Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/38

ness, and, guided by the light of these three criterions, was restored to the felicity of lost innocence.

Order was thus transmitted from the religious into the moral world, and passed from the moral into the political world. The Catholic God, the creator and preserver of the universe, subjects all things to the laws of his Providence, and governs them by his vicars. St. Paul says in his Epistle to the Romans, chap. xiii.: "Non est potestas nisi a Deo;" and Solomon has written in the Book of Proverbs, chap. viii. v. 15: "Per me reges regnant, et legum conditores justa decernunt." The authority exercised by his vicars is holy, chiefly on account of what it possesses extrinsic to them; that is to say, it is divine. The idea of authority is of Catholic origin. The rulers over the nations of antiquity placed their right of supremacy on human foundations; they governed for themselves, and they governed by force. The Catholic rulers did not claim to exercise authority through any inherent right, but only as the delegated agents of God, and as the servants of the people. When man became the child of God, then he ceased to be the slave of man. There is nothing more solemn, more impressive, and at the same time more respectable, than the words which the Church addressed to Christian princes at their consecration: "Receive this scepter as an emblem of the sacred power confided to you in order that you may protect the weak, sustain the wavering, correct the vicious, and conduct the good in the way of salvation. Receive this scepter as the rule of divine justice, which upholds the good and punishes the wicked; learn by it to love justice, and to abhor iniquity." These words are in perfect consonance with the idea of legitimate authority as revealed to the world by our Lord