Intentions of the pope.  But this dual system approaches its close.  To the northern nations, less imaginative and less superstitious, it had long ago become intolerable; they rejected it summarily at the epoch of the Reformation, notwithstanding the protestations and pretensions of Rome, Russia, happier than the rest, has never acknowledged the influence of any foreign spiritual power.  She gloried in her attachment to the ancient Greek rite, and saw in the papacy nothing more than a troublesome dissenter from the primitive faith.  In America the temporal and the spiritual have been absolutely divorced—­the latter is not permitted to have any thing to do with affairs of state, though in all other respects liberty is conceded to it.  The condition of the New World also satisfies us that both forms of Christianity, Catholic and Protestant, have lost their expansive power; neither can pass beyond its long-established boundary-line—­the Catholic republics remain Catholic, the Protestant Protestant.  And among the latter the disposition to sectarian isolation is disappearing; persons of different denominations consort without hesitation together.  They gather their current opinions from newspapers, not from the Church.

Pius IX., in the movements we have been considering, has had two objects in view:  1.  The more thorough centralization of the papacy, with a spiritual autocrat assuming the prerogatives of God at its head; 2.  Control over the intellectual development of the nations professing Christianity.

The logical consequence of the former of these is political intervention.  He insists that in all cases the temporal must subordinate itself to the spiritual power; all laws inconsistent with the interests of the Church must be repealed.  They are not binding on the faithful.  In the preceding pages I have briefly related some of the complications that have already occurred in the attempt to maintain this policy.

The syllabus.  I now come to the consideration of the manner in which the papacy proposes to establish its intellectual control; how it defines its relation to its antagonist, Science, and, seeking a restoration of the mediaeval condition, opposes modern civilization, and denounces modern society.

The Encyclical and Syllabus present the principles which it was the object of the Vatican Council to carry into practical effect.  The Syllabus stigmatizes pantheism, naturalism, and absolute rationalism, denouncing such opinions as that God is the world; that there is no God other than Nature; that theological matters must be treated in the same manner as philosophical ones, that the methods and principles by which the old scholastic doctors cultivated theology are no longer suitable to the demands of the age and the progress of science; that every man is free to embrace and profess the religion he may believe to be true, guided by the light of his reason; that it appertains