from the law of God while they conceded the
divine origin or right of government, they sought to effect its
independence by asserting for it only a natural or purely human
origin. For nearly two centuries the most popular and
influential writers on government have rejected the divine origin
and ground of civil authority, and excluded God from the state.
They have refused to look beyond second causes, and have labored
to derive authority from man alone. They have not only separated
the state from the church as an external corporation, but from
God as its internal lawgiver, and by so doing have deprived the
state of her sacredness, inviolability, or hold on the conscience,
scoffed at loyalty as a superstition, and consecrated not civil
authority, but what is called "the right of insurrection." Under
their teaching the age sympathizes not with authority in its
efforts to sustain itself and protect society, but with those who
conspire against it--the insurgents, rebels, revolutionists
seeking its destruction. The established government that seeks
to enforce respect for its legitimate authority and compel
obedience to the laws, is held to be despotic, tyrannical,
oppressive, and resistance to it to be obedience to God, and a
wild howl rings through Christendom against the prince that will
not stand still and permit the conspirators to cut his throat.
There is hardly a government now in the civilized world that can
sustain itself for a moment without an armed force sufficient to
overawe or crush the party or parties in permanent conspiracy
against it.

This result is not what was aimed at or desired, but it is the
logical or necessary result of the attempt to erect the state on
atheistical principles. Unless founded on the divine sovereignty,
authority can sustain itself only by force, for political atheism
recognizes no right but might. No doubt the politicians have
sought an atheistical, or what is the same thing, a purely human,
basis for government, in order to secure an open field for human
freedom and activity, or individual or social progress. The end
aimed at has been good, laudable even, but they forgot that
freedom is possible only with authority that protects it against
license as well as against despotism, and that there can be no
progress where there is nothing that is not progressive. In
civil society two things are necessary--stability and movement.
The human is the element of movement, for in it are possibilities
that can be only successively actualized. But the element of
stability can be found only in the divine, in God, in whom there
is no unactualized possibility, who, therefore, is immovable,
immutable, and eternal. The doctrine that derives authority from
God through the people, recognizes in the state both of these
elements, and provides alike for stability and progress.

This doctrine is not mere theory; it simply states the real order
of things. It is not telling what ought to be, but what is in
the real order. It only asserts for civil government the
relation to God which nature herself holds to him, which the
entire universe holds to the Creator. Nothing in man, in nature,
in the universe, is explicable without the creative act of God,
for nothing exists without that act. That God "in the beginning
created heaven and earth," is the first principle of all science
as of all existences, in politics no less than in theology. God
and creation comprise all that is or exists, and creation, though
distinguishable from God as the act from the actor, is
inseparable from him, "for in Him we live and move and have our
being." All creatures are joined to him by his creative act, and
exist only as through that act they participate of his being.
Through that act he is immanent as first cause in all creatures
and in every act of every creature. The creature deriving from
his creative act can no more continue to exist than it could
begin to exist without it. It is as bad philosophy as theology,
to suppose that God created the universe, endowed it with certain
laws of development or activity, wound it up, gave it a jog, set
it agoing, and then left it to go of itself. It cannot go of
itself, because it does not exist of itself. It did not merely
not begin to exist, but it cannot continue to exist, without the
creative act. Old Epicurus was a sorry philosopher, or rather,
no philosopher at all. Providence is as necessary as creation,
or rather, Providence is only continuous creation, the creative
act not suspended or discontinued, or not passing over from the
creature and returning to God.

Through the creative act man participates of God, and he can
continue to exist, act, or live only by participating through it
of his divine being. There is, therefore , something of divinity,
so to speak, in every creature, and therefore it is that God is
worshipped in his works without idolatry. But he creates
substantial existences capable of acting as second causes. Hence,
in all living things there is in their life a divine element and
a natural element; in what is called human life, there are the
divine and the human, the divine as first and the human as second
cause, precisely what the doctrine of the great Christian
theologians assert to be the fact with all legitimate or real
government. Government cannot exist without the efficacious
presence of God any more than man himself, and men might as well
attempt to build up a world as to attempt to found a state
without God. A government founded on atheistical principles were
less than a castle in the air. It would have nothing to rest on,
would not be even so much as "the baseless fabric of a vision,"
and they who imagine that they really do exclude God from their
politics deceive themselves; for they accept and use principles
which, though they know it not, are God. What they call abstract
principles, or abstract forms of reason, without which there were
no logic, are not abstract, but the real, living God himself.
Hence government, like man himself, participates of the divine
being, and, derived from God through the people, it at the same
time participates of human reason and will, thus reconciling
authority with freedom, and stability with progress.

The people, holding their authority from God, hold it not as an
inherent right, but as a trust from Him, and are accountable to
Him for it. It is not their own. If it were their own they
might do with it as they pleased, and no one would have any right
to call them to an account; but holding it as a trust from God,
they are under his law, and bound to exercise it as that law
prescribes. Civil rulers, holding their authority from God
through the people, are accountable for it both to Him and to
them. If they abuse it they are justiciable by the people and
punishable by God himself.

Here is the guaranty against tyranny, oppression, or bad
government, or what in modern times is called the responsibility
of power. At the same time the state is guarantied against
sedition, insurrection, rebellion, revolution, by the elevation
of the civic virtues to the rank of religious, virtues, and
making loyalty a matter of conscience. Religion is brought to
the aid of the state, not indeed as a foreign auxiliary, but as
integral in the political order itself. Religion sustains the
state, not because it externally commands us to obey the higher
powers, or to be submissive to the powers that be, not because it
trains the people to habits of obedience, and teaches them to be
resigned and patient under the grossest abuses of power, but
because it and the state are in the same order, and inseparable,
though distinct, parts of one and the same whole. The church and
the state, as corporations or external governing bodies, are
indeed separate in their spheres, and the church does not absorb
the state, nor does the state the church; but both are from God,
and both work to the same end, and when each is rightly
understood there is no antithesis or antagonism between them.
Men serve God in serving the state as directly as in serving the
church. He who dies on the battle-field fighting for his country
ranks with him who dies at the stake for his faith. Civic
virtues are themselves religious virtues, or at least virtues
without which there are no religious virtues, since no man who
loves not his brother does or can love God.

The guaranties offered the state or authority are ample, because
it has not only conscience, moral sentiment, interest, habit, and
the via inertia of the mass, but the whole physical force of the
nation, at its command. The individual has, indeed, only moral
guaranties against the abuse of power by the sovereign people,
which may no doubt sometimes prove insufficient. But moral
guaranties are always better than none, and there are none where
the people are held to be sovereign in their own native right and
might, organized or unorganized, inside or outside of the
constitution, as most modern democratic theorists maintain;
since, if so, the will of the people, however expressed, is the
criterion of right and wrong, just and unjust, true and false, is
infallible and impeccable, and no moral right can ever be pleaded
against it; they are accountable to nobody, and, let them do what
they please, they can do no wrong. This would place the
individual at the mercy of the state, and deprive him of all
right to complain, however oppressed or cruelly treated. This
would establish the absolute despotism of the state, and deny
every thing like the natural rights of man, or individual and
personal freedom, as has already been shown. Now as men do take
part in government, and as men, either individually or
collectively, are neither infallible nor impeccable, it is never
to be expected, under any possible constitution or form of
government, that authority will always be wisely and justly
exercised, that wrong will ever be done, and the rights of
individuals never in any instance be infringed; but with the
clear understanding that all power is of God, that the political
sovereignty is vested in the people or the collective body, that
the civil rulers hold from God through them and are responsible
to Him through them, and justiciable by them, there is all the
guaranty against the abuse of power by the, nation, the political
or organic people, that the nature of the case admits. The
nation may, indeed, err or do wrong, but in the way supposed you
get in the government all the available wisdom and virtue the
nation has, and more is never, under any form or constitution of
government, practicable or to be expected,

It is a maxim with constitutional statesmen, that "the king
reigns, not governs." The people, though sovereign under God,
are not the government. The government is in their name and by
virtue of authority delegated from God through them, but they are
not it, are not their own ministers. It is only when the people
forget this and undertake to be their own ministers and to manage
their own affairs immediately by themselves instead of selecting
agents to do it for them, and holding their agents to a strict
account for their management, that they are likely to abuse their
power or to sanction injustice. The nation may be misled or
deceived for a moment by demagogues, those popular courtiers, but
as a rule it is disposed to be just and to respect all natural
rights. The wrong is done by individuals who assume to speak in
their name, to wield their power, and to be themselves the state.
L'etat, c'est moi. I am the state, said Louis XIV. of France,
and while that was conceded the French nation could have in its
government no more wisdom or virtue than he possessed, or at
least no more than he could appreciate. And under his government
France was made responsible for many deeds that the nation would
never have sanctioned, if it bad been recognized as the
depositary of the national sovereignty, or as the French state,
and answerable to God for the use it made of political power, or
the conduct of its government.

But be this as it may, there evidently can be no physical force
in the nation to coerce the nation itself in case it goes wrong,
for if the sovereignty vests in the nation, only the nation can
rightly command or authorize the employment of force, and all
commissions must run in its name. Written constitutions alone
will avail little, for they emanate from the people, who can
disregard them, if they choose, and alter or revoke them at will.
The reliance for the wisdom and justice of the state must after
all be on moral guaranties. In the very nature of the case there
are and can be no other. But these, placed in a clear light,
with an intelligent and religious people, will seldom be found
insufficient. Hence the necessity for the protection, not of
authority simply or chiefly, but of individual rights and the
liberty of religion and intelligence in the nation, of the
general understanding that the nation holds its power to govern
as a trust from God, and that to God through the people all civil
rulers are strictly responsible. Let the mass of the people in
any nation lapse into the ignorance and barbarism of atheism, or
lose themselves in that supreme sophism called pantheism, the
grand error of ancient as well as of modern gentilism, and
liberty, social or political, except that wild kind of liberty,
and perhaps not even that should be excepted, which obtains among
savages, would be lost and irrecoverable.

But after all, this theory does not meet all the difficulties of
the case. It derives sovereignty from God, and thus asserts the
divine origin of government in the sense that the origin of
nature is divine; it derives it from God through the people,
collectively, or as society, and therefore concedes it a natural,
human, and social element, which distinguishes it from pure
theocracy. It, however, does not explain how authority comes
from God to the people. The ruler, king, prince, or emperor,
holds from God through the people, but how do the people
themselves hold from God? Mediately or immediately? If
mediately, what is the medium? Surely not the people themselves.
The people can no more be the medium than the principle of their
own sovereignty. If immediately, then God governs in them as he
does in the church, and no man is free to think or act contrary
to popular opinion, or in any case to question the wisdom or
justice of any of the acts of the state, which is arriving at
state absolutism by another process. Besides, this would
theoretically exclude all human or natural activity, all human
intelligence and free-will from the state, which were to fall
into either pantheism or atheism.

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