He erects his system of faith upon this premise: That neither the pope nor the Church can be made "subject to the civil authority" of any country; that is, that he may disobey all human laws which place any restraint upon his authority as he shall define it, at his own pleasure. Affirming that all who do not assent to the faith as announced by the pope "will perish eternally without any doubt," he condemned all other professions of religious faith as the "most fruitful cause" of evil. The diversity of religious professions he considered the "poisoned source" of "that _false and absurd_, or rather extravagant maxim, _that liberty of conscience should be established and guaranteed to each man_." He characterized this liberty of conscience as "a _most contagious error_, to which leads that absolute and unbridled liberty of opinion, which, _for the ruin of Church and State_, spreads over the world, and which some men, by unbridled impudence, fear not to represent as advantageous to the Church." Having thus denounced liberty of conscience as sinful, and its advocates as guilty of "unbridled impudence," he, as a necessary consequence, blended with it "_the liberty of the press_," which he called "_the most fatal liberty, an execrable liberty, for which there never can be sufficient horror_." These two great liberties, universally understood to constitute the basis of popular government, caused him, as he declared, "to shudder," because he considered them "_monstrous doctrines_, or rather _prodigies of error_." He charged the people of Italy, who were demanding a constitution, "with the blackest machinations of revolt and sedition" in their "endeavor to destroy the _fidelity due to princes_, and to hurl them from their thrones." In the further inculcation of the duty "_of constant submission to princes_," he declared that this submission has its "_source in the holiest precepts of the Christian religion_;" wherefore he insisted that "the Vaudois, Beguards, Wickliffites, and other like children of Belial, the shame and opprobrium of the human race," were "justly anathematized by the Apostolic See." And he condemned the separation of Church and State by characterizing it as "the rupture of concord between the priesthood and the empire," which he desired to preserve, because, said he, "it is an established fact that all the votaries of the most unbridled liberty fear more than all else this concord, which has always been so salutary and so happy for Church and State."[173]