The Roman Catholic Church is the most widely diffused and the most powerfully organized of all modern societies.

It is far more a political than a religious combination.

Its principle is that all power is in the clergy, and that for laymen there is only the privilege of obedience.

The republican forms under which the Churches existed in primitive Christianity have gradually merged into an absolute centralization, with a man as vice-God at its head.

This Church asserts that the divine commission under which it acts comprises civil government; that it has a right to use the state for its own purposes, but that the state has no right to intermeddle with it; that even in Protestant countries it is not merely a coordinate government, but the sovereign power.