onditional obedience. This is dwelt upon by the early
apologists: "Oramus etiam pro imperatoribus, pro ministris eorum et
potestatibus, pro statu saeculi, pro rerum quiete, pro mora finis."[301]
It has the authority, too, of those who thought with St. Augustine that
the State had a sinful origin and character: "Primus fuit terrenae
civitatis conditor fratricida."[302] The Liberals, at the same time, are
strong in the authority of many scholastic writers, and of many of the
older Jesuit divines, of St. Thomas and Suarez, Bellarmine, and Mariana.
The absolutists, too, countenanced by Bossuet and the Gallican Church,
and quoting amply from the Old Testament, can point triumphantly to the
majority of Catholic countries in modern times. All these arguments are
at the same time serviceable to our adversaries; and those by which one
objection is answered help to fortify another.

The frequent recurrence of this sort of argument which appears to us as
treacherous for defence as it is popular as a weapon of attack, shows
that no very definite ideas prevail on the subject, and makes it
doubtful whether history, which passes sentence on so many theories, is
altogether consistent with any of these. Nevertheless it is obviously an
inquiry of the greatest importance, and one on which controversy can
never entirely be set at rest; for the relation of the spiritual and the
secular power is, like that of speculation and revelation, of religion
and nature, one of those problems which remain perpetually open, to
receive light from the meditations and experience of all ages, and the
complete solution of which is among the objects, and would be the end,
of all history.

At a time when the whole system of ecclesiastical government was under
discussion, and when the temporal power was beginning to predominate
over the Church in France, the greatest theologian of the age made an
attempt to apply the principles of secular polity to the Church.
According to Gerson (_Opera_, ii. 254), the fundamental forms into which
Aristotle divides all government recur in the ecclesiastical system. The
royal power is represented in the Papacy, the aristocracy by the
college of cardinals, whilst the councils form an ecclesiastical
democracy (_timocratia_). Analogous to this is the idea that the
constitution of the Church served as the model of the Christian States,
and that the notion of representation, for instance, was borrowed from
it. But it is not by the