Every age, nation, or community understands by liberty, freedom to follow unrestrained its own dominant tendency; we might say, its own dominant passion. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, liberty meant the freedom of temporal sovereigns to govern according to their own good pleasure, unrestrained by the church, on the one hand, and estates, diets, or parliaments, on the other. Liberty means now the freedom of the people, unrestrained either by the rights of God or the rights of princes, to govern as they or the demagogues, their masters, judge proper. Hence, liberty, as the world understands it, varies in its meaning from age to age, and from nation to nation, and, indeed, from individual to individual. Whatever favors or is in accordance with the dominant tendency or passion of an age, nation, community, or individual, favors or is in accordance with liberty; and whatever opposes or impedes it is opposed to liberty--is civil, political, or spiritual despotism. Protestantism never resists, but always follows, and encourages and echoes the dominant tendency of the age or nation. The church, having a life and force derived from a source independent of the age or nation, seeks not support in that dominant passion or tendency, does not yield or conform to it, but labors unceasingly and with all her energy to conform it to herself. Hence, in the estimation of the world, Protestantism is always on the side of liberty, and the church on the side of despotism and slavery. The attempt to deny this, and to prove that the church favors liberty in this sense, is perfectly idle; and to seek to modify her position and action, so as to force her to accept and conform to the dominant or popular tendency or passion of the age or nation, is to mistake her essential character and office, and to forget that her precise mission is to govern all men and nations, kings and peoples, sovereigns and subjects, and to conform them to the invariable and inflexible law of God, which she is appointed by God himself to declare and apply, and therefore to resist with all her might every passion or tendency of every age, nation, community, or individual, whenever and wherever it deviates from that law of which she is the guardian and judge. The church is instituted, as every Catholic who understands his religion believes, to guard and defend the rights of God on earth against any and every enemy, at all times and in all places. She therefore does not and cannot accept, or in any degree favor, liberty in the Protestant sense of liberty, and if liberty in that sense be the true sense, the Protestant pretension cannot be successfully denied.