Chapter IX: Book II: The second book answers the question whether the Roman people

took to itself this dignity of Monarchy, or Empire, by right. But right in things is nothing else than the similitude of the Divine Will, and what God wills in human society is to be held as true and pure right. God’s will is invisible; but it is manifested in this matter by the whole history of Rome (ii. 1, 2). The surpassing nobleness of Aeneas, and therefore of his descendants (ii. 3); the traditional miracles wrought for the Romans (ii. 4); the devotion of the great Roman citizens from Cincinnatus to Cato, showing that the Roman people, in subjecting the world to itself, contemplated the good of the Commonwealth, and therefore the end of right (ii. 5, 6); the manifest adaptation of the Roman people by nature for ruling the nations with imperial sway (ii. 7);--all these prove that it was by right that the Romans acquired the Empire. The hidden judgment of God is sometimes revealed by contest, whether in the clash of champions in an ordeal or in the contention of rivals striving together for some prize (ii. 8). Such a prize was the empire of the world, which by divine judgment fell to the Roman people, when all were wrestling for it, and the kings of the Assyrians, Egyptians, and Persians, and even Alexander himself had failed (ii. 9). Their wars, too, from the earliest times were under the form of an ordeal; and Divine Providence declared in their favour. Thus arguments resting on principles of reason prove that the Roman people acquired the supreme and universal jurisdiction by right (ii. 10, 11). And arguments based upon principles of Christian faith support it. Christ, by His birth under the edict of Augustus, confirmed the imperial jurisdiction from which that edict proceeded; and, by His death under the vicar of Tiberius, He confirmed the universal penal jurisdiction of the Emperor over all the human race which was to be punished in His flesh (ii. 12, 13). “Let them cease to reproach the Roman Empire, who feign themselves to be sons of the Church; when they see that the Bridegroom, Christ, thus confirmed it at either limit of His warfare” (_i.e._ at the beginning and at the end of His life upon earth).