1. "Those old fanatics of arbitrary power dogmatized as if hereditary monarchy were the only lawful government in the world, just as our new fanatics of popular arbitrary power maintain that a popular election is the only lawful source of authority." (Burke, _Reflections on French Revolution_.) We here stand between two idols of the tribe of politicians. We may call them Gog and Magog: Gog, the divine right of kings; Magog, the inalienable sovereignty of the people. 2. The position known in history as "the divine right of kings" may be best described as a _political popedom_. It is the belief of Catholics that our Divine Redeemer, instituting His Church by His own personal act as a perfect society and spiritual commonwealth, instituted in like manner the polity under which He willed it to be governed, namely, the Papal monarchy, begun in St. Peter and carried to completion according to our Lord's design under the line of Popes, Peter's successors. The monarchy thus established is essential to the Catholic Church. We speak not here of the temporal power which the Pope once enjoyed in the Roman States, but of his spiritual sovereignty over all Christendom. The Pope cannot validly resign and put out of his own and his successors' hands, nor can the Cardinals take away from him, nor the Episcopate, one jot or tittle of this spiritual prerogative. He cannot, for instance, condition his infallibility on the consent of a General Council, or surrender the canonization of saints to the votes of the faithful at large. Such are the inalienable, Christ-given prerogatives of the Papacy. Henry VIII. feloniously set himself up for Pope within the realm of England. Blending together temporal and spiritual jurisdiction, he made out his rights and prerogatives as a monarch, even in the civil order, to be inalienable as in the spiritual. Spiritual and civil attributes together formed a jewelled circlet, one and indivisible, immoveably fixed on the brow of the King's Most Sacred Majesty. Grown and swollen by their union with the spirituality, the civil attributes of the Crown were exaggerated to the utmost, and likewise declared inalienable. They were exaggerated till they came to embrace all the powers of government. The privileges of Parliament, and the limitations to the royal authority, set forth in the Petition of Right in 1628, were regarded as mere concessions tenable at the King's pleasure: from which point of view we understand the readiness of so conscientious a monarch as Charles I. to act against such privileges after he had allowed them. But to vest all the powers of government inalienably in the King, so that whoever else may seem to partake in them, shall partake only by royal sufferance, is tantamount to declaring monarchy the sole valid and lawful polity. This declaration the ministers, lay and clerical, of our Charleses and Jameses do not seem to have made in express terms. It is, however, contained by