When liberty reigns in the intellectual world, when the human thought and conscience are not subjected to a power which denies them the right of discussion and decision, and employs force to crush them--when, in fact, there is no visible and constituted spiritual government, arrogating and exercising the right of dictating opinions--then is the idea of the dominion of a spiritual order over a temporal impossible. Such is pretty nearly the present state of the world. But when there exists, as in the tenth century did exist, a government of the spiritual order; when thought and conscience come under laws, institutions, and powers, which assert a right to command and coerce them; in a word, when the spiritual power is constituted, when it has taken effective possession, under the sanction of right and of force, of human reason and conscience, it is natural that it should be tempted to lay claim to dominion over the temporal order, and that it should exclaim, 'How! I have right and sway over what is most lofty and independent in man--over his reason, his inward will, his conscience--and shall I not have right over his outward, material, and fleeting interests? I, who am the interpreter of justice and truth, shall I be debarred from regulating earthly matters according to justice and truth?' By the mere provocative of this reasoning, the spiritual order was sure to be urged into an invasion of the temporal order. And this was still more certain when the spiritual order monopolised all the developments of the human mind then possible: there was but one science, theology; but one spiritual order, the theological: all the other sciences, rhetoric, arithmetic, even music, everything was comprised in theology. {102} The spiritual power thus finding itself at the head of the whole activity of the human brain, naturally fell into a self-assumption of the general government of the world. A second cause was equally powerful in urging it to this appropriation--namely, the frightful state of the temporal order, and the violence and iniquity which prevailed in the temporal government of all communities.