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

432 INFLUENCE OF POPERY ON GOVERNMENT.In the third place, the theory of the papal governmentnecessarily and stringently excluded every particle of thedemocratic element. Its pretensions to infallibility and toa divine origin made it arrogate all power to itself, andutterly repudiate the claims of all others to participation orcontrol. It abhorred the popular element, whether in theshape of constitutional chambers or constitutional advisers,or checks of any kind. The people were debarred from allshare, direct or indirect, in the government. Their placewas blind, unreasoning, implicit submission. Nor could thePapacy have admitted them to the smallest privilege of thissort without renouncing the fundamental principler on whichit is built.In the fourth place, though in one respect the most centralizedof all tyrannies, the Papacy was in another themost diffused. The great primal Papacy occupied theSeven Hills, but it had power to multiply itself,—to reproduceits own image,—till Europe came to be studded andcovered with minor Papacies. Each kingdom was a distinctPapacy on a small scale. This arrangement consummatedthe despotism of the papal rule, by making its sphere aswide as its rigour was intolerable. Had Rome not confoundedthe temporal and spiritual jurisdictions, matterswould not have been so bad. Had the pontiffs confinedtheir pretensions as divine rulers within the ecclesiasticaldomain, men might have enjoyed some measure of civil freedom,and that would have mitigated somewhat the iron yokeof ecclesiastical bondage ; but all distinction between thetwo provinces was obliterated ; the pretensions of the Popeextended alike over both, not leaving an inch of ground onwhich liberty might plant her foot. Practically throughoutEurope the two domains were confounded. If the Pope wasthe vicegerent of God, the kings were the vicegerents of thePope, and, of course, the vicegerents of God at the distanceof one remove. The same twofold character which thepontiff possessed, he permitted, for his own ends, everymonarch under him to assume. They were kings by divine