because he represents a superior order, but because the church,
of which he is the visible chief, is a supernatural institution,
and holds immediately from God; whereas civil society,
represented by the emperor, holds from God only mediately,
through second causes, or the people. Yet, though derived from
God only through the people, civil authority still holds from God,
and derives its right from Him through another channel than the
church or spiritual society, and, therefore, has a right, a
sacredness, which the church herself gives not, and must
recognize and respect. This she herself teaches in teaching that
even infidels, as we have seen, may have legitimate government,
and since, though she interprets and applies the law of God, both
natural 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,