2. Anarchy may easily seem to us "the acme of disorder and the expression of chaos. They say that when a Parisian burgher of the seventeenth century once heard that in Venice there was no king, the good man could not get over his astonishment, and thought he should die of laughing. Such is our prejudice."[156] As against this, Proudhon draws a picture of how men's life in society under anarchy might perhaps shape itself in detail, to execute the functions now belonging to the State. He begins with an example. "For many centuries the spiritual power has been separated, within traditional limits, from the temporal power. [But there has never been a complete separation, and therefore, to the great detriment of the church's authority and of believers, centralization has never been sufficient.] There would be a complete separation if the temporal power not only did not concern itself with the celebration of mysteries, the administration of sacraments, the government of parishes, etc., but did not intervene in the nomination of bishops either. There would ensue a greater centralization, and consequently a more regular government, if in each parish the people had the right to choose for themselves their vicars and curates, or to have none at all; if in each diocese the priests elected their bishop; if the assembly of bishops, or a primate of the Gauls, had sole charge of the regulation of religious affairs, theological instruction, and worship. By this separation the clergy would cease to be, in the hands of political power, an instrument of tyranny over the people; and by this application of universal suffrage the ecclesiastical government, centralized in itself, receiving its inspirations from the people and not from the government or the pope, would be in constant harmony with the needs of society and with the moral and intellectual condition of the citizens. We must, then, in order to return to truth, organic, political, economic, or social (for here all these are one), first, abolish the constitutional cumulation by taking from the State the nomination of the bishops, and definitively separating the spiritual from the temporal; second, centralize the church in itself by a system of graded elections; third, give to the ecclesiastical power, as we do to all the other powers in the State, the vote of the citizens as a basis. By this system what to-day is GOVERNMENT will no longer be anything but _administration_; all France is centralized, so far as concerns ecclesiastical functions; the country, by the mere fact of its electoral initiative, governs itself in matters of eternal life as well as in those of this world. And one may already see that if it were possible to organize the entire country in temporal matters on the same bases, the most perfect order and the most vigorous centralization would exist without there being anything of what we to-day call constituted authority or government."[157]