The alliance between Church and State is loudly denounced as the source and means of spiritual des potism. But history shows that sacerdotal tyranny may reach its height while the Church is struggling against a hostile civil power. No practical inference therefore, professing to be drawn from the testimony of facts, can be valid, unless what has been incidental to hierarchical usurpation is clearly distinguished from what was its essential principle. Otherwise, we may unwittingly promote the very abuses we wish to exclude and may be led' moreover to spurn the most important of all the axioms that should give law to the social system.