But in these questions and in the dogmas which reply to them, nothing can now arouse between Catholicism and civil society either conflict or embarrassment. In this matter, the State proclaims not only the liberty but the right of the church, and declares itself absolutely incompetent to interfere. And here lies whatever truth exists in that deplorable and confused saying which has excited so much comment, "_The law is atheistical_." Surely not so. The law is not atheistical. How should it be so? Is the law a real living being, a being with a soul which approaches to or recedes from God, which may be lost or saved? "Human societies," says M. Royer Collard, "live and die on the earth, there they fulfil their destinies." But they do not comprehend man as an entire. {84} After he has bound himself to society there still remains to him the noblest part of himself, the high faculties by which he raises himself to God, to a future life, to unknown good in an invisible world. We, as individuals, as beings endowed with immortality, have a different destiny from states. And it is on this account that the State should not interfere with that other destiny. As its nature and aim are different from her own, as the two have nothing in common, to interfere must produce confusion and usurpation. That which the state now proclaims was taught to it by the Church, the Catholic Church. During centuries when the state wished to interfere in matters of opinion and salvation, did not the Church distinctly reject such pretensions. And how did she do so? By the distinction of temporal and spiritual, of terrestrial and eternal life, that is, by the incompetence of the state to deal with the relations of the soul with God. And the Catholic Church was right in sustaining this principle, the forgetfulness of which has cost her much. How did she lose a portion of her empire? How came Henry VIII. amongst others to separate from her? By proclaiming the temporal power competent to matters of faith and salvation. Let Catholicism go back to the sixteenth century, to the history of the reformation. It is by the confusion of the two powers, by this religious competence of the state, that she has suffered the rudest shocks. {85} The Catholic Church has no more dangerous enemies than lay theologians, whether princes or doctors. They are the more dangerous foes because religious motives are not those which alone may animate them, and lay usurpations in matters of faith have often served as a veil to the most worldly interests. Had the religious incompetence of the state always been acknowledged, the church would not so often have seen her property as well as her power in danger or lost. She has henceforth nothing similar to fear. Usurpation is on both sides forbidden. Her kingdom belongs to herself alone; she possesses it completely and securely.