The power of the Pontiff, argues Father Tarquini, is this--What he binds on earth is bound in heaven. But if the king, stepping in, says, To bind implies the force of law, and your acts shall not acquire the force of law without my _placet_, how then? Why, the Pontiff becomes the one really bound. The king refuses to allow the pontifical judgments to take effect of themselves. It is not with him "said on earth and done in heaven." His _placet_ must intervene. It is competent, indeed, he admits to the Pontiff, to _grant_ a right of _placet_; but such a right, founded on the grace of a Pope, cannot be confounded with one inherent in the crown. We quote the following in full:--"You say that the _placet_ is a real right, demanded by justice, and essential to political government. The Church condemns it by a series of judgments, perhaps without parallel in her history, extending from her foundation down to Pius IX. She expressly defines it, with Leo X, Clement VII, Clement XI, and Benedict XIV, as opposed to all justice, as indecent, absurd, rash, scandalous, as insufferable depravity, and worthy of eternal pain. Therefore she punishes it with the greatest of penalties, the anathema. "In this matter there is no middle course. You must either lay aside the mask of Catholicism, which no longer becomes you, and boldly avow that the Church has defined good as evil, justice as injustice, an inherent right of the crown as an absurdity and a wrong, and done so in a judgment perpetuated from her foundation to our own day; or you must, on the other hand, confess that you are in an error not to be tolerated." Thus it seems that what with a Christian minister would only be a claim to announce the belief and the moral precepts which he found in the Holy Scriptures, becomes with the Roman Pontiff a claim to put his decree on any matter which he deems conducive to the good of "the Church" into the form of law, and to set it up without, or in spite of, but anyhow above, the national law, be it republican, royal, or imperial. This boundless pretension--for boundless it is--will often be found gently expressed as the right of the Pontiff _to communicate with the faithful_. The writer then asks what, from his point of view, would seem to be a natural question. Would kings like the Pope to demand that his _placet_ should be required before their laws came into force?[22] He replies that some of them have so far unlearned "Christian doctrine as to say that, in case the Pope did so, he would usurp sovereign rights in their States." But such a proposition is heretical, pronounced to be so by the Holy Office in 1654, with the approbation of Innocent X.[23] By virtue of this, even our children know that the Church presided over and governed by the Vicar of Christ is a kingdom which has the ends of the earth for its bounds. Therefore it belongs to the Vicar of Christ to make laws in all parts of the world for her welfare and for her government.