the state, the reasoning was denied, and churchmen replied: The
Pope represents the spiritual order, which is always and
everywhere supreme over the temporal, since the spiritual order
is the divine sovereignty itself. Always and everywhere, then,
is the Pope independent of the emperor, his superior, and to
subject him in any thing to the emperor would be as repugnant to
reason as to subject the soul to the body, the spirit to the
flesh, heaven to earth, or God to man.

If the universal supremacy claimed for the Pope, rejoined the
imperialists, be conceded, the state would be absorbed in the
church, the autonomy of civil society would be destroyed, and
civil rulers would have no functions but to do the bidding of the
clergy. It would establish a complete theocracy, or, rather,
clerocracy, of all possible governments the government the most
odious to mankind, and the most hostile to social progress. Even
the Jews could not, or would not, endure it, and prayed God to
give them a king, that they might be like other nations.

In the heat of the controversy neither party clearly and
distinctly perceived the true state of the question, and each was
partly right and partly wrong. The imperialists wanted room for
the free activity of civil society, the church wanted to
establish in that society the supremacy of the moral order, or
the law of God, without which governments can have no stability,
and society no real well-being. The real solution of the
difficulty was always to be found in the doctrine of the church
herself, and had been given time and again by her most approved
theologians. The Pope, as the visible head of the spiritual
society, is, no doubt, superior to the emperor, not precisely