Such, nevertheless, was the evil which overbore the church in its relations with the faithful, though its weight became alleviated, as I shall hereafter demonstrate. We have already seen, that for the clergymen themselves, and in the heart of the church, liberty had no guarantee. For laymen, and outside the church, the matter was much worse. Amongst ecclesiastics, there was at all events discussion, deliberation, and a deployment of individual faculties; with them the excitement of dispute supplied in some sort the lack of liberty. But there was nothing of this description between the clergy and the people. The laymen assisted in the government of the church as simple spectators. And thus we perceive that idea so early vegetate and expand, that theology, or religious questions and affairs, are the privileged domain of the clergy, that the clergy alone have a right to decide, or even to canvass them, and that on no account, or under any pretence, ought laymen to interfere. At the era under review this theory was already in full blossom; and it has required ages and terrible revolutions to subdue it, and to bring back, even partially, religious questions and science to the public domain. Therefore, in principle as well as in fact, the legal separation of the clergy and the Christian people was nearly complete before the twelfth century. In spite of this, however, the Christian people were not without influence, even at this epoch, upon their government. Legal interference was wanting to it, but not influence. In fact its extinction is scarcely possible in any government, much less in one founded upon articles of belief common to the governing and the governed. {106} Whenever an actual community of ideas is developed, or an intellectual movement of the same order is participated by both government and people, a bond necessarily exists between them which no viciousness in the organisation can utterly break. To give a clear explanation of my meaning, I will take an example from our own history of the political cast. At no date in the history of France have the French people had less legal control over their government, by means of institutions, than in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, under Louis XIV. and Louis XV. Every one knows that almost all the direct and official interference of the country, in the exercise of authority, had died away at those periods. Yet there is no doubt that the public and the country then exercised much more influence over the government than at other times--in those, for instance, in which the States-General were frequently convoked, in which the parliaments took considerable part in politics, and in which the legal participation of the people with power was unquestionably greater.