Three Ideals. 115 



inevitable course fatally to the mediaeval theocracy and the 

 social system therewith connected. Providentially accom- 

 panying this movement has gone on a gradual perfecting 

 of the Church's independent organism, and a greater and 

 greater detachment of it from the State. 



"The Church has willingly lent its support to the 

 secular power, which, in return, has either sought per- 

 fidiously to bind it in golden chains, or has brutally 

 spurned it, as now in Germany. This fortunate perfidy 

 will enable the Church to escape the popular enmity 

 which the State is sure, sooner or later, to incur, while 

 its perfect organisation will enable it to survive and 

 flourish the better for the pseudo-Christian State's down- 

 fall and replacement by a system of natural freedom for 

 each individual citizen. 



"This process of reinvigoration is already becoming 

 patent. Since the clearly logical and Christian declara- 

 tions of Boniface VIIL, no pontiff has so uncompromis- 

 ingly asserted the Church's claims as Pius IX. 



" The completion of the anti-mediaeval movement will 

 only bring out yet more clearly what is but in effect and 

 in other terms the proclamation and assertion of the 

 supreme rights of conscience. But while the extent of the 

 Church's success in the thirteenth century should not be 

 over-stated, so also there is no cause for discouragement 

 in the apparent reverses it has since undergone. Whether 

 under the anti-papal revolts of the sixteenth century, or 



