The-papacy-its-history-dogmas-genius-and-prospects-wylie

——;THINGS CIVIL AND SACRED BLENDED. 115generally is successful. Governments cannot move a stepbut they are met by this tremendous spiritual check. Theycannot make laws about education or about church lands,they cannot regulate monasteries or take cognizance of theclergy,—they cannot extend civil privileges to their subjects,or conclude a treaty with foreign states,—without coming intocollision with the Church.Every matter which they touchis Church, and before they can avoid her they must step outof the world. Under the plea of directing their consciences,their power, they find, is a nullity, and the real master ofboth themselves and their kingdom is the Bishop of Rome,or his cowled or scarlet-hatted representative at their court.Thus there is nothing of a temporal kind which is not drawnwithin the jurisdiction of the Pope's constructive empireand the " purely spiritual power" is felt in practice to be anintolerable secular thraldom. Under Rome's scheme of infalliblespiritual direction things sacred and civil are inseparablyand hopelessly blended; and the attempt to separatethe two would be as vain as the attempt to separate timefrom the beings that live in it, or space from the bodies itcontains, or, as it is well expressed by a writer in the EdinhurghReview^^' to cut out Shylock's pound of flesh withoutspilling a drop of blood. The recent concordat between thePope and the Spanish governmentf shows what a powerfulengine the " spiritual jurisdiction" is for the government ofa nation in all its affairs, temporal and spiritual.That concordatputs both swords into the hands of Pius IX. as trulyas ever Gregory VII. or Innocent III. held them. Let thereader mark its leading provisions, and see how it subjectsthe temporal to the spiritual power :" Art. 1 declares that the Roman Catholic religion, beingthe sole worship of theall others, shallSpanish nation, to the exclusion ofbe maintained for ever, with all the rights* Number for April 1851.t Ratifications were exchanged April 23, 1851.