The state and the church Author:John Augustine Ryan Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 3. THE MORAL ORIGIN OF CIVIL AUTHORITY1 By Louis Cardinal Billot, S.J. The statement that political authority is immediately from the people, can be understoo... more »d in two ways: Fither from the people, as it were, abdicating and transferring by a donation or contract that authority to those who preside over the commonwealth; or from the people, creating organic law in virtue of which authority is embodied in such or such a governmental form, and given to such or such a possessor. . . . The difference between these two ways may be illustrated by an example taken from the law of property. I may receive dominion over a thing from another person, as the rightful possessor who now makes mine that which was his, as if Titius would donate to me his field; or from another, as from the immediate author of a law by which dominion is acquired, as if, in virtue of prescription enacted by the civil legislator, I begin to be the owner of a piece of land which before did not belong to me. That magistrates derive their power proximately from the people, is explained by most of the older scholastics according to the analogy of the former example. But we think that we should base the explanation rather on the second example. However, these points concern only the deeper understanding of the doctrine, and maybe this is a dispute more about words than things. In any case, forms of government and titles to exercise power, and power itself, as existing in its determinate possessors, are not immediately from God, but only through the medium of human consent, that is, the consent of the community. An objection to the foregoing statement has been broughtforward from the words of the Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII, Diuturnum Illud: "It is important to bear in mind that those who are to preside over the commo...« less