While insisting on the dignity and obligations of suffrage, it may perhaps be necessary to observe that the church prescribes no specific form of government. Government itself is required under some form, for the reason that we are created and fulfil our allotted destiny under the operation of an organic law which we have the power, and under certain circumstances the disposition, to violate.
We have no power to annul or abrogate the organic law, and its violation in virtue of its own nature, and our responsibility entails specific penalties in time, and, as it is eternal in its origin and action, eternity. The superiority of the human race, and the merit and honor of obedience, reside in the power of choice, and the ability which we possess to decide our temporal and eternal destiny, and renew and perfect, or reject and obliterate our relations with the Creator. A happy, prosperous, and peaceful temporal condition is not guaranteed, nor is it essential to true well-being but these most desirable concomitants of earthly existence necessarily accompany and flow from the enforcement of the requirements of the organic law upon our own conduct and that of others less disposed to obey them.
All human government rests upon this basis, whether of patriarch, prophet, priest, king, chieftain, pope, bishop, emperor, or people in organized assembly.
The principle underlying every form of government is that of command and obedience, because the government of the universe is one of law. Both command and obedience are of the same nature and alike honorable, because there can be but one source of law, and that is God; and he in his humanity obeyed the laws of his own creation in his divinity, and personally fulfilled the obligations of his own imposition. Who is he who despises obedience, when the Son of Man became obedient to the death of the cross?
All legislation in harmony with the organic law is theocratic and divine; all in violation or opposition, precisely in the measure and degree of departure, unjust, cruel, tyrannical, false, vain, unstable, and weak, and not entitled to respect or obedience.
Since justice and our honor and dignity require that we should obey God, and not man, we are compelled by every reasonable motive to ascertain his will. He does not communicate personally and orally with creatures.
Unless we have the means of ascertaining with certainty what his wishes are on a given subject, whether of the private practice of virtue or the administration of a public duty, we are left to the direction of opinions, interests, and passions more or less superficially instructed and enlightened, and tend inevitably toward barbarism, despotism, and social and political disorganization. The Catholic Church is the medium and channel through which the will of God is expressed. The chain of communication, composed of the triple strand of revelation, inspiration, and faith, stretches underneath the billows of eternity to the shore of time, from the throne of God to the chair of Peter. The finger of the pope, like the needle in the compass, invariably points to the pole of eternal truth, and the mind of the sovereign pontiff is as certain to reflect the mind and will of God as the mirror at one end of a submarine cable to indicate the electric signal made at the other.
The will of God is expressed as plainly through the church as it was through Moses and the tables of the law. It is distinct, definite, intelligible, and precise, and we are bound to execute the will thus expressed, and act in the light of the intelligence thus supplied.
All legislation which has stood the test of time has flowed from the divinely-inspired fountain of natural justice, illuminated by her wisdom, corrected by her experience, interpreted by her theology and philosophy. All tyranny, injustice, force, cruelty, violence, and oppression follow as the result of violation of the organic law as interpreted by the church, or from systems of legislation in opposition to, or abrogation of, her eternal principles.
While immunity from temporal suffering is nowhere promised, it is nevertheless true that the greater portion of evils and sorrows are capable of prevention or relief.