AND DEMOCRACY 443
Papal Commissions which meet in die Vatican. One supervises Biblical studies, another the interpretation of the Codex Juris canonist, a third (comprised o Benedictines) is entrusted with the study and editing of the Vulgate, and a fourth deals with Russian questions. The newest Commission, founded by Pope Pius XI, fosters Christian archaeology and an institute affiliated with this is supervised by a German scholar. The renowned Vatican Library is carefully watched over, especially now that a librarian wears the tiara. The Vatican missionary expedition of 1925 gave rise to a Museum in the Lateran Palace for missionary and ethnological study, At the head of this there is an anthropologist who belongs to the Society of the Divine Word.
A structure of harmonious proportions, simple and majestic alike, the Curia compels even its enemies to pay it respect. But it is not what its adulators would make of it, an ideal co-ordination of antago- nistic forms of government. It is rather the purest incarnation of absolutism, being bolstered up not only by Divine right, as was the old idea of the monarchy, but by the consciousness of representing God's kingdom on earth. The structure of the hierarchy rests, it is true, on the soil of the believing laity, but it is as if it hung from heaven with chains by reason of its faith in the imparting of the Holy Ghost to the one consecrated Head. No secular form of the state can be compared with this kingdom of Christian souls. The Church also has its aristocracy in the College of Cardinals, but this is basically dif- ferent from the hereditary nobility because it is always renewed from below according to the democratic principle. The parliamentarism of the Church, on the other hand, is completely undemocratic: one will, one power, flow from above downward through organs chosen and guided; and the will and the co-government of the masses below never move upward through freely elected representatives, without whom democracy and parliamentarism are inconceivable. Demo- cratic renewal from below is, however, nothing excepting natural neces- sity, for the absolute electoral monarchy of the Church cannot dispense with the mothers who from out of the laity send successors into its celibate hierarchical organization.
