Page:The True Story of the Vatican Council.djvu/42

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The True Story of the Vatican Council.

ship, and of the protection which governments afford to error. They desired especially that the Council should make some declaration on the imminent danger of Christian governments lapsing into the tyranny of a pagan Cæsarism, by which the state is deified, and all that is called God or worshipped is included in the sphere of its arbitrary power.

Lastly, they desired that the Council should declare that the temporal power of the Pontiff is no obstacle to any progress founded upon the laws of the Christian world; that the unhappy conflict between the spiritual and civil powers which now convulses the world arose not from any aggression on the part of the Church, but from the departure of modern civilisation from the basis of Christian society. The last error condemned in the syllabus is that "the Roman Pontiff can and ought to reconcile himself and come to terms with progress, liberalism, and modern civilisation." The Christian civilisation represented by the Roman Pontiff consists in the unity of faith, the unity of worship, of Christian marriage and Christian education. No reasonable man can wonder, therefore, if Pius the Ninth declines to reconcile himself with indifferentism in faith and worship, divorce courts, and secular schools.

We may now sum up this part of our subject which carries us down to the first public announce-