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The Syllabus of Pius IX.

The fifty-ninth, sixtieth, and sixty-first, acknowledge no law in nature but the right of the strongest.

The sixty-second applies to States the degrading principle, which every Englishman loathes and detests, of standing idly by, while the weak are oppressed by the strong, called the principle of non-intervention.

In condemning the sixty-third, the Pontiff shews himself the best preserver of civil allegiance, binding all Catholics throughout the world, under pain of being deprived of the communion of the Church and excluded from all hope of salvation, to condemn and repudiate the doctrine that makes it lawful to refuse obedience to legitimate princes, or to rebel against them.


§ VIII.—Errors concerning Christian Marriage.

The summary of what Catholics believe on the subject of marriage with reference to the opinions herein censured, is this: "Marriage, even in the law of nature, was indissoluble, though not with the more perfect indissolubility it has acquired from Christ in the New Law. He has raised it to the dignity of a sacrament. The contract itself is the sacrament; the latter is not something extrinsical, superadded to the matrimonial contract. As it is an absolute decree of the Redeemer that so it should be, it is out of the power of Christians to evade it. Hence every marriage between baptized Christians, if validly contracted, is, ipso facto, a sacrament, although gone through without any exterior religious rite or ceremony. Once raised to the rank of a sacrament, it took its place among the social