act analogous to the French Concordat of 1801, he negotiates with the
sovereign of the country--Bavaria, Wurtemburg, Prussia, Austria, Spain,
Portugal, the two Sicilies, the Netherlands, Belgium and Russia. Again,
owing to the tolerant liberalism, or to the Constitutional indifference
of the lay government, he alone prescribes, notably in Holland, in
Ireland, in England, in Canada, and in the United States, a division
of the country into ecclesiastical districts, the erection of new
bishoprics, and the lasting regulation of the hierarchy, the discipline,
the means of support and the recruiting of the clergy. Again, when
sovereignty is in dispute, as after the emancipation of the Spanish
colonies, he does without it, in spite of the opposition of the
mother-country, and, "without putting himself in relation with the new
governments,[5209] he, acting for himself, "that he may put an end
to the widowhood of the Churches," appoints bishops, assigns them a
provisional regime in anticipation of the epoch when, in concert with
better founded governments, he will decree their definitive regime. In
this way, all the great existing churches of the Catholic universe are
the work of the Pope, his latest work, his own creation attested by a
positive act of contiguous date, and of which the souvenir is vivid:
he has not recognized them--he has made them; he has given them their
external form and their internal structure; no one of them can look
within itself without finding in its laws the fresh imprint of the
sovereign hand which has fashioned it; none of them can assert or even
believe itself legitimate without declaring the superior authority to be
legitimate which has just endowed it with life and being. The last
step, the greatest of all, above the terrestrial and practical order of
things, in speculative theology, in the revelation of the supernatural,
in the definition of things that are divine: the Pope, the better to
prove his autocracy, in 1854, decrees, solely, of his own accord, a new
dogma, the immaculate conception of the Virgin, and he is careful to
note that he does it without the concurrence of the bishops; they were
on hand, but they neither deliberated nor decided.[5210]

Thus arise durable powers, spiritual or temporal, little by little,
through the uninterrupted and uncontested series of their acts; from
1791 to 1870 all ecclesiastical precedents, one added to another, became
consolidated, one through the other an