VII. St. Augustine, St. Gregory Magnus, St. Thomas, Bellarmin, Suarez, and the theologians generally, hold that princes derive their power from God through the people, or that the people, though not the source, are the medium of all political authority, and therefore rulers are accountable for the use they make of their power to both God and the people.
This doctrine agrees with the democratic theory in vesting sovereignty in the people, instead of the king or the nobility, a particular individual, family, class, or caste; and differs from it, as democracy is commonly explained, in understanding by the people, the people collectively, not individually--the organic people, or people fixed to a given territory, not the people as a mere population--the people in the republican sense of the word nation, not in the barbaric or despotic sense; and in deriving the sovereignty from God, from whom is all power, and except from whom there is and can be no power, instead of asserting it as the underived and indefeasible right of the people in their "own native right and might." The people not being God, and being only what philosophers call a second cause, they are and can be sovereign only in a secondary and relative sense. It asserts the divine origin of power, while democracy asserts its human origin. But as, under the law of nature, all men are equal, or have equal rights as men, one man has and can have in himself no right to govern another; and as man is never absolutely his own, but always and everywhere belongs to his Creator, it is clear that no government originating in humanity alone can be a legitimate government. Every such government is founded on the assumption that man is God, which is a great mistake--is, in fact, the fundamental sophism which underlies every error and every sin.
The divine origin of government, in the sense asserted by Christian theologians, is never found distinctly set forth in the political writings of the ancient Greek and Roman writers. Gentile philosophy had lost the tradition of creation, as some modern philosophers, in so-called Christian nations, are fast losing it, and were as unable to explain the origin of government as they were the origin of man himself.