Political Science Of The State

462 POLITICAL SCIENCE.

privation of church privileges. And it also claims against the
individual the right of deciding over him, on questions of
conscience, and of visiting him with censure. Protestant
communions, whose discipline is strict, really take the same
ground. A man may be shut out from church privileges by
a small sect for " using a little wine," when he himself feels
no scruples about so doing. It might be thought from this
that all religious power stands and must stand in the same
relations both towards state and individual. But while this
is in one sense true, because all religious associations must
establish certain rules of communion, the vast and wide
power of the Roman church centered in a single man, who
cannot err, if he speaks ex cathedra, places it on different
grounds from the protestant sects which are independent of
the state, and much more on different ground from protestant
established churches which are dependent.

Against this theory and the practice under it a large part
of Christendom revolted at the reformation, and since that
event the papal theory has been for the most part practically
suspended in the Catholic nations. A flagrant instance in
which the old claims of the church were waived, and at
which Innocent III. would have been horror-struck, was the
concordat between Leo X. and Francis I. (1515), by which
the king acquired the right of nominating bishops, and the
old pragmatic sanctions, long grievous to the powers at Rome,
were abandoned. The precedent of this departure from the
strict principles of the Catholic church has since been fol-
lowed elsewhere.

3. We pass on next to that relation of the church to the
Church subject to state in which it has little or no independent

power and is subject to state policy. The earli-
est example of such subjection is found in the Byzantine em-
pire, and it goes sometimes under the name of Byzantinism,
Here mere despotism of the emperor ruled in both spheres,
disturbed or overthrown sometimes in the political sphere by
successful insurrections, and resisted in the religious sphere
by fanatical monks or others more orthodox than the empe-

state.