consciences and understandings of men. If the Church has the uppermost
hand, except in primitive times, it destroys freedom; if the State is
supreme, it destroys spirituality. The free Church in the free State is
an idea that every day more fully recommends itself to the public
opinion of Europe, and the sovereignty of the Pope, like that of all
other spiritual potentates, can only be exercised over those who choose
of their own accord to submit to it; a sovereignty of a kind which De
Maistre thought not much above anarchy.

To conclude, De Maistre's mind was of the highest type of those who fill
the air with the arbitrary assumptions of theology, and the abstractions
of the metaphysical stage of thought. At every point you meet the
peremptorily declared volition of a divine being, or the ontological
property of a natural object. The French Revolution is explained by the
will of God; and the kings reign because they have the _esprit royal_.
Every truth is absolute, not relative; every explanation is universal,
not historic. These differences in method and point of view amply
explain his arrival at conclusions that seem so monstrous to men who
look upon all knowledge as relative, and insist that the only possible
road to true opinion lies away from volitions and abstractions in the
positive generalisations of experience. There can be no more
satisfactory proof of the rapidity with which we are leaving these
ancient methods, and the social results which they produced, than the
willingness with which every rightly instructed mind now admits how
indispensable were the first, and how beneficial the second. Those can
best appreciate De Maistre and his school, what excellence lay in their
aspirations, what wisdom in their system, who know most clearly why
their aspirations were hopeless, and what makes their system an
anachronism.

FOOTNOTES:

[10] De Maistre forgot or underestimated the services of Leo the
Isaurian whose repulse of the Caliph's forces at Constantinople (A.D.
717) was perhaps as important for Europe as the more renowned victory of
Charles Martel. But then Leo was an Iconoclast and heretic. Cf. Finlay's
_Byzantine Empire_, pp. 22, 23.

[11] _Du Pape_, bk. iii. c. iv. p. 298 (ed. 1866).

[12] _Du Pape_, bk. iv. c. vii.

[13] A remark of Mr. Finlay's is worth quoting here. 'The Greeks,' he
says, 'had at times only a secondary share in the ecclesiastical
controversies in the Eastern Church, though the circ