ural and revealed, she
makes neither.

Nevertheless, the imperialists or the statists insisted on their false
charge against the Pope, that he labored to found a purely theocratic
or clerocratic government, and finding themselves unable to place the
representative of the civil society on the same level with the
representative of the spiritual, or to emancipate the state from the
law of God while they conceded the divine origin or right of
government, they sought to effect its independence by asserting for it
only a natural or purely human origin. For nearly two centuries the
most popular and influential writers on government have rejected the
divine origin and ground of civil authority, and excluded God from the
state. They have refused to look beyond second causes, and have labored
to derive authority from man alone. They have not only separated the
state from the church as an external corporation, but from God as its
internal lawgiver, and by so doing have deprived the state of her
sacredness, inviolability, or hold on the conscience, scoffed at
loyalty as a superstition, and consecrated not civil authority, but
what is called "the right of insurrection." Under their teaching the
age sympathizes not with authority in its efforts to sustain itself and
protect society, but with those who conspire against it--the
insurgents, rebels, revolutionists seeking its destruction. The
established government that seeks to enforce respect for its legitimate
authority and compel obedience to the laws, is held to be despotic,
tyrannical, oppressive, and resistance to it to be obedience to God,
and a wild howl rings through Christendom against the prince that will
not stand still and permit the conspirators to cut his throat. There is
hardly a government now in the civilized world that can sustain itself
for a moment without an armed force sufficient to overawe or crush the
party or parties in permanent conspiracy against it.

This result is not what was aimed at or desired, but it is the logical
or necessary result of the attempt to erect the state on atheistical
principles. Unless founded on the divine sovereignty, authority can
sustain itself only by force, for political atheism recognizes no right
but might. No doubt the politicians have sought an atheistical, or
what is the same thing, a purely human, basis for government, in order
to secure an open field for human freedom and activity, or individual
or social progress.