The necessity for claiming and exercising that power in a society constituted as is the American does not exist, because in our society the state frankly concedes all that she was in those ages struggling for. There was nothing which Gregory VII., Innocent III., Boniface VIII., and other great popes struggled for against the German emperors, the kings of France, Aragon, and England, and the Italian republics, that is not recognized here by our republic to be the right of the spiritual order. Here the old antagonism between church and state does not exist. There is here a certain antagonism, no doubt, between the church and the sects, but none between the church and the state or civil society. Here the church has, so far as civil society is concerned, all that she has ever claimed, all that she has ever struggled for. Here she is perfectly free. She summons her prelates to meet in council when she pleases, and promulgates her decrees for the spiritual government of her children without leave asked or obtained. The _placet_ of the civil power is not needed, is neither solicited nor accepted. She erects and fills sees as she judges proper, founds and conducts schools, colleges, and seminaries in her own way, without let or hindrance; she manages her own temporalities, not by virtue of a grant or concession of the state, but as her acknowledged right, held as the right of conscience, independently of the state. Here she has nothing to conquer from the state, for the civil law affords her the same protection for her property that it does to the citizen for his; and therefore all that she can seek in relation to the constitution of our civil society, is that it should remain unaltered. True, the sects have before civil society the same freedom that she has, but the state protects her from any violence they might be disposed to offer her. They are not permitted to rob her of her churches, desecrate her altars, molest her worship, or interfere with her management of her own affairs. Their freedom in no respect whatever abridges hers, and whatever controversy she may have with them, it is entirely on questions with which civil society has nothing to do, which are wholly within the spiritual order, and which could not be settled by physical force, if she had it at her command, and was disposed to use it. Lying in the spiritual order, they are independent of the state, and it has no right to interfere with them. There is nothing, then, in the freedom of the sects to interfere with the fullest liberty of the church, so long as the state recognizes and protect her freedom and independence as well as theirs. There is nothing, then, that the church can receive from civil society, that she has not in the United States, and guaranteed to her by the whole force of the civil constitution. {13}