obedience as a religious duty. Conscience is accountable to God
alone, and civil government, if it had only a natural or human
origin, could not bind it. Yet Christianity makes the civil law,
within its legitimate sphere, as obligatory on conscience as the
divine law itself, and no man is blameless before God who is not
blameless before the state. No man performs faithfully his
religious duties who neglects his civil duties, and hence, the
law of the church allows no one to retire from the world and
enter a religious order, who has duties that bind him or her to
the family or the state; though it is possible that the law is
not always strictly observed, and that individuals sometimes
enter a convent for the sake of getting rid of those duties, or
the equally important duty of taking care of themselves. But by
asserting the divine origin of government, Christianity
consecrates civil authority, clothes it with a religious
character, and makes civil disobedience, sedition, insurrection,
rebellion, revolution, civil turbulence of any sort or degree,
sins against God as well as crimes against the state. For the
same reason she makes usurpation, tyranny, oppression of the
people by civil rulers, offences against God as well as against
society, and cognizable by the spiritual authority.

After the establishment of the Christian church, after its public
recognition, and when conflicting claims arose between the two
powers--the civil and the ecclesiastical--this doctrine of the
divine origin of civil government was abused, and turned against
the church with most disastrous consequences. While the Roman
Empire of the West subsisted, and even after its fall, so long as
the emperor of the East asserted and practically maintained his
authority in the Exarchate of Ravenna and the Duchy of Rome, the