It is evident that, if these assumptions be accepted, there are very few human activities the regulation of which belongs outside of the authority of the Church. This is in substance the view presented by an Austrian Romanist previously quoted, who was writing on behalf of the liberties of the Austrian Church.[43] The Rev. Joseph Berington, writing in 1760, uses, in describing the ecclesiastical polity, the following language: “The mode of government which Rome maintains in this kingdom (England) and from which in no kingdom it ever departed but when driven by hard necessity, draws very near to that feudal system of polity, to which the nations of Europe were once subject. It contained one sovereign as suzerain monarch in whose hands was lodged the _supremum dominium_, and this he apportioned out to a descending series of vassals who, all holding of him _in capite_, returned him service for the benefits they received in honours, jurisdiction on lands; and to this service they were bound by gratitude, which was strengthened by an oath of fealty. The application of the system to the sovereign power of the pontiff and to a chain of descending vassalage in archbishops, bishops, and the inferior orders in the ministry, is direct and inevitable.”[44] Catalani, writing in 1738, contends that the oath of allegiance to the pope expresses not only a profession of canonical obedience, but an oath of fealty not unlike that which vassals took to their direct lords.[45] He cites as an example, the first oath of the kind, that taken by the Patriarch of Aquileia to Gregory VII, in 1079. Mendham concludes, after reference to other authorities, that allegiance and obedience are divided in the most unfavourable sense and degree (particularly in the case of heretical rulers) when the soul and conscience are to be given to a foreign (so-called) spiritual sovereign, while the actual temporal ruler can claim only what remains of his subject.[46]