spiritual and temporal affairs throughout the whole of Italy, including the provinces annexed to Sardinia! It requires a very inventive imagination to conceive of an act of more supreme folly than this useless allocution.[185] If Pius IX had been less perturbed, and calm enough to reason logically, he might have observed how fatal to his own conclusion was an important confession made by him in this official allocution. Without seeming to comprehend its full meaning and force, he declared it to be "a singular arrangement of Divine providence" that the pope "was invested with his civil authority" _at the time of the fall of the Roman Empire_; that is, during the latter half of the fifth century, and nearly five hundred years after the beginning of the Christian era. In this he admits--certainly by necessary implication--that during all the long period preceding that event, the affairs of the Church had been conducted without the assistance of a temporal monarch at Rome or elsewhere, and by spiritual authority alone--by bishops who looked after religious and not political affairs.[186] He must have been guilty of a singular omission of duty if it did not occur to him to inquire why so great and radical a change in the management of Church affairs had not been made before the fall of the Roman Empire, but had been deferred until that particular period. It is easy enough to understand how the popes may have become kings in a purely temporal sense, after that event; but that was not the question he was considering. His object was to show that when the Roman Empire fell, the temporal power was divinely added to the spiritual power of the pope, and, therefore, that it would violate the divine law if he were deprived of the crown of temporal royalty, which the popes of the primitive times did not possess. A little calm reflection might have enabled him to see, in the light of his own statement, what fallacy there is in the pretense that belief in the Divine establishment of the temporal power is a necessary and essential part of true religious faith; for if it had been the Divine purpose that Christianity should not exist without it, that purpose would have been fulfilled long before the fall of the Roman Empire. The concession of Pius IX must consequently be taken as fatal to the claim of temporal power as necessarily pertaining to the cause of Christianity or to the Church as a religious body. The primitive Christians had no knowledge of it, and the fact that they had not--which he concedes--suggests such a contrast between what the early Church was immediately following the apostolic period, and what it became after the papacy was established by means alone of the temporal power, as to show conclusively that the papal pretense of sovereignty must have been the result of usurpation.