virtue of feudal relations, not by virtue of the spiritual authority
of the Holy See or the vicarship of the Holy Father. The right
to govern under feudalism was simply an estate, or property; and
as the church could acquire and hold property, nothing prevented
her holding fiefs, or her chief from being suzerain. The
expressions in the papal briefs and bulls, taken in connection
with the special relations existing between the Pope and emperor
in the Middle Ages, and his relations with other states as their
feudal sovereign, explained by the controversies concerning
rights growing out of these relations, will be found to give no
countenance to the theory in question.

These relations really existed, and they gave the Pope certain
temporal rights in certain states, even the temporal supremacy,
as he has still in what is left him of the States of the Church;
but they were exceptional or accidental relations, not the
universal and essential relations between the church and the
state. The rights that grew out of these relations were real
rights, sacred and inviolable, but only where and while the
relations subsisted. They, for the most part, grew out of the
feudal system introduced into the Roman empire by its barbarian
conquerors, and necessarily ceased with the political order in
which they originated. Undoubtedly the church consecrated civil
rulers, but this did not imply that they received their power or
right to govern from God through her; but implied that their
persons were sacred, and that violence to them would be
sacrilege; that they held the Christian faith, and acknowledged
themselves bound to protect it, and to govern their subjects
justly, according to the law of God.