The fundamental principles of such a government are imposed upon it by necessity.  In the first place, progressive centralisation, and the substitution of a graduated hierarchy for popular government, came about as inevitably in the Catholic Church as in the Mediterranean Empire of the Caesars.  The primitive colleges of presbyters soon fell under the rule of the bishops, the bishops under the patriarchs; and then Rome suffered her first great defeat in losing the Eastern patriarchates, which she could not subjugate.  The truncated Church, no longer ‘universal,’ found itself obliged to continue the same policy of centralisation, and with such success that, under Innocent III, the triumph of the theocracy seemed complete.  The Papacy dominated Europe de facto, and claimed to rule the world de jure.  Boniface VIII, when the clouds were already gathering, issued the famous Bull ’Unam sanctam,’ in which he said:  ’Subesse Romano pontifici omnes humanas creaturas declaramus, definimus, et pronuntiamus omnino esse de necessitate salutis.’  The claim is logical.  A theocracy (when religion is truly monotheistic)[51] must claim to be universal de jure; and its ruler must be the infallibly inspired and autocratic vicegerent of the Almighty.  He is the rightful lord of the world, whether he gives a continent to the King of Spain by a stroke of the pen, or whether his secular jurisdiction is limited by the walls of his palace.  In the fourteenth century the Pope is already called ’dominus deus noster’—­precisely the style in which Martial adulates Domitian.  In the Bull of Pius V (1570) the claim of universal dominion is reiterated; it is asserted that the Almighty,

’cui data est omnis in caelo et in terra potestas, unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam, extra quam nulla est salus, uni soli in terris, videlicet apostolorum principi Petro Petrique successori Romano pontifici in potestatis plenitudine tradidit gubernandam.’

But the final victory of infallibilism was the achievement of the nineteenth-century Jesuits, who completed the dogmatic apotheosis of the Pope at the moment when the last vestiges of his temporal power were being snatched from him.

Now a government of this type is always in want of money.  The spiritual Roman Empire was as costly an institution as the court and the bureaucracy of Diocletian and his successors.  The same necessity which suppressed democracy in the Church drove it to elaborate an oppressive system of taxation, in which every weakness of human nature was systematically exploited for gain, and every morsel of divine grace placed on a tariff.  But this method of raising revenue is only possible while the priests can persuade the people that they really control a treasury of grace, from which they can make or withhold grants at their pleasure.  It stands or falls with a non-ethical and magical view of the divine economy which is hardly compatible with a high level of culture or morality.  The Catholic Church has thus been obliged, for purely fiscal reasons, to discourage secular education, particularly of a scientific kind, and to keep the people, so far as possible, in the mental and moral condition most favourable to such transactions as the purchase of indulgences and the payment of various insurances against hell and purgatory.