d through their mass; story after
story, steadily ascending and converging to raise the Pope higher still,
until at last, on the summit of the edifice, the Holy See becomes
the keystone of the arch, the omnipotence of fact being completed by
omnipotence of right.

Meanwhile Catholic opinion came to the aid of pontifical opinion, and,
in France, the clergy spontaneously became ultramontane because there
was no longer any motive for remaining Gallican. Since the Revolution,
the Concordat and the Organic Articles, all the sources which maintained
in it a national as well as particularist spirit, had dried up; in
ceased being a distinct, proprietary and favored body; its members are
no longer leagued together by the community of a temporal interest,
by the need of defending their privileges, by the faculty of acting
in concert, by the right of holding periodical assemblies; they are no
longer, as formerly, attached to the civil power by great social and
legal advantages, by their honorable priority in lay society, by their
immunities from taxation, by the presence and influence of their bishops
in the provincial parliaments, by the noble origin and magnificent
endowments of nearly all their prelates, by the repressive support which
the secular arm lent to the church against dissenters and free-thinkers,
by the immemorial legislation and customs which, erecting Catholicism
into a State religion, imposed the Catholic faith on the monarch, not
alone in his quality of a private individual and to fix his personal
belief, but again in his quality of public magistrate, to influence his
policy and to share in his government. This last article is capital,
and out of its abrogation the rest follows: at this turn of the road
the French clergy is thrown off the Gallican track, every step it
takes after this being on the way to Rome. For, according to Catholic
doctrine, outside of the Roman Church there is no salvation; to enter
it, to rest in it, to be led by it is the highest interest and first
duty of man; it is the unique and infallible guide; all acts that it
condemns are culpable, and not only private acts, but likewise all
public acts; the sovereign who commits them may, as an individual, be
Catholic by profession and even loyal at heart; but, as a ruler, he is
disloyal, he has lost his semi-ecclesiastic character, he has ceased to
be "the exterior bishop," he is not worthy to command a clerical body.
Henceforth, the Christian co