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ON 
 
 THE CONSTITUTION OF THE CHURCH 
 AND STATE. 
 

ON THE CONSTITUTION 
 
 OF THE 
 
 CHURCH AND STATE, 
 
 ACCORDING TO THE IDEA OF EACH. 
 
 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. /W 
 
 EDITED FROM THE AUTHOR’S CORRECTED COPY, WITH NOTES, 
 
 By henry nelson COLERIDGE, M.A. 
 
 FOURTH EDITION. 
 
 LONDON : 
 
 EDWARD MOXON, DOVER STREET. 
 1852. 
 
 e©LL«t&E LIBKAKY 
 6H1BTNUT HILL, MASS. 
 
LONDOJH : 
 
 BRADBUBY AND EVANS, PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PREFACE . 
 
 ADVERTISEMENT 
 
 CHURCH AND STATE, PART I. . , . 
 
 CHURCH OF CHRIST 
 
 CHURCH OF ANTICHRIST .... 
 CHURCH AND STATE, PART II. 
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 HISTORY OF ENTHUSIASM 
 
 dialogue between demosius and MYSTES 
 
 Page 
 
 vii 
 
 1 
 
 9 
 
 135 
 
 157 
 
 175 
 
 197 
 
 201 
 
 208 
 
'' O THAT our Clergy did but know and see that their tithes and glebes 
 belong to them as officers and functionaries of the Nationalty, — as 
 clerks, and not exclusively as theologians, and not at all as ministers 
 of the Gospel ; — but that they are likewise ministers of the Church of 
 Christ, and that their claims and the powers of that Church are no more 
 alienated or affected by their being at the same time the Established 
 Clergy, than by the common coincidence of their being justices of the 
 peace, or heirs to an estate, or stockholders ! The Romish divines placed 
 the Church above the Scriptures : our present divines give it no place 
 at all. 
 
 “ But Donne and his great contemporaries had not yet learnt to be 
 afraid of announcing and enforcing the claims of the Church, distinct 
 from, and coordinate with, the Scriptures. This is one evil consequence, 
 though most unnecessarily so, of the union of the Church of Christ with 
 the National Church, and of the claims of the Christian pastor and 
 preacher with the legal and constitutional rights and revenues of the 
 officers of the National Clerisy. Our Clergymen, in thinking of their 
 legal rights, forget those rights of theirs which depend on no human law 
 at all .” — Literary Remains, vol. iii. p. 119. 
 
PREFACE TO THE CHURCH AND STATE. 
 
 A RECOLLECTION of the value set upon the following 
 little work bj its Author,* combined with a deep 
 sense of the wisdom and importance of the positions 
 laid down in it, will, it is hoped, be thought to 
 justify the publication of a few preliminary remarks, 
 designed principally to remove formal difficulties 
 out of the path of a reader not previously acquainted 
 with Mr. Coleridge’s writings, nor conversant with 
 the principles of his philosophy. The truth is that, 
 although the Author’s plan is well defined and the 
 treatment strictly progressive, there is in some 
 parts a want of detailed illustration and express 
 connexion, which weakens the impression of the 
 entire work on the generality of readers. ‘‘ If,” 
 says Mr. Maurice, “ I were addressing a student 
 
 * See Table Talk, 2nd edit. p. 5, note. 
 
PREl’ACE. 
 
 viii 
 
 who was seeking to make up his mind on the ques- 
 tion, without being previously biassed by the views 
 of any particular party, I could save myself this 
 trouble by merely referring him to the work of 
 Mr. Coleridge, on the Idea of Church and State, 
 published shortly after the passing of the Eoman 
 Catholic Bill. The hints respecting the nature of 
 the Christian Church which are thrown out in that 
 work are only sufficient to make us wish that the 
 Author had developed his views more fully; but 
 the portion of it which refers to the State seems 
 to me in the highest degree satisfactory. When I 
 use the word satisfactory, I do not mean that it 
 will satisfy the wishes of any person who thinks 
 that the epithets teres atque rotundus are the 
 highest that can be applied to a scientific work; 
 who expects an author to furnish him with a 
 complete system which he can carry away in his 
 memory, and, after it has received a few improve- 
 ments from himself, can hawk it about to the public 
 or to a set of admiring disciples. Men of this 
 description would regard Mr. Coleridge’s book as 
 disorderly and fragmentary; but those who have 
 some notion of what Butler meant when he said, 
 that the best writer would be he who merely stated 
 his premisses, and left his readers to work out 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 IX 
 
 the conclusions for themselves; — those who feel 
 that they want just the assistance which Socrates 
 offered to his scholars — assistance, not in providing 
 them with thoughts, hut in bringing forth into the 
 light thoughts which they had within them before ; 
 — these will acknowledge that Mr. Coleridge has 
 only deserted the common high way of exposition, 
 — that he might follow more closely the turnings 
 and windings which the mind of an earnest thinker 
 makes when it is groping after the truth to which 
 he wishes to conduct it. To them, therefore, the 
 book is satisfactory by reason of those very qualities 
 which make it alike unpleasant to the formal school- 
 man and to the man of the world. And, accordingly, 
 scarcely any book, published so recently, and pro- 
 ducing so little apparent effect, has really exercised 
 a more decided influence over the thoughts and 
 feelings of men who ultimately rule the mass of 
 their countrymen.” * 
 
 Under these circumstances, the following argu- 
 ment or summary of the fundamental and more 
 complicated portion of the work may be serviceable 
 to the ingenuous but less experienced reader. 
 
 I. — The constitution of the State and the Church 
 
 * Kingdom of Christy yoI. iii. p. 2 (first edition). A work 
 of singular originality and power. (See Dedication to the 
 Second Edition.) 
 
X 
 
 PHEFACE. 
 
 is treated according to the Idea of each. By the 
 Idea of the State or Church is here meant that 
 conception, which is not abstracted from any par- 
 ticular form or mode in which either may happen 
 to exist at any given time, nor yet generalised from 
 any number or succession of such forms or modes, 
 but which is produced by a knowledge or sense of 
 the ultimate aim of each. This idea, or sense of 
 the ultimate aim, may exist, and powerfully influ- 
 ence a man’s thoughts and actions, without his being 
 able to express it in definite words, and even with- 
 out his being distinctly conscious of its indwelling. 
 A few may possess ideas in this meaning; — the 
 generality of mankind are possessed by them. In 
 either case, an idea, so understood, is in order of 
 thought always and of necessity contemplated as 
 antecedent, — a mere conception, strictly defined 
 as an abstraction or generalisation from one or more 
 particular forms or modes, is necessarily posterior, 
 in order of thought, to the thing thus conceived. 
 And though the idea is in its nature a prophecy, yet 
 it must be carefully remembered that the particular 
 form, construction, or model, best fitted to render 
 the idea inteUigible to a third person, is not neces- 
 sarily — ^perhaps, not most commonly — ^the mode or 
 form in which it actually arrives at realisation. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 XI 
 
 For in consequence of the imperfection of means 
 and materials in all the works of man, a law of 
 compensation and a principle of compromise are 
 perpetually active : and it is the first condition of 
 a sound philosophy of State to recognise the wide 
 extent of the one, the necessity of the other, and 
 the frequent occurrence of both. 
 
 II. — The word State is used in two senses, — a 
 larger, in which it comprises, and a narrower, in 
 which it is opposed to, the JSTational Church. A 
 Constitution is the ideal attribute of a State in the 
 larger sense, as a body politic having the principle 
 of its unity within itself; and it is the law or 
 principle which prescribes the means and conditions 
 by and under which that unity is established and 
 preserved. The Constitution, therefore, of this 
 Nation comprises the idea of a Church and a State 
 in the narrower sense, placed in simple antithesis 
 one to another. The unity of the State, in this 
 latter sense, results from the equipoise and inter- 
 dependence of the two great opposite interests of 
 every such State, its Permanence and its Progres- 
 sion. The permanence of a State is connected 
 with the land ; its progression with the mercantile, 
 manufacturing, distributive, and professional classes. 
 The first class is subdivided into what our law 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 xii 
 
 books bave called Major and Minor Barons ; — both 
 of these subdivisions, as such, being opposed to the 
 representatives of the progressive interest of the 
 nation, yet the latter of them drawing more nearly 
 to the antagonist order than the former. Upon 
 these facts the principle of the Constitution of the 
 State, in its narrower sense, was established. The 
 balance of permanence and progression was secured 
 by a legislature of two Houses ; the first, consisting 
 wholly of the Major Barons or landholders ; the 
 second, of the Minor Barons or knights, as the 
 representatives of the remaining landed community, 
 together with the Burgesses, as representing the 
 commercial, manufacturing, distributive, and profes- 
 sional classes — ^the latter constituting the effectual 
 majority in number. The King, in whom the 
 executive power was vested, was in regard to the 
 interests of the State, in its antithetic sense, the 
 beam of the scales. 
 
 This is the Idea of that State, not its history ; 
 it has been the standard or aim, the Lex Legum, 
 which, in the very first law of State ever promulgated 
 in the land, was pre-supposed as the ground of that 
 first law. 
 
 III. — But the English Constitution results from 
 the harmonious opposition of two institutions, the 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 xiii 
 
 State, in the narrower sense, and the Church. For 
 as by the composition of the one provision was 
 alike made for permanence, and progression in 
 wealth and personal freedom ; to the other was 
 committed the only remaining interest of the State 
 in its larger sense, that of maintaining and advancing 
 the moral cultivation of the people themselves, 
 without which neither of the former could continue 
 to exist. 
 
 IV. — It was common, at least to the Scandinavian, 
 Keltic, and Gothic, with the Semitic tribes, if not 
 universal in all the primitive races, that in taking 
 possession of a new country, and in the division 
 of the land into heritable estates among the indi- 
 vidual warriors or heads of families, a Eeserve 
 should he made for the Nation itself. The sum total 
 of these heritable portions is called the Propriety, 
 the Eeserve the Nationalty. These were consti- 
 tuent factors of the commonwealth ; the existence 
 of the one being the condition of the rightfiilness 
 of the other. But the wealth appropriated was 
 not so entirely a property as not to remain, to a 
 certain extent, national ; nor was the wealth reserved 
 so exclusively national as not to admit an individual 
 tenure. The settlement of the Nationalty in one 
 tribe only of the Hebrew confederacy, subservient 
 
XIV 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 as it was to a higher purpose, was in itself a 
 deviation from the idea, and a main cause of the 
 comparatively httle effect which the Levitical 
 establishment produced on the moral and intellec- 
 tual character of the Jewish people during the 
 whole period of their existence as an independent 
 state. 
 
 V. — The Nationalty was reserved for the main- 
 tenance of a permanent class or order, the Clerisy, 
 Clerks, Clergy, or Church of the Nation. This 
 class comprised the learned of all denominations, 
 the professors of all those arts and sciences, the 
 possession and application of which constitute the 
 civilisation of a country. Theology formed only a 
 part of the objects of the National Church. The 
 theologians took the lead, indeed, and deservedly 
 so ; — ^not because they were priests, but because 
 under the name of theology were contained the 
 study of languages, history, logic, ethics, and a 
 philosophy of ideas ; because the science of theology 
 itself was the root of the knowledges that civUise 
 man, and gave unity and the circulating sap of life 
 to aU other sciences ; and because, under the same 
 name were comprised all the main aids, instruments, 
 and materials of National Education. Accordingly, 
 a certain smaller portion of the functionaries of the 
 
PHEFACE. 
 
 XV 
 
 Clerisj were to remain at the fountain heads of the 
 humanities, cultivating and enlarging the knowledge 
 already possessed, watching over the interests of 
 physical and moral science, and the instructors of 
 all the remaining more numerous classes of the 
 order. These last were to be distributed through- 
 out the country, so as not to leave even the smallest 
 integral division without a resident guide, guardian, 
 and teacher, diffusing through the whole community 
 the knowledge indispensable for the understanding 
 of its rights, and for the performance of the corre- 
 spondent duties. But neither Christianity, nor a 
 fortiori, any particular scheme of theology supposed 
 to be deduced from it, forms any essential part of 
 the being of a National Church, however conducive 
 it may be to its well being. A National Church 
 may exist, and has existed, without, because before, 
 the institution of the Christian Church, as the 
 Levitical Church in the Hebrew, and the Druidical 
 in the Keltic, constitutions may prove. 
 
 VI. — But two distinct functions do not neces- 
 sarily imply or require two different functionaries : 
 on the contrary, the perfection of each may require 
 the union of both in the same person. And in the 
 instance now in question, as great and grievous 
 errors have arisen from confounding the functions 
 
XVI 
 
 PUEFACE. 
 
 of the National Church with those of the Church 
 of Christ, so fearfully great and grievous will be 
 the evils from the success of an attempt to separate 
 them. 
 
 VII. — In process of time, however, and as a 
 natural consequence of the expansion of the mer- 
 cantile and commercial order, the students and 
 professors of those sciences and sorts of learning, 
 the use and necessity of which were perpetual to 
 the Nation, but only occasional to the Individuals, 
 gradually detached themselves from the National 
 Clerisy, and passed over, as it were, to that order, 
 with the growth and thriving condition of which 
 their particular emoluments were found to increase 
 in equal proportion. And hence by slow degrees 
 the learned in the several departments of law, 
 medicine, architecture and the like, contributed to 
 form, under the common name of Professional, an 
 intermediate link between the national clerisy and 
 the simple burgesses. 
 
 YIII. — But this circumstance cannot alter the 
 tenure, or annul the rights, of those who remained, 
 and who, as members of the permanent learned 
 class, were planted throughout the realm as the 
 immediate agents and instruments in the work of 
 increasing and perpetuating the civilisation of the 
 
PEEFACE. 
 
 xvii 
 
 nation ; and who, tHus fulfilling the purposes for 
 which the Nationalty was reserved, are entitled to 
 remain its usufructuary trustees. The proceeds of 
 the ISTationalty, might, indeed, in strictness, if it 
 could ever be expedient, he rightfully transferred to 
 functionaries other than such as are also ministers 
 of the Church of Christ. But the Nationalty 
 itself cannot, without foul wrong to the nation, he 
 alienated from its original purposes ; and those who 
 being duly appointed thereto, exercise the functions 
 and perform the duties attached to the Nationalty, 
 possess a right to the same by a title to which the 
 thunders from Mount Sinai might give greater 
 authoi;ity, hut not additional evidence. 
 
 IX. — Previously to the sixteenth century, large 
 masses were alienated from the heritable proprieties 
 of the realm, and confounded with the Xationalty 
 under the common name of Church property. At 
 the period of the Eeformation a re-transfer of these 
 took place, and rightfully so : hut together with, 
 and under pretext of, this restoration to the State 
 of what properly belonged to it, a wholesale usurpa- 
 tion took place of a very large portion of that 
 which belonged to the Church. This was a sacri- 
 legious robbery on the Nation, and a deadly wound 
 on the constitution of the State at large. The 
 
 h 
 
XVlll 
 
 PHEFACE. 
 
 balance of the reserved and appropriated wealth of 
 the Nation was deranged, and thus the former 
 became unequal to the support of the entire burthen 
 of popular civilisation originally intended to be 
 borne by it."*^ Barely enough — indeed, less than 
 enough — was left for the effectual maintenance of 
 the primary class of the Clerisy, which had not 
 fallen off into separate professions, but continued 
 to be the proper servants of the public in producing 
 and reproducing, in preserving, promoting, and 
 perfecting all the necessary sources and conditions 
 of the civilisation of the Nation itself. t 
 
 X. — Though many things may detract from the 
 comparative fitness of individuals, or of particular 
 classes, for the trust and functions of the Nationalty, 
 
 * “ Give back to the Church what the Nation originally 
 consecrated to its use, and it ought then to be charged with 
 the education of the people ; but half of the original revenue 
 has been already taken by force from her, or lost to her 
 through desuetude, legal decision, or public opinion : and 
 are those whose very houses and parks are part and parcel 
 of what the Nation designed for the general purposes of the 
 Clergy, to be heard, when they argue for making the Church 
 support, out of her diminished revenues, institutions, the 
 intended means for maintaining which they themselves hold 
 under the sanction of legal robbery ] ” Table Talk, Pref. p. 
 xvi. 2nd edit. 
 
 f See an approach to an expression of the Author’s idea 
 of the National Church thus regarded, in the Bishop of 
 London’s late Charge, Oct. 1838, p. 2, &c. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 XIX 
 
 there are only two absolute disqualifications ; — 
 allegiance to a foreign power, or the acknowledg- 
 ment of any other visible head of the National 
 Church but the King ; — and compulsory celibacy, 
 in connexion with, and dependence on, a foreign 
 and extra-national head. 
 
 XI. — The legitimate objects of the power of the 
 King and the two Houses of Parliament, as consti- 
 tuting the State, in its special and antithetic sense, 
 comprise, according to the idea, all the interests 
 and concerns of the Propriety, and rightfully those 
 alone. 
 
 XII. — The King, again, is the Head of the 
 National Clerisy, and the supreme trustee of the 
 Nationalty ; the power of which, in relation to its 
 proper objects is rightfully exercised, according to 
 the idea, by the King and the two Houses of Con- 
 vocation, and by them alone. The proper objects 
 of this power are mentioned in No. V. 
 
 XIII. — The Coronation Oath neither does, nor 
 can, bind the conscience of the King in matters of 
 faith. But it binds him to refuse his consent 
 (without which no change in the existing law can 
 be effected) to any measure subverting or tending 
 to subvert the safety and independence of the 
 National Church, or which may expose the realm to 
 
 h 2 
 
XX 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 the danger of a return of that foreign Usurper, 
 misnamed spiritual, from which it has with so many 
 sacrifices emancipated itself. And previously to 
 the ceremonial act which announces the King the 
 only lawful and sovereign head of both the Church 
 and the State, this oath is administered to him 
 religiously as the representative person and crowned 
 majesty of the Nation ; — religiously ; for the mind 
 of the Nation, existing only as an idea, can act 
 distinguishably on the ideal powers alone, — that is, 
 on the reason and conscience. 
 
 The several other points comprised in the 
 remainder of this work, though of great interest 
 and importance, require neither analysis nor com- 
 ment for their perfect comprehension. But it will 
 naturally occur to the reader to consider how far 
 the idea of the Church and of its relation to the 
 State presented in these pages coincides with either 
 of the two celebrated systems, those of Hooker and 
 Warburton, which, under one shape or another, 
 have divided the opinions of thinking persons up 
 to the present day. 
 
 Acording to Hooker, the Church is one body, — 
 the essential unity of which consists iu, and is 
 known by, an external profession of Christianity, 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 XXI 
 
 without regard in any respect had to the moral 
 virtues or spiritual graces of any member of that 
 body. “ If by external profession they be Chris- 
 tians, then are they of the visible Church of Christ : 
 and Christians by external profession they are all, 
 whose mark of recognisance hath in it those things 
 which we have mentioned, yea, although they be 
 impious idolaters, wicked heretics, persons excom- 
 municable, yea, and cast out for notorious improbit}\ 
 Such withal we deny not to be the imps and limbs 
 of Satan, even as long as they continue such.” 
 ( — E. P. III. c. i. s. 7. Kehle's edit. vol. i. p. 431.) 
 
 With this Warburton and Coleridge in general 
 terms agree. {Alliance, &c. II. c. ii. s. 2 . — Church 
 and State, p. 139.) And the words of the nineteenth 
 Article, though apparently of a more restricted 
 import, may be presumed not to mean less. 
 
 But, further. Hooker insists that the Church, 
 existing in any particular country, and the State 
 are one and the same society, contemplated in two 
 different relations. “ A Commonwealth we name 
 it simply in regard of some regiment or policy 
 under which men live ; a Church for the truth of 
 that religion which they profess. * * * When we 
 oppose the Church, therefore, and the Common- 
 wealth in a Christian society, we mean by the 
 
xxii PREFACE. 
 
 Commonwealth that society with relation unto all 
 the public afiairs thereof, only the matter of true 
 religion excepted ; by the Church, the same society 
 with only reference unto the matter of true religion, 
 without any other alfairs besides: when that 
 society, which is both a Church and a Common- 
 wealth, doth flourish in those things which belong 
 unto it as a Commonwealth, we then say, ‘the 
 Commonwealth doth flourish ; ’ when in those things 
 which concern it as a Church, ‘ the Church doth 
 flourish;’ when in both, then ‘the Church and 
 Commonwealth flourish together.’ ” (E. P. VIII. 
 
 c. i. s. 5. vol. hi. p. 420 — 1.) 
 
 To this view "Warburton, as is weU known, is 
 directly opposed. He argues that, although two 
 societies may be so closely related to each other 
 as to have one common suppositum , — that is, the 
 same natural persons being exclusively members 
 of each, — the societies themselves, as such, are 
 factitious bodies, and each of them must therefore 
 of necessity be distinct in personality and will from 
 the other. “The artificial man, society, is much 
 unlike the natural ; who being created for several 
 ends hath several interests to pursue, and several 
 relations to consult, and may therefore be con- 
 sidered under several capacities, as a religious, a 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 XXlll 
 
 civil, and a rational animal ; and yet they all make 
 but one and the same man. But one and the same 
 political society cannot be considered in one view, 
 as a religious — in another, as a civil — and in 
 another, as a literary — community. One society 
 can be precisely but one of these communities.” 
 (Alliance^ &c. ii. c. v.) Accordingly Warburton 
 insists, in opposition to Hooker, that the Puritan 
 premiss, — that the Church and the State are distinct 
 and originally independent societies, — was and is 
 the truth ; but he denies the Puritan inference, that 
 such independency must therefore be perpetual ; — 
 aflBrming the existence of an alliance between these 
 two societies upon certain terms ; and a resulting 
 mutual inter-dependency of one on the other; 
 whereby the consequence from the position of the 
 Puritans — an im])erium in vmjperio^ or subjugation of 
 the State to the Church, — and the consequence 
 from the position of Hooker — the enslavement of 
 the Church by the State — are equally precluded. 
 The Church subordinates itself to the State upon 
 faith of certain stipulations for support by the 
 latter ; and if the State violates, or withdraws from 
 the fulfilment of, those stipulations, the Church is 
 thereby remitted to her original independence.* 
 
 * It is worthy of remark that, if Warburton had lived in 
 
XXIV 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 Now SO far as the distinct inter-dependency of 
 the State and the Church is in question, Coleridge 
 agrees with Warburton. But the peculiarity of 
 his system, as expressly laid down in this work 
 and incidentally mentioned in many of his other 
 writings, — a peculiarity fruitful in the most impor- 
 tant consequences — is grounded on a distinction 
 taken between the visible Church of Christ, as 
 localised in any Christian country, and the National 
 or Established Church of that country. Distinction^ 
 be it observed, not separation, — for the two ideas 
 
 — hene conveniunt, et in una sede morantur ; 
 
 they not only may co-exist in the same suppositim, 
 but may require an identity of subject in order to 
 the complete development of the perfections of 
 either. According to Coleridge, then, the Christian 
 Church is not a kingdom or realm of this world, 
 nor a member of any such kingdom or realm ; it is 
 not opposed to any particular State in the large 
 
 these days, and had adhered to the principles advocated by 
 him in this treatise, he must several years ago have declared 
 the terms of convention between the Church and State in 
 this country violated by the latter, and the alliance of the 
 two at an end. See his third book, and especially the 
 second chapter. It is to be observed, also, that Warburton 
 confounds the Christian with the Established Church as 
 much as Hooker. See B. II. c. iii. 3. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 XXV 
 
 or narrow sense of the word ; it is in no land 
 national, and the national Eeserve is » not entrusted 
 to its charge. It is, on the contrary, the opposite to 
 the World only ; the counterforce to the evils and 
 defects of States, as such, in the abstract, — asking 
 of any particular State neither wages nor dignities, 
 but demanding protection, that is, to be let alone. 
 
 With so much therefore of the preceding and all 
 other theories as considers any branch of the 
 Church of Christ, as such, in the character of a 
 National Establishment, and arrogates to it, as 
 such, upon any ground, worldly riches, rank or 
 power — Coleridge is directly at variance. But we 
 have already seen (v. vi. yii. yiii.) that there is, 
 neYertheless, in this and in almost every other 
 country raised above the level of barbarism, a 
 Church, which is strictly and indefeasibly National; 
 and in the ideal history herein presented of its 
 origin and primary elements, its endowment, its 
 uses, duties, ends, and objects, its relation to the 
 State, and its present representatives, a solemn 
 warning is recorded of the fatal consequences of 
 either confounding it with, or separating it from, 
 the visible Church of Christ. 
 
 The Christian Church is a public and visible 
 community, having ministers of its own, whom the 
 
XXVI 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 State can neither constitute nor degrade, and whose 
 maintenance amongst Christians is as secure as the 
 command of Christ can make it : for so hath the 
 Lord ordained that they which preach the Gospel 
 should live of the Gospel, (1 Cor. ix. 14.) The 
 National Church is a public and visible community, 
 having ministers whom the Nation, through the 
 agency of a Constitution, hath created trustees of a 
 reserved national fund, upon fixed terms and with 
 defined duties, and whom, in case of breach of 
 those terms or dereliction of those duties, the 
 Nation, through the same agency, may discharge. 
 “ If the former be Ecclesia, the communion of such 
 as are called out of the World, that is, in reference 
 to the especial ends and purposes of that com- 
 munion; the lattermight more expressively havebeen 
 called Enclesia, or an order of men chosen in and of 
 the realm, and constituting an estate of the realm.” 
 
 Now there is no reason why the ministers of the 
 one Church may not also be ministers of the other : 
 there are many reasons why they should be. 
 
 When therefore it is objected that Christ’s 
 hingdom is not of this world, it is admitted to be 
 true ; but the text is shown to have no application 
 in the way of impeachment of the titles, emoluments 
 or authorities, of an institution which rightfully is of 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 XXVll 
 
 this world, and would not answer the end of its 
 constitution if it ceased to belong to, and in a 
 certain sense to sympathise with, the world. When 
 again it is alleged that “ the best service which men 
 of power can do to Christ is without any more 
 ceremony to sweep all and leave the Church as bare 
 as in the day it was first born ” — “ that if we give 
 God our hearts and affections, our goods are better 
 bestowed otherwise,” * the spirit and reason of that 
 allegation are humbly submitted to God’s own 
 judgment ; but it is at the same time confidently 
 charged in reply, that the notion of the Church, 
 as the established instructress of the people, being 
 improved in efficiency by the reduction of its 
 ministers to a state bordering on mendicancy — can 
 in its flagrant folly be alone attributed to that 
 meanness of thought, which is at once the fruit and 
 the punishment of minds enslaved to party and the 
 world, and rendered indifierent to all truth by an 
 affected toleration of every form of error. When 
 further it is said that the Bishops of the Church of 
 Christ have no vocation to interfere in the legisla- 
 tion of the country, it is granted ; but with this 
 parallel assertion, that the Prelates of a National 
 Establishment, charged with the vast and awful 
 
 * Hooker, B. Y. Ixxiv. 17. 
 
xxviii 
 
 PEEFACE. 
 
 task of preserving, increasing and perpetuating the 
 moral culture of the people, have a call to be 
 present, advise, and vote in the ISTational Council, 
 which can only cease to be a right when the 
 representatives of the dearest national interest are 
 denied a voice in the national assembly ; and which 
 is no more impaired by the fact of those Prelates 
 sustaining in their individual persons another and 
 still more sacred character than by their being 
 members of a literary club or a botanical society. 
 When, finally, it is insisted to be contrary to justice 
 to compel those who dissent from a religious system 
 either as to its doctrines or its forms of worship, 
 to contribute to the maintenance of its priests and 
 ministers, it is not denied ; but it is withal main- 
 tained, that a national dedication of funds for the 
 support of a determinate class of men, with the 
 duty of national civilisation to perform, can no more 
 be vacated or qualified by reason of the voluntary 
 secession of such dissenters from that religious 
 system, because the seceders understand the 
 character and obligation of that duty in a way of 
 their own, than the rights of Parliament to levy 
 taxes for the protection of our independence from 
 foreign aggression can be afiected by the dogma of 
 rich philanthropists that war is unlawful, and to 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 XXIX 
 
 pay a shilling towards its support an offence 
 against Grod. 
 
 But after all, it is urged, the funds set apart by 
 the ISTation for the support of the National Church 
 are now in fact received by the ministers of the 
 Church of Christ in this country ! True ; but, 
 according to the idea, — and that idea involves a 
 history and a prophecy of the truth — it is not 
 because they are such ministers that they receive 
 those funds, but because, being now the only 
 representatives, as formerly the principal con- 
 stituents of the National Clerisy or Church, they 
 alone have a commission to carry on the work of 
 national cultivation on national grounds — trans- 
 muting and integrating aU that the separate 
 professions have achieved in science or art — but, 
 with a range transcending the limits of professional 
 views, or local or temporary interests, applying the 
 product simple and defecated, to the strengthening 
 and subliming of the moral life of the Nation itself. 
 
 Such a Church is a principal instrument of the 
 divine providence in the institution and government 
 of human society. But it is not that Church against 
 which we know that Hell shall not prevail. 
 
 Bor when the Nation, fatigued with the weight 
 of dear and glorious recollections, shall resolve to 
 
XXX 
 
 PEEFACE. 
 
 repudiate its corporate existence and character, 
 and to resolve its mystic unity into the breathing 
 atoms that crowd the surface of the land, — then 
 the national and ancestral Church of England will 
 have an end. But it cannot be destroyed before. 
 It hes within the folds of that marvellous Constitu- 
 tion, which patriots have out-watched the stars to 
 develop and to protect, and is not separable from 
 it. The time may come when it may seem fit to 
 God that both shall perish, forever, or for a season; 
 — and the sure token of that time will be, when the 
 divorce of scientific from religious education shall 
 have had its full work throughout the length and 
 the breadth of the land. Then although the Church 
 of England may faU, the Church of Christ in 
 England will stand erect ; and the distinction, lost 
 now in a common splendour, will be better seen 
 and more poignantly felt by that darkening World 
 to which the Christian Church must become a 
 more conspicuous opposite. 
 
 01 ) y d p VLV Ouard 
 
 <pv<ns dvepcau €Tlkt€v, oude 
 ixi)v TTore XdQa KaraKoifMao'CL' 
 fieyas ip r avrrj ©ebs, 
 ou5b yr)pd(TK€i. 
 
 Lincoln’s Inn, 
 
 Nov. 29, 1838. 
 
 H. K C. 
 
ON 
 
 THE CONSTITUTION OF THE CHUECH 
 AND STATE, 
 
 ACCORDING TO THE IDEA OP EACH. 
 
ADVEETISEMENT.* 
 
 The occasion of this little work will be sufficiently 
 explained by an extract from a letter addressed by 
 me to a friend a few years ago : — “You express your 
 wonder that I, who have so often avowed my dislike 
 to the introduction even of the word, religion, in any 
 special sense, in Parliament, or from the mouth of 
 lawyer or statesman, speaking as such ; who have so 
 earnestly contended that religion cannot take on itself 
 the character of law, without facto ceasing to be 
 religion, and that law could neither recognise the 
 obligations of religion for its principles, nor become 
 the pretended guardian and protector of the Faith, 
 without degenerating into inquisitorial tyranny ; — that 
 I, who have avowed my belief, that if Sir Matthew 
 Hale’s doctrine,+ that the Bible was a part of the law 
 
 * To the first edition. — Ed. 
 
 + Hale’s expression was that Christianity is part of the 
 laws of England; and therefore to reproach the Christian 
 religion, is to speak in subversion of the law. The King 
 
 B 
 
2 
 
 ADVERTISEMENT. 
 
 of tlie land, had been uttered by a Puritan divine 
 instead of a Puritan judge, it would have been quoted 
 at this day as a specimen of Puritanical nonsense and 
 bigotry ; — ^you express your wonder that I, with all 
 these heresies on my head, should yet withstand the 
 measure of Roman Catholic emancipation, as it is called, 
 and join in opposing Sir Francis Burdett’s intended 
 Bill for the repeal of the disqualifying statutes ! And 
 you conclude by asking : but is this true ? 
 
 “ My answer is : Here are two questions. To the 
 first, namely, is it true that I am unfriendly to what 
 you call Catholic emancipation ? — I reply ; No, the 
 contrary is the truth. There is no inconsistency, 
 however, in approving the thing, and yet having my 
 doubts respecting the manner ; in desiring the same 
 end, and yet scrupling the means proposed for its 
 attainment. When you are called in to a consultation, 
 you may perfectly agree with another physician 
 respecting the existence of the malady and the expe- 
 dience of its removal, and yet differ respecting the 
 medicines and the method of cure. To your second 
 question, namely, am I unfriendly to the present 
 measure ? — I shall return an answer no less explicit. 
 Why I cannot return as brief a one, you will learn 
 from the following pages transcribed, for the greater 
 
 V. Taylor y Ventr. 293, Keble, 607. But Sir Edward Coke 
 had many years before said that Christianity is part and 
 parcel of the Common Law.” — Ed. 
 
ADVERTISEMENT. 
 
 3 
 
 part, from a paper drawn up by me some years ago, 
 at the request of a gentleman * — (that I have been 
 permitted to call him my friend, I place among the 
 highest honours of my life), — an old and intimate 
 acquaintance of the late Mr. Canning’s ; and which 
 paper, had it been finished before he left England, it 
 was his intention to have laid before the late Lord 
 Liverpool. 
 
 “From the period of the Union with Ireland, to 
 the present hour, I have neglected no opportunity of 
 obtaining correct information from books and from 
 men respecting the facts that bear on the question, 
 whether they regard the existing state of things, 
 or the causes and occasions of it ; nor, during this 
 time, has there been a single speech of any note, on 
 either side, delivered, or reported as delivered, in 
 either House of Parliament, which I have not heed- 
 ful! y and thoughtfully perused, abstracting and noting 
 down every argument that was not already on my list, 
 which, I need not say, has for many years past had 
 but few accessions to number. Lastly, my conclusion 
 I have subjected, year after year, to a fresh revisal, 
 conscious but of one influence likely to warp my 
 judgment : and this is the pain, I might with truth 
 add the humiliation, of differing from men whom I 
 loved and revered, and whose superior competence to 
 judge aright in this momentous cause I knew and 
 
 * The Right Honourable John Hookham Frere. — Ed, 
 
 B 2 
 
4 
 
 ADVERTISEMENT. 
 
 delighted to know ; and this aggravated by the reflec- 
 tion, that in receding from the Burkes, Cannings, and 
 Lansdownes, I did not move a step nearer to the 
 feelings and opinions of their antagonists. With this 
 exception, it is scarcely possible, I think, to conceive 
 an individual less under the influences of the ordinary 
 disturbing forces of the judgment than your poor 
 friend ; or from situation, pursuits, and habits of 
 thinking, from age, state of health and temperament, 
 less likely to be drawn out of his course by the under- 
 currents of hope or fear, of expectation or wish. But 
 least of all by predilection for any particular sect or 
 party : for wherever I look, in religion or in politics, 
 I seem to see a world of power and talent wasted on 
 the support of half truths, too often the most mis- 
 chievous, because least suspected of errors. This may 
 result from the spirit and habit of partisanship, the 
 supposed inseparable accompaniment of a free state, 
 which pervades all ranks, and is carried into all 
 subjects. But whatever may be its origin, one conse- 
 quence seems to be, that every man is in a bustle, 
 and, except under the sting of excited or alarmed self- 
 interest, scarcely any one in earnest.” 
 
 I had collected materials for a third part under the 
 title of “ What is to be done now 1 ” — consisting of 
 illustrations, from the history of the English and Scottish 
 Churches, of the consequences of the ignorance or con- 
 travention of the principles, which I have attempted 
 
ADVEETISEMENT. 
 
 to establish in the first part of this work ; and of 
 practical deductions from these principles, addressed 
 chiefly to the English clergy. But I felt the embers 
 glowing under the white ashes ; and, on reflection, I 
 have considered it more expedient that the contents of 
 this volume should be altogether in strict conformity 
 with the title ; that they should be, and profess to be, 
 no more and no other than ideas of the constitution in 
 Church and State. And thus I may without incon- 
 sistency entreat the friendly reader to bear in mind the 
 distinction enforced in these pages, between the exhi- 
 bition of an idea, and the way of acting on the same ; 
 and that the scheme or diagram best suited to make 
 the idea clearly understood may be very different from 
 the form in which it is or may be most adequately 
 realised. And if the reasonings of this work should 
 lead him to think that a strenuous opponent of the 
 former attempts in Parliament may have given his 
 support to the Bill lately passed into law without 
 inconsistency, and without meriting the name of 
 apostate, it may be to the improvement of his charity 
 and good temper, and not detract a tittle from his good 
 sense or political penetration. 
 
^:...y - , ■ ....'>.■; 
 
PART 1. 
 
 THE CONSTITUTION OF THE CHURCH 
 AND STATE, 
 
 ACCORDING TO THE IDEA OF EACH. 
 
THERE IS A MYSTERY IN THE SOUL OF STATE, 
 
 WHICH HATH AN OPERATION MORE DIVINE 
 
 THAN OUR MERE CHRONICLERS DARE MEDDLE WITH. 
 
 (Troil. and Cress, act iv. sc. 3, altered. — Ed.) 
 
ON 
 
 THE CONSTITUTION OE THE CHUECH 
 AND STATE, 
 
 ACCORDING TO THE IDEA OF EACH. 
 
 CHAPTEE I. 
 
 Prefatory remarks on the true import of the word, 
 Idea ; and what the Author means hy the expres- 
 sion, according to the ideaP 
 
 The Act lately passed for the admission of Eoman 
 Catholics into the Legislature * comes so near the 
 mark to which my convictions and wishes have 
 through my whole life, since earliest manhood, 
 unwaveringly pointed, and has so agreeably dis- 
 appointed my fears, that my first impulse was to 
 suppress the pages, which I had written while the 
 particulars of the Bill were yet unknown, in com- 
 pliance with the request of an absent friend, who 
 
 * 10 Geo. IV. c. 7. “An Act for the relief of his Majesty’s 
 Roman Catholic subjects.” — Ed. 
 
10 
 
 CONSTITUTION OF 
 
 had expressed an anxiety “to learn from myself 
 the nature and grounds of my apprehension, that 
 the measure would fail to effect the object imme- 
 diately intended by its authors.” 
 
 In answer to this I reply that the main ground 
 of that apprehension is certainly much narrowed ; 
 but as certainly not altogether removed. I refer 
 to the securities. And, let it be understood, that 
 in calling a certain provision hereafter specified, a 
 security, I use the word comparatively, and mean 
 no more, than that it has at least an equal claim 
 to be so called, with any of those that have been 
 hitherto proposed as such. Whether either one or 
 the other deserve the name; whether the thing 
 itself is possible ; I leave undetermined. This pre- 
 mised, I resume my subject, and repeat that the 
 main objection from which my fears as to the prac- 
 tical results of the proposed Bill were derived, 
 applies with nearly the same force to the Act 
 itself; though the fears themselves have, by the 
 spirit and general character of the clauses, been 
 considerably mitigated. The principle, the solemn 
 recognition of which I deem indispensable as a 
 security, and should be willing to receive as the 
 only security — superseding the necessity, though 
 possibly not the expediency, of any other, but itself 
 by no other superseded — this principle is not for- 
 mally recognised. It may perhaps be implied in one 
 
CHURCH A^^D STATE. 
 
 11 
 
 of the clauses (that which forbids the assumption 
 of local titles by the Eomish bishops) ;* but 
 this implication, even if really contained in the 
 clause, and actually intended by its framers, is 
 not calculated to answer the ends, and utterly 
 inadequate to supply the place, of the solemn 
 and formal declaration which I had required, and 
 which, with my motives and reasons for the same, 
 it will be the object of the following pages to set 
 forth. 
 
 But to enable the reader fully to understand, 
 and fairly to appreciate, my arguments, I must 
 previously state (what I at least judge to be) the 
 true idea of a Constitution, and, likewise, of a 
 national Church. And in giving the essential 
 character of the latter, I shall briefly specify its 
 distinction from the Church of Christ, and its 
 contra- distinction from a third form, which is 
 neither national nor Christian, but irreconcilable 
 with, and subversive of, both. By an idea I 
 mean (in this instance) that conception of a thing, 
 which is not abstracted from any particular state, 
 
 * S.ee ss. 24-5-6, prohibiting under a penalty the assump- 
 tion of the titles of the bishoprics and other ecclesiastical 
 dignities and ofiBces ; the exhibition of the insignia of Romish 
 priesthood, and the performance of any part of Romish 
 worship or religious service, elsewhere than in the usual 
 chapels. These enactments have been openly violated 
 with impunity from the passing of the Relief Act to this 
 day. — Ed. 
 
12 
 
 CONSTITUTION OF 
 
 form, or mode, in whicli the thing may happen to 
 exist at this or at that time ; nor yet generalised 
 from any number or succession of such forms or 
 modes; hut which is given by the knowledge of 
 its idtimate aim. 
 
 Only one observation I must be allowed to add ; 
 that this knowledge, or sense, may very well exist, 
 aye, and powerfully influence a man’s thoughts and 
 actions, without his being distinctly conscious of 
 the same, much more without his being competent 
 to express it in deflnite words. This, indeed, is 
 one of the points which distinguish ideas from con- 
 ceptions, both terms being used in their strict and 
 proper significations. The latter, that is, a con- 
 ception, consists iu a conscious act of the under- 
 standing, bringing any given object or impression 
 into the same class with any number of other 
 objects or impressions by means of some character 
 or characters common to them all. Concipimus 
 id est, capimus hoc cum illo ; — we take hold of 
 both at once, we comprehend a thing, when we 
 have learned to comprise it in a known class. On 
 the other hand, it is the privilege of the few to 
 possess an idea : of the generality of men, it might 
 be more truly affirmed that they are possessed 
 by it. 
 
 What is here said, will, I hope, suffice as a 
 popular explanation. Tor some of my readers, 
 
CHURCH AND STATE. 
 
 13 
 
 however, the following definition may not, perhaps, 
 be useless or unacceptable. That which, contem- 
 plated objectively, that is, as existing externally 
 to the mind, we call a law ; the same contemplated 
 subjectively (that is, as existing in a subject or 
 mind), is an idea. Hence Plato often names ideas 
 laws ; and Lord Bacon, the British Plato, describes 
 the laws of the material universe as the ideas in 
 nature.* Q;uo^^ in natura naturata lex^ in na- 
 tura naturante idea, dicitur. By way of illus- 
 tration take the following. Every reader of Eous- 
 seau, or of Hume’s Essays, will understand me 
 when I refer to the original social contract as- 
 sumed by Eousseau, and by other and wiser men 
 before him, as the basis of all legitimate govern- 
 ment. Now, if this be taken as the assertion of 
 an historical fact, or as the application of a con- 
 ception, generalised from ordinary compacts be- 
 tween man and man, or nation and nation, to an 
 alleged actual occurrence in the first ages of the 
 world ; namely, the formation of a first contract, 
 in which men should have covenanted with each 
 other to associate, or in which a multitude should 
 have entered into a compact with a few, the one 
 
 * Hm autem {divince mentis idecd) sunt vera signaxiula 
 Creatoris super creaturas, prout in materie per lineas reras et 
 exquisitas imprirmmtw' et terminantur, Nov. Org. P. II. 124. 
 —Ed, 
 
14 
 
 CONSTITUTION OF 
 
 to be governed and the other to govern under 
 certain declared conditions ; I shall run little 
 hazard at this time of day in declaring the pre- 
 tended fact a pure fiction, and the conception of 
 such a fact an idle fancy. It is at once false and 
 foolish.* For what if an original contract had 
 actually been entered into and formally recorded ? 
 Still I cannot see what addition of moral force 
 would be gained by the fact. The same sense of 
 moral obligation which binds us to keep it, must 
 have pre-existed in the same force and in relation 
 to the same duties, impelling our ancestors to make 
 it. For what could it do more than bind the con- 
 tracting parties to act for the general good, ac- 
 cording to their best lights and opportunities ? 
 It is evident that no specific scheme or consti- 
 tution can derive any other claim to our reverence, 
 than that which the presumption of its necessity 
 or fitness for the general good shall give it ; and 
 which claim of course ceases, or rather is reversed, 
 as soon as this general presumption of its utility 
 
 * I am not indeed certain that some operatical farce, 
 under the name of a social contract or compact, may not 
 have been acted by the Illuminati and constitution-manu- 
 facturers at the close of the eighteenth century ; a period 
 which how far it deserved the name, so complacently affixed 
 to it by contemporaries, of “ this enlightened age,’’ niay be 
 doubted. That it was an age of enlighteners no man will 
 deny. 
 
CHURCH AND STATE. 
 
 15 
 
 has given place to as general a conviction of the 
 contrary. It is true, indeed, that from duties 
 anterior to the formation of the contract, because 
 they arise out of the very constitution of our 
 humanity, which supposes the social state — it is true, 
 that in order to a rightful removal of the institution 
 or law thus agreed on, it is required that the con- 
 viction of its inexpediency shall be as general as 
 the presumption of its fitness was at the time of 
 its establishment. This, the first of the two great 
 paramount interests of the social state, that of 
 permanence, demands ; but to attribute more than 
 this to any fundamental articles, passed into law 
 by any assemblage of individuals, is an injustice 
 to their successors, and a high offence against the 
 other great interest of the social state, namely, 
 its progressive improvement. The conception, 
 therefore, of an original contract, is, I repeat, 
 incapable of historic proof as a fact, and it is 
 senseless as a theory. 
 
 But if instead of the conception or theory of an 
 original social contract, we say the idea of an ever- 
 originating social contract, this is so certain and 
 so indispensable, that it constitutes the whole 
 ground of the difference between subject and serf, 
 between a commonwealth and a slave plantation. 
 And this, again, is evolved out of the yet higher 
 idea of person in contra- distinction to thing; all 
 
16 
 
 CONSTITUTION OF 
 
 social law and justice being grounded on the prin- 
 ciple that a person can never, but by his own fault, 
 become a thing, or, without grievous wrong, be 
 treated as such ; and the distinction consisting in 
 this, that a thing may be used altogether and 
 merely as the means to an end; but the person 
 must always be included in the end ; his interest 
 must form a part of the object, a mean to which 
 he by consent, that is, by his own act, makes 
 himself. We plant a tree and we fell it ; we breed 
 the sheep and we shear or we kill it ; in both cases 
 wholly as means to our ends ; for trees and animals 
 are things. The wood-cutter and the hind are 
 likewise employed as means, but on agreement, and 
 that too an agreement of reciprocal advantage, which 
 includes them as well as their employer in the end ; 
 for they are persons. And the government, under 
 which the contrary takes place, is not worthy to be 
 called a state, if, as in the kingdom of Dahomey, it 
 be unprogressive ; or only by anticipation, where, 
 as in Eussia, it is in advance to a better and more 
 man- worthy order of things. N ow, notwithstanding 
 the late wonderful spread of learning through the 
 community, and though the schoolmaster and the 
 lecturer are abroad, the hind and the woodman 
 may, very conceivably, pass from cradle to coffin 
 without having once contemplated this idea, so 
 as to be conscious of the same. And there would 
 
CHURCH AND STATE. 
 
 17 
 
 be even an improbability in the supposition that 
 they possessed the power of presenting tbis idea 
 to tbe minds of others, or even to their own 
 thoughts, verbally as a distinct proposition. But 
 no man, who has ever listened to labourers of this 
 rank, in any alehouse, over the Saturday night’s 
 jug of beer, discussing the injustice of the present 
 rate of wages, and the iniquity of their being 
 paid in part out of the parish poor-rates, will 
 doubt for a moment that they are fully possessed 
 by the idea. 
 
 In close, though not perhaps obvious, connection 
 with this is the idea of moral freedom, as the ground 
 of our proper responsibility. Speak to a young 
 Liberal, fresh from Edinburgh or Hackney or the 
 hospitals, of free-will as implied in free-agency, he 
 will perhaps confess with a smile that he is a 
 necessitarian, — proceed to assure his hearer that 
 the liberty of the will is an impossible conception, 
 a contradiction in terms,* and finish by recom- 
 mending a perusal of the works of Jonathan 
 Edwards or Dr. Crombie ; or as it may happen 
 he may declare the will itself a mere delusion, a 
 
 * In fact, this is one of the distinguishing characters of 
 ideas, and marks at once the difference between an idea (a 
 truth-power of the reason) and a conception of the under- 
 standing ; namely, that the former, as expressed in words, 
 is always, and necessarily, a contradiction in terms. — See 
 Aids to Reflection. 3rd edit. p. 206. — Ed. 
 
18 
 
 CONSTITUTION OF 
 
 nonentity, and advise the study of Mr. Lawrence’s 
 Lectures. Converse on the same subject with a 
 plain, single-minded, yet reflecting, neighbour, 
 and he may probably say, (as St. Augustine had 
 said long before him, in reply to the question, 
 "What is time ?) I know it well enough when 
 you do not ask me.” But alike with both the 
 supposed parties, the self-complacent student, just 
 as certainly as with our less positive neighbour ; 
 if we attend to their actions, their feelings, and 
 even to their words, we shall be in ill luck, if 
 ten minutes pass without having full and satisfac- 
 tory proof that the idea of man’s moral freedom 
 possesses and modifles their whole practical 
 being, in all they say, in all they feel, in all they 
 do and are done to ; even as the spirit of life, 
 which is contained in no vessel, because it per- 
 meates all. 
 
 Just so is it with the Constitution.* Ask any 
 of our politicians what is meant by the Constitution, 
 and it is ten to one that he will give a false expla- 
 nation ; as for example, that it is the body of our 
 laws, or that it is the Bill of Eights ; or perhaps, 
 
 * I do not say, with the idea : for the Constitution itself 
 is an idea. This will sound like a paradox or a sneer to 
 those with whom an idea is but another word for a fancy, 
 a something unreal ; but not to those who in the ideas con- 
 template the most real of all realities, and of all operative 
 powers the most actual. 
 
CHUECH AND STATE. 
 
 19 
 
 if he have read Thomas Payne, he may say that 
 we do not yet possess one ; and yet not an hour may 
 have elapsed, since we heard the same individual 
 denouncing, and possibly with good reason, this or 
 that code of laws, the excise and revenue laws, or 
 those for including pheasants, or those for excluding 
 Eoman Catholics, as altogether unconstitutional; 
 and such and such acts of Parliament as gross out- 
 rages on the Constitution. Mr. Peel, who is rather 
 remarkable for groundless and unlucky concessions, 
 owned that the late Act broke in on the Constitu- 
 tion of 1688 : whilst in 1689 a very imposing 
 minority of the then House of Lords, with a decisive 
 majority in the Lower House of Convocation, 
 denounced this very Constitution of 1688, as 
 breaking in on the English Constitution. 
 
 But a Constitution is an idea arising out of the 
 idea of a State; and because our whole history 
 from Alfred onwards demonstrates the continued 
 influence of such an idea, or ultimate aim, on the 
 minds of our forefathers, in their characters and 
 functions as public men, alike in what they resisted 
 and in what they claimed ; in the institutions and 
 forms of polity, which they established, and with 
 regard to those against which they more or less 
 successfully contended ; and because the result has 
 been a progressive, though not always a direct or 
 equable, advance in the gradual realisation of the 
 
20 
 
 CONSTITUTION OF 
 
 idea ; and because it is actually, though even because 
 it is an idea not adequately, represented in a cor- 
 respondent scheme of means reaUy existing; we 
 speak, and have a right to speak, of the idea itself, 
 as actually existing, that is, as a principle existing 
 in the only way in which a principle can exist, — in 
 the minds and consciences of the persons whose 
 duties it prescribes, and whose rights it deter- 
 mines. In the same sense that the sciences of 
 arithmetic and of geometry, that mind, that life 
 itself, have reality ; the Constitution has real exist- 
 ence, and does not the less exist in reality, because 
 it both is, and exists as, an idea. 
 
 There is yet another ground for the af&rmation of 
 its reality ; that, as the fundamental idea, it is at 
 the same time the final criterion by which all par- 
 ticular frames of government must be tried; for 
 here only can we find the great constructive prin- 
 ciples of our representative system — (I use the 
 term in its widest sense, in which the crown itself 
 is included as representing the unity of the people, 
 the true' and primary sense of the word majesty) ; 
 — those principles, I say, in the light of which it 
 can alone be ascertained what are excrescences, 
 symptoms of distemperature, and marks of degene- 
 ration; and what are native growths, or changes 
 naturally attendant on the progressive development 
 of the original germ, symptoms of immaturity 
 
CHTJECH AND STATE. 
 
 21 
 
 perhaps, but not of disease ; or, at worst, modifica- 
 tions of the growth by the defective or faulty, but 
 remediless, or only gradually remediable, qualities 
 of the soil and surrounding elements. 
 
 There are two other characters, distinguishing 
 the class of substantive truths, or truth-powers 
 here spoken of, that will, I trust, indemnify the 
 reader for the delay of the two or three short 
 sentences required for their explanation. The first 
 is, that in distinction from the conception of a 
 thing, — which being abstracted or generalised fi^om 
 one or more particular states, or modes, is neces- 
 sarily posterior in order of thought to the thing 
 thus conceived, — an idea, on the contrary, is in 
 order of thought always and of necessity contem- 
 plated as antecedent. In the idea or principle, 
 life, for instance, the vital functions are the result 
 of the organisation ; but this organisation supposes 
 and pre-supposes the vital principle. The bearings 
 of the planets on the sun are determined by the 
 ponderable matter of which they consist ; but the 
 principle of gravity, the law in the material creation, 
 the idea of the Creator, is pre-supposed in order to 
 the existence, yea, to the very conception of the 
 existence, of matter itself. 
 
 This is the first. The other distinctive mark 
 may be most conveniently given in the form of a 
 caution. We should be made aware, namely, that 
 
22 
 
 CONSTITUTION OF 
 
 the particular form, construction, or model, that 
 may be best fitted to render the idea intelligible, 
 and most efiectually serve the purpose of an 
 instructive diagram, is not necessarily the mode or 
 form in which it actually arrives at realisation. In 
 the works both of man and of nature — in the one 
 by the imperfection of the means and materials, in 
 the other by the multitude and complexity of 
 simultaneous purposes — the fact is most often 
 otherwise. A naturalist, (in the infancy of physio- 
 logy, we will suppose, and before the first attempts 
 at comparative anatomy,) — whose knowledge had 
 been confined exclusively to the human frame, or 
 to that of animals similarly organised, and who by 
 this experience had been led inductively to the idea 
 of respiration, as the cojpida and m*ediator of the 
 vascular and the nervous systems, — might, very 
 probably, have regarded the lungs, with their 
 appurtenances, as the only form in which this idea, 
 or ultimate aim, was realisable. Ignorant of the 
 functions of the sjpiracula in insects, and of the 
 gills of fish, he would, perhaps, with great confi- 
 dence degrade both to the class of non-respirants. 
 Eut alike in the works of nature and the institutions 
 of man, there is no more efiectual preservative 
 agamst pedantry and the positiveness of sciolism, 
 than to meditate on the law of compensation and 
 the principle of compromise; and to be fuUy 
 
CHURCH AND STATE. 
 
 23 
 
 impressed with the wide extent of the one, the 
 necessity of the other, and the frequent occurrence 
 of both. 
 
 Having (more than sufficiently, I fear,) exercised 
 my reader’s patience with these preparatory re- 
 marks, for which the anxiety to be fully understood 
 is my best excuse, though in a moment of less 
 excitement they might not have been without some 
 claim to attention for their own sake, I return to 
 the idea which forms the present subject, the 
 English Constitution, which an old writer calls, 
 
 lex sacra, mater legum, than which nothing can 
 be proposed more certain in its grounds, more 
 pregnant in its consequences, or that hath more 
 harmonical reason within itself: and which is so 
 connatural and essential to the genius and innate 
 disposition of this nation, it being formed (silk- 
 worm-like) as that no other law can possibly 
 regulate it ; a law not to be derived from Alured, 
 or Alfred, or Canute, or other elder or later 
 promulgators of particular laws, but which might 
 say of itself, — When reason and the laws of God 
 first came, then came I with them.” 
 
 As according to an old saying, ‘^an ill foreknown 
 is half disarmed,” I will here notice an inconvenience 
 in our language, which, without a greater incon- 
 venience, I could not avoid, in the use of the term 
 “ State ” in a double sense ; a larger, in which it is 
 
24 CONSTITUTION OF CHURCH AND STATE. 
 
 equivalent to realm, and includes tlie Churcli, and 
 a narrower, in which it is distinguished quasi 'per 
 antithesin from the Church, as in the phrase. 
 Church and State. But the context, I trust, will 
 in every instance prevent ambiguity. 
 
IDEA OE A STATE. 
 
 25 
 
 CHAPTEE II. 
 
 The Idea of a State in the larger sense of the term^ 
 introductory to the constitution of the State in 
 the narrower sense, as it exists in this country. 
 
 A CoNSTiTUTioif is the attribute of a State, that 
 is, of a body politic having the principle of its 
 unity within itself, whether by concentration of its 
 forces, as a constitutional pure monarchy, which, 
 however, has hitherto continued to be ens rationale, 
 unknown in history f or, with which we are alone 
 concerned, l&y equipoise and interdependency ; — 
 the lex equilihrii, the principle prescribing the 
 means and conditions by and under which this 
 balance is to be established and preserved, being 
 the constitution of the State. It is the chief of 
 many blessings derived from the insular character 
 and circumstances of our country, that our social 
 institutions have formed themselves out of our 
 proper needs and interests ; that long and fierce as 
 the birth- struggle and the growing pains have been, 
 the antagonist powers have been of our own system, 
 
 * Spinozae Tract. Pol. cap. vi. De MonarcJiia ex rationu 
 prcescripto. 
 
26 
 
 IDEA OF A STATE. 
 
 and have been allowed to work out their final 
 balance with less disturbance from external forces, 
 than was possible in the continental states. 
 
 Not yet enslaved, not wholly vile, 
 
 O Albion ! 0 my mother Isle ! 
 
 Thy valleys, fair as Eden’s bowers, 
 
 Glitter green with sunny showers ; 
 
 Thy grassy uplands’ gentle swells 
 Echo to the bleat of flocks ; 
 
 (Those grassy hills, those glittering dells. 
 
 Proudly ramparted with rocks ;) 
 
 And Ocean mid his uproar wild 
 Speaks safety to his Island-child ! 
 
 Hence for many a fearless age 
 
 Has social freedom loved the quiet shore. 
 
 Nor ever proud invader’s rage 
 
 Or sack’d thy towers, or stain’d thy fields with gore.* 
 
 Now, in every country of civilised men, acknow- 
 ledging the rights of property, and by means of 
 determined boundaries and common laws united 
 into one people or nation, the two antagonist 
 powers or opposite interests of the State, under 
 which all other state interests are comprised, are 
 those of permanence and of progression. t 
 
 * Ode to the Departing Year. Poet. Works, vol. i., p. 
 
 12Q.—Ed, 
 
 Let me call attention to the essential difference between 
 opposite ” and contrary.” Opposite powers are always of 
 the same kind, and tend to union, either by equipoise or by 
 a common product. Thus the + and — poles of the mag- 
 net, thus positive and negative electricity, are opposites. 
 
IDEA OF A STATE. 
 
 27 
 
 It will not be necessary to enumerate the several 
 causes that combine to connect the permanence of 
 a state with the land and the landed property. 
 To found a family, and to convert his wealth into 
 land, are twin thoughts, births of the same moment, 
 in the mind of the opulent merchant, when he 
 thinks of reposing from his labours. From the 
 class of the novi homines he redeems himself by 
 becoming the staple ring of the chain, by which the 
 
 Sweet and sour are opposites ; sweet and bitter are con- 
 traries. The feminine character is opposed to the masculine ; 
 but the effeminate is its contrary. Even so in the present 
 instance, the interest of permanence is opposed to that of 
 progressiveness ; but so far from being contrary interests, 
 they, like the magnetic forces, suppose and require each 
 other. Even the most mobile of creatures, the serpent, 
 makes a rest of its own body, and, drawing up its volumi- 
 nous train from behind, on ihi^ fulcrum propels itself onward. 
 On the other hand, it is a proverb in all languages, that 
 (relatively to man at least) what would stand still must in fact 
 be retrograde. 
 
 Many years ago, in conversing with a friend, I expressed 
 my belief that in no instance had the false use of a word 
 become current without some practical ill consequence, of 
 far greater moment than would primo dspectu have been 
 thought possible. That friend, very lately referring to this 
 remark, assured me that not a month had passed since then, 
 without some instance in proof of its truth having occurred 
 in his own experience ; and added, with a smile, that he 
 had more than once amused himself with the thought of a 
 verbarian Attorney-General, authorised to bring informa- 
 tions ex officio against the writer or editor of any work in 
 extensive circulation, who, after due notice issued, should 
 persevere in misusing a word. 
 
28 
 
 IDEA OF A STATE. 
 
 present will become connected with the past, and 
 the test and evidence of permanency be afforded. 
 To the same principle appertain primogeniture and 
 hereditary titles, and the influence which these 
 exert in accumulating large masses of property, 
 and in counteracting the antagonist and dispersive 
 forces, which the follies, the vices, and misfortunes 
 of individuals can scarcely fail to supply. To this, 
 likewise, tends the proverbial obduracy of prejudices 
 characteristic of the humbler tillers of the soil, and 
 their aversion even to benefits that are offered in 
 the form of innovations. But why need I attempt 
 to explain a fact which no thinking man will deny, 
 and where the admission of the fact is aU that my 
 argument requires ? 
 
 On the other hand, with as little chance of con- 
 tradiction, I may assert that the progression of a 
 State in the arts and comforts of life, in the diffu- 
 sion of the information and knowledge, useful or 
 necessary for all ; in short, all advances in civili- 
 sation, and the rights and privileges of citizens, 
 are especially connected with, and derived from, 
 the four classes, the mercantile, the manufacturing, 
 the distributive, and the professional. To early 
 Borne, war and conquest were the substitutes for 
 trade and commerce. War was their trade.* As 
 
 * “War in Republican Rome was the offspring of its in- 
 tense aristocracy of spirit, and stood to the state in lieu of 
 
IDEA OF A STATE. 
 
 29 
 
 these wars became more frequent, on a larger 
 scale, and with fewer interruptions, the liberties of 
 the plebeians continued increasing : for even the 
 sugar plantations of Jamaica would (in their present 
 state, at least), present a softened picture of the 
 hard and servile relation, in which the plebeians at 
 one time stood to their patrician superiors. 
 
 Italy is supposed at present to maintain a larger 
 number of inhabitants than in the days of Trajan 
 or in the best and most prosperous of the Eoman 
 empire. With the single exception of the Eccle- 
 siastical State, the whole country is cultivated like 
 a garden. You may find there every gift of Grod 
 — only not freedom. It is a country rich in the 
 proudest records of liberty, illustrious with the 
 names of heroes, statesmen, legislators, philoso- 
 phers. It hath a history all alive with the virtues 
 and crimes of hostile parties, when the glories and 
 the struggles of ancient Greece were acted over 
 again in the proud republics of Venice, Genoa, 
 and Elorence. The life of every eminent citizen 
 was in constant hazard from the furious factions 
 of his native city, and yet life had no charm out of 
 its dear and honoured walls. AU the splendours of 
 
 trade. As long as there was any thing ah extra to conquer, 
 the state advanced : when nothing remained but what was 
 Homan, then, as a matter of course, civil war began.” — Tahle- 
 Talh, 2d edit., p. 169. — Ed. 
 
30 
 
 IDEA OF A STATE. 
 
 the hospitable palace, and the favour of princes, 
 could not soothe the pining of Dante or Machiavel, 
 exiles from their free, their beautiful Florence. 
 But scarcely a pulse of true liberty survives. It 
 was the profound policy of the Spanish and Austrian 
 courts to degrade by every possible means the 
 profession of trade ; and even in Pisa and Florence 
 themselves to introduce the feudal pride and pre- 
 judice of less happy, less enlightened, countries. 
 Agriculture, meanwhile, with its attendant popu- 
 lation and plenty, was cultivated with increasing 
 success ; but from the Alps to the Straits of Messina 
 the Italians became slaves. 
 
 I have thus divided the subjects of the State 
 into two orders, the agricultural or possessors of 
 land ; and the mercantile, manufacturing, distribu- 
 tive, and professional bodies, under the common 
 name of citizens. And I have now to add that by 
 the nature of things common to every civilised 
 country, at aU events by the course of events in 
 this country, the first order is subdivided into two 
 classes, which, in imitation of our old law books, 
 we may call the Major and Minor Barons ; both 
 these, either by their interests or by the very efiect 
 of their situation, circumstances, and the nature of 
 their employment, vitally connected with the per- 
 manency of the State, its institutions, rights, 
 customs, manners, privileges, and as such, opposed 
 
IDEA OF A STATE. 
 
 31 
 
 to the second order, the inhabitants of ports, towns, 
 and cities, who are in like manner and from like 
 causes more especially connected with its progres- 
 sion. I scarcely need say, that in a very advanced 
 stage of civilisation, the two orders of society will 
 more and more modify and leaven each other, yet 
 never so completely but that the distinct character 
 will remain legible, and, to use the words of the 
 E-oman Emperor, even in what is struck out the 
 erasure will be manifest. At all times the Eranklins, 
 or the lower of the two ranks of which the first 
 order consists, will, in their political sympathies, 
 draw more nearly to the antagonist order than the 
 first rank. On these facts, which must at all times 
 have existed, though in very different degrees 
 of prominence or maturity, the principle of our 
 Constitution was established. The total interests 
 of the country, the interests of the State, were 
 entrusted to a great Council or Parliament, com- 
 posed of two Houses. The first consisted exclu- 
 sively of the Major Barons, who at once stood as 
 the guardians and sentinels of their several estates 
 and privileges, and the representatives of the 
 common weal. The Minor Barons, or Eranklins, 
 too numerous, and indeed individually too weak, to 
 sit and maintain their rights in person, were to 
 choose among the worthiest of their own body 
 representatives, and these in such number as to 
 
32 
 
 IDEA OF A STATE. 
 
 form an important though minor proportion of a 
 second House, the majority of which was formed 
 by the representatives of the second order chosen 
 by the cities, ports, and boroughs ; which repre- 
 sentatives ought on principle to have been elected 
 not only by, but from among, the members of the 
 manufacturing, mercantile, distributive, and pro- 
 fessional classes. 
 
 These four last mentioned classes, by an arbitrary 
 but convenient use of the phrase, I will designate 
 by the name of the Personal Interest, as the expo- 
 nent of all moveable and personal possessions, 
 including skill and acquired knowledge, the moral 
 and intellectual stock in trade of the professional 
 man and the artist, no less than the raw materials, 
 and the means of elaborating, transporting, and 
 distributing them. 
 
 Thus in the theory of the Constitution it was 
 provided that even though both divisions of the 
 Landed Interest should combine in any legislative 
 attempt to encroach on the rights and privileges 
 of the Personal Interest, yet the representatives of 
 the latter forming the clear and effectual majority 
 of the lower House, the attempt must be abortive ; 
 the majority of votes in both Houses being indis- 
 pensable in order to the presentation pf a bill for 
 the completory act ; that is to make it a law of 
 the land. By force of the same mechanism must 
 
IDEA OF A STATE. 
 
 33 
 
 every attack be baffled that sbould be made by the 
 representatives of tbe minor land-bolders, in con- 
 cert with tbe burgesses, on tbe existing rights and 
 privileges of tbe peerage, and of tbe hereditary 
 aristocracy, of Tvbich tbe peerage is tbe summit and 
 tbe natural protector. Lastly, should tbe nobles 
 join to invade tbe rights and franchises of tbe 
 Frankbns and tbe Yeomanry, tbe sympathy of 
 interest, by which tbe inhabitants of cities, towns, 
 and sea-ports are linked to tbe great body of their 
 agricultural fellow-commoners, who supply their 
 markets, and form their principal customers, could 
 not fail to secure a united and successful resistance. 
 Nor would this afflnity of interest find a sbgbt 
 support in tbe sympathy of feeling between tbe 
 burgess senators and tbe county representatives, as 
 members of tbe same House ; and in tbe conscious- 
 ness which tbe former have of tbe dignity conferred 
 on them by tbe latter. Eor tbe notion of superior 
 dignity will always be attached in tbe minds of 
 men to that kind of property with which they have 
 most associated tbe idea of permanence; and tbe 
 land is tbe synonyme of country. 
 
 That the burgesses were not bound to elect 
 representatives from among their own order, indi- 
 \dduals Iona fide belonging to one or other of tbe 
 foirr divisions above enumerated; that tbe elec- 
 tive franchise of tbe cities, towns, and ports first 
 
 D 
 
34 
 
 IDEA OF A STATE. 
 
 invested witli borougli-riglits, was not made con- 
 ditional, and to a certain extent at least dependent, 
 on their retaining the same comparative wealth and 
 independence, and rendered subject to a periodical 
 revisal and re-adjustment ; that, in consequence of 
 these and other causes, the very weights intended 
 for the effectual counterpoise of the great land- 
 holders, have, in the course of events, been shifted 
 into the opposite scale ; that they now constitute 
 a large proportion of the political power and 
 influence of the very class of men whose personal 
 cupidity and whose partial views of the Landed 
 Interest at large they were meant to keep in 
 check ; — these things are no part of the Constitu- 
 tion, no essential ingredients in the idea, but 
 apparent defects and imperfections in its realisa- 
 tion ; which, however, we need neither regret nor 
 set about amending, till we have seen whether an 
 equivalent force has not arisen to supply the de- 
 ficiency ; — a force great enough to have destroyed 
 the equilibrium^ had not such a transfer taken 
 place previously to, or at the same time with, 
 the operation of the new forces. Eoads, canals, 
 machinery, the press, the periodical and daily 
 press, the might of public opinion, the consequent 
 increasing desire of popularity among public men 
 and functionaries of every description, and the in- 
 creasing necessity of public character, as the means 
 
IDEA OF A STATE. 
 
 35 
 
 or condition of political influence ; — I need but 
 mention these to stand acquitted of having started 
 a vague and naked possibility in extenuation of an 
 evident and palpable abuse. 
 
 But whether this conjecture be well or ill 
 grounded, the principle of the Constitution remains 
 the same. That harmonious balance of the two 
 great correspondent, at once supporting and coun- 
 terpoising, interests of the State, its permanence, 
 and its progression ; that balance of the Landed 
 and the Personal Interests was to be secured by a 
 legislature of two Houses ; the first consisting 
 wholly of barons or landholders, permanent and 
 hereditary senators ; the second of the knights or 
 minor barons, elected by, and as the representatives 
 of, the remaining landed community, together with 
 the burgesses, the representatives of the commer- 
 cial, manufacturing, distributive, and professional 
 classes, — the latter (the elected burgesses) consti- 
 tuting the major number. The King, meanwhile? 
 in whom the executive power is vested, it will 
 suffice at present to consider as the beam of the 
 constitutional scales. A more comprehensive view 
 of the kingly office must be deferred, till the 
 remaining problem (the idea of a national Church) 
 has been solved. 
 
 I here again entreat the reader to bear in mind 
 what I have before endeavoured to impress on him, 
 
 D 2 
 
36 
 
 IDEA OF A STATE. 
 
 that I am not giving an historical account of the 
 legislative body ; nor can I be supposed to assert 
 that such was the earliest mode or form in which 
 the national council was constructed. My asser- 
 tion is simply this, that its formation has advanced 
 in this direction. The line of evolution, however 
 sinuous, has still tended to this point, sometimes 
 with, sometimes without, not seldom, perhaps, 
 against, the intention of the individual actors, but 
 always as if a power, greater and better than the 
 men themselves, had intended it for them. Nor 
 let it be forgotten that every new growth, every 
 power and privilege, bought or extorted, has uni- 
 formly been claimed by an antecedent right ; not 
 acknowledged as a boon conferred, but both de- 
 manded and received as what had always belonged 
 to them, though withholden by violence and the 
 injury of the times : and this too, in cases, where, 
 if documents and historical records, or even con- 
 sistent traditions, had been required in evidence, 
 the monarch would have had the better of the 
 argument. But, in truth, it was no more than a 
 practical way of saying : “ this or that is contained 
 in the idea of our government, and it is a conse- 
 quence of the lex, mater legwn, which, in the very 
 first law of state ever promulgated in the land, 
 was pre-supposed as the ground of that first law.” 
 
 Before I conclude this part of my subject, I must 
 
IDEA OE A STATE. 
 
 37 
 
 press on the reader’s attention, that the preceding 
 is offered only as the constitutional idea of the 
 State. In order to correct views respecting the 
 Constitution, in the more enlarged sense of the 
 term, namely, the constitution of the nation, we 
 must, in addition to a grounded knowledge of the 
 State, have the right idea of the national Church. 
 These are two poles of the same magnet ; the 
 magnet itself, which is constituted by them, is the 
 constitution of the nation. 
 
38 
 
 IDEA OE THE NATIONAL CHURCH. 
 
 CHAPTEE III. 
 
 On the National Church. 
 
 The reading of histories may dispose a man to 
 satire ; but the science of history, history studied 
 in the light of philosophy, as the great drama of 
 an ever unfolding Providence, has a very different 
 effect. It infuses hope and reverential thoughts of 
 man and his destination. It will, therefore, I trust, 
 be no unwelcome result, if it should be made appear 
 that something deeper and better than priestcraft 
 and priest-ridden ignorance was at the bottom of 
 the phrase. Church and State, and entitled it to be 
 the form in which so many thousands of the men 
 of England clothed the wish for their country’s 
 weal. But many things have conspired to draw off 
 attention from its true origin and import, and have 
 led us to seek the reasons for thus connecting the 
 two words in facts and motives that lie nearer the 
 surface. I wiU mention one only, because, though 
 less obvious than many other causes that have 
 favoured the general misconception on this point, 
 and though its action is indirect and negative, it 
 is by no means the least operative. The immediate 
 
IDEA OF THE NATIONAL CHURCH. 
 
 39 
 
 effect, indeed, may be confined to the men of edu- 
 cation. But what infiuences these will finally 
 influence all. I am referring to the noticeable fact 
 arising out of the system of instruction pursued in 
 all our classical schools and universities, that the 
 annals of ancient Greece, and of republican and 
 imperial Borne, though they are, in truth, but 
 brilliant exceptions from history generally, do yet, 
 partly from the depth and intensity of all early 
 impressions, and in part from the number and 
 splendour of individual characters and particular 
 events and exploits, so fill the imagination as almost 
 to be, — during the period when the groundwork of 
 our minds is principally formed, and the direction 
 given to our modes of thinking, — what we mean by 
 history. Hence things, of which no instance or 
 analogy is recollected in the customs, policy, and 
 jurisprudence of Greece and Borne, lay little hold 
 on our attention. Among these, I know not one 
 more worthy of notice than the principle of the 
 division of property, which, if not, as I however 
 think, universal in the earliest ages, was, at all 
 events, common to the Scandinavian, Keltic, and 
 Gothic tribes with the Semitic, or the tribes 
 descended from Shem. 
 
 It is not the least among the obligations which 
 the antiquarian and the philosophic statist owe to 
 a tribe of the last- mentioned race, the Hebrew, 
 
40 
 
 IDEA OF THE NATIONAL CHUECH. 
 
 that in the institutes of their great legislator, who 
 first formed them into a state or nation, they have 
 preserved for us a practical illustration of the prin- 
 ciple in question, which was by no means peculiar 
 to the Hebrew people, though in their case it 
 received a peculiar sanction. 
 
 To confound the inspiring spirit with the in- 
 forming word, and both with the dictation of sen- 
 tences and formal propositions ; and to confine the 
 oflB.ce and purpose of inspiration to the miraculous 
 immission or infusion of novelties, res nusquam 
 jprius mscd vel auditce, — these, alas ! are the current 
 errors of Protestants without learning, and of bigots 
 in spite of it ; but which I should have left un- 
 noticed, but for the injurious infiuence which 
 certain notions in close connexion with these errors 
 have had on the present subject. The notion, I 
 mean, that the Levitical institution was not only 
 enacted by an inspired law-giver, not only a work 
 of revealed wisdom, (which who denies ?) but that 
 it was a part of revealed religion, having its origin 
 in this particular revelation, as a something which 
 could not have existed otherwise ; yet, on the other 
 hand, a part of the religion that had been abolished 
 by Christianity. Had these reasoners contented 
 themselves with asserting that it did not belong 
 to the Christian religion, they would have said 
 nothing more than the truth ; and for this plain 
 
IDEA OF THE NATIONAL CHURCH. 
 
 41 
 
 reason, tliat it forms no part of religion at all 
 in the Gospel sense of the word, — that is, 
 religion as contra - distinguished from law ; the 
 spiritual as contra -distinguished from the temporal 
 or political. 
 
 In answer to all these notions, it is enough to 
 say that not the principle itself, but the superior 
 wisdom with which the principle was carried into 
 effect, the greater perfection of the machinery, 
 forms the true distinction, the peculiar worth, of 
 the Hebrew constitution. The principle itself was 
 common to Goth and Kelt, or rather, I would say, 
 to all the tribes that had not fallen off to either of 
 the two aphelia, or extreme distances from the 
 generic character of man, the wild or the barbarous 
 state ; but who remained either constituent parts 
 or appendages of the stirps generosa seu historica, 
 as a philosophic friend has named that portion of 
 the Semitic and Japetic races which had not 
 degenerated below the conditions of progressive civi- 
 lisation : — it was, I say, common to all the primitive 
 races, that in taking possession of a new country, 
 and in the division of the land into heritable estates 
 among the individual warriors or heads of families, 
 a reserve should be made for the nation itself. 
 
 The sum total of these heritable portions, appro- 
 priated each to an individual lineage, I take leave to 
 name the Propriety ; and to call the reserve above- 
 
42 
 
 IDEA OE THE NATIONAL CHURCH. 
 
 mentioned the Nationaltj; and likewise to employ 
 the term wealth in that primary and wide sense 
 which it retains in the term, commonwealth. In 
 the establishment, then, of the landed proprieties, 
 a National ty was at the same time constituted ; as 
 a wealth not consisting of lands, but yet derivative 
 from the land, and rightfully inseparable from the 
 same. These, the Propriety and the Nationalty, 
 were the two constituent factors, the opposite, 
 but correspondent and reciprocally supporting, 
 counterweights of the commonwealth ; the existence 
 of the one being the condition and the perfecting 
 of the rightfulness of the other. Now as all polar 
 forces, — that is, opposite, not contrary, powers, — 
 are necessarily unius generis^ homogeneous, so in 
 the present instance each is that which it is called, 
 relatively, by predominance of the one character or 
 quality, not by the absolute exclusion of the other. 
 The wealth appropriated was not so entirely a 
 property as not to remain, to a certain extent, 
 national; nor was the wealth reserved so exclu- 
 sively national as not to admit of individual tenure. 
 It was only necessary that the mode and origin of 
 the tenure should be different, and, as- it were, in 
 antitJiesi. If the one be hereditary, the other must 
 be elective ; if the one be lineal, the other must be 
 circulative. 
 
IDEA OF THE HEBREW COMMONWEALTH. 43 
 
 CHAPTEE IV. 
 
 Illustration of the preceding Chapter from history^ 
 and principally from that of the Hebrew Common- 
 wealth. 
 
 In the unfolding and exposition of any idea we 
 naturally seek assistance and the means of illus- 
 tration from the historical instance, in which it has 
 been most nearly realised, or of which we possess 
 the most exact and satisfactory records. Both of 
 these recommendations are found in the formation 
 of the Hebrew Commonwealth. But in availing 
 ourselves of examples from history there is always 
 danger lest that which was to assist us in attaining 
 a clear insight into truth should be the means 
 of disturbing or falsifying it, so that we attribute 
 to the object what was but the effect of flaws or 
 other accidents in the glass, through which we 
 looked at it. To secure ourselves from this danger, 
 we must constantly bear in mind that in the actual 
 realisation of every great idea or principle there 
 will always exist disturbing forces, modifying the 
 product, either from the imperfection of the agents, 
 or from especial circumstances overruling them ; 
 
44 IDEA OF THE HEBREW COMMONWEALTH. 
 
 or from the defect of the materials ; or lastly, and 
 which most particularly applies to the instances 
 I have here in view, from the co-existence of some 
 yet greater idea, some yet more important purpose, 
 with which the former must be combined, but like- 
 wise subordinated. Nevertheless, these are no 
 essentials of the idea, no exemplary parts in the 
 particular construction adduced for its illustration. 
 On the contrary, they are deviations from the 
 idea, which we must abstract and put aside before 
 we can make a safe and fearless use of the example. 
 
 Such, for instance, was the settlement of the 
 Nation alty in one tribe, which, to the^ exclusion of 
 the other eleven divisions of the Hebrew confe- 
 deracy, was to be invested with its rights, and to 
 be alone capable of discharging its duties. This 
 was, indeed, in some measure, corrected by the 
 institution of the Ndbim, or prophets, who might 
 be of any tribe, and who formed a numerous body, 
 uniting the functions and three-fold character of 
 the Eoman Censors, the Tribunes of the people, 
 and the sacred college of Augurs ; protectors of 
 the nation and privileged state-moralists, whom 
 Milton has already compared to the orators of the 
 Greek democracies.* Still the most satisfactory 
 
 ♦ The lines which our sage and learned poet puts in the 
 Saviour’s mouth, both from their truth and from their appo- 
 siteness to the present subject, well deserve to be quoted : — 
 Their orators thou then ext oil’ st, as those 
 
IDEA OE THE HEBREW COMMONWEALTH. 45 
 
 justification of this exclusive policy is to be found, 
 I think, in the fact, that the Jewish theocracy 
 itself was but a mean to a further and greater end ; 
 and that the effects of the policy were subordinated 
 to an interest far more momentous than that of 
 any single kingdom or commonwealth could be. 
 The unfitness and insufficiency of the Jewish 
 character for the reception and execution of the 
 great legislator’s scheme were not less important 
 parts of the sublime purpose of Providence, in the 
 separation of the chosen people, than their charac- 
 teristic virtues. Their frequent relapses, and the 
 never-failing return of a certain number to the 
 national faith and customs, were alike subservient 
 to the ultimate object, the final cause, of the 
 Mosaic dispensation. Without pain or reluctance, 
 therefore, I should state this provision, by which a 
 particular lineage was made a necessary qualification 
 for the trustees and functionaries of the reserved 
 IS’ationalty, as the main cause of the comparatively 
 
 The top of eloquence : — Statists indeed 
 And lovers of their country as may seem ; 
 
 But herein to our prophets far beneath, 
 
 As men divinely taught and better teaching 
 The solid rules of civil government, 
 
 In their majestic, unaffected style. 
 
 Than all the oratory of Greece and Home. 
 
 In them is plainest taught and easiest learnt 
 What makes a nation happy, and keeps it so.” 
 
 Par. Reg. B. iv. 
 
46 IDJEA of the HEBREW COMMONWEALTH. 
 
 little effect, which the Levitical establishment 
 produced on the moral and intellectual character of 
 the Jewish people during the whole period of their 
 existence as an independent state. 
 
 With this exception, however, the scheme of the 
 Hebrew polity may be profitably used as the diagram 
 or illustrative model of a principle which actuated 
 the primitive races generally under similar circum- 
 stances. With this and one other exception, like- 
 wise arising out of the peculiar purpose of 
 Providence, namely, the discouragement of trade 
 and commerce in the Hebrew policy, — a principle 
 so inwoven in the whole fabric, that the revolution 
 in this respect effected by Solomon had, perhaps, 
 no small share in the quickly succeeding dissolution 
 of the confederacy, — it may be profitably considered 
 even under existing circumstances. 
 
 And first let me observe that with the Keltic, 
 Gothic, and Scandinavian, equally as with the 
 Hebrew, tribes property by absolute right existed 
 only in a tolerated alien ; and that there was every- 
 where a prejudice against the occupation expressly 
 directed to its acquirement, namely, the trafficking 
 with the current representatives of wealth. Even 
 in that species of possession, in which the right of 
 the individual was the prominent relative character, 
 the institution of the Jubilee provided against its 
 degenerating into the merely personal ; reclaimed 
 
IDEA OF THE HEBREW COMMONWEALTH. 47 
 
 it for the State, that is, for the line, the heritage, 
 as one of the permanent units or integral parts, 
 the aggregate of which constitutes the State, in 
 that narrower and especial sense in which it has 
 been distinguished from the nation. And to these 
 permanent units the calculating and governing 
 mind of the State directs its attention, even as it is 
 the depths, breadths, bays, and windings or reaches 
 of a river that are the subject of the hydrographer, 
 not the water-drops that at any one moment con- 
 stitute the stream. And on this point the greatest 
 stress should be laid ; this should be deeply 
 impressed, and carefully borne in mind, that the 
 abiding interests, the estates, and ostensible tangible 
 properties, not the persons as persons, are the 
 proper subjects of the State in this sense, or of the 
 power of the parliament or supreme council, as the 
 representatives and plenipotentiaries of the State, 
 that is, of the Propriety, and in distinction from 
 the commonwealth, in which I comprise both the 
 Propriety and the Nationalty. 
 
 And here let me further remark that the records 
 of the Hebrew polity are rendered far less instruc- 
 tive as lessons of political wisdom by the disposition 
 to regard the J ehovah in that universal and spiritual 
 acceptation, in which we use the word as Christians. 
 Por relatively to the Jewish polity the Jehovah was 
 their covenanted king : and if we draw any inference 
 
48 IDEA OF THE HEBEEW COMMONWEALTH. 
 
 from the former or Christian sense of the term, it 
 should be this ; — that Grod is the unity of every 
 nation ; that the convictions and the will, which are 
 one, the same, and simultaneously acting in a mul- 
 titude of individual agents, are not the birth of any 
 individual ; that when the people speak loudly and 
 unanimously, it is from their being strongly 
 impressed by the godhead or the demon. Only 
 exclude the (by no means extravagant) supposition 
 of a demoniac possession, and then vox populi vox 
 Dei.^ So thought Sir Philip Sidney, who in the 
 great revolution of the Netherlands considered the 
 universal and simultaneous adoption of the same 
 principles as a proof of the divine presence ; and 
 on that belief, and on that alone, grounded his 
 assurance of its successful result. And that I may 
 apply this to the present subject, it was in the 
 character of the king, as the majesty or symbolic 
 unity of the whole nation, both of the State 
 and of the persons ; it was in the name of 
 the king, in whom both the Propriety aud the 
 Nationalty ideally centered, and from whom, as 
 
 * I never said that the mx jpopuli was of course the vox 
 Dei. It may be ; but it may be, and with equal probability 
 a priori, vox Diaholi. That the voice of ten millions of men 
 calling for the same thing is a spirit, I believe ; but whether 
 that be a spirit of Heaven or Hell, I can only know by trying 
 the thing called for by the prescript of reason and God’s 
 will.” Table Talk, 2nd edit. p. 163. — Ed. 
 
IDEA OF THE HEBREW COMMONWEALTH. 49 
 
 from a fountain, they are ideally supposed to flow ; 
 it was in the name of the king, that the proclama- 
 tion throughout the land, by sound of trumpet, was 
 made to all possessors : The land is not yoms, saith 
 the Lord^ the land is mine. To you I lent it. The 
 voice of the trumpets is not, indeed, heard in this 
 country. But no less intelligibly is it declared by 
 the spirit and history of our laws that the possession 
 of a property, not connected with especial duties, a 
 property not fiduciary or official, but arbitrary and 
 unconditional, was in the sight of our forefathers 
 the brand of a Jew and an alien; not the dis- 
 tinction, nor the right, nor the honour, of an 
 English baron or gentleman. 
 
50 
 
 IDEA OF THE NATIONAL CHURCH. 
 
 CHAPTEE V. 
 
 Of the Church of England^ or National Clergy, 
 according to the Constitution; its characteristic 
 ends, purposes and functions ; and of the persons 
 comprehended under the Clergy, or the functionaries 
 of the National Church. 
 
 After these introductory preparations, I can have 
 no difficulty in setting forth the right idea of a 
 national Church as in the language of Queen 
 Elizabeth the third great venerable estate of the 
 realm ; the first being the estate of the land-owners 
 or possessors of fixed property, consisting of the 
 two classes of the Barons and the Eranklins ; and 
 the second comprising the merchants, the manu- 
 facturers, free artizans, and the distributive class. 
 To comprehend, therefore, the true character of 
 this third estate, in which the reserved Nationalty 
 was vested, we must first ascertain the end or 
 national purpose, for which such reservation was 
 made. 
 
 Now, as in the first estate the permanency of 
 the nation was provided for; and in the second 
 estate its progressiveness and personal freedom ; 
 
IDEA OF THE NATIONAL CHURCH. 
 
 51 
 
 while in the king the cohesion bj interdependence, 
 and the unity of the country, were established ; 
 there remains for the third estate only that interest 
 which is the ground, the necessary antecedent 
 condition, of both the former. These depend on 
 a continuing and progressive civilisation. Eut 
 civilisation is itself but a mixed good, if not far 
 more a corrupting influence, the hectic of disease 
 not the bloom of health, and a nation so distin- 
 guished more fitly to be called a varnished than a 
 polished people, where this civilisation is not 
 grounded in cultivation, in the harmonious deve- 
 lopment of those qualities and faculties that 
 characterise our humanity. We must be men in 
 order to be citizens. 
 
 The Nationalty, therefore, was reserved for the 
 support and maintenance of a permanent class or 
 order with the following duties. A certain smaller 
 number were to remain at the fountain heads of 
 the humanities, in cultivating and enlarging the 
 knowledge already possessed, and in watching over 
 the interests of physical and moral science ; being, 
 likewise, the instructors of such as constituted, or 
 were to constitute, the remaining more numerous 
 classes of the order. The members of this latter 
 and far more numerous body were to be distributed 
 throughout the country, so as not to leave even the 
 smallest integral part or division without a resident 
 
52 IDEA OF THE NATIONAL CHURCH. 
 
 guide, guardian, and instructor ; tlie objects and 
 final intention of the whole order being these — to 
 preserve the stores and to guard the treasures of 
 past civilisation, and thus to bind the present with 
 the past, to perfect and add to the same, and thus 
 to connect the present with the future ; but espe- 
 cially to difiuse through the whole community and 
 to every native entitled to its laws and rights that 
 quantity and quality of knowledge which was indis- 
 pensable both for the understanding of those rights, 
 and for the performance of the duties correspondent : 
 finally, to secure for the nation, if not a superiority 
 over the neighbouring states, yet an equality at 
 least, in that character of general civilisation, which 
 equally with, or rather more than, fleets, armies, 
 and revenue, forms the ground of its defensive and 
 ofiensive power. The object of the two former 
 estates of the realm, which conjointly form the 
 State, was to reconcile the interests of permanence 
 with that of progression — law with liberty. The 
 object of the national Church, the third remaining 
 estate of the realm, was to secure and improve that 
 civilisation, without which the nation could be 
 neither permanent nor progressive. 
 
 That, in all ages, individuals who have directed 
 their meditations and their studies to the nobler 
 characters of our nature, to the cultivation of those 
 powers and instincts which constitute the man, at 
 
IDEA OF THE NATIONAL CHUECH. 
 
 53 
 
 least separate him from the animal, and distinguish 
 the nobler from the animal part of his own being, 
 will be led bjthe supernatural in themselves to the 
 contemplation of a power which is likewise super- 
 human ; that science, and especially moral science, 
 will lead to religion, and remain blended with it, — 
 this, I say, will in all ages be the course of things. 
 That in the earlier ages, and in the dawn of civility, 
 there will be a twilight in which science and religion 
 give light, but a light refracted through the dense 
 and the dark, a superstition; — this is what we 
 learn from history, and what philosophy would 
 have taught us to expect. But I affirm that in the 
 spiritual purpose of the word, and as understood in 
 reference to a future state, and to the abiding 
 essential interest of the individual as a person, and 
 not as the citizen, neighbour, or subject, religion 
 may be an indispensable ally, but is not the essen- 
 tial constitutive end, of that national institute, 
 which is unfortunately, at least improperly, styled 
 the Church; a name which in its best sense is 
 exclusively appropriate to the Church of Christ. 
 If this latter be ecclesia, the communion of such 
 as are called out of the world, that is, in reference 
 to the especial ends and purposes of that commu- 
 nion; this other might more expressly have been 
 entitled enclesia, or an order of men chosen in and 
 of the realm, and constituting an estate of that 
 
54 
 
 IDEA OP THE NATIONAL CHURCH. 
 
 realm. And, in fact, such was the original and 
 proper sense of the more appropriately named clergy. 
 It comprehended the learned of all names, and the 
 clerk was the synonyme of the man of learning. 
 JN'or can any fact more strikingly illustrate the 
 conviction entertained by our ancestors respecting 
 the intimate connexion of this clergy with the peace 
 and weal of the nation, than the privilege formerly 
 recognised by our laws, in the weU-known phrase, 
 “benefit of clergy.” 
 
 Deeply do I feel, for clearly do I see, the im- 
 portance of my theme. And had I equal confi- 
 dence in my ability to awaken the same interest in 
 the minds of others, I should dismiss as afironting 
 to my readers all apprehension of being charged 
 with prolixity, while I am labouring to compress 
 in two or three brief chapters the principal sides 
 and aspects of a subject so large and multilateral 
 as to require a volume for its full exposition ; — 
 with what success will be seen in what follows, 
 commencing with the Churchmen, or (a far apter 
 and less objectionable designation,) the national 
 Clerisy. 
 
 The Clerisy of the nation, or national Church, 
 in its primary acceptation and original intention, 
 comprehended the learned of all denominations, 
 the sages and professors of the law and jurispru- 
 dence, of medicine and physiology, of music, of 
 
IDEA OF THE NATIONAL CHURCH. 
 
 55 
 
 military and civil architecture, of the physical 
 sciences, with the mathematical as the common 
 organ of the preceding : in short, all the so-called 
 liberal arts and sciences, the possession and appli- 
 cation of which constitute the civilisation of a 
 country, as well as the theological. The last was, 
 indeed, placed at the head of all; and of good 
 right did it claim the precedence. But why ? 
 Because under the name of theology or divinity 
 were contained the interpretation of languages, 
 the conservation and tradition of past events, the 
 momentous epochs and revolutions of the race 
 and nation, the continuation of the records, logic, 
 ethics, and the determination of ethical science, in 
 application to the rights and duties of men in all 
 their various relations, social and civil ; and lastly, 
 the ground-knowledge, the prima scientia as it 
 was named, — philosophy, or the doctrine and dis- 
 cipline of ideas.* 
 
 * That is, of knowledges immediate, yet real, and herein 
 distinguished in kind from logical and mathematical truths, 
 which express not realities, hut only the necessary forms of 
 conceiving and perceiving, and are therefore named the formal, 
 or abstract sciences. Ideas, on the other hand, or the truths 
 of philosophy, properly so called, correspond to substantial 
 beings, to objects the actual subsistence of which is implied 
 in their idea, though only by the idea revealable. To adopt 
 the language of the great philosophic Apostle, they are spi- 
 ritual realities that I can only spiritually he discerned, and 
 the inherent aptitude and moral preconfiguration to which 
 
56 
 
 IDEA OF THE NATIONAL CHURCH. 
 
 Theology formed only a part of the objects, the 
 theologians formed only a portion of the clerks 
 or clergy, of the national Church. The theological 
 order had precedency indeed, and deservedly ; but 
 not "because its members were priests, whose office 
 was to conciliate the invisible powers, and to 
 superintend the interests that survive the grave ; 
 nor as being exclusively, or even principally, 
 sacerdotal or templar, which, when it did occur, is 
 to be considered as an accident of the age, a mis- 
 growth of ignorance and oppression, a falsification 
 of the constitutive principle, not a constituent part 
 of the same, ^o, the theologians took the lead, 
 because the science of theology was the root and 
 the trunk of the knowledges that civilised man, 
 because it gave unity and the circulating sap of 
 life to all other sciences, by virtue of which alone 
 they could be contemplated as forming, collectively, 
 
 constitutes what we mean by ideas, and by the presence of 
 ideal truth and of ideal power, in the human being. They, 
 in fact, constitute his humanity. For try to conceive a man 
 without the ideas of God, eternity, freedom, will, absolute 
 , truth, of the good, the true, the beautiful, the infinite. An 
 animal endowed with a memory of appearances and of facts 
 might remain. But the man will have vanished, and you 
 have instead a creature, more subtle than any beast of the field y 
 but likewise cursed above every beast of the field; upon the 
 belly must it go and dust must it eat all the days of its life. But 
 I recal myself from a train of thoughts little likely to find 
 favour in this age of sense and selfishness. 
 
IDEA OE THE NATIONAL CHDECH. 
 
 57 
 
 the living tree of knowledge. It had the precedency 
 because, under the name theology, were comprised 
 all the main aids, instruments, and materials of 
 national education, the nisus formativus of the 
 body politic, the shaping and informing spirit, 
 w’^hich, educing or eliciting the latent man in all the 
 natives of the soil, trains them up to be citizens of 
 the country, free subjects of the realm. And lastly, 
 because to divinity belong those fundamental truths, 
 which are the common ground-work of our civil 
 and our religious duties, not less indispensable to 
 a right view of our temporal concerns, than to a 
 rational faith respecting our immortal well-being. 
 Not without celestial observations can even terres- 
 trial charts be accurately constructed. And of 
 especial importance is it to the objects here con- 
 templated, that only by the vital warmth diffused 
 by these truths throughout the many, and by the 
 guiding light from the philosophy, which is the 
 basis of divinity, possessed by the few, can either 
 the community or its rulers fully comprehend, or 
 rightly appreciate, the permanent distinction and 
 the occasional contrast between cultivation and 
 civilisation ; or be made to understand this most 
 valuable of the lessons taught by history, and 
 exemplified alike in her oldest and her most recent 
 records — that a nation can never be a too cultivated, 
 but may easily become an over-civilised, race. 
 
58 
 
 IDEA OF THE NATIONAL CHURCH. 
 
 CHAPTEE VI. 
 
 Secessions or offsets from the National Clerisy. 
 Usurpations and abuses previous to the Reforma- 
 tion, Henry VIII., what he might and should 
 have done. The main end and final cause of the 
 Nationalty ; and the duties, which the State may 
 demand of the National Clerisy, A question, and 
 the answer to it. 
 
 As a natural consequence of the full development 
 and expansion of the mercantile and commercial 
 order, which in the earlier epochs of the constitu- 
 tion only existed, as it were, potentially and in the 
 bud ; the students and possessors of those sciences, 
 and those sorts of learning, the use and necessity of 
 which were indeed constant and perpetual to the 
 nation, but only accidental and occasional to indi- 
 viduals, gradually detached themselves from the 
 Nationalty and the national clergy, and passed to 
 the order, with the growth and thriving condition 
 of which their emoluments were found to increase 
 in equal proportion. Eather, perhaps, it should be 
 said that under the common name of professional, 
 the learned in the departments of law, medicine 
 
IDEA OF THE NATIONAL CHURCH. 
 
 59 
 
 and the like, formed an intermediate link between 
 the established clergj and the burgesses. 
 
 This circumstance, however, can in no way affect 
 the principle, nor alter the tenure, nor annul the 
 rights of those who remained, and who, as members 
 of the permanent learned class, were planted 
 throughout the realm, each in his appointed place, 
 as the immediate agents and instruments in the 
 great and indispensable work of perpetuating, 
 promoting, and increasing the civilisation of the 
 nation, and who thus fulfilling the purposes for 
 which the determinate portion of the total wealth 
 from the land had been reserved, are entitled to 
 remain its trustees and usufructuary proprietors. 
 But I do not assert that the proceeds from the 
 Nationalty cannot be rightfully vested, except in 
 what we now mean by clergymen and the established 
 clergy. I have everywhere implied the contrary. 
 But I do assert, that the Nationalty cannot right- 
 fully, and that without foul wrong to the nation it 
 never has been, alienated from its original purposes. 
 I assert that those who, being duly elected and 
 appointed thereto, exercise the functions, and 
 perform the duties, attached to the ISFationalty, 
 possess collectively an inalienable, indefeasible, title 
 to the same; and this by a jus divinim, to which 
 the thunders from Mount Sinai might give additional 
 authority, but not additional evidence. 
 
60 
 
 IDEA OE THE NATIONAL CHUECH. 
 
 CoEOLLART. — During the dark times, when the 
 incuhus of superstition laj heavy across the breast 
 of the living and the dying ; and when all the 
 familiar tricksy spirits in the service of an alien, 
 self-expatriated and anti-national priesthood were 
 at work in all forms and in all directions to aggran- 
 dise and enrich a kingdom of this world ; large 
 masses were alienated from the heritable proprieties 
 of the realm, and confounded with the ISTationalty 
 under the common name of Church property. Had 
 every rood, every peppercorn, every stone, brick, 
 and beam been re-transferred and made heritable 
 at the Deformation, no right would have been 
 invaded, no principle of justice violated. What the 
 State by law — that is, by the collective will of its 
 functionaries at any one time assembled — can do or 
 suffer to be done ; that the State by law can undo 
 or inhibit. And in principle, such bequests and 
 donations were vicious ah initio, implying in the 
 donor an absolute property in land, unknown to 
 the constitution of the realm, and in defeasance of 
 that immutable reason which, in the name of the 
 nation and the national majesty, proclaims : — The 
 land is not yours ; it was vested in your lineage in 
 trust for the nation.” And though, in change of 
 times and circumstances, the interest of progres- 
 sion, with the means and motives for the same — 
 hope, industry, enterprise — may render it the 
 
IDEA OF THE NATIONAL CHURCH. 
 
 61 
 
 wisdom of the State to facilitate the transfer from 
 line to line, still it must be within the same scale 
 and with preservation of the balance. The most 
 honest of our English historians, and with no 
 superior in industry and research, Mr. Sharon 
 Turner, has laboured successfully in detaching from 
 the portrait of our first Protestant king the layers 
 of soot and blood, with which pseudo- Catholic hate 
 and pseudo-Protestant candour had coated it. But 
 the name of Henry VIII. would have outshone that 
 of Alfred, and with a splendour which not even the 
 ominous shadow of his declining life would have 
 eclipsed, had he retained the will and possessed the 
 power of effecting, what in part he promised and 
 proposed to do ; that is, if he had availed himself 
 of the wealth and landed masses that had been un- 
 constitutionally alienated from the State, namely, 
 transferred from the scale of heritable lands and 
 revenues, to purchase and win back whatever had 
 been alienated from the opposite scale of the 
 Hationalty ; — wrongfully alienated; for it was a 
 possession, in which every free subject in the 
 nation has a living interest, a permanent, and like- 
 wise a possible personal and reversionary, interest ; 
 — sacrilegiously alienated ; for it had been con- 
 secrated tS 6€(p olK€L(p, to the potential divinity in 
 every man, which is the ground and condition of 
 his civil existence, that without which a man can 
 
62 
 
 IDEA OP THE NATIONAL CHURCH. 
 
 be neither free nor obliged, and bj which alone, 
 therefore, he is capable of being a free subject or a 
 citizen : and if, I say, having thus righted the 
 balance on both sides, Henry had then directed the 
 Hationalty to its true national purposes, (in order 
 to which, however, a different division and sub- 
 division of the kingdom must have superseded the 
 present barbarism, which forms an obstacle to the 
 improvement of the country, of much greater mag- 
 nitude than men are generally aware) ; and the 
 National ty had been distributed in proportionate 
 channels to the maintenance ; — 1, of the universi- 
 ties and great schools of liberal learning ; — 2, of a 
 pastor, presbyter, or parson* in every parish ; — 3, of 
 a school-master in every parish, who in due time, 
 and under condition of a faithful performance of his 
 arduous duties should succeed to the pastorate ; 
 
 * Persona kut 6|ox^ v ; persona exemplaris ; the represen- 
 tative and exemplar of the personal character of the commu- 
 nity or parish; of their duties and rights, of their hopes, 
 privileges and requisite qualifications, as moral persons, and 
 not merely living things. But this the pastoral clergy can- 
 not be other than imperfectly ; they cannot be that which it 
 is the paramount end and object of their establishment and 
 distribution throughout the country that they should be — 
 each in his sphere the germ and nucleus of the progressive 
 civilisation — unless they are in the rule married men and 
 heads of families. This, however, is adduced only as an 
 accessory to the great principle stated in a following page, 
 as an instance of its beneficial consequences, not as the 
 grounds of its validity. 
 
IDEA OF THE NATIONAL CHURCH. 
 
 63 
 
 SO that both should be labourers in different 
 compartments of the same field, workmen engaged 
 in different stages of the same process, with such 
 difference of rank, as might be suggested in the 
 names pastor and sub-pastor, or as now exists 
 between rector and curate, elder and deacon. 
 Both alike, I say, being members and ministers of 
 national Clerisy or Church, working to the same 
 end, and determined in the choice of their means 
 and the direction of their labours by one and the 
 same object — namely, the production and reproduc- 
 tion, the preservation, continuance, and perfection 
 of the necessary sources and conditions of national 
 civilisation ; this being itself an indispensable 
 condition of national safety, power and welfare, the 
 strongest security and the surest provision, both 
 for the permanence and the progressive advance of 
 whatever as laws, institutions, tenures, rights, 
 privileges, freedoms, obligations, and the like, 
 constitutes the public weal : — these parochial clerks 
 being the great majority of the national clergy, the 
 comparatively small remainder being principally ^ 
 
 * Considered, I mean, in their national relations, and in 
 that which forms their ordinary, their most conspicuous 
 purpose and utility ; for God forbid, I should deny or forget 
 that the sciences, and not only the sciences both abstract 
 and experimental, but the literce humaniores, the products of 
 genial power, of whatever name, have an immediate and 
 positive value even in their bearings on the national interests. 
 
64 
 
 IDEA OF THE NATIONAL CHUECH. 
 
 in ordine ad hos, Cleri doctores ut Clerus 
 pojpuli. 
 
 I may be allowed, therefore, to express the final 
 cause of the whole by the office and purpose of the 
 greater part ; and this is, to form and train up the 
 people of the country to be obedient, free, useful, 
 organisable subjects, citizens, and patriots, living 
 to the benefit of the State, and prepared to die for 
 its defence. The proper object and end of the 
 national Church is civilisation with freedom; and 
 the duty of its ministers, could they be contem- 
 plated merely and exclusively as officiaries of the 
 national Church, would be fulfilled in the commu- 
 nication of that degree and kind of knowledge to 
 all, the possession of which is necessary for all in 
 order to their civility. By civility I mean all the 
 qualities essential to a citizen, and devoid of which 
 no people or class of the people can be calculated 
 on by the rulers and leaders of the State for 
 the conservation or promotion of its essential 
 interests. 
 
 It follows, therefore, that in regard to the 
 grounds and principles of action and conduct, the 
 State has a right to demand of the national Church 
 that its instructions should be fitted to difiuse 
 throughout the people legality, that is, the obliga- 
 tions of a well calculated self-interest, under the 
 conditions of a common interest determined by 
 
IDEA OE THE NATIONAL CHUECH. 
 
 65 
 
 common laws. At least, whatever of higher origin 
 and nobler and wider aim the ministers of the 
 national Church, in some other capacity, and in 
 the performance of other duties, might labour to 
 implant and cultivate in the minds and hearts of 
 their congregations and seminaries, should include 
 the practical consequences of the legality above- 
 mentioned. The State requires that the basin 
 should be kept full, and that the stream which 
 supplies the hamlet and turns the mill, and waters 
 the meadow-fields, should be fed and kept fiowing. 
 If this be done the State is content, indifierent for 
 the rest, whether the basin be filled by the spring 
 in its first ascent, and rising but a hand’s-breadth 
 above the bed ; or whether, drawn from a more 
 elevated source, shooting aloft in a stately column, 
 that refiects the light of heaven from its shaft, and 
 bears the Iris^ cceli decuSy promissumque Jovis 
 lucidum on its spray, it fills the basin in its 
 descent. 
 
 ‘‘In what relation, then, do you place Chris- 
 tianity to the national Church ? ” Though un- 
 willing to anticipate what belongs to a part of my 
 subject yet to come, namely, the Idea of the 
 Catholic or Christian Church, I am still more 
 averse to leave this question, even for a moment, 
 unanswered. And this is my answer. 
 
 In relation to the national Church, Christianity, 
 
 F 
 
66 
 
 IDEA OE THE NATIONAL CHUECH. 
 
 or the Churcli of Christ, is a blessed accident,* 
 a providential boon, a grace of Grod, a mighty and 
 faithful friend, the envoy, indeed, and liege subject 
 of another State, but which can neither administer 
 the laws nor promote the ends of this other State, 
 which is not of the world, without advantage, 
 direct and indirect, to the true interests of the 
 States, the aggregate of which is what we mean by 
 the world, that is, the civilised world. As the olive 
 tree is said in its growth to fertilise the surrounding 
 soil, to invigorate the roots of the vines in its 
 immediate neighbourhood, and to improve the 
 strength and flavour of the wines ; such is the 
 relation of the Christian and the national Church. 
 But as the olive is not the same plant with the 
 vine, or with the elm or poplar (that is, the State) 
 with which the vine is wedded ; and as the vine 
 with its prop may exist, though in less perfection, 
 without the olive, or previously to its implantation; 
 — even so is Christianity, and d fortiori any parti- 
 cular scheme of theology derived and supposed by 
 its partizans to be deduced from Christianity, no 
 essential part of the being of the national Church, 
 however conducive or even indispensable it may be 
 
 * Let not the religious reader be ofifended with this phrase. 
 I mean only that Christianity is an aid and instrument 
 which no State or realm could have produced out of its own 
 elements, which no State had a right to expect. It was, most 
 awfully, a God-send ! 
 
IDEA OF THE NATIONAL CHURCH. 
 
 67 
 
 to its well being. And even so a national Church 
 might exist, and has existed, without, because 
 before the institution of, the Christian Church ; — 
 as the Levitical Church in the Hebrew constitution, 
 and the Druidical in the Keltic, would suffice to 
 prove. 
 
 But here I earnestly entreat that two things 
 may be remembered — first, that it is my object to 
 present the Idea of a national Church, as the only 
 safe criterion by which the judgment can decide 
 on the existing state of things ; for when we are in 
 fuU and clear possession of the ultimate aim of an 
 institution, it is comparatively easy to ascertain in 
 what respects this aim has been attained in other 
 ways arising out of the growth of the nation, and 
 the gradual and successive expansion of its germs ; 
 in what respects the aim has been frustrated by 
 errors and diseases in the body politic; and in 
 what respects the existing institution still answers 
 the original purpose, and continues to be a mean 
 to necessary or most important ends, for which no 
 adequate substitute can be found. Birst, I say, 
 let it be borne in mind that my object has been to 
 present the idea of a national Church, not the 
 history of the Church established in this nation. 
 Secondly, that two distinct functions do not neces- 
 sarily imply or require two different functionaries : 
 nay, the perfection of each may require the union 
 
 F 2 
 
68 
 
 IDEA OF THE NATIONAL CHURCH. 
 
 of both in the same person. And in the instance 
 now in question, great and grievous errors have 
 arisen from confounding the functions ; and fear- 
 fully great and grievous will be the evils from the 
 success of an attempt to separate them — an attempt 
 long and passionately pursued, in many forms, and 
 through many various channels, by a numerous 
 party which has already the ascendancy in the 
 State ; and which, unless far other minds and far 
 other principles than those which the opponents of 
 this party have hitherto allied with their cause, are 
 called into action, will obtain the ascendancy in 
 the nation. 
 
 I have already said that the subjects, which lie 
 right and left of my road, or even jut into it, are 
 so many and so important that I offer these pages 
 but as a catalogue of texts and theses, which will 
 have answered their purpose if they excite a certain 
 class of readers to desire or to supply the com- 
 mentary. But there will not be wanting among 
 my readers men who are no strangers to the ways 
 in which my thoughts travel: and the jointless 
 sentences that make up the following chapter or 
 inventory of regrets and apprehensions will suffice 
 to possess them of the chief points that press on 
 my mind. 
 
 The commanding knowledge, the power of truth, 
 given or obtained by contemplating the subject in 
 
IDEA OF THE NATIONAL CHURCH. 
 
 69 
 
 the fontal mirror of the idea, is in Scripture ordi- 
 narily expressed by vision : and no dissimilar gift, 
 if not rather in its essential characters the same, 
 does a great living poet speak of, as 
 
 The vision and the faculty divine. 
 
 Indeed of the many political ground-truths con- 
 tained in the Old Testament, I cannot recall one 
 more worthy to be selected as the moral and 
 V envoy of a Universal History, than the text in 
 Proverbs,* Where no vision is, the jyeople jperisheth. 
 
 It is now thirty years since the diversity of reason 
 and the understanding, of an idea and a conception, 
 and the practical importance of distinguishing the 
 one from the other, were first made evident to me. 
 And scarcely a month has passed during this long 
 interval in which either books, or conversation, or 
 the experience of life, have not supplied or suggested 
 some fresh proof and instance of the mischiefs and 
 mistakes derived from that ignorance of this truth, 
 which I have elsewhere called the queen-bee in the 
 hive of error. 
 
 WeU and truly has the understanding been 
 A.Q&xieA.—facultas mediata et mediorum — ^the faculty 
 of means to medial ends, that is, to such purposes 
 or ends as are themselves but means to some 
 ulterior end. 
 
 ♦ xxix. 18. 
 
70 
 
 IDEA OE THE NATIONAL CHUECH. 
 
 My eye at this moment rests on a volume newly 
 read by me, containing a well-written history of 
 the inventions, discoveries, public improvements, 
 docks, railways, canals, and the like, for about 
 the same period, in England and Scotland. I 
 closed it under the strongest impressions of awe, 
 and admiration akin to wonder. We live, I 
 exclaimed, under the dynasty of the understanding : 
 and this is its golden age. 
 
 It is the faculty of means to medial ends. With 
 these the age, this favoured land, teems : they 
 spring up, the armed host , — seges clgpeata — from 
 the serpent’s teeth sown by Cadmus : — 
 
 mortalia semina, dentes. 
 
 In every direction they advance, conquering and 
 to conquer. Sea and land, rock, mountain, lake 
 and moor, yea nature and all her elements, sink 
 before them, or yield themselves captive ! But the 
 ultimate ends ? Where shall I seek for information 
 concerning these ? By what name shall I seek for 
 the historiographer of reason ? Where shall I find 
 the annals of her recent campaigns ? the records of 
 her conquests ? In the facts disclosed by the 
 Mendicity Society ? In the reports on the increase 
 of crimes, commitments ? In the proceedings of 
 the Police ? Or in the accumulating volumes on 
 the horrors and perils of population ? 
 
IDEA OF THE NATIONAL CHUECH. 
 
 71 
 
 0 voice, once heard 
 Delightfully, Increase and multiply ! 
 
 Now death to hear ! For what can we increase 
 Or multiply,* hut woe, crime, ^penury. 
 
 Alas ! for a certain class, the following chapter 
 will, I fear, but too vividly show the burden of the 
 valley of vision ^ — even the burden upon the crowned 
 isle, whose merchants are 'princes, whose traffickers 
 are the honourable of the earth ; — who stretcheth 
 out her hand over the sea, — and she is the mart of 
 nations ! f 
 
 P. L. X. 729.— 
 
 f Isaiah, xxii., xxiii. 
 
72 
 
 EEGEETS AND APPEEHENSIONS. 
 
 CHAPTEE VII. 
 
 Regrets and Apprehensions. 
 
 The National Church was deemed in the dark age 
 of Queen Elizabeth, in the unenlightened times of 
 Burleigh, Hooker, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Lord 
 Bacon, a great venerable estate of the realm ; but 
 now by aU the intellect of the kingdom it has been 
 determined to be one of the many theological sects 
 or communities established in the realm ; yet dis- 
 tinguished from the rest by having its priesthood 
 endowed, durante bene placito^ by favour of the 
 Legislature, that is, of the majority, for the time 
 being, of the two houses of Parliament. The 
 Church being thus reduced to a religion, religion 
 in genere is consequently separated from the 
 Church, and made a subject of Parliamentary deter- 
 mination, independently of this Church. The poor 
 are withdrawn from the discipline of the Church. 
 The education of the people is detached from the 
 ministry of the Church. Eeligion becomes a noun 
 of multitude, or nomen collectivum, expressing the 
 aggregate of all the different groups of notions and 
 
EEGEETS AND APPREHENSIONS. 
 
 73 
 
 ceremonies connected with the invisible and super- 
 natural. On the plausible (and in this sense o. 
 the word unanswerable) pretext of the multitude 
 and variety of religions, and for the suppression 
 of bigotry and negative persecution, national educa- 
 tion is to be finally sundered from all religion, 
 but speedily and decisively emancipated from the 
 suf)erintendence of the national Clergy. Education 
 is to be reformed, and defined as synonymous with 
 instruction. The axiom of education so defined is 
 — knowledge being power, those attainments, which 
 give a man the power of doing what he wishes in 
 order to obtain what he desires, are alone to be 
 considered as knowledge, or to be admitted into 
 the scheme of national education. The subjects to 
 be taught in the national schools are to be, reading, 
 writing, arithmetic, the mechanic arts, elements 
 and results of physical science, but to be taught, as 
 much as possible, empirically. Eor all knowledge 
 being derived from the senses, the closer men are 
 kept to the fountain head, the more knowing they 
 must become. 
 
 Popular ethics consist of a digest of the criminal 
 laws, and the evidence requisite for conviction 
 under the same: lectures on diet, on digestion, 
 on infection, and the nature and effects of a specific 
 VITUS incidental to and communicable by livingbodies 
 in the intercourse of society. And note, that in 
 
74 
 
 REGRETS AND APPREHENSIONS. 
 
 order to balance tbe interests of individuals and 
 the interests of the State, the dietetic and peptic 
 text books are to be under the censorship of the 
 Board of Excise. 
 
 Then we have game laws, corn laws, cotton 
 factories, Spitalfields, the tillers of the land paid 
 by poor rates, and the remainder of the population 
 mechanised into engines for the manufactory of 
 new rich men ; — yea, the machinery of the wealth 
 of the nation made up of the wretchedness, disease 
 and depravity of those who should constitute the 
 strength of the nation ! Disease, I say, and vice, 
 while the wheels are in full motion ; but at the 
 first stop the magic wealth-machine is converted 
 into an intolerable weight of pauperism. But 
 this partakes of history. The head and neck of 
 the huge serpent are out of the den : the voluminous 
 train is to come. What next ? May I not whisper 
 as a fear, what senators have promised to demand 
 as a right ? Yes ! the next in my filial bodings is 
 spoliation; — spoliation of the Nationalty, half 
 thereof to be distributed among the land-owners, 
 and the other half among the stock-brokers, and 
 stock-owners, who are to receive it in lieu of the 
 interest formerly due to them. 
 
 But enough. I will ask only one question. 
 Has the national welfare, have the weal and hap- 
 piness of the people, advanced with the increase 
 
REGEETS AND APPREHENSIONS. 
 
 75 
 
 of the circumstantial prosperity ? Is the increasing 
 number of wealthy individuals that which ought to 
 be understood by the wealth of the nation ? In 
 answer to this, permit me to annex the following 
 chapter of contents of the moral history of the 
 last 130 years. 
 
 A. A declarative act respecting certain parts of 
 the Constitution, with provisions against further 
 violation of the same, erroneously intituled. The 
 Revolution of 1688. 
 
 B. The mechanico-corpuscular theory raised to 
 the title of the mechanic philosophy, and espoused 
 as a revolution in philosophy, by the actors and 
 partizans of the (so called) Revolution in the 
 State. 
 
 C. Result illustrated, in the remarkable con- 
 trast between the acceptation of the word, idea, 
 before the Restoration, and the present use of the 
 same word. Before 1660, the magnificent Son of 
 Cosmo was wont to discourse with Ricini, Politian 
 and the princely Mirandula on the ideas of will, 
 God, freedom. Sir Philip Sidney, the star of 
 serenest brilliance in the glorious constellation of 
 Elizabeth’s court, communed with Spenser on the 
 idea of the beautiful ; and the younger Algernon 
 — soldier, patriot, and statesman — with Harrington, 
 Milton, and Hevil on the idea of the State : and 
 in what sense it may be more truly affirmed, that 
 
76 
 
 EEGEETS AND APPREHENSIONS. 
 
 the People, that is, the component particles of the 
 body politic, at any moment existing as such, are 
 in order to the State, than that the State exists 
 for the sake of the People. 
 
 As to the present use of the word. 
 
 Dr. Holofernes, in a lecture on metaphysics, 
 delivered at one of the Mechanics’ Institutions, 
 explodes all ideas but those of sensation ; and his 
 friend. Deputy Costard, has no idea of a better 
 flavoured haunch of venison than he dined off at the 
 London Tavern last week. He admits (for the 
 Deputy has travelled) that the Prench have an 
 excellent idea of cooking in general ; but holds 
 that their most accomplished moUres de cuisine 
 have no more idea of dressing a turtle than the 
 Parisian gourmands themselves have any real idea 
 of the true taste and colour of the fat. 
 
 D. Consequences exemplified. A state of nature, 
 or the Ouran Outang theology of the origin of the 
 human race, substituted for the flrst ten chapters 
 of the Book of G-enesis ; rights of nature for the 
 duties and privileges of citizens; idealess facts, 
 misnamed proofs from history, grounds of experi- 
 ence, and the like, for principles and the insight 
 derived from them. Our state-policy a Cyclops 
 with one eye, and that in the back of the head ; our 
 measures become either a series of anachronisms, 
 or a truckling to events instead of the science. 
 
REGRETS AND APPREHENSIONS. 
 
 77 
 
 that should command them ; for all true insight is 
 foresight. (Take as documents, the measures of 
 the British Cabinet from the Boston Port-Bill, 
 March, 1774 ; but particularly from 1789, to the 
 Union with Ireland, and the Peace of Amiens.) 
 Meantime, behold the true historical feeling, the 
 immortal life of the nation, generation linked to 
 generation by faith, freedom, heraldry, and an- 
 cestral fame, languishing, and giving place to 
 the superstitions of wealth and newspaper repu- 
 tation. 
 
 E. Talents without genius : a swarm of clever, 
 well-informed men : an anarchy of minds, a des- 
 potism of maxims. Hence despotism of finance 
 in government and legislation — of vanity and 
 sciolism in the intercourse of life — of presump- 
 tion, temerity, and hardness of heart in political 
 economy. 
 
 E. The guess-work of general consequences 
 substituted for moral and political philosophy, and 
 its most familiar exposition adopted as a text-book 
 in one of the Universities, and cited as authority 
 in the Legislature. Hence plehs pro senatu popu- 
 loque; and the wealth of the nation (that is, of 
 the wealthy individuals thereof,) and the magni- 
 tude of the revenue mistaken for the well-being of 
 the people. 
 
 G-. Gin consumed by paupers to the value of 
 
REGRETS AND APPREHENSIONS. 
 
 about eighteen millions yearly: government by 
 clubs of journeymen ; by saint and sinner societies, 
 committees, institutions ; by reviews, magazines, 
 and above all by newspapers : lastly, crimes qua- 
 drupled for the whole country, and in some counties 
 decupled. 
 
 Concluding address to the Parliamentary leaders 
 of the Liberalists and Utilitarians. 
 
 I respect the talents of many, and the motives 
 and character of some, among you too sincerely to 
 court the scorn which I anticipate. But neither 
 shall the fear of it prevent me from declaring 
 aloud, and as a truth which I hold it the disgrace 
 and calamity of a professed statesman not to know 
 and acknowledge, that a permanent, nationalised, 
 learned order, a national clerisy or Church is an 
 essential element of a rightly constituted nation, 
 without which it wants the best security alike for 
 its permanence and its progression ; and for which 
 neither tract societies nor conventicles, nor Lan- 
 casterian schools, nor mechanics’ institutions, nor 
 lecture bazaars under the absurd name of univer- 
 sities, nor all these collectively, can be a substitute. 
 For they are all marked with the same asterisk 
 of spuriousness, show the same distemper- spot 
 on the front, that they are empirical specifics for 
 morbid symptoms that help to feed and continue 
 the disease. 
 
EEGRETS AND APPREHENSIONS. 
 
 79 
 
 But you wish for general illumination : you 
 would spur-arm the toes of society: you would 
 enlighten the higher ranks per ascensvm ah imis. 
 You begin, therefore, with the attempt to popu- 
 larise science : but you will only effect its plehifi- 
 cation. It is foUy to think of making aU, or the 
 many, philosophers, or even men of science and 
 systematic knowledge. But it is duty and wisdom 
 to aim at making as many as possible soberly and 
 steadily religious ; inasmuch as the morality which 
 the State requires in its citizens for its own well- 
 being and ideal immortality, and without reference 
 to their spiritual interest as individuals, can only 
 exist for the people in the form of rehgion. But 
 the existence of a true philosophy, or the pover 
 and habit of contemplating particulars in the unity 
 and fontal mirror of the idea, — this in the rulers 
 and teachers of a nation is indispensable to a sound 
 state of religion in all classes. In fine, religion, 
 true or false, is and ever has been the centre of 
 gravity in a realm, to which aU other things must 
 and will accommodate themselves. 
 
80 
 
 PAST BENEFITS OF 
 
 CHAPTEE VIII. 
 
 The suljeet resumed^ namely ^ the proper aims and 
 characteristic directions and channels of the 
 Nationally, The benefits of the National Church 
 in time past. The present beneficial infimences 
 and wordings of the same. 
 
 The deep interest which, during the far larger 
 portion of my life since early manhood, I have 
 attached to these convictions has, I perceive, 
 hurried me onwards as in a rush from the letting 
 forth of accumulated waters by the sudden opening 
 of the sluice gates. It is high time that I should 
 return to my subject. And I have no better way 
 of taking up the thread of my argunient than by 
 re-stating my opinion, that our eighth Henry 
 would have acted in correspondence with the great 
 principles of our constitution, if, having restored 
 the original balance on both sides, he had deter- 
 mined the Nationalty to the following objects : 
 1st. To the maintenance of the Universities and 
 the great liberal schools: 2ndly. To the main- 
 tenance of a pastor and schoolmaster in every 
 parish : 3rdly. To the raising and keeping in 
 
THE NATIONAL CHURCH. 
 
 81 
 
 repair of the churclies, schools, and other buildings 
 of that kind ; and, lastly, to the maintenance of 
 the proper, that is, the infirm, poor, whether from 
 age or sickness : one of the original purposes of the 
 national reserve being the alleviation of those evils, 
 which in the best forms of worldly States must 
 arise, and must have been foreseen as arising, from 
 the institution of individual properties and primo- 
 geniture. If these duties were efficiently per- 
 formed, and these purposes adequately fulfilled, 
 the very increase of the population (which would, 
 however, by these very means have been prevented 
 from becoming a vicious population), would have 
 more than counterbalanced those savings in the 
 expenditure of the JSTationalty occasioned by the 
 detachment of the practitioners of Law, Medicine, 
 and the like from the national clergy. That this 
 transfer of the national reserve from what had 
 become national evils to its original and inherent 
 purpose of national benefits, instead of the sacri- 
 legious alienation which actually took place — that 
 this was impracticable, is historically true : but no 
 less true is it philosophically, that this impracti- 
 cability, — arising wholly from moral causes, that is, 
 from loose manners and corrupt principles — does 
 not rescue this wholesale sacrilege from deserving 
 the character of the first and deadliest wound 
 inflicted on the constitution of the kingdom : 
 
 G 
 
82 
 
 PAST BENEFITS OF 
 
 which term, -constitution, in the body politic, as in 
 bodies natural, expresses not only what has been 
 actually evolved from, but likewise whatever is 
 potentially contained in, the seminal principle of 
 the particular body, and would in its due time 
 have appeared but for emasculation or disease. 
 Other wounds, by which indeed the constitution of 
 the nation has suffered, but which much more 
 immediately concern the constitution of the 
 Church, I shall perhaps find another place to 
 mention. 
 
 The mercantile and commercial class, in which 
 I here comprise all the four classes that I have put 
 in antithesis to the landed order, the guardian and 
 depository of the permanence of the realm, as more 
 characteristically conspiring to the interests of its 
 progression, the improvement and general freedom 
 of the country — this class, as I have already 
 remarked, in the earlier states of the constitution 
 existed but as in the bud. Tet during all this 
 period of potential existence, or what we may call 
 the minority of the burgess order, the National 
 Church was the substitute for the most important 
 national benefits resulting from the same. The 
 National Chm’ch presented the only breathing- 
 hole of hope. The Church alone relaxed the iron 
 fate by which feudal dependency, primogeniture, 
 and entail would otherwise have predestined every 
 
THE NATIONAL CHURCH. 
 
 83 
 
 native of the realm to be lord or vassal. To the 
 Church alone could the nation look for the benefits 
 of existing knowledge, and for the means of future 
 civilisation. Lastly, let it never be forgotten, that 
 under the fostering wing of the Church the class 
 of free citizens and burghers were reared. To the 
 feudal system we owe the forms, to the Church 
 the substance, of our liberty. I mention only two 
 of many facts that would form the proof and com- 
 ment of the above ; first, the origin of towns and 
 cities in the privileges attached to the vicinity of 
 churches and monasteries, and which, preparing 
 an asylum for the fugitive vassal and oppressed 
 franklin, thus laid the first foundation of a class 
 of freemen detached from the land ; — secondly, 
 the holy war, which the national clergy, in this 
 instance faithful to their national duties, waged 
 against slavery and villenage, and with such suc- 
 cess, that in the reign of Charles II., the law * 
 which declared every native of the realm free by 
 birth had merely to sanction an o'pus jam con- 
 swmmatum. Our Maker has distinguished man 
 from the brute that perishes, by making hope first 
 
 * The Author means the Act passed at the Restoration, 
 12 C. II. c. 24. *^And these encroachments grew to be so 
 universal, that when tenure in villenage was virtually 
 abolished, (though copyholds were preserved) by the statute 
 of Charles II., there was hardly a pure villein left in the 
 nation.” Blackstone II. c. 6. 96. — Ed. 
 
 G 2 
 
84 
 
 PAST BENEFITS OF 
 
 an iustinct of his nature, and, secondly, an indis- 
 pensable condition of his moral and intellectual 
 progression : 
 
 For every gift of noble origin 
 
 Is breathed upon by Hope’s perpetual breath. 
 
 Wordsworth. 
 
 But a natural instinct constitutes a right, as far 
 as its gratification is compatible with the equal 
 rights of others. And this principle may be 
 expanded and applied to the idea of the National 
 Church. 
 
 Among the primary ends of a State (in that 
 highest sense of the word, in which it is equivalent 
 to the nation, considered as one body politic, and 
 therefore including the National Church), there 
 are two, of which the National Church (according 
 to its idea) is the especial and constitutional organ 
 and means. The one is, to secure to the subjects 
 of the realm, generally, the hope, the chance of 
 bettering their own or their children’s condition. 
 And though during the last three or four centuries, 
 the National Church has found a most powerful 
 surrogate and ally for the effectuation of this great 
 purpose in her former wards and foster-children, 
 that is, in trade, commerce, free industry, and the 
 arts ; yet still the Nationalty, under all its defal- 
 cations, continues to feed the higher ranks by 
 drawing up whatever is worthiest from below, and 
 
THE NATIONAL CHURCH. 
 
 85 
 
 thus maintains the principle of hope in the humblest 
 families, while it secures the possessions of the rich 
 and noble. This is one of the two ends. The 
 other is, to develope in erery native of the country 
 those faculties, and to provide for every native that 
 knowledge and those attainments, which are neces- 
 sary to qualify him for a member of the State, the 
 free subject of a civilised realm. I do not mean 
 those degrees of moral and intellectual cultivation 
 which distinguish man from man in the same 
 civilised society, much less those that separate 
 the Christian from the this-worldian ; but those 
 only that constitute the civilised man in contra- 
 distinction from the barbarian, the savage, and the 
 animal. 
 
 I have now brought together all that seemed 
 requisite to put the intelligent reader in full pos- 
 session of (what I believe to be) the right idea of 
 the National Clergy, as an estate of the realm. 
 But I cannot think my task finished without an 
 attempt to rectify the too frequent false feeling 
 on this subject, and to remove certain vulgar errors 
 — errors, alas ! not confined to those whom the 
 world call the vulgar. Ma nel mondo non e se non 
 volgo, says Machiavel. I shall make no apology, 
 therefore, for interposing between the preceding 
 statements and the practical conclusion from them 
 the following paragraph extracted from a work long 
 
86 
 
 PAST BENEFITS OF 
 
 out of print,* and of such very limited circtdation 
 that I might have stolen from myself with little 
 risk of detection, had it not been my wish to show 
 that the convictions expressed in the preceding 
 pages are not the offspring of the moment, brought 
 forth for the present occasion ; but an expansion of 
 sentiments and principles publicly avowed in the 
 year 1817. 
 
 Among the numerous blessings of the English 
 Constitution, the introduction of an established 
 Church makes an especial claim on the gratitude 
 of scholars and philosophers ; in England, at least, 
 where the principles of Protestantism have con- 
 spired with the freedom of the government to 
 double all its salutary powers by the removal of its 
 abuses. 
 
 That the maxims of a pure morality, and those 
 sublime truths of the divine unity and attributes, 
 which a Plato found hard to learn and more diffi- 
 cult to reveal ; that these should have become the 
 almost hereditary property of childhood and poverty, 
 of the hovel and the workshop ; that even to the 
 unlettered they sound as common-place ; this is a 
 fact which must withhold all but minds of the 
 most vulgar cast from undervaluing the services 
 even of the pulpit and the reading-desk. Yet he 
 who should confine the efficiency of an established 
 
 * Biog. Lit. VoL I. chap. xi. — Ed. 
 
THE NATIONAL CHURCH. 
 
 87 
 
 Church to these can hardly be placed in a much 
 higher rank of intellect. That to every parish 
 throughout the kingdom there is transplanted a 
 germ of civilisation ; that in the remotest villages 
 there is a nucleus, round which the capabilities of 
 the place may crystallise and brighten; a model 
 sufficiently superior to excite, yet sufficiently near 
 to encourage and facilitate, imitation ; this inob- 
 trusive, continuous agency of a Protestant Church 
 Establishment, this it is which the patriot and the 
 philanthropist, who would fain unite the love of 
 peace with a faith in the progressive amelioration 
 of mankind, cannot estimate at too high a price. 
 It cannot he valued with the gold of Ophir, with 
 the precious onyx, or the sapphire. No mention 
 shall he made of coral or of pearls ; for the price of 
 wisdom is above ruhies. The clergyman is with his 
 parishioners and among them ; he is neither in the 
 cloistered cell, nor in the wilderness, but a neigh- 
 bour and family-man, whose education and rank 
 admit him to the mansion of the rich-landholder 
 while his duties make him the frequent visiter of 
 the farm-house and the cottage. He is, or he may 
 become, connected with the families of his parish 
 or its vicinity by marriage. And among the 
 instances of the blindness or at best of the short- 
 sightedness, which it is the nature of cupidity to 
 inflict, I know few more striking than the clamours 
 
88 
 
 PAST BENEFITS OF THE NATIONAL CHUBCH. 
 
 of the farmers against Church property. Whatever 
 was not paid to the clergymen would inevitably at 
 the next renewal of the lease be paid to the land- 
 holder, while, as the case at present stands, the 
 revenues of the Church are in some sort the 
 reversionary property of every family that may 
 have a member educated for the Church or a 
 daughter that may marry a clergyman. Instead 
 of being foreclosed and immoveable, it is, in fact, 
 the only species of landed property that is essen- 
 tially moving and circulative. That there exist no 
 inconveniences, who will pretend to assert ? But 
 I have yet to expect the proof that the incon- 
 veniences are greater in this than in any other 
 species ; or that either the farmers or the clergy 
 would be benefited by forcing the latter to become 
 either Trullibers or salaried placemen. Nay, I do 
 not hesitate to declare my firm persuasion that 
 whatever reason of discontent the farmers may 
 assign, the true cause is that they may cheat the 
 parson but cannot cheat the steward : and that 
 they are disappointed if they should have been able 
 to withhold only two pounds less than the legal 
 claim, having expected to withhold five. 
 
DISQUALIFICATIONS FOR THE NATIONAL CHURCH. 89 
 
 CHAPTEE IX. 
 
 Fractical Conclusion : What unfits for, and ivhat 
 excludes from, the National Church. 
 
 The Clerisj, or Xational Churcli, being an estate 
 of the realm, the Church and State, w ith the King 
 as the sovereign head of both, constituting the 
 body politic, the State in the larger sense of the 
 word, or the nation dynamically considered {kv 
 bvvd[jL€L Kara irvedixa, that is, as an ideal, but not the 
 less actual and abiding, unity) ; and in like manner, 
 the Xationalty being one of the two constitutional 
 modes or species, of which the common wealth of 
 the nation consists ; it follows by immediate conse- 
 quence, that of the qualifications and preconditions 
 for the trusteeship, absolutely to be required of the 
 order collectively, and of every individual person as 
 the conditions of his admission into this order, and 
 of his capability of the usufruct or life-interest of 
 any part or parcel of the Xationalty, the first and 
 most indispensable, that without which all others 
 are nuU and void, is, that the national Clergy and 
 every member of the same from the highest to the 
 lowest, shall be fully and exclusively citizens of the 
 
90 
 
 DISQUALIFICATIONS FOR 
 
 State, neither acknowledging the authority, nor 
 within the influence, of any other state in the 
 world ; — full and undistracted subjects of this 
 kingdom, and in no capacity, and under no pre- 
 tences, owning any other earthly sovereign or 
 visible head but the King, in whom alone the 
 majesty of the nation is apparent, and by whom 
 alone the unity of the nation in will and in deed is 
 symbolically expressed and impersonated. 
 
 The full extent of this first and absolutely neces- 
 sary qualification will be best seen in stating the 
 contrary, that is, the absolute disqualifications, the 
 existence of which in any individual, and in any 
 class or order of men, constitutionally incapacitates 
 such individual and class or order from being 
 inducted into the national trust : and this on a 
 principle so vitally concerning the health and 
 integrity of the body politic, as to render the 
 voluntary transfer of the ISTationalty, whole or in 
 part, direct or indirect, to an order notoriously 
 thus disqualified, a foul treason against the most 
 fundamental rights and interests of the realm, and 
 of all classes of its citizens and free subjects, the 
 individuals of the very order itself, as citizens and 
 subjects, not excepted. Kow there are two things, 
 and but two, which evidently and predeterminably 
 disqualify for this great trust : the first absolutely ; 
 and the second, — which in its collective operation. 
 
THE NATIONAL CHURCH. 
 
 91 
 
 and as an attribute of tbe whole class, would, of 
 itself, constitute the greatest possible unfitness for 
 the proper ends and purposes of the National 
 Church, as explained and specified in the preceding 
 paragraphs, and the heaviest drawback from the 
 civilising infiuence of the national Clergy in their 
 pastoral and parochial character — the second, I 
 say, by implying the former, becomes likewise an 
 absolute ground of disqualification. It is scarcely 
 necessary to add, what the reader will have anti- 
 cipated, that the first absolute disqualification is 
 allegiance to a foreign power : the second, the 
 abjuration — under the command and authority of 
 this power, and as by the rule of their order its 
 professed lieges {alligati) — of that bond, which 
 more than all other ties connects the citizen with 
 his country ; which beyond all other securities 
 afibrds the surest pledge to the State for the fealty 
 of its citizens, and that which (when the rule is 
 applied to any body or class of men, under what- 
 ever name united, where the number is sufficiently 
 great to neutralise the accidents of individual 
 temperament and circumstances,) enables the State 
 to calculate on their constant adhesion to its 
 interests, and to rely on their faith and singleness 
 of heart in the due execution of whatever public 
 or national trust may be assigned to them. 
 
 But I shall, perhaps, express the nature of this 
 
92 
 
 DISqUALIFICATIONS FOR 
 
 security more adequately by the negative. The 
 marriage tie is a bond the preclusion of which by 
 an antecedent obligation, that overrules the acci- 
 dents of individual character and is common to the 
 whole order, deprives the State of a security with 
 which it cannot dispense. I will not say that it is 
 a security which the State may rightfully demand 
 of all its adult citizens, competently circumstanced, 
 by positive enactment : though I might shelter 
 the position under the authority of the great 
 publicists and state-lawyers of the Augustan age, 
 who, in the Lex Papia Poppcea^ enforced anew 
 a principle common to the old Roman Constitution 
 with that of Sparta. But without the least fear 
 of confutation, though in the full foresight of 
 vehement contradiction, I do assert that the State 
 may rightfully demand of any number of its sub- 
 jects united in one body or order the absence of all 
 customs, initiative vows, covenants and by-laws in 
 that order, precluding the members of such body 
 collectively and individually from affording this 
 security. In strictness of principle, I might here 
 conclude the sentence, though as it now stands it 
 would involve the assertion of a right in the State 
 to suppress any order confederated under laws so 
 
 * A.U.C. 762 . — inditi custodes, et lege Papia Poppcea prce- 
 miis inductif ut, si a privilegiis parentum cessaretur, velut parens 
 omnium populus vacantia teneret. Tac. Ann. III. 28. — Ed. 
 
THE NATIONAL CHUKCH. 
 
 93 
 
 anti-civic. But I am no friend to anj rights that 
 can be disjoined from the duty of enforcing them. 
 I therefore at once confine and complete the 
 sentence thus : — The State not only possesses the 
 right of demanding, but is in duty bound to 
 demand, the above as a necessary condition of its 
 entrusting to any order of men, and to any indi- 
 vidual as a member of a known order, the titles, 
 functions, and investments of the National Church. 
 
 But if any doubt could attach to the proposition, 
 whether thus stated or in the perfectly equivalent 
 converse, that is, that the existence and known 
 enforcement of the injunction or prohibitory by-law, 
 before described, in any order or incorporation, 
 constitutes an a ‘priori disqualification for the 
 trusteeship of the Nationalty, and an insuperable 
 obstacle to the establishment of such an order or 
 of any members of the same as a national Clergy, 
 — such doubt would be removed, as soon as this 
 injunction, or vow exacted and given, or whatever 
 else it may be, by which the members of the order, 
 collectively and as such, incapacitate themselves 
 from afibrding this security for their full, faithful, 
 and unbiassed application of a national trust to its 
 proper and national purposes, is found in conjunc- 
 tion with, and aggravated by, the three following 
 circumstances : — First, that this incapacitation 
 originates in, and forms part of, the allegiance of 
 
94 
 
 DISQUALIFICATIONS FOR 
 
 the order to a foreign sovereignty : secondly, that 
 it is notorious that the canon or prescript, on 
 which it is grounded, was first enforced on the 
 secular clergy universally, after long and obstinate 
 reluctation on their side, and on that of their 
 natural sovereigns in the several realms, to which 
 as subjects they belonged; and that it is still 
 retained in force, and its revocation infiexibly 
 refused, as the direct and only adequate means of 
 supporting that usurped and foreign sovereignty, 
 and of securing by virtue of the expatriating and 
 insulating effect of its operation, the devotion and 
 allegiance of the order* to their visible head and 
 sovereign: and thirdly, that the operation of the 
 interdict precludes one of the most constant and 
 infiuential ways and means of promoting the great 
 paramount end of a National Church, the progres- 
 sive civilisation of the community. 
 
 Emollit mores j nec sinit esse feros, 
 
 * For the fullest and ablest exposition of this point, I 
 refer to the Rev. Joseph Blanco White’s '^Practical and 
 Internal Evidence against Catholicism,” and to that ad- 
 mirable work, Eiforma d' Italia” written by a professed 
 and apparently sincere Roman Catholic, a work which well 
 merits translation. I know no work so well fitted to soften 
 the prejudices against the theoretical doctrines of the Latin 
 Church, and to deepen our reprobation of what it actually, 
 and practically is in all countries where the expediency of 
 keeping up appearances, as in Protestant neighbourhoods, 
 does not operate. 
 
THE NATIONAL CHURCH. 
 
 05 
 
 And now let me conclude these preparatory 
 notices by compressing the sum and substance of 
 my argument into this one sentence. Though 
 many things may detract from the comparative 
 fitness of individuals or of particular classes for 
 the trust and functions of the Nationalty, there 
 are only two absolute disqualifications : and these 
 are, allegiance to a foreign power, or the acknow- 
 ledgment of any other visible head of the Church, 
 but our sovereign lord the King : and compulsory 
 celibacy in connection with, and in dependence on, 
 a foreign and extra-national head. 
 
96 
 
 IDEA OF THE KING 
 
 CHAPTEE X. 
 
 On the King and the Nation. 
 
 A TEEATiSE ? why, the subjects might, I own, 
 excite some apprehension of the sort. But it will 
 be found like sundry Greek treatises among the 
 tinder-rolls of Herculaneum, with titles of as large 
 promise, somewhat largely and irregularly abbre- 
 viated in the process of unrolling. In fact, neither 
 my purpose nor my Limits permit more than a few 
 hints which may prepare the reader for some of 
 the positions assumed in the second part of this 
 volume. 
 
 Of the King with the two Houses of Parliament, 
 as constituting the State (in the especial and 
 antithetic sense of the word) I have already spoken : 
 and what remains is only to determine the proper 
 and legitimate objects of its superintendence and 
 control. On what is the power of the State right- 
 fully exercised ? JSTow, I am not arguing in a 
 court of law ; and my purpose would be grievously 
 misunderstood if what I say should be taken as 
 intended for an assertion of the fact. Neither of 
 
AND THE NATION. 
 
 97 
 
 facts, nor of statutory and demandable rights do 
 I speak : but exclusively of the State according to 
 the idea. And in accordance with the idea of the 
 State, I do not hesitate to answer that the legiti- 
 mate objects of its power comprise all the interests 
 and concerns of the Proprietage, both landed and 
 personal, and whether inheritably vested in the 
 lineage or in the individual citizen; and these 
 alone. Even in the lives and limbs of the lieges 
 the King, as the head and arm of the State, has an 
 interest of property : and in any trespass against 
 them the King appears as plaintiff. 
 
 The chief object for which men, who from the 
 beginning existed as a social bond, first formed 
 themselves into a state, and on the social super- 
 induced the political relation, was not the protec- 
 tion of their lives but of their property. The 
 natural man is too proud an animal to admit that 
 he needs any other protection for his life than what 
 his own courage and that of his clan can bestow. 
 Where the nature of the soil and climate has 
 precluded all property but personal, and admitted 
 that only in its simplest forms, as in Greenland for 
 instance, — there men remain in the domestic state 
 and form neighbourhoods, not governments. And 
 in North America the chiefs appear to exercise 
 government in those tribes only which possess 
 individual landed property. Among the rest the 
 
 H 
 
98 
 
 IDEA OF THE KING 
 
 chief is the general, a leader in war ; not a magis- 
 trate. To property and to its necessary inequali- 
 ties must be referred all human laws, that would 
 not be laws without and independent of any con- 
 ventional enactment ; that is, aU State-legislation.* 
 Next comes the King, as the head of the National 
 Church or Clerisy, and the protector and supreme 
 trustee of the Nationalty : the power of the same 
 in relation to its proper objects being exercised by 
 the Enng and the Houses of Convocation, of which, 
 as before of the State, the King is the head and 
 arm. And here if it had been my purpose to enter 
 at once on the development of this position, 
 together with the conclusions to be drawn from it, 
 I should need with increased earnestness remind 
 the reader that I am neither describing what the 
 National Church now is, nor determining what it 
 ought to be. My statements respect the idea alone 
 as deduced from its original purpose and ultimate 
 aim : and of the idea only must my assertions be 
 understood. But the full exposition of this point 
 is not necessary for the appreciation of the late 
 Bill which is the subject of the following part of 
 the volume. It belongs indeed to the chapter with 
 which I had intended to conclude this volume, and 
 which, should my health permit, and the circum- 
 stances warrant it, it is still my intention to let 
 
 * See the Friend, L p. 275. 4th edit. — Ed. 
 
AND THE NATION. 
 
 99 
 
 follow the present work — namely, my humble con- 
 tribution towards an answer to the question, What 
 is to be done now ? For the present, therefore, it 
 will be sufficient, if I recall to the reader’s recollec- 
 tion that formerly the national Clerisy, in the two 
 Houses of Convocation duly assembled and repre- 
 sented, taxed themselves. But as to the proper 
 objects, on which the authority of the Convocation 
 with the King at its head was to be exercised, 
 — these the reader will himself without difficulty 
 decipher by referring to what has been already said 
 respecting the proper and distinguishing ends and 
 purposes of a National Church. 
 
 I pass, therefore, at once to the relations of the 
 Nation, or the State in the larger sense of the 
 word, to the State especially so named, and to the 
 Crown. And on this subject again I shall confine 
 myself to a few important, yet, I trust, not common 
 nor obvious, remarks respecting the conditions 
 requisite or especially favourable to the health and 
 vigour of the realm. From these again I separate 
 those, the nature and importance of which cannot 
 be adequately exhibited but by adverting to the 
 consequences which have followed their neglect or 
 inobservance, reserving them for another place: 
 while for the present occasion I select two only ; 
 but these, I dare believe, not unworthy the name of 
 political principles, or maxims, that is, regulw quce 
 
 H 2 
 
100 
 
 IDEA OF THE KING 
 
 inter maximas numerari merentur. And both of 
 them forcibly confirm and exemplify a remark, 
 often and in various ways suggested to my mind, 
 that with, perhaps, one* exception, it would be 
 difficult in the whole compass of language to find 
 a metaphor so commensurate, so pregnant, or 
 suggesting so many points of elucidation, as that 
 of body politic, as the exponent of a State or 
 Eealm. I have little admiration for the many- 
 jointed similitudes of Flavel, and other finders of 
 moral and spiritual meanings in the works of art 
 and nature, where the proportion of the likeness to 
 the difierence not seldom reminds me of the cele- 
 brated comparison of the morning twilight to a 
 boiled lobster.f But the correspondence between 
 the body politic and the body natural holds even in 
 the detail of application. Let it not, however, be 
 supposed that I expect to derive any proof of my 
 positions from this analogy. My object in thus 
 prefacing them is answered, if I have shown cause 
 for the use of the physiological terms by which I 
 have sought to render my meaning intelligible. 
 
 The first condition then required, in order to a 
 sound constitution of the body politic, is a due 
 proportion of the free and permeative life and 
 
 * That namely of the Word (John i. 1.) for the Divine 
 Alterity ; the Deus Alter et Idem of Philo ; Deltas Ohjectiva. 
 
 t Hudibras, Pt. II. c. 2, v. 29. — Ed. 
 
AND THE NATION. 
 
 101 
 
 energy of the nation to the organised powers 
 brought within containing channels. What those 
 vital forces that seem to bear an analogy to the 
 imponderable agents, magnetic, or galvanic, in 
 bodies inorganic, if indeed, they are not the same 
 in a higher energy and under a different law of 
 action — what these, I say, are in the living body in 
 distinction from the fluids in the glands and vessels 
 — the same, or at least holding a like relation, are 
 the indeterminable, but yet actual, influences of 
 intellect, information, prevailing principles and 
 tendencies (to which we must add the influence of 
 property, or income, where it exists without right 
 of suffrage attached thereto), to the regular, 
 deflnite, and legally recognised powers in the body 
 politic. But as no simile runs on all four legs 
 (nihil simile est idem), so here the difference in 
 respect to the body politic is, that in sundry 
 instances the former, that is, the permeative, species 
 of force is capable of being converted into the 
 latter, of being as it were organised and rendered 
 a part of the vascular system, by attaching a 
 measured and determinate political right or privi- 
 lege thereto. 
 
 What the exact proportion, however, of the two 
 kinds of force should be, it is impossible to prede- 
 termine. But the existence of a disproportion is 
 sure to be detected sooner or later by the effects. 
 
102 
 
 IDEA OE THE KING 
 
 Thus : the ancient G-reek democracies, the hot-beds 
 of art, science, genius, and civilisation, fell into 
 dissolution from the excess of the former, the per- 
 meative power deranging the functions, and by 
 explosions shattering the organic structures, which 
 they should have enlivened. On the contrary, the 
 Eepublic of Venice fell by the contrary extremes. 
 For there all political power was confined to the 
 determinate vessels, and these becoming more and 
 more rigid, even to an ossification of the arteries, 
 the State, in which the people were nothing, lost 
 all power of resistance ad extra. 
 
 Under this head, in short, there are three possible 
 sorts of malformation to be noticed. The first is, 
 the adjunction or concession of direct political 
 power to personal force and influence, whether 
 physical or intellectual, existing in classes or 
 aggregates of individuals, without those fixed or 
 tangible possessions, freehold, copyhold, or lease- 
 hold, in land, house, or stock. The power resulting 
 from the acquisition of knowledge or skill, and 
 from the superior development of the understand- 
 ing is, doubtless, of a far nobler kind than mere 
 physical strength and fierceness; the one being 
 peculiar to the animal man, the other common to 
 him with the bear, the bufialo, and the mastiff. 
 And if superior talents, and the mere possession of 
 knowledges, such as can be learned at Mechanics’ 
 
AND THE NATION. 
 
 103 
 
 Institutions, were regularly accompanied with a 
 will in harmony with the reason, and a consequent 
 subordination of the appetites and passions to the 
 ultimate ends of our being; — if intellectual gifts 
 and attainments were infallible signs of wisdom 
 and goodness in the same proportion, and the 
 knowing and clever were always rational ; — if the 
 mere facts of science conferred or superseded the 
 softening humanising influences of the moral world, 
 that habitual presence of the beautiful or the seemly, 
 and that exemption from all familiarity with the 
 gross, the mean, and the disorderly, whether in 
 look or language, or in the surrounding objects, 
 in which the main efficacy of a liberal education 
 consists ; — and if, lastly, these acquirements and 
 powers of the understanding could be shared equally 
 by the whole class, and did not, as by a necessity 
 of nature they ever must do, fall to the lot of two 
 or three in each several group, club, or neighbour- 
 hood; — then, indeed, by an enlargement of the 
 Chinese system, political power might not unwisely 
 be conferred as the honorarium or privilege on 
 having passed through all the forms in the national 
 schools, without the security of political ties, with- 
 out those fastenings and radical fibres of a collective 
 and registrable property, by which the citizen 
 inheres in and belongs to the commonwealth, as a 
 constituent part either of the Proprietage, or of the 
 
104 
 
 IDEA OF THE KING 
 
 Nationalty ; either of the State or of the National 
 Church. But as the contrary of all these suppo- 
 sitions may he more safely assumed, the practical 
 conclusion will be — not that the requisite means 
 of intellectual development and growth should be 
 withholden from any native of the soil, which it was 
 at all times wicked to wish, and which it would be 
 now silly to attempt; but that the gifts of the 
 understanding, whether the boon of a genial nature, 
 or the reward of more persistent application, should 
 be allowed fair play in the acquiring of that pro- 
 prietorship, to which a certain portion of political 
 power belongs as its proper function. Bor in this 
 way there is at least a strong probability that 
 intellectual power will be armed with political 
 power, only where it has previously been combined 
 with and guarded by the moral qualities of pru- 
 dence, industry, and self-control. And this is the 
 first of the three kinds of mal-organisation in a 
 state ; — namely, direct political power without 
 cognisable possession. 
 
 The second is, the exclusion of any class or 
 numerous body of individuals, who have notoriously 
 risen into possession, and the influence inevitably 
 connected with known possession, under pretence 
 of impediments that do not directly or essentially 
 affect the character of the individuals as citizens, 
 or absolutely disqualify them for the performance 
 
AND THE NATION. 
 
 105 
 
 of civic duties. Imperfect, yet oppressive and 
 irritating, ligatures these that peril the trunk, the 
 circulating current of which they would withhold, 
 even more than the limb which they would fain 
 excommunicate . 
 
 The third and last is, a gross incorrespondency, 
 in relation to our own country, of the proportion 
 of the antagonist interests of the body politic in 
 the representative body, in the two Houses of 
 Parliament, to the actual proportion of the same 
 interests and of the public influence exerted by 
 the same in the nation at large. Whether in 
 consequence of the gradual revolution which has 
 transferred to the magnates of the landed interest so 
 large a portion of that borough representation which 
 was to have been its counterbalance ; whether the 
 same causes which have deranged the equilibrium 
 of the landed and the* monied interests in the 
 
 * Monied, used arbitrarily, as in preceding pages the words. 
 Personal and Independent, from my inability to find any one 
 self-interpreting word, that would serve for the generic name 
 of the four classes, on which I have stated the interest of 
 progression more especially to depend, and with it the free- 
 dom which is the indispensable condition and propelling 
 force of all national progress : even as the counter-pole, the 
 other great interest of the body politic, its permanency, is 
 more especially committed to the landed order, as its natural 
 guardian and depository. I have therefore had recourse to 
 the convenient figure of speech, by which a conspicuous 
 part or feature of a subject is used to express the whole ; and 
 
106 
 
 IDEA OF THE KING 
 
 Legislature have not likewise deranged the balance 
 between the two unequal divisions of the landed 
 
 the reader will be so good as to understand, that the monied 
 order in this place comprehends and stands for the com- 
 mercial, manufacturing, distributive, and professional classes 
 of the community. 
 
 Only a few days ago, an accident placed in my hand a 
 work of which, from my very limited opportunities of seeing 
 new publications, I had never before heard, — Mr. Crawfurd’s 
 History of the Indian Archipelago — the work of a wise as 
 well as of an able and well-informed man. Need I add 
 that it was no ordinary gratification to find that in respect 
 of certain prominent positions, maintained in this volume, 
 I had unconsciously been fighting behind the shield of one 
 whom I deem it an honour to follow. But the sheets con- 
 taining the passages having been printed off, I avail myself 
 of this note to insert the sentences from Mr. Crawfurd’s 
 History, rather than lose the confirmation which a coinci- 
 dence with so high an authority has produced on my own 
 mind, and the additional weight which my sentiments will 
 receive in the judgment of others. The first of the two 
 extracts the reader will consider as annexed to pp. 27 — 29 
 of this volume; the second to the paragraph (p. 97) on the 
 protection of property, as the end chiefly proposed in the 
 formation of a fixed government, quoted from a work of my 
 own, published ten or eleven years before the appearance of 
 Mr. Crawfurd’s History, which I notice in order to give the 
 principle in question that probability of its being grounded 
 in fact, which is derived from the agreement of two inde- 
 pendent minds. The first extract Mr. Crawfurd introduces 
 by the remark that the possession of wealth, derived from 
 a fertile soil, encouraged the progress of absolute power in 
 Java. He then proceeds — 
 
 Extract I. 
 
 The devotion of a people to agricultural industry, by ren- 
 dering themselves more tame and their property more tan- 
 
AND THE NATION. 
 
 107 
 
 interest itself, namely, the Major Barons, or great 
 land-owners, with or without title, and the great 
 body of the agricultural community, and thus given 
 to the real or imagined interests of the compara- 
 tively few the imposing name of the interest of the 
 whole, the landed interest ; — these are questions, 
 to which the obdurate adherence to the jail- 
 crowding game laws, (which, during the reading of 
 the Litany, I have sometimes been tempted to 
 include, by a sort of sub intellige, in the petitions 
 — -from envy, hatred, and malice, and all uncha- 
 ritableness ; from battle, murder, and sudden death. 
 Good Lord, deliver us I') to which the old corn 
 laws, and the exclusion of the produce of our own 
 colonies from our distilleries, during the war, 
 against the earnest recommendation of the govern- 
 ment, the retention of the statutes against usury, 
 and other points of minor importance or of less 
 safe handling, may seem at a first view to suggest 
 
 gible, went still farther towards it : for wherever agriculture 
 is the principal pursuit, there it may certainly be reckoned, 
 that the people will be found living under an absolute 
 government. — Vol. iii. p. 24. 
 
 Extract II. 
 
 In cases of murder, no distinction is made (in the ancient 
 laws of the Indian Islanders) between wilful murder and 
 chance-medley. It is the loss, which the family or tribe 
 sustains, that is considered, and the pecuniary compensation 
 was calculated to make up that loss. — Ib. p. 123. 
 
108 
 
 IDEA OF THE KING 
 
 an answer in the affirmative; but which, for 
 reasons before assigned, I shall leave unresolved, 
 content if only I have made the principle itself 
 intelligible. 
 
 The following anecdote, for I have no means of 
 ascertaining its truth, and no warrant to offer for 
 its accuracy, I give not as a fact in proof of an 
 overbalance of the landed interest, but as an indis- 
 tinctly remembered hearsay, in elucidation of 
 what is meant by the words. Some eighteen or 
 twenty years ago — for so long I think it must have 
 been, since the circumstance was first related to 
 me — my illustrious (alas ! I must add, I fear, my 
 late) friend. Sir Humphrey Davy, at Sir Joseph 
 Banks’s request, analysed a portion of an East 
 Indian import, known by the names of cutch, and 
 terra Japonica ; but which he ascertained to be a 
 vegetable extract, consisting almost wholly of pure 
 tannin ; and further trials, with less pure speci- 
 mens, still led to the conclusion that the average 
 product would be seven parts in ten of the tanning 
 principle. This discovery w’as * communicated to 
 
 ♦ And, (if I recollect right, though it was not from him, 
 that I received the anecdote) by a friend of Sir Humphrey’s, 
 whom I am proud to think my friend likewise, and by an 
 elder claim — a man whom I have seen now in his harvest 
 
 ^ The late excellent Thomas Poole of Nether Stowey^ 
 Somerset. — Ed. 
 
AND THE NATION. 
 
 109 
 
 the trade ; and on inquiry made at the India House, 
 it was found that this cutch could be prepared in 
 large quantities, and imported at a price which, 
 after an ample profit to the importers, it would very 
 well answer the purposes of the tanners to give. 
 The trade, itself, too, was likely to be greatly 
 
 field, or the market, now in a committee-room with the Rick- 
 mans and Ricardos of the age ; at another time with Davy, 
 Wollaston, and the Wedgwoods; now with Wordsworth, 
 Southey, and other friends not unheard of in the republic of 
 letters ; now in the drawing-rooms of the rich and the noble, 
 and now presiding at the annual dinner of a village benefit 
 society ; and in each seeming to be in the very place he was 
 intended for, and taking the part to which his tastes, talents, 
 and attainments gave him an admitted right. And yet this 
 is not the most remarkable, not the individualising, trait of 
 my friend’s character. It is almost overlooked in the ori- 
 ginality and raciness of his intellect ; in the life, freshness, 
 and practical value of his remarks and notices, truths i)lucked 
 as they are gi'owing, and delivered to you with the dew on 
 them, the fair earnings of an observing eye, armed and kept 
 on the watch by thought and meditation ; and above all, in 
 the integrity or entireness of his being, (^ntegrum et sine cera 
 vas), the steadiness of his attachments, and the activity and 
 persistency of a benevolence, which so graciously presses a 
 warm temper into the service of a yet warmer heart, and 
 so lights up the little flaws and imperfections, incident to 
 humanity in its choicest specimens, that were their removal 
 at the option of his friends, (and few have, or deserve to 
 have so many) not a man among them but would vote for 
 leaving him as he is. 
 
 This is a note digressive ; but, as the height of the offence 
 is, that the garnish is too good for the dish, I shall confine 
 my apology to a confession of the fault. 
 
110 
 
 IDEA OF THE KING 
 
 benefited and enlarged by being rendered less 
 dependent on particular situations ; while the 
 reduction of the price at which it could be offered 
 to the foreign consumer, acting in conjunction with 
 the universally admitted superiority of the English 
 leather, might be reasonably calculated on as 
 enabliug us to undersell our foreign rivals in their 
 own markets. Accordingly, an offer was made on 
 the part of the principal persons interested in the 
 leather trade to purchase, at any price below the 
 sum that had been stated to them as the highest 
 or extreme price, as large a quantity as it was pro- 
 bable that the Company would find it feasible or 
 convenient to import in the first instance. Well! 
 the ships went out, and the ships returned, again 
 and again : and no increase in the amount of the 
 said desideratum appearing among the imports, 
 enough only being imported to meet the former 
 demand of the druggists, and (it is whispered) of 
 certain ingenious transmuters of Bohea into Hyson, 
 — my memory does not enable me to determine 
 whether the inquiry into the occasion of this dis- 
 appointment was made, or whether it was anti- 
 cipated by a discovery that it would be useless. 
 But it was generally understood that the tanners 
 had not been the only persons, whose attention had 
 been drawn to the qualities of the article, and the 
 consequences of its importation ; and that a very 
 
AND THE NATION. 
 
 Ill 
 
 intelligible hint had been given to persons of knovm 
 influence in Leadenhall-street, that in case any such 
 importation were allowed, the East India Company 
 must not expect any support from the landed 
 interest in Parliament at the next renewal, or 
 motion for the renewal of their Charter. The East 
 India Company might reduce the price of bark, 
 one half or more ; and the British navy, and the 
 grandsons of our present senators, might thank 
 them for thousands and myriads of noble oaks, left 
 unstript in consequence — this may be true ; but no 
 less true is it, that the free merchants would soon 
 reduce the price of good tea in the same proportion, 
 and monopolists ought to have a feeling for each 
 other. 
 
112 
 
 THE OMNIPOTENCE 
 
 CHAPTEE XI. 
 
 The relations of the ^potential to the actual. The 
 omnipotence of Parliament; — of what hind. 
 
 So much in explanation of the first of the two con- 
 ditions* of the health and vigour of a body politic : 
 and far more, I must confess, than I had myself 
 reckoned on. I wiU endeavour to indemnify the 
 reader by despatching the second in a few sen- 
 tences, which could not so easily have been accom- 
 plished without the explanations given in the 
 preceding paragraphs. Eor as we have found the 
 first condition in the due proportion of the free and 
 permeative life of the State to the powers organised, 
 and severally determined by their appropriate 
 containing or conducting nerves, or vessels; the 
 second condition is a due proportion of the potential, 
 that is, latent or dormant power to the actual 
 power. In the first condition, both powers alike 
 are awake and in act. The balance is produced by 
 the polarisation of the actual power, that is, the 
 opposition of the actual power organised to the 
 
 See ante, p. 100. — Ed. 
 
OF PARLIAMENT, 
 
 113 
 
 actual power free and permeating the organs. In 
 the second, the actual power, in toto, is opposed to 
 the potential. It has been frequently and truly 
 observed that in England, where the ground plan, 
 the skeleton, as it were, of the government is a 
 monarchy, at once buttressed and limited by the 
 aristocracy, (the assertions of its popular character 
 finding a better support in the harangues and 
 theories of popular men, than in state-docu- 
 ments and the records of clear history,) a far 
 greater degree of liberty is, and long has been, 
 enjoyed than ever existed in the ostensibly freest, 
 that is, most democratic, commonwealths of ancient 
 or of modern times ; — greater, indeed, and with a 
 more decisive predominance of the spirit of freedom 
 than the wisest and most philanthropic statesmen 
 of antiquity, or than the great Commonwealth’ s- 
 men, (the stars of that narrow interspace of blue 
 sky between the black clouds of the first and second 
 Charles’s reigns) believed compatible, the one with 
 the safety of the State, the other with the interests 
 of morality. 
 
 Yes! for little less than a century and a half 
 Englishmen have collectively and individually lived 
 and acted with fewer restraints on their free-agency 
 than the citizens of any known * republic, past or 
 
 * It will be thought, perhaps, that the United States of 
 North America should have been excepted. But the identity 
 
114 
 
 THE OMNIPOTENCE 
 
 present. The fact is certain. It has been often 
 boasted of, but never, I think, clearly explained. 
 The solution must, it is obvious, be sought for in 
 the combination of circumstances, to which we owe 
 the insular privilege of a self-evolving Constitu- 
 tion: and the following will, I think, be found 
 the main cause of the fact in question. Extremes 
 meet — an adage of inexhaustible exemplification. 
 A democratic republic and an absolute monarchy 
 agree in this ; that, in both alike, the nation or 
 people delegates its whole power. Nothing is left 
 obscure, nothing sufiered to remain in the idea, 
 unevolved and only acknowledged as an existing, 
 yet indeterminable right. A Constitution such 
 states can scarcely be said to possess. The whole 
 wiU of the body politic is in act at every moment. 
 But in the constitution of England according to 
 the idea, (which in this instance has demonstrated 
 its actuality by its practical infiuence, and this too 
 though counter-worked by fashionable errors and 
 maxims, that left their validity behind in the law- 
 
 of stock, language, customs, manners and laws scarcely 
 allows me to consider this an exception : even though it were 
 quite certain both that it is and that it will continue such. 
 It was, at all events, a remark worth remembering, which 
 I once heard from a traveller (a prejudiced one I must 
 admit), that where every man may take liberties, there is 
 little liberty for any man ; — or, that where every man takes 
 liberties, no man can enjoy any. 
 
OP PAELIAMENT. 
 
 115 
 
 courts, from which they were borrowed) the nation 
 has delegated its power, not without measure and 
 circumscription, whether in respect of the duration 
 of the trust, or of the particular interests entrusted. 
 
 The omnipotence of Parliament, in the mouth 
 of a lawyer, and understood exclusively of the 
 restraints and remedies within the competence of 
 our law-courts, is objectionable only as bombast. 
 It is but a puffing pompous way of stating a plain 
 matter of fact. Yet in the times preceding the 
 Restoration even this was not universally admitted. 
 And it is not without a fair show of reason that 
 the shrewd and learned author of “ The Eoyalist’s 
 Defence,” printed in the year 1648, (a tract of 172 
 pages, small quarto, from which I now transcribe,) 
 thus sums up his argument and evidences ; 
 
 “ Upon the whole matter clear it is, the Parlia- 
 ment itself (that is, the King, the Lords, and 
 Commons) although unanimously consenting, are 
 not boundless : the Judges of the realm by the 
 fundamental law of England have power to deter- 
 mine which Acts of Parliaments are binding and 
 which void.” p. 48. — That a unanimous declaration 
 of the judges of the realm that any given Act of 
 Parliament was against right reason and the funda- 
 mental law of the land (that is, the constitution of 
 the realm), would render such Act null and void, 
 was a principle that did not want defenders among 
 
 I 2 
 
116 
 
 THE OMNIPOTENCE 
 
 the lawyers of elder times. And in a state of 
 society in which the competently informed and 
 influential members of the community (the national 
 Clerisy not included), scarcely perhaps trebled the 
 number of the members of the two Houses, and 
 Parliaments were so often tumultuary congresses 
 of a victorious party rather than representatives 
 of the State, the right and power here asserted 
 might have been wisely vested in the judges of the 
 realm; and with at least equal wisdom, under 
 change of circumstances, has the right been suffered 
 to fall into abeyance. Therefore let the potency 
 of Parliament be that highest and uttermost, 
 beyond which a court of law looketh not: and 
 within the sphere of the Courts quicquid Hex cvm 
 Harliamento voluit,fatum sit! ” 
 
 But if the strutting phrase be taken, as from 
 sundry recent speeches respecting the fundamental 
 institutions of the realm it may be reasonably in- 
 ferred that it has been taken, that is, absolutely, 
 and in reference, not to our courts of law exclu- 
 sively, but to the nation, to England with all her 
 venerable heir-looms, and with all her germs of 
 reversionary wealth, — thus used and understood, 
 the omnipotence of Parliament is an hyberbole 
 that would contain mischief in it, were it only 
 that it tends to provoke a detailed analysis of the 
 materials of the joint-stock company, to which so 
 
OF PARLIAMENT. 
 
 117 
 
 terrific an attribute belongs, and the competence 
 of the shareholders in this earthly omnipotence to 
 exercise the same. And on this head the obser- 
 vations and descriptive statements given in the 
 fifth chapter of the old tract, just cited, retain all 
 their force ; or if any have fallen off, their place 
 has been abundantly filled up by new growths. 
 The degree and sort of knowledge, talent, probity, 
 and prescience, which it would be only too easy, 
 were it not too invidious, to prove from acts and 
 measures presented by the history of the last half 
 century, are but scant measure even when exerted 
 within the sphere and circumscription of the con- 
 stitution, and on the matters properly and pecu- 
 liarly appertaining to the State according to the 
 idea ; — this portion of moral and mental endowment 
 placed by the side of the ^Zi45^z^«m-gigantic height 
 and amplitude of power, implied in the unqualified 
 use of the phrase, omnipotence of Parliament, and 
 with its dwarfdom intensified by the contrast, 
 would threaten to distort the countenance of truth 
 itself with the sardonic laugh of irony.* 
 
 * I have not in my possession the morning paper in which 
 I read it, or I should with great pleasure transcribe an ad- 
 noirable passage from the present King of Sweden’s Address 
 to the Storthing, or Parliament of Norway, on the necessary 
 limits of Parliamentary power, consistently with the exist- 
 ence of a constitution. But I can with confidence refer 
 the reader to the speech, as worthy of an Alfred. Every 
 
118 
 
 THE OMNIPOTENCE 
 
 The non-resistance of successive generations 
 has ever been, and with evident reason, deemed 
 equivalent to a tacit consent, on the part of the 
 nation, and as finally legitimating the act thus 
 acquiesced in, however great a dereliction of prin- 
 ciple, and breach of trust, the original enactment 
 may have been. I hope, therefore, that without 
 offence I may venture to designate the Septennial 
 Act as an act of usurpation, tenfold more dangerous 
 to the true liberty of the nation than the pretext for 
 the measure, namely, the apprehended Jacobite 
 leaven from a new election, was at aU likely to 
 have proved : and I repeat the conviction which I 
 have expressed in reference to the practical sup- 
 pression of the Convocation, that no great principle 
 was ever invaded or trampled on, that did not 
 sooner or later avenge itself on the country, and 
 even on the governing classes themselves, by the 
 consequences of the precedent. The statesman 
 who has not learned this from history has missed 
 its most valuable result, and might in my opinion 
 as profitably, and far more delightfully, have 
 devoted his hours of study to Sir Walter Scott’s 
 JS’ovels.* 
 
 thing indeed that I have heard or read of this sovereign, 
 has contributed to the impression on my mind, that he is a 
 good and a wise man, and worthy to be the king of a virtuous 
 people, the purest specimen of the Gothic race. 
 
 ♦ This would not be the first time that these fascinating 
 
OF PARLIAMENT. 
 
 119 
 
 But I must draw in my reins. Neither my limits 
 permit, nor does my present purpose require, that 
 I should do more than exemplify the limitation 
 resulting from that latent or potential power, a due 
 proportion of which to the actual powers I have 
 stated as the second condition of the health and 
 vigor of a body politic, by an instance bearing 
 directly on the measure which in the following 
 section I am to aid in appreciating, and which was 
 the occasion of the whole work. The principle 
 itself,— which, as not contained within the rule 
 and compass of law, its practical manifestations 
 being indeterminable and inappreciable a priori, 
 and then only to be recorded as having manifested 
 itself, when the predisposing causes and the en- 
 during effects prove the unific mind and energy of 
 the nation to have been in travail ; when they have 
 made audible to the historian that voice of the 
 people which is the voice of God ; — this principle, 
 I say, (or the power, that is the subject of it) which 
 by its very essence existing and working as an 
 idea only, except in the rare and predestined 
 epochs of growth and reparation, might seem to 
 
 volumes had been recommended as a substitute for history 
 — a ground of recommendation, to which I could not con- 
 scientiously accede ; though some half dozen of these 
 Novels, with a perfect recollection of the contents of every 
 page, I read over more often in the course of a year than I 
 can honestly put down to my own credit. 
 
120 
 
 THE OMNIPOTENCE 
 
 many fitter matter for verse than for sober argu- 
 ment, — I will, by way of compromise, and for the 
 amusement of the reader, sum up in the rhyming 
 prose of an old Puritan poet, consigned to contempt 
 by Mr. Pope, but whose writings, with all their 
 barren flats and dribbling common-place, contain 
 nobler principles, profounder truths, and more that 
 is properly and peculiarly poetic, than are to be 
 found in his own works.* The passage in question, 
 however, I found occupying the last page on a 
 flying- sheet of four leaves, entitled, JEngland^s 
 Misery and Remedy ^ in a judicious Letter from 
 an Utter-JBarrister to his Special Friend^ con- 
 cerning Lieut. -Col. Lilburne^s Imprisonment in 
 Newgate; and I beg leave to borrow the intro- 
 duction, together with the extract, or that part at 
 least, which suited my purpose. 
 
 “ Christian Reader, having a vacant place for 
 
 * If it were asked whether I consider the works of the 
 one of equal value with those of the other, or hold George 
 Withers to be as great a writer as Alexander Pope, — my 
 answer would be that I am as httle likely to do so as the 
 querist would be to put no greater value on a highly 
 wrought vase of pure silver from the hand of a master, than 
 on an equal weight of copper ore that contained a small 
 per centage of separable gold scattered through it. The 
 reader will be pleased to observe that in the passage here 
 cited, the “State” is used in the largest sense, and as 
 synonymous with the realm, or entire body politic, including 
 Church and State in the narrower and special sense of the 
 latter term. 
 
OF PARLIAMENT. 
 
 121 
 
 some few lines, I have made bold to use some of 
 Major Greorge Withers his verses out of Fbo? 
 Facijlca, jpage 199. 
 
 Let not your King and Parliament in one, 
 
 Much less apart, mistake themselves for that 
 Which is most worthy to be thought upon : 
 
 Nor think they are, essentially, the State. 
 
 Let them not fancy, that th’ authority 
 And privileges upon them bestown, 
 
 Conferr’d are to set up a majesty, 
 
 A power, or a glory, of their own ! 
 
 But let them know, ’twas for a deeper life. 
 
 Which they but represent 
 
 That there’s on earth a yet auguster thing. 
 
 Veil’d tho’ it be, than Parliament and King.” 
 
122 OBLIGATION OF THE CORONATION OATH 
 
 CHAPTEE XII. 
 
 The •preceding 'position exemplified. The origin and 
 'meaning of the Coronation Oath^ in respect 
 of the National Church. In 'what its moral 
 obligation consists. Recapitulation. 
 
 And liere again the “ Eojalist’s Defence” furnishes 
 me with the introductory paragraph ; and I am 
 always glad to find in the words of an elder writer, 
 what I must otherwise have said in my own person 
 — otium simul et auctoritatem. 
 
 “ All Englishmen grant, that arbitrary power 
 is destructive of the best purposes for which power 
 is conferred : and in the preceding chapter it has 
 been shown, that to give an unlimited authority 
 over the fundamental laws and rights of the nation, 
 even to the King and two Houses of Parliament 
 jointly, though nothing so bad as to have this 
 boundless power in the King alone, or in the 
 Parliament alone, were nevertheless to deprive 
 Englishmen of the security from arbitrary power, 
 which is their birth-right. 
 
 “ Upon perusal of former statutes it appears, 
 that the members of both Houses have been 
 
IN RESPECT OF THE NATIONAL CHURCH. 123 
 
 frequently drawn to consent, not only to things 
 prejudicial to the Commonwealth, hut, (even in 
 matters of greatest weight) to alter and contradict 
 what formerly themselves had agreed to, and that, 
 as it happened to please the fancy of the present 
 Prince, or to suit the passions and interests of a 
 prevailing faction. Witness the statute by which 
 it was enacted that the proclamation of King 
 Henry YIII. should be equivalent to an Act of 
 Parliament; another declaring both Mary and 
 Elizabeth bastards ; and a third statute empower- 
 ing the Eng to dispose of the Crown of England 
 by will and testament. Add to these the several 
 statutes in the times of King Henry VIII., Edward 
 VI., Queen Mary, and Queen Elizabeth, setting 
 up and puUing down each other’s religion, every 
 one of them condemning even to death the pro- 
 fession of the one before established .” — Eoyalisfs 
 Defence, p. 41. 
 
 So far my anonymous author, evidently an old 
 Tory lawyer of the genuine breed, too enlightened 
 to obfuscate and incense-blacken the shrine, 
 through which the kingly idea should be translu- 
 cent, into an idol to be worshipped in its own right ; 
 but who, considering both the reigning Sovereign 
 and the Houses, as limited and representative 
 functionaries, thought he saw reason, in some few 
 cases, to place more confidence in the former than 
 
124 OBLIGATION OF THE CORONATION OATH 
 
 in the latter; while there were points, which he 
 wished as little as possible to'trust to either. With 
 this experience, however, as above stated, (and it 
 would not be difficult to increase the catalogue,) 
 can we wonder that the nation grew sick of Par- 
 liamentary religions ; — or that the idea should at 
 last awake and become operative, that what virtually 
 concerned their humanity and involved yet higher 
 relations than those of the citizen to the State, 
 duties more awful, and more precious privileges, 
 while yet it stood in closest connection with all 
 their civil duties and rights, as their indispensable 
 condition and only secure ground — that this was 
 not a matter to be voted up or down, off or on, by 
 fluctuating majorities; — that it was too precious 
 an inheritance to be left at the discretion of an 
 omnipotency which had so little claim to omni- 
 science ? No interest this of a single generation, 
 but an entailed boon too sacred, too momentous, 
 to be shaped and twisted, pared down or plumped 
 up, by any assemblage of Lords, Knights, and 
 Burgesses for the time being; — men perfectly 
 competent, it may be, to the protection and manage- 
 ment of those interests in which, as having so 
 large a stake, they may be reasonably presumed to 
 feel a sincere and lively concern, but who, the ex- 
 perience of ages might teach us, are not the class of 
 persons most likely to study or feel a deep concern 
 
IN RESPECT TO THE NATIONAL CHURCH. 125 
 
 in the interests here spoken of, in either sense 
 of the term Church ; — that is, whether the interests 
 be of a kingdom not of the world, or those of an 
 estate of the realm, and a constituent part, there- 
 fore, of the same system with the State, though as 
 the opposite pole. The results at all events have 
 been such, whenever the representatives of the one 
 interest have assumed the direct control of the 
 other, as gave occasion long ago to the rhyming 
 couplet, quoted as proverbial by Luther : 
 
 Cum mare siccatur, cum Dosmon ad astra levatur. 
 Tunc clero laicus fidus amicus erit. 
 
 But if the nation willed to withdraw the religion 
 of the realm from the changes and revolutions 
 incident to whatever is subjected to the suffrages of 
 the representative assemblies, whether of the State 
 or of the Church, the trustees of the Proprietage 
 or those of the Nationalty, the first question is, 
 how this reservation is to be declared and by what 
 means to be effected. These means, the security 
 for the permanence of the established religion, 
 must, it may be foreseen, be imperfect ; for what 
 can be otherwise that depends on human will ? 
 but yet it may be abundantly sufiB.cient to declare 
 the aim and intention of the provision. Our 
 ancestors did the best it was in their power to do. 
 Knowing by recent experience that multitudes 
 
126 OBLIGATION OF THE CORONATION OATH 
 
 never blush, that numerous assemblies, however 
 respectably composed, are not exempt from tem- 
 porary hallucinations and the influences of party 
 passion ; that there are things, for the conservation 
 of which — 
 
 Men safelier trust to heaven, than to themselves, 
 
 When least themselves, in storms of loud debate, 
 
 Where folly is contagious, and too oft 
 
 Even wise men leave their better sense at home 
 
 To chide and wonder at them, when return’d.* 
 
 Knowing this, our ancestors chose to place their 
 reliance on the honour and conscience of an indi- 
 vidual, whose comparative height, it was believed, 
 would exempt him from the gusts and shifting 
 currents that agitate the lower region of the poli- 
 tical atmosphere. Accordingly, on a change of 
 dynasty they bound the person, who had accepted 
 the crown in trust, — bound him for himself and 
 his successors by an oath to refuse his consent 
 (without which no change in the existing law can 
 be effected,) to any measure subverting or tending 
 to subvert the safety and independence of the 
 National Church, or which exposed the realm to 
 the danger of a return of that foreign usurper mis- 
 named spiritual, from which it had with so many 
 sacriflces emancipated itself. However unconstitu- 
 tional therefore the royal veto on a Bill presented 
 
 * Poet. Works, Vol. ii. p. 258. — Ed. 
 
IN EESPECT TO THE NATIONAL CHURCH. 127 
 
 by the Lords and Commons may be deemed 
 in all ordinary cases, this is clearly an exception. 
 For it is no additional power conferred on the 
 King ; but a limit imposed on bim by the consti- 
 tution itself for its own safety. Previously to the 
 ceremonial act, which announces him the only 
 lawful and sovereign head of both the Church and 
 the State, the oath is administered to him religiously 
 as the representative person and crowned majesty 
 of the nation. Eeligiously, I say ; — for the mind 
 of the nation, existing only as an idea, can act 
 distinguishably on the ideal powers alone — that is, 
 on the reason and conscience. 
 
 It only remains then to determine what it is to 
 which the Coronation oath obliges the conscience 
 of the King. And this may be best done by 
 considering what in reason and in conscience the 
 nation had a right to impose. Now that the nation 
 had a right to decide for the King’s conscience 
 and reason, and for the reason and conscience of 
 all his successors, and of his and their counsellors 
 and ministers, laic and ecclesiastic, on questions of 
 theology, and controversies of faith, — for example, 
 that it is not allowable in directing our thoughts 
 to a departed Saint, the Virgin Mary for instance, 
 to say Ova pro ndhis^ heat a Virpo, though there 
 might, peradventure, be no harm in saying, Oret 
 pro nohis, precor, heata Virgo ; whether certain 
 
128 OBLIGATION OF THE CORONATION OATH 
 
 books are to be bolden canonical; wbetber tbe 
 text, They shall he saved as through fire, refers to a 
 purgatorial process in tbe body, or during tbe 
 interval between its dissolution and tbe day of 
 judgment ; wbetber tbe words, This is my lody, are 
 to be understood bterally, and if so, wbetber it is 
 by consubstantiation with, or transubstantiation of, 
 bread and wine; and that tbe members of both 
 Houses of Parliament, together with tbe Privy 
 Councillors and all tbe Clergy shall abjure and 
 denounce tbe theory last mentioned — this I utterly 
 deny. And if this were tbe whole and sole object 
 and intention of tbe oath, however large tbe 
 number might be of tbe persons who imposed or 
 were notoriously favourable to tbe imposition, so 
 far from recognising the nation in their collective 
 number, I should regard them as no other than an 
 aggregate of intolerant mortals, from bigotry and 
 presumption forgetful of their fallibibty, and not 
 less ignorant of their own rights than callous to 
 those of succeeding generations. If tbe articles of 
 faith therein disclaimed and denounced were the 
 substance and proper intention of tbe oath, and 
 not to be understood, as in all common sense they 
 ought to be, as temporary marks, because the 
 known accompaniments, of other and legitimate 
 grounds of disqualification ; and which only in 
 reference to these, and only as long as they implied 
 
IN RESPECT TO THE NATIONAL CHURCH. 129 
 
 their existence, were fit objects of political inter- 
 ference ; it would be as impossible for me, as for 
 the late Mr. Canning, to attach any such sanctity 
 to the Coronation oath as should prevent it from 
 being superannuated in times of clearer light and 
 less heat. But that these theological articles, and 
 the open profession of the same by a portion of the 
 King’s subjects as parts of their creed, are not the 
 evils which it is the true and legitimate purpose of 
 the oath to preclude, and which constitute and 
 define its obligation on the royal conscience ; and 
 what the real evils are, that do indeed disqualify 
 for offices of national trust, and give the permanent 
 obligatory character to the engagement — this, — 
 in which I include the exposition of the essential 
 characters of the Christian or Catholic Church ; 
 and of a very different Church, which assumes the 
 name ; and the application of the premises to an 
 appreciation on principle of the late Bill, now the 
 law of the land, — will occupy the remaining portion 
 of the volume. 
 
 And now I may be permitted to look back on 
 the road we have passed : in the course of which, 
 I have placed before the reader a small part indeed 
 of what might, on a suitable occasion, be profitably 
 said; but it is all that for my present purpose I 
 deem it necessary to say respecting three out of 
 the five themes that were to form' the subjects of 
 
130 
 
 RECAPITULATION. 
 
 the first part of this little work. But let me avail 
 myself of the pause to repeat my apology to the 
 reader for any extra trouble I may have imposed 
 on him, by employing the same term, the State, 
 in two senses; though I fiatter myself I have in 
 each instance so guarded it as to leave scarcely the 
 possibility that a moderately attentive reader should 
 understand the word in one sense, when I had 
 meant it in the other, or confound the State as a 
 whole and comprehending the Church, with the 
 State as one of the two constituent parts, and in 
 contradistinction from the Church. 
 
 BRIEF RECAPITULATION. 
 
 Birst, then, I have given briefiy hut, I trust, 
 with sufficient clearness, the right idea of a State, 
 or body politic ; the word State being here synony- 
 mous with a constituted realm, kingdom, common- 
 wealth, or nation ; that is, where the integral parts, 
 classes, or orders are so balanced, or interdependent 
 as to constitute, more or less, a moral unit, an 
 organic whole ; and as arisiug out of the idea of a 
 State I have added the idea of a Constitution, as 
 the informing principle of its coherence and unity. 
 But in applying the above to our own kingdom 
 (and with this qualification the reader is requested 
 
RECAPITULATION. 
 
 131 
 
 to understand me as speaking in all the following 
 remarks), it was necessary to observe, and I 
 willingly avail myself of this opportunity to repeat 
 the observation, — that the constitution, in its widest 
 sense as the constitution of the realm, arose out of, 
 and in fact consisted in, the co-existence of the 
 constitutional State (in the second acceptation of 
 the term) with the King as its head, and of the 
 Church, that is, the National Church, with the 
 King likewise as its head ; and lastly of the King, 
 as the head and majesty of the whole nation. The 
 reader was cautioned therefore not to confound 
 it with either of its constituent parts ; that he 
 must first master the true idea of each of these 
 severally ; and that in the synopsis or conjunction 
 of the three the idea of the English constitution, 
 the constitution of the realm, will rise of itself 
 before him. And in aid of this purpose and 
 following this order, I have given according to my 
 best judgment, first, the idea of the State in the 
 second or special sense of the term ; of the State- 
 legislature ; and of the two constituent orders, the 
 Landed, with its two classes, the Major Barons, 
 and the Eranklins ; and the Personal, consisting of 
 the mercantile, or commercial, the manufacturing, 
 the distributive and the professional ; these two 
 orders corresponding to the two great all-including 
 interests of the State, — the Landed, namely, to the 
 
132 
 
 RECAPITULATION. 
 
 permanence, — the Personal to the progression. The 
 possessions of both orders, taken collectively, form 
 the* Proprietage of the realm. In contradistinction 
 from this and as my second theme, I have explained 
 (and it being the principal object of this work, more 
 diffusely) the Nationalty, its nature and purposes, 
 and the duties and qualifications of its trustees and 
 functionaries. In the same sense in which I at 
 once oppose and conjoin the Nationalty to the 
 Proprietage ; in the same antithesis and conjunction 
 I use and understand the phrase. Church and State. 
 Lastly, I have essayed to determine the constitu- 
 tional idea of the Crown, and its relations to the 
 nation, to which I have added a few sentences on 
 the relations of the nation to the State. 
 
 To the completion of this first part of my under- 
 taking, two subjects still remain to be treated of — 
 and to each of these I shall devote a small section ; 
 the title of the first being, “ On the idea of the 
 Christian Church ; ” that of the other, “ On a third 
 
 * To convey his meaning precisely is a debt which an 
 Author owes to his readers. He therefore who, to escape 
 the charge of pedantry, will rather be misunderstood than 
 startle a fastidious critic with an unusual term, may be 
 compared to the man who should pay his creditor in base or 
 counterfeit coin, when he had gold or silver ingots in his 
 possession, to the precise amount of the debt; and this 
 under the pretence of their unshapeliness and want of the 
 mint impression. 
 
RECAPITULATION. 
 
 133 
 
 Church : ” the name of which I withhold for the 
 present, in the expectation of deducing it bj con- 
 trast from the contradistinguishing characters of 
 the former. 
 
IDEA OE THE CHEISTIAN CHTJECH. 
 
*‘We (said Luther), tell our Lord God plainly: If he 
 will have his Church, then he must look how to maintain 
 and defend it; for we can neither uphold nor protect it. 
 And well for us, that it is so ! For in case we could, or 
 were able to defend it, we should become the proudest 
 asses under heaven. Who is the Church’s protector, that 
 hath promised to be with her to the end, and the gates of 
 hell shall not prevail against her? Kings, Diets, Parlia- 
 ments, Lawyers? Marry, no such cattle.” — Luther's Table 
 Talk with additions. — Ed. 
 
IDEA OF THE CHEISTIAN CHDECH. 
 
 — ♦ — 
 
 The practical conclusion from our inquiries re- 
 specting the origin and idea of the National Church, 
 the paramount end and purpose of which is the 
 continued and progressive civilisation of the com- 
 munity, {emollit mores nec sinit esse feros^ was 
 this : that though many things may be conceived 
 of a tendency to diminish the fitness of particular 
 men, or of a particular class, to be chosen as trus- 
 tees and functionaries of the same ; though there 
 may be many points more or less adverse to the 
 perfection of the establishment ; there are yet but 
 two absolute disqualifications; namely, allegiance 
 to a foreign power, or an acknowledgment of any 
 other visible head of the Church but our sovereign 
 lord the King; and compulsory celibacy in con- 
 nection with, and dependence on, a foreign and 
 extra-national head. I now call the reader to a 
 different contemplation, to the idea of the Christian 
 Church. 
 
 Of the Christian Church, I say, not of Christianity. 
 
138 
 
 IDEA OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 
 
 To the ascertainment and enucleation of the 
 latter, of the great redemptive process which began 
 in the separation of light from Chaos {Hades, or 
 the indistinction), and has its end in the union of 
 life with Grod, the whole summer and autumn and 
 now commenced winter of my life have been dedi- 
 cated. Hie labor, hoc opus est, on which alone 
 I rest my hope that I shall be found not to have 
 lived altogether in vain. Of the Christian Church 
 only, and of this no further than is necessary for 
 the distinct understanding of the National Church, 
 it is my purpose now to speak : and for this pur- 
 pose it will be sufficient to enumerate the essential 
 characters by which the Christian Church is dis- 
 tinguished. 
 
 I. — The Christian Church is not a kingdom, 
 realm {royaurue), or state {sensu latiori^ of the 
 world, that is, of the aggregate or total number 
 of the kingdoms, states, realms, or bodies politic, 
 (these words being, as far as the present argument 
 is concerned, perfectly synonymous), into which 
 civilised man is distributed ; and which, collectively 
 taken, constitute the civilised world. The Chris- 
 tian Church, I say, is no state, kingdom, or realm 
 of this world ; nor is it an estate of any such realm, 
 kingdom or state ; but it is the appointed opposite 
 to them all collectively — the sustaining, correcting, 
 befriending opposite of the world ; the compensating 
 
IDEA OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 
 
 139 
 
 counterforce to the inherent* and inevitable evils 
 and defects of the State, as a State, and without 
 reference to its better or worse construction as 
 a particular state ; while whatever is beneficent and 
 humanising in the aims, tendencies, and proper 
 objects of the State, the Christian Church collects in 
 itself as in 2i focus, to radiate them back in a higher 
 quality; or to change the metaphor, it completes 
 and strengthens the edifice of the State, without 
 interference or commixture, in the mere act of 
 laying and securing its own foundations. And for 
 these services the Church of Christ asks of the 
 State neither wages nor dignities. She asks only 
 protection and to be let alone. These indeed she 
 demands ; but even these only on the ground that 
 there is nothing in her constitution or in her dis- 
 cipline inconsistent with the interests of the State, 
 
 * It is not without pain that I have advanced this posi- 
 tion, without the accompanying proofs and documents which 
 it may be thought to require, and without the elucidations 
 which I am sure it deserves ; but which are precluded alike 
 by the purpose and the limits of the present work. I will, 
 however, take this opportunity of earnestly recommending to 
 such of my readers as understand German, Lessing’s Ernst 
 und Falk : Gespr'dche fur Freymdurer. They will find it in 
 Vol. vii. of the Leipsic edition of Lessing’s Works. I know 
 no finer example of the point, elegance, and exquisite, yet 
 effortless, precision and conciseness of Lessing’s philosophic 
 and controversial writings. I remember nothing that is at 
 once like them, and equal to them, but the Provincial 
 Letters of Pascal. 
 
140 
 
 IDEA OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 
 
 notliing resistant or impedimental to tlie State in 
 the exercise of its rightful powers, in the fulfilment 
 of its appropriate duties, or in the effectuation of 
 its legitimate objects. It is a fundamental principle 
 of all legislation, that the State shall leave the 
 largest portion of personal free agency to each of 
 its citizens, that is compatible with the free agency 
 of all, and not subversive of the ends of its own 
 existence as a state. And though a negative, it is a 
 most important distinctive, character of the Church 
 of Christ, that she asks nothing for her members as 
 Christians, which they are not already entitled to 
 demand as citizens and subjects. 
 
 II. — The Christian Church is not a secret com- 
 munity. In the once current (and well worthy to 
 be re-issued) terminology of our elder divines, it 
 is objective in its nature and purpose, not mystic 
 or subjective, that is, not like reason or the court 
 of conscience, existing only in and for the indivi- 
 dual. Consequently the Church here spoken of 
 is not the kingdom of God which is within^ and 
 which cometh not with ohservationf but is most 
 observable, — a city huilt on a hill, and not to be 
 hid — an institution consisting of visible and public 
 communities. In one sentence it is the Church 
 visible and militant under Christ. And this 
 
 * Luke xvii. 21 — 20. See ib. xxL 28, 31. — Ed, 
 
IDEA OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 
 
 141 
 
 visibility, this publicity, is its second distinctive 
 character. 
 
 III. — The third character reconciles the two pre- 
 ceding and gives the condition, under which their 
 co-existence in the same subject becomes possible. 
 Antagonist forces are necessarily of the same kind. 
 It is an old rule of logic, that only concerning two 
 subjects of the same kind can it be properly said 
 that they are opposites. Inter res Tieterogeneas 
 non datur op;positio ; that is, contraries cannot be 
 opposites. Alike in the primary and the meta- 
 phorical use of the word, rivals {rivales) are those 
 only who inhabit the opposite banks of the same 
 stream. 
 
 Now, in conformity to the first character, the 
 Christian Church is not to be considered as a 
 counterpole to any particular State, the word being 
 here taken in the largest sense. Still less can it, 
 like the National Clerisy, be opposed to the State 
 in the narrower sense. The Christian Church, as 
 such, has no Nationalty entrusted to its charge. 
 It forms no counter-balance to the collective 
 Heritage of the realm. The phrase, Church and 
 State, has a sense and a propriety in reference to 
 the National Church alone. The Church of Christ 
 cannot be placed in this conjunction and antithesis 
 without forfeiting the very name of Christian. 
 The true and only contra-position of the Christian 
 
142 
 
 IDEA OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 
 
 Cliurcli is to the World. Her paramount aim and 
 object, indeed, is another world, not a world to 
 come exclusively, but likewise another world that 
 now is,* and to the concerns of which alone the 
 epithet spiritual can, without a mischievous abuse 
 of the word, be applied. But as the necessary 
 consequence and accompaniments of the means by 
 which she seeks to attain this especial end, and as 
 a collateral object, it is her office to counteract the 
 evils that result by a common necessity from all 
 bodies politic, the system or aggregate of which is 
 the world. And observe that the nisus^ or counter- 
 agency, of the Christian Church is against the 
 evil results only, and not (directly, at least, or by 
 primary intention) against the defective institutions 
 that may have caused or aggravated them. 
 
 But on the other hand, by virtue of the second 
 character, the Christian Church is to exist in every 
 kingdom and state of the world, in the form of 
 public communities, and is to exist as a real and 
 ostensible power. The consistency of the first and 
 second character depends on, and is fully efiected 
 by, the third character of the Church of Christ ; 
 namely, — 
 
 The absence of any visible head or sovereign, and 
 by the non-existence, nay the utter preclusion, 
 
 * See Appendix to this Treatise. — Ed, 
 
IDEA OF THE CHHISTIAN CHURCH. 
 
 143 
 
 of any local or personal centre of unity, of any 
 single source of universal power. This fact may 
 be thus illustrated. Kepler and Newton, sub- 
 stituting the idea of the infinite for the conception 
 of a finite and determined world, assumed^ in the 
 Ptolemaic astronomy, superseded and drove out 
 the notion of a one central point or body of the 
 universe. Pinding a centre in every point of 
 matter and an absolute circumference no where, 
 they explained at once the unity and the distinc- 
 tion that co-exist throughout the creation by focal 
 instead of central bodies : the attractive and 
 restrainiug power of the sun or focal orb, in each 
 particular system, supposing and resulting from an 
 actual power, present in all and over all, throughout 
 an indeterminable multitude of systems. And this, 
 demonstrated as it has been by science, and verified 
 by observation, we rightly name the true system 
 of the heavens. And even such is the scheme and 
 true idea of the Christian Church. In the primitive 
 times, and as long as the churches retained the 
 form given them by the Apostles and Apostolic 
 men, every community, or in the words of a Father 
 of the second century, (for the pernicious fashion 
 of assimilating the Christian to the Jewish, as 
 afterwards to the Pagan, ritual by false analogies 
 was almost coeval with the Church itself,) every 
 altar had its own bishop, every flock its own pastor, 
 
144 
 
 IDEA OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 
 
 who derived his authority immediately from Christ, 
 the universal Shepherd, and acknowledged no 
 other superior than the same Christ, speaking by 
 his spirit in the unanimous decision of any number 
 of bishops or elders, according to his promise, 
 Where two or three are gathered together in my 
 name, there am I in the midst of them.^ 
 
 * Questions of dogmatic divinity do not enter into the 
 purpose of this work ; and I am even anxious not to give it 
 a theological character. It is, however, within the scope of 
 my argument to observe that, as may be incontrovertibly 
 proved by other equivalent declarations of our Lord, this 
 promise is not confined to houses of worship and prayer- 
 meetings exclusively. And though I cannot ofiPer the same 
 justification for what follows, yet the interest and importance 
 of the subject will, I trust, excuse me if I remark that, even 
 in reference to meetings for divine worship, the true import 
 of these gracious, soul-awing, words is too generally over- 
 looked. It is not the comments or harangues of unlearned 
 and fanatical preachers that I have in my mind, but sermons 
 of great and deserved celebrity, and divines whose learning, 
 well-regulated zeal, and sound Scriptural views are as ho- 
 nourable to the Church, as their piety, beneficence, and 
 blameless life, are to the Christian name, when I say that 
 passages occur which might almost lead one to conjecture 
 that the authors had found the words, I will come and join 
 you,” instead of, I am in the midst of you , — passages from 
 which it is at least difficult not to infer that they had inter- 
 preted the promise, as of a corporal co-presence, instead of 
 a spiritual immanence (ort fxivei iv as of an individual 
 coming in or down, and taking a place, as soon as the required 
 number of petitioners was completed ; as if, in short, this pre- 
 sence, this actuation of the I AM, (el/it eV {xiacp avrcoy) were 
 an after-consequence, an accidental and separate result and 
 
IDEA OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 
 
 145 
 
 Hence tlie unitive relation of the churches to 
 each other, and of each to all, being equally actual 
 
 reward of the contemporaneous and contiguous worshipping 
 — and not the total act itself, of which the spiritual Christ, 
 one and the same in all the faithful, is the originating and 
 perfective focal unity. Even as the physical life is in each 
 limb and organ of the body, all in every part ; but is mani- 
 fested as life, by being one in all and thus making all one ; 
 even so with Christ, our spiritual life. He is in each true 
 believer, in his solitary prayer and during his silent commu- 
 nion in the watches of the night, no less than in the congre- 
 gation of the faithful; but he manifests his indwelling 
 presence more characteristically, with especial evidence, 
 when many, convened in his name, whether for prayer or 
 for council, do through him become one. 
 
 I would that these preceding observations were as little 
 connected with the main subject of this volume, as to some 
 they will appear to be. But as the mistaking of symbols 
 and analogies for metaphors has been a main occasion and 
 support of the worst errors in Protestantism : so the under- 
 standing the same symbols in a literal or phenomenal 
 sense, notwithstanding the most earnest warnings against 
 it, the most express declarations of the folly and danger of 
 interpreting sensually what was delivered of objects super- 
 sensual — this was the rank wilding, on which the prince of 
 this world, the lust of power and worldly aggrandizement, 
 was enabled to graft, one by one, the whole branchery of 
 Papal superstition and imposture. A truth not less im- 
 portant might be conveyed by reversing the image ; — by 
 representing the Papal monarchy as the stem or trunk cir- 
 culating a poison-snap through the branches successively 
 grafted thereon, the previous and natural fruit of which was 
 at worst only mawkish and innutritions. Yet among the 
 dogmas or articles of belief that contra-distinguish the Roman 
 from the Reformed Churches, the most important and, in 
 their practical effects and consequences, the most pernicious 
 
 L 
 
146 
 
 IDEA OP THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 
 
 indeed, but likewise equally ideal, that is, mystic 
 and superseusual, as the relation of the whole 
 
 I cannot but regard as refracted and distorted truths, pro- 
 found ideas sensualised into idols, or at the lowest rate lofty 
 and affecting imaginations, safe while they remained general 
 and indefinite, but debased and rendered noxious by their 
 application in detail : for example, the doctrine of the Com- 
 munion of Saints, or the sympathy between all the members 
 of the universal Church, which death itself doth not inter- 
 rupt, exemplified in St. Anthony and the cure of sore eyes, 
 St. Boniface and success in brewing, and other such follies. 
 What the same doctrines now are, used as the pretexts and 
 shaped into the means and implements of priestly power and 
 revenue : or rather, what the whole scheme is of Romish rites, 
 doctrines, institutions, and practices in their combined and 
 full operation, where it exists in undisputed sovereignty, 
 neither repressed by the prevalence, nor modified by the 
 light, of a purer faith, nor holden in check by the conscious- 
 ness of Protestant neighbours and lookers-on ; — this is a 
 question which cannot be kept too distinct from the former. 
 And, as at the risk of passing for a secret favourer of super- 
 annuated superstitions, I have spoken out my thoughts of 
 the Roman theology, so, and at a far more serious risk of 
 being denounced as an intolerant bigot, I will declare what, 
 after a two years’ residence in exclusively Popish countries, 
 and in situations and under circumstances that afforded more 
 than ordinary means of acquainting myself with the workings 
 and the proceeds of the machinery, was the impression left 
 on my mind as to the effects and influences of the Romish 
 (most un-Catholic) religion, — not as even according to its 
 own canons and authorized decisions it ought to be ; but, 
 as it actually and practically exists. This impression, and 
 the convictions grounded thereon, which have assuredly not 
 been weakened by the perusal of Mr. Blanco White’s most 
 affecting statements, and by the recent history of Spain and 
 Portugal, I cannot convey more satisfactorily to myself than 
 
IDEA OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 
 
 147 
 
 Churcli to its one invisible Head, tbe Church with 
 and under Christ, as a one kingdom or state, is 
 hidden : while in all its several component monads, 
 (the particular visible churches I mean,) Caesar 
 receiving the things that are Caesar’s, and confronted 
 by no rival Caesar, by no authority, which existing 
 locally, temporally, and in the person of a fellow 
 mortal, must be essentially of the same kind with 
 his own, notwithstanding any attempt to belie its 
 true nature under the perverted and contradictory 
 name of spiritual, sees only so many loyal groups, who, 
 
 by repeating the answer, which I long since returned to the 
 same question put by a friend, that is to say, — 
 
 When I contemplate the whole system, as it affects the 
 great fundamental principles of morality, the terra firman as 
 it were, of our humanity ; then trace its operation on the 
 sources and conditions of national strength and well-being ; 
 and lastly, consider its woful influences on the innocence 
 and sanctity of the female mind and imagination, on the faith 
 and happiness, the gentle fragrancy and unnoticed ever- 
 present verdure of domestic life, — I can with difficulty avoid 
 applying to it what the Rabbins fable of the fratricide Cain, 
 after the curse: that the firm earth trembled wherever he strode^ 
 and the grass turned black beneath his feet. 
 
 Indeed, if my memory does not cheat me, some of the 
 mystic divines, in their fond humoiu* of allegorizing, tell us 
 that in Gen. iv. 3 — 8, is correctly narrated the history of the 
 first apostate Church, that began by sacrificing amiss, im- 
 propriating the fruit of the gromtd or temporal possessions 
 under spiritual pretexts ; and ended in slaying the shepherd 
 brother who brought the firstlings of his fold, holy and without 
 blemish, to the Great Shepherd, and presented them as new 
 creatures, before the Lord and Owner of the flocks. 
 
 L 2 
 
148 
 
 IDEA OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 
 
 claiming no peculiar rights, make themselves known 
 to him as Christians, only by the more scrupulous 
 and exemplary performance of their duties as citizens 
 and subjects. And here let me add a few sentences 
 on the use, abuse, and misuse of the phrase, spiritual 
 power. In the only appropriate sense of the 
 words, spiritual power is a power that acts on the 
 spirits of men. Now the spirit of a man, or the 
 spiritual part of our being, is the intelligent will : 
 or (to speak less abstractly) it is the capability, 
 with which the Father of Spirits hath endowed man, 
 of being determined to action by the ultimate ends, 
 which the reason alone can present. The under- 
 standing, which derives all its materials from the 
 senses, can dictate purposes only, that is, such 
 ends as are in their turn means to other ends. The 
 ultimate ends, by which the will is to be deter- 
 mined, and by which alone the will, not corrupted, 
 the spirit made perfect^ would be determined, are 
 called, m relation to the reason, moral ideas. Such 
 are the ideas of the eternal, the good, the true, the 
 holy, the idea of Grod as the absoluteness and 
 reality (or real ground) of all these, or as the 
 supreme Spirit in which aU these substantially are, 
 and are one: lastly, the idea of the responsible 
 will itself; of duty, of guilt, or evil in itself 
 without reference to its outward and separable 
 consequences. 
 
IDEA OF THE CHEISTIAN CHURCH. 
 
 149 
 
 A power, therefore, that acts on the appetites 
 and passions, which we possess in common with 
 the beasts, by motives derived from the senses and 
 sensations has no pretence to the name ; nor can 
 it without the grossest abuse of the word be called 
 a spiritual power. Whether the man expects the 
 auto da fe, the fire and faggots, with which he is 
 threatened, to take place at Lisbon or Smithfield, 
 or in some dungeon in the centre of the earth, 
 makes no difference in the kind of motive by which 
 he is influenced ; nor of course in the nature of the 
 power which acts on his passions by means of it. 
 It would be strange indeed if ignorance and super- 
 stition, the dense and rank fogs that most strangle 
 and suffocate the light of the spirit in man, should 
 constitute a spirituality in the power which takes 
 advantage of them ! 
 
 This is a gross abuse of the term, spiritual. The 
 following, sanctioned as it is by custom and statute, 
 yet (speaking exclusively as a philologist and without 
 questioning its legality) I venture to point out as 
 a misuse of the term. Our great Church dignitaries 
 sit in the Upper House of the Convocation as 
 Prelates of the National Church: and as Prelates 
 may exercise ecclesiastical power. In the House 
 of Lords they sit as barons and by virtue of the 
 baronies which, much against the vdll of those 
 haughty prelates, our Kings forced upon them : 
 
150 IDEA OE THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH, 
 
 and as such, they exercise a Parliamentary power. 
 As Bishops of the Church of Christ only can 
 they possess, or exercise (and God forbid ! I should 
 doubt, that as such, many of them do faithfully 
 exercise) a spiritual power, which neither King 
 can give, nor King and Parliament take away. As 
 Christian Bishops, they are spiritual pastors, by 
 power of the spirits ruling the flocks committed to 
 their charge; but they are temporal Peers and 
 Prelates. 
 
 The Pourth Character of the Christian Church, 
 and a necessary consequence of the first and third, 
 is its universality. It is neither Anglican, Gallican, 
 nor Boman, neither Latin nor Greek. Even the 
 Catholic and Apostolic Church of England is a less 
 safe expression than the Church of Christ in 
 England : though the Catholic Church in England, 
 or (what would be still better), the Catholic 
 Church under Christ throughout Great Britain 
 and Ireland is justifiable and appropriate : for 
 through the presence of its only Head and Sove- 
 reign, entire in each and one in all, the Church 
 Universal is spiritually perfect in every true 
 Church, and of course in any number of such 
 Churches, of which from circumstance of place, or 
 the community of country or of language, we have 
 occasion to speak collectively. I have already, here 
 and elsewhere, observed, and scarcely a day passes 
 
IDEA OF THE CHEISTIAN CHURCH. 
 
 151 
 
 without some occasion to repeat the observation, 
 that an equivocal term, or a word with two or more 
 different meanings, is never quite harmless. Thus, 
 it is at least an inconvenience in our language that 
 the term church, instead of being confined to its 
 proper sense kirk, cedes Kyriacce, or the Lord’s 
 house, should likewise be the word by which our 
 forefathers rendered the Tlcclesia^ or the ck/cXt^toi, 
 or evocati, the called out of the world, named collec- 
 tively ; and likewise our term for the clerical estab- 
 lishment. To the Called at Eome — to the Church 
 of Christ at Corinth, or in Philippi — such was the 
 language of the Apostolic age ; and the change 
 since then has been no improvement. The true 
 Church of England is the National Church or 
 Clerisy. There exists, God be thanked ! a Catholic 
 and Apostolic Church in England : and I thank 
 God also for the constitutional and ancestral Church 
 of England. 
 
 These are the four distinctions, or peculiar and 
 essential marks, by which the Church with Christ 
 as its head is distinguished from the National 
 Church, and separated from every possible coun- 
 terfeit, that has, or shall have, usurped its name. 
 And as an important comment on the same, and 
 in confirmation of the principle which I have 
 attempted to establish, I earnestly recommend for 
 the reader’s perusal the following transcript from 
 
152 
 
 IDEA OF THE CHEISTIAN CHURCH. 
 
 Henry More’s Modest Inquiry, or True Idea of 
 Antickristianism . 
 
 “We win suppose some one prelate, who had 
 got the start of the rest, to put in for the title and 
 authority of Universal Bishop ; and for the obtaining 
 of this sovereignty, he will first pretend that it is 
 unfit that the visible Catholic Church, being one, 
 should not be united under one visible head, which 
 reasoning, though it makes a pretty show at first 
 sight, will yet, being closely looked into, vanish 
 into smoke. For this is but a quaint concinnity 
 urged in behalf of an impossibility. For the 
 erecting such an office for one man, which no one 
 man in the world is able to perform, implies that 
 to be possible which is indeed impossible. Whence 
 it is plain that the head will be too little for the 
 body ; which therefore will be a piece of mischievous 
 asymmetry or inconcinnity also. Ho one mortal 
 can be a competent head for that Church which 
 has a right to be Catholic, and to overspread the 
 face of the whole earth. There can be no such 
 head but Christ, who is not mere man, but God in 
 the Divine humanity, and therefore present with 
 every part of the Church, and every member 
 thereof, at what distance soever. But to set some 
 one mortal Bishop over the whole Church, were to 
 suppose that great Bishop of our spirit absent from 
 it, who has promised that he will le with her to the 
 
IDEA OF THE CHRISTIAN CHUllCH. 
 
 153 
 
 end of the world. Nor does tlie Chiircli Catholic 
 on earth lose her unity thereby. For rather hereby 
 only is or can she be one.* 
 
 “ Such and so futile is the first pretence. But if 
 this will not serve the turn, there is another in 
 reserve. And notwithstanding the demonstrated 
 impossibility of the thing, still there must be one 
 visible head of the Church universal, the successor 
 and vicar of Christ, for the slaking of controversies, 
 for the determination of disputed points! We 
 will not stop here to expose the weakness of the 
 argument (not alas 1 peculiar to the sophists of 
 Eome, nor employed in support of Papal infallibility 
 only), that this or that must be, and consequently 
 is, because sundry inconveniences would result from 
 the want of it; and this without considering 
 whether these inconveniences have been prevented 
 or removed by its alleged presence ; whether they 
 do not continue in spite of this pretended remedy 
 or antidote ; whether these inconveniences were 
 intended by Providence to be precluded, and not 
 rather for ivise purposes permitted to continue; 
 and lastly, whether the remedy may not be worse 
 than the disease, like the sugar of lead administered 
 
 * As rationally might it be pretended that it is not the 
 life, the rector spiritus prcesens per totum et in omni parte, but 
 the crown of the skull, or some one convolute of the brain, 
 that causes and preserves the unity of the body natural. 
 
154 
 
 IDEA OE THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 
 
 by the empiric, who cured a fever fit by exchanging 
 it for the dead palsy. Passing by this sophism, 
 therefore, it is sufB.cient to reply that all points 
 necessary are so plain and so widely known, that it 
 is impossible that a Christian, who seeks those aids 
 which the true Head of the Church has promised 
 shall never be sought in vain, should err therein 
 from lack of knowing better. And those who, from 
 defects of head or heart, are blind to this widely 
 diffused light, and who neither seek nor wish those 
 aids, are still less likely to be influenced by a minor 
 and derivative authority. But for other things, 
 whether ceremonies or conceits, whether matters of 
 discipline or of opinion, their diversity does not 
 at all break the unity of the outward and visible 
 Church, as long as they do not subvert the funda- 
 mental laws of Christ’s kingdom nor contradict the 
 terms of admission into his Church, nor contravene 
 the essential characters by which it subsists and is 
 distinguished as the Christian Cathohc Church.” 
 
 To these sentiments, borrowed from one of the 
 most philosophical of our learned elder divines, I 
 have only to add an observation as suggested by 
 them; that as many and fearful mischiefs have 
 ensued from the confusion of the Christian with 
 the National Church, so have many and grievous 
 practical errors, and much unchristian intolerance, 
 arisen from confounding the outward and visible 
 
IDEA OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 
 
 155 
 
 Church of Christ with the spiritual and invisible 
 Church, known only to the Father of all Spirits. 
 The perfection of the former is to afford every 
 opportunity, and to present no obstacle, to a gradual 
 advancement of the latter. The different degrees 
 of progress, the imperfections, errors and accidents 
 of false perspective, which lessen indeed with our 
 advance — our spiritual advance — but to a greater 
 or lesser amount are inseparable from all progres- 
 sion; these, the interpolated half-truths of the 
 twilight, through which every soul must pass from 
 darkness to the spiritual sunrise, belong to the 
 visible Church as objects of hope, patience, and 
 charity alone. 
 
THE THIED POSSIBLE CHUECH 
 
 OB 
 
 THE CHURCH OF ANTICHRIST. 
 
 Ecclesia Cattolica non, nia il Papismo denunciamo,perche suggerito dal 
 interesse, perche fortificato dalla menzogna, ptrchl radicato dal pin ahbomi- 
 nevole despotismo, percM contrario al diritto e ai titoli incommunicoMli di 
 Cristo, ed alia tranquillity d'ogni Chiesa e d'ogni Stato . — Spanzotti. 
 
Thus, on the depluming of the Pope, every bird had his 
 own feather: in the partage whereof, what he had gotten 
 by sacrilege was restored to Christ; what by usurpation, 
 was given to the King, the (National) Church and the 
 State ; what by oppression, was remitted to each particular 
 Christian . — Fullers Church Histm'y of Britain, Booh v. 
 
ON THE CHUECH. 
 
 NEITHER NATIONAL NOR IJNIYERSAL. 
 
 Ie our forefathers were annoyed with the cant of 
 over-boiling zeal, arising out of the belief, that the 
 Pope is Antichrist, and likewise (sexu mutato) the 
 Harlot of Babylon : we are more endangered by 
 the twaddle of humid charity, which (some years 
 ago at least) used to drizzle, a something between 
 mist and small rain, from the higher region of our 
 Church atmosphere. It was sanctioned, I mean, 
 both in the pulpit and the senate by sundry digni- 
 taries, whose horror of Jacobinism during the then 
 panic of property led them to adopt the principles 
 and language of Laud and his faction. And once 
 more the Church of Eome, in contrast with Pro- 
 testant dissenters, became “ a right dear, though 
 erring sister.” And the heaviest charge against 
 the Eomish Pontificate was, that the Italian politics 
 and nepotism of a series of Popes had converted so 
 great a good into an intolerable grievance. We 
 were reminded that Grotius and Leibnitz had 
 
160 
 
 ON THE CHUECH, 
 
 regarded a visible bead of the CatboHc Church as 
 most desirable ; that they, and with them more 
 than one Primate of our own Church, yearned for a 
 conciliating settlement of the differences between 
 the Eomish and Protestant Churches ; and mainly 
 in order that there might exist really, as well as 
 nominally, a visible head of the Church Universal, 
 a fixt centre of unity. Of course the tenet that 
 the Pope was in any sense the Antichrist predicted 
 by Paul was decried as fanatical and Puritanical 
 cant. 
 
 Now it is a duty of Christian charity to presume 
 that the men, who in the present day employ this 
 language, are, or believe themselves to be, Chris- 
 tians; and that they do not privately think that 
 St. Paul, in the two celebrated passages of his Pirst 
 and Second Epistles to the Church at Thessalo- 
 nica, (I. iv., 13 — 18 ; II. ii. 1 — 12), practised a ruse 
 de guerre^ and meant only by throwmg the fulfil- 
 ment beyond the life of the present generation, and 
 by a terrific detail of the horrors and calamities 
 that were to precede it, to damp the impatience, 
 and silence the objections, excited by the expectation 
 and the delay of our Lord’s personal re-appearance. 
 Agaiu : as the persons, of whom I have been speak- 
 iug, are weU-educated men, and men of sober minds, 
 it may be safely taken for granted that they do not 
 understand by Antichrist any nondescript monster, 
 
NEITHER NATIONAL NOR UNIVERSAL. 161 
 
 or suppose it to be tbe proper name or designation 
 of some one individual man or devil exclusively. 
 The Christians of the second century, sharing in a 
 delusion that prevailed over the whole !Roman 
 Empire, believed that Nero would come to life 
 again, and be Antichrist : and I have been informed 
 that a learned clergyman of our own times, endowed 
 with the gift of prophecy by assiduous study of the 
 Book of Daniel and the Apocalypse, asserts th ^ 
 same thing of Napoleon Buonaparte. 
 
 But, as before said, it would be calumnious to 
 attribute such pitiable fanaticism to the parties 
 here in question. And to them I venture to affirm 
 that if by Antichrist be meant — what alone can 
 rationally be meant — a power in the Christian 
 Church, which in the name of Christ, and at once 
 pretending and usurping his authority, is systema- 
 tically subversive of the essential and distinguishing 
 characters and purposes of the Christian Church : 
 then, if the Papacy, and the Eomish hierarchy as 
 far as it is Papal, be not Antichrist, the guilt of 
 schism in its most aggravated form lies on the 
 authors of the Eeformation. Eor nothing less than 
 this could have justified so tremendous a rent in the 
 Catholic Church with all its foreseen most calamitous 
 consequences. And so Luther himself thought ; 
 and so thought Wicliff before him. Only in the 
 conviction that Christianity itself was at stake, — 
 
 M 
 
162 
 
 ON THE CHURCH^ 
 
 that the cause was that of Christ in conflict 
 with Antichrist, — could, or did, even the lion- 
 hearted Luther with unquailed spirit avow to 
 himself ; — I bring not peace, but a sword into the 
 world. 
 
 It is my full conviction, a conviction formed after 
 a long and patient study of the subject in detail ; 
 and if in support of this competence I only add 
 that I have read, and with care, the Summa Theologies 
 of Aquinas, and compared the system with the 
 statements of Arnauld and Bossuet, the number of 
 those who in the present much-reading, but not very 
 hard-reading, age would feel themselves entitled to 
 dispute my claim, will not, perhaps, be very formid- 
 able ; — it is, I repeat, my full conviction that the 
 rights and doctrines, the agenda et credenda, of the 
 Eoman Catholics, could we separate them from the 
 adulterating ingredients combined with, and the 
 use made of, them by the sacerdotal Mamelukes of 
 the Eomish monarchy, for the support of the 
 Papacy and Papal hierarchy, would neither have 
 brought about, nor have sufficed to justify, the 
 convulsive separation under Leo X. Xay, that it* 
 they were fairly, and in the light of a sound philo- 
 sophy, compared vdth either of the two main 
 divisions of Protestantism, as it now exists in this 
 country, that is, with the fashionable doctrines and 
 interpretations of the Arminian and Grrotian school 
 
NEITHER NATIONAL NOR UNIVERSAL. 163 
 
 on the one hand, and with the tenets and language 
 of the modem Calvinists on the other, an enlight- 
 ened disciple of J ohn and of Paul would be perplexed 
 which of the three to prefer as the least unlike 
 the profound and sublime system he had learned 
 from his great masters. And in this comparison I 
 leave out of view the extreme sects of Protest- 
 antism, whether of the frigid or of the torrid zone, 
 Socinian or fanatic. 
 
 During the siunmer of last year, I made the 
 tour of Holland, Planders, and up the Hhine as 
 far as Bergen, and among the few notes then taken, 
 I find the following : — Every fresh opportunity 
 of examining the Boman Catholic religion on the 
 spot, every new fact that presents itself to my 
 notice, increases my conviction that its immediate 
 basis and the true grounds of its continuance are 
 to be found in the wickedness, ignorance, and 
 wretchedness of the many ; and that the producing 
 and continuing cause of this deplorable state is, 
 that it is the interest of the Bomish priesthood 
 that so it should remain as the surest, and, in fact, 
 only support of the Papal sovereignty and infiuence 
 against the civil powers, and the reforms wished 
 for by the more enlightened governments, as well 
 as by all the better informed and wealthier class of 
 Boman Catholics generally. And as parts of the 
 same policy, and equally indispensable to the 
 
 M 2 
 
164 
 
 ON THE CHURCH, 
 
 interests of the Papal Crown, are the ignorance, 
 grossness, excessive number and poverty of the 
 lower ecclesiastics themselves, the religious orders 
 included. When I say the Pope, I understand the 
 Papal hierarchy, which is, in truth, the dilated 
 Pope : and in this sense only, and not of the 
 individual priest or friar at Pome, can a wise man 
 be supposed to use the word.” — Cologne, July 2, 
 1828. 
 
 I feel it as no small comfort and confirmation to 
 know that the same view of the subject is taken, 
 the same conviction entertained, by a large and 
 increasing number in the Poman Catholic com- 
 munion itself, in Germany, Prance, Italy, and even 
 in Spain ; and that no inconsiderable portion of this 
 number consists of men who are not only pious as 
 Christians, but zealous as Poman Catholics; and 
 who would contemplate with as much horror a 
 reform from their Church, as they look with earnest 
 aspirations and desires towards a reform in the 
 Church. Proof of this may be found m the learned 
 work mtituled Disordini morali e politici della Corte 
 di Boma — evidently the work of a zealous Pomanist 
 and from the ecclesiastical erudition displayed in 
 the volumes, probably a priest. Nay, from the 
 angry aversion with which the foul heresies of those 
 sons of perdition, Luther and Calvin, are mentioned, 
 and his very faiut and qualified censure of the 
 
NEITHER NATIONAL NOR UNIVERSAL. 165 
 
 persecution of the Albigenses and AValdenses, I am 
 obliged to infer that the writer’s attachment to bis 
 communion was zealous even to bigotry. 
 
 The disorders denounced by him are : — 
 
 1. The pretension of the Papacy to temporal 
 power and sovereignty, directly or as the pretended 
 consequence of spiritual dominion ; and as fur- 
 nishing occasion to this, even the retention of the 
 primacy in honour over all other Bishops, after 
 Rome had ceased to he the metropolis of Christen- 
 dom, is noticed as a subject of regret. 
 
 2. The boast of Papal infallibility. 
 
 3. The derivation of the Episcopal power from 
 the Papal, and the dependence of Bishops on the 
 Pope, rightly named the evil of a false centre. 
 
 4. The right of exercising authority in other 
 dioceses besides that of Rome. 
 
 5. The privilege of reserving to himself the 
 greater causes — le cause maggiori, 
 
 6. 7, 8, 9, 10. Of conferring any and every bene- 
 fice in the territory of other Bishops ; of exacting 
 the Annates, or Eirst Emits ; of receiving appeals ; 
 with the power of subjecting all churches in all 
 parts, to the ecclesiastical discipline of the church 
 of Rome : and lastly, the dispensing power of the 
 Pope. 
 
 11. The Pope’s pretended superiority to an 
 Ecumenical Council. 
 
166 
 
 ON THE CHURCH, 
 
 12. The exclusive power of canonising Saints. 
 
 Now, of the twelve abuses here enumerated, it is 
 remarkable that ten, if not eleven, are but expan- 
 sions of the one grievance — ^the Papal power as the 
 centre, and the Pope as the one visible head and 
 sovereign of the Christian Church. 
 
 The writer next enumerates the personal instru- 
 ments of these abuses : — 1. The Cardinals. 2. The 
 excessive number of the priests and other eccle- 
 siastics. 3. The Regulars, Mendicant Orders, 
 Jesuits, and the rest. Lastly, the means employed 
 by the Papacy to found and preserve its usurped 
 power, namely : — 
 
 1. The institution of a Chair of Canon Law, in 
 the University of Bologna, the introduction of 
 Gratian’s Canons, and the forged decisions. 2. The 
 prohibition of books, wherever published. 3. The 
 Inquisition ; and 4. The tremendous power of 
 excommunication : — the last tw'o in their temporal 
 inflictions and consequences equalling, or rather 
 greatly exceeding, the utmost extent of the punitive 
 power exercised by the temporal sovereign and 
 the civil magistrate, armed with the sword of the 
 criminal law. 
 
 It is observable that the most efdcient of all the 
 means adopted by the Roman Pontifis, namely, the 
 celibacy of the clergy, is omitted by this writer ; — 
 a sufficient proof that he was neither a Protestant 
 
NEITHER NATIONAL NOR UNIVERSAL. 167 
 
 nor a philosopher, which in the Italian states, and, 
 indeed, in most Eomish Catholic countries, is the 
 name of courtesy for an infidel. 
 
 One other remark in justification of the tenet 
 avowed in this chapter, and I shall have said all I 
 deem it necessary to say on the third form of a 
 Church. That erection of a temporal monarch under 
 the pretence of a spiritual authority, which was not 
 possible in Christendom but by the extinction or 
 entrancement of the spirit of Christianity, and which 
 has therefore been only partially attained by the 
 Papacy — this was efiected in full by Mohammed, 
 to the establishment of the most extensive and 
 complete despotism, that ever warred against 
 civilisation and the interests of humanity. And had 
 Mohammed retained the name of Christianity, had 
 he deduced his authority from Christ as his principal, 
 and described his own Khalifate and that of his 
 successors as vicarious, there can be no doubt 
 that to the Mussulman theocracy, embodied in the 
 different Mohammedan dynasties, would belong the 
 name and attributes of Antichrist. But the Prophet 
 of Arabia started out of Paganism an unbaptised 
 Pagan. He was no traitor in the Church, but an 
 enemy from -without, who levied war against its 
 outward and formal existence, and is, therefore, 
 not chargeable with apostasy from a faith which 
 he had never acknowledged, or from a Church to 
 
168 
 
 ON THE CHUECH. 
 
 wMch he had never appertained. Neither in the 
 Prophet nor in his system, therefore, can we find 
 the predicted Antichrist, that is, a usurped power 
 in the Church itself, which, in the name of Christ, 
 and pretending his authority, systematically sub- 
 verts or counteracts the peculiar aims and purposes 
 of Christ’s mission; and which, vesting in a mortal 
 his incommunicable headship, destroys and exchanges 
 for the contrary the essential contra- distinguishing 
 marks or characters of his kingdom on earth. But 
 apply it, as WiclifT, Luther,* and indeed all the first 
 Reformers did to the Papacy, and Papal hierarchy ; 
 and we understand at once the grounds of the great 
 
 * And (be it observed) without any reference to the 
 Apocalypse, the canonical character of which Luther at first 
 rejected, and never cordially received. And without the 
 least sympathy with Luther’s suspicions on this head, but on 
 the contrary receiving this sublime poem as the imdoubted 
 work of the Apostolic age, and admiring in it the most per- 
 fect specimen of symbolic poetry, I am as little disposed to 
 cite it on the present occasion ; — convinced as I am and hope 
 shortly to convince others, that in the whole series of its 
 magnificent imagery there is not a single symbol, that can 
 be even plausibly interpreted of either the Pope, the Turks, 
 or Napoleon Buonaparte. Of charges not attaching to the 
 moral character, there are few, if any, that I should be more 
 anxious to avoid than that of being an affecter of paradoxes. 
 But the dread of other men’s thoughts shall not tempt me to 
 withhold a truth, which the strange errors grounded on the 
 contrary assumption render important. And in the thorough 
 assurance of its truth I make the assertion, that the per- 
 spicuity, and (with singularly few exceptions even for us) 
 
NEITHER NATIONAL NOR UNIVERSAL. 169 
 
 Apostle’s premonition, that this Antichrist could 
 not appear till after the dissolution of the Latin 
 
 the uniform intelligibility, and close consecutive meaning, 
 verse by verse, with the simplicity and grandeur of the plan, 
 and the admirable ordonnance of the parts, are among the 
 prominent beauties of the Apocalypse. Nor do I doubt that 
 the substance and main argument of this drama sui generis 
 (the Prometheus of Eschylus comes the nearest to the kind) 
 were supplied* by John the Evangelist : though I incline 
 with Eusebius to find the poet himself in John, an Elder of 
 the Church of Ephesus. 
 
 It may remove, or at least mitigate, the objections to the 
 palliative language in which I have spoken of the doctrines 
 of the Roman Catholic Church, if I remind the reader that 
 that Church dates its true origin from the Council of 
 Trent. Widely differing from my valued and affectionately 
 respected friend, the Rev. Edward Irving, in his inter- 
 pretations of the Apocalypse and the Book of Daniel, and 
 no less in his estimation of the latter, and while I honour 
 his courage as a Christian minister, almost as much as I 
 admire his eloquence as a writer, yet protesting against his 
 somewhat too adventurous speculations on the Pei’sons of 
 the Trinity and the Body of our Lord, — I have great delight 
 in extracting from his Sermons, Lectures, and Discowrses” 
 vol. iii. p. 870, and declaring my cordial assent to the follow- 
 ing just observations: namely, — ^'that after the Reforma- 
 tion had taken firmer root, and when God had provided a 
 purer Church, the Council of Trent did corroborate and 
 decree into unalterable laws and constitutions of the Church 
 all those impostures and innovations of the Roman See, 
 which had been in a state of uncertainty, perhaps of permis- 
 sion or even of custom ; but which every man till then had 
 been free to testify against, and against which, in fact, there 
 never wanted those in each successive generation who did 
 testify. The Council of Trent ossified all those ulcers and 
 blotches which had deformed the Church, and stamped the 
 
170 
 
 ON THE CHURCH, 
 
 empire, and the extinction of the Imperial power in 
 Eome — and the cause why the Eishop of Con- 
 
 hitherto much doubted and controverted prerogative of the 
 Pope with the highest authority recognised in the Church.” 
 Then first was the Catholic converted and particularised into 
 the Romish Church, the Church of the Papacy. 
 
 Not less cordially do I concur with Mr. Irving in his re- 
 mark in the following page. For I too, am free to confess 
 and avow moreover, that I believe the soil 6f the Catholic 
 Church, when Luther arose, was of a stronger mould, fitted 
 to bear forest trees and cedars of God, than the soil of the 
 Protestant Church in the times of Whitfield and Wesley, 
 which {though sown with the same word) hath brought forth 
 only stunted undergrowths, and creeping brushwood.” I 
 too, ‘‘believe, that the faith of the Protestant Church in 
 Britain had come to a lower ebb, and that it is even now at 
 a lower ebb, than was the faith of the Papal Church when 
 the Spirit of the Lord was able to quicken in it and draw' 
 forth out of it such men as Luther, and Melancthon, and 
 Bullinger, Calvin, Bucer, and Latimer, and Ridley, and a 
 score others whom I might name.” 
 
 And now, as the conclusion of this long note, let me be 
 permitted to add a word or two of Edward Irving himself. 
 That he possesses my unqualified esteem as a man, is only 
 saying that I know him, and am neither blinded by envy nor 
 bigotry. But my name has been brought into connexion 
 with his on points that regard his public ministry; and he 
 himself has publicly distinguished me as his friend on public 
 grounds ; and in proof of my confidence in his regard, I have 
 not the least apprehension of forfeiting it by a frank decla- 
 ration of what I think. Well, then ! I have no faith in his 
 prophesyings ; small sympathy "with his fulminations ; and 
 in certain peculiarities of his theological system as distinct 
 from his religious principles I cannot see my way. But I 
 hold withal, and not the less firmly for these discrepancies 
 in our moods and judgments, that Edward Irving possesses 
 
NEITHER NATIONAL NOR UNIVERSAL. 
 
 171 
 
 stantinople, with all imaginable good wishes and 
 disposition to do the same, could never raise the 
 
 more of the spirit and purposes of the first Reformers ; that 
 he has more of the head and heart, the life, the unction, and 
 the genial power of Martin Luther than any man now alive ; 
 yea, than any man of this and the last century. I see in 
 Edward Irving a minister of Christ after the order of Paul ; 
 and if the points, in which I think him either erroneous, or 
 excessive and out of bounds, have been at any time a subject 
 of serious regret with me, this regret has arisen principally 
 or altogether from the apprehension of their narrowing the 
 sphere of his infiuence, from the too great probability that 
 they may furnish occasion or pretext for withholding or with- 
 drawing many from those momentous truths which the age 
 especially needs, and for the enforcement of which he hath 
 been so highly and especially gifted. Finally, my friend’s 
 intellect is too instinct with life, too potential, to remain 
 stationary ; and assuming, as every satisfied believer must 
 be supposed to do, the truth of my own views, I look forward 
 with confident hope to a time when his soul shall have 
 perfected her victory over the dead letter of the senses and 
 its apparitions in the sensuous understanding; when the 
 halcyon Ideas shall have alit on the surging sea of his con- 
 ceptions, 
 
 Which then shall quite forget to rave. 
 
 While birds of calm sit brooding on the charmed wave. 
 
 But to return from the personal, for which I have little 
 taste at any time, and the contrary when it stands in any 
 connexion with myself ; — ^in order to the removal of one 
 main impediment to the spiritual resuscitation of the Church 
 it seems to me indispensable that in freedom and unfearing 
 faith, with that courage which cannot but flow from the 
 inward and life-like assurance, that neither death, nor things 
 present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other 
 creatme, shall he able to separate us from the love of Qod, vMch 
 
172 
 
 ON THE CHUECH. 
 
 Patriarchate of the Greek empire into a Papacj. 
 The Bishops of the other Eome became the slaves 
 of the Ottoman, the moment they ceased to be the 
 subjects of the Emperor. 
 
 I will now proceed to the Second Part, intended 
 as a humble aid to a just appreciation of the 
 measure, which under the auspices of Mr. Peel and 
 the Duke of Wellington is now the law of the land. 
 
 is in Christ Jesus our Lord, the rulers of our Church and our 
 teachers of theology should meditate and draw the obvious, 
 though perhaps unpalatable, inferences from the following 
 two or three plain truths : — First, that Christ, the Spirit of 
 Truth, has promised to be with his Church even to the end: — 
 secondly, — that Christianity was described as a tree to be 
 raised from the seed, so described by Him who brought the 
 seed from Heaven and first sowed it : — lastly, — that in the 
 process of evolution there are in every plant growths of 
 transitory use and dm’ation. “ The integuments of the seed, 
 having fulfilled their destined office of protection, burst and 
 decay. After the leaves have unfolded, the cotyledons that 
 had performed their functions, wither and drop off” ^ The 
 husk is a genuine growth of the stafi* of life ; yet we must 
 separate it from the grain. It is, therefore, the cowardice 
 of faithless superstition, if we stand in greater awe of the 
 palpable interpolations of vermin; if we shrink from the 
 removal of excrescences that contain nothing of nobler 
 parentage than maggots of moth or chafer. Let us cease to 
 confound oak-apples with acorns; still less, though gilded 
 by the fashion of the day, let us mistake them for golden 
 pippins or renates.^ 
 
 ‘ Smith’s Introduction to Botany. i 
 
 2 The fruit from a pippin grafted on a pippin, is called a | 
 
 rennet, that is, renate (re-natus) or twice-born. i 
 
 i 
 
NEITHER NATIONAL NOR UNIVERSAL. I73 
 
 This portion of the volume was written while the 
 measure was yet in prosjpectu; before even the 
 particular clauses of the Bill were made public. It 
 was written to explain and vindicate my refusal to 
 sign a petition against any change in the scheme 
 of law and policy established at the Bevolution. 
 But as the arguments are in uo respect affected by 
 this circumstance ; nay, as their constant reference 
 to, and dependence on, one fixed general principle, 
 which will at once explain both why I find the 
 actual Bill so much less objectionable than I had 
 feared, and yet so much less complete and satis- 
 factory than I had wished, will be rendered more 
 striking by the reader’s consciousness that the 
 arguments were suggested by no wish or purpose 
 either of attacking or supporting any particular 
 measure ; it has not been thought necessary or 
 advisable to alter the form. jN^ay, if I am right in 
 my judgment that the Act lately passed, if charac- 
 terised by its own contents and capabilities, really 
 is — with or without any such intention on the part 
 of its framers — a stepping-stone, and nothing more; 
 whether to the subversion or to the more perfect 
 establishment of the Constitution in Church and 
 State, must be determined by other causes ; — the 
 Act in itself being equally fit for either, — and 
 offering the same facilities of transit to both friend 
 and foe, though with a foreclosure to the first 
 
174 
 
 ON THE CHURCH^ ETC. 
 
 comer ; — if this be a right, as it is my sincere judg- 
 ment and belief, there is a propriety in retaining 
 the language of anticipation. Mons adhuc parturit : 
 the ridiculus mus was but an omen. 
 
PART 11. 
 
 AIDS TO A EIGHT APPEECTATION OP 
 THE ACT 
 
 ADMITTING ROMAN CATHOLICS TO SIT IN BOTH HOUSES 
 OP PARLIAMENT. 
 
*A/4eA.€z, [xa rov AC ovk eVao'TrtSwo'o/iar 
 A6|ft> S’ vnep '’KrepoyvaixSvav, a fiOL So/ce? 
 
 Kai Toi BedoiKa iroWd' rovs re yap rpoirovs 
 Tovs ^vfXTroKiTuv ol^a x^f-povras <T(p6Bpa, 
 
 4dv Tis avTOVs evXoyfj Ka\ r^v iroXiv, 
 av)]p dKa^iav, Kai dUaia /caSiKa* 
 
 Kavravda XavBdvovt/ dTre/j.noXdiiJ.evoi, 
 
 Aristoph, Achm'n, 367 , dec. {leviter mutata.) 
 
I ESTIMATE the beauty and benefit of what is called 
 “ a harmony in fundamentals, and a conspiration 
 in the constituent parts of the body politic,” as 
 highly as any one. If I met a man who should 
 deny that an imperium in imperio was in itself an 
 evil, I would not attempt to reason with him : he 
 is too ignorant. Or if, conceding this, he should 
 deny that the Eomish Priesthood in Ireland does 
 in fact constitute an imperium in imperio, I yet 
 would not argue the matter with him : for he must 
 be a bigot. But my objection to the argument is, 
 that it is nothing to the purpose. And even so 
 with regard to the arguments grounded on the 
 dangerous errors and superstitions of the Eomish 
 Church. They may be aU very true ; but they are 
 nothing to the purpose. Without any loss they 
 might pair off with the heroes of Trafalgar and 
 Waterloo,” and our Catholic ancestors, to whom 
 we owe our Magna Charta,” on the other side. If 
 the prevention of an evil were the point in question, 
 then indeed ! But the day of prevention has long 
 
 N 
 
178 
 
 AIDS TO A RIGHT APPRECIATION 
 
 passed by. The evil exists : and neither rope, sword, 
 nor sermon, neither suppression nor conversion, can 
 remove it. Not that I think slightingly of the last ; 
 but even those who hope more sanguinely than I 
 can pretend to do respecting the effects ultimately 
 to result from the labours of missionaries, the 
 dispersion of controversial tracts, and whatever 
 other lawful means and implements it may be in 
 our power to employ — even these must admit that 
 if the remedy could cope with the magnitude and 
 inveteracy of the disease, it is whoUy inadequate 
 to the urgency of the symptoms. In this instance 
 it would be no easy matter to take the horse to the 
 water ; and the rest of the proverb you know. But 
 why do I waste words ? There is and can be but 
 one question : and there is and can be but one 
 way of stating it. A great numerical majority of 
 the inhabitants of one integral part of the realm 
 profess a religion hostile to that professed by the 
 majority of the whole realm : and a religion, too, 
 which the latter regard, and have had good reason 
 to regard, as equally hostile to liberty and the 
 sacred rights of conscience generally. In fewer 
 words, three-fourths of his Majesty’s Irish subjects 
 are Homan Catholics, with a Popish priesthood, 
 while three-fourths of the sum total of his Majesty’s 
 subjects are Protestants. This with its causes and 
 consequences is the evil. It is not in our power. 
 
OF THE ROMAN CATHOLIC ACT. 
 
 179 
 
 by any immediate or direct means, to effect its 
 removal. The point, therefore, to be determined 
 is: Will the measures now in contemplation be 
 hkely to diminish or to aggravate it ? And to the 
 determination of this point on the probabilities 
 suggested by reason and experience I would gladly 
 be aidant, as far as my poor mite of judgment will 
 enable me. 
 
 Let us, however, first discharge what may well 
 be deemed a debt of justice from every well 
 educated Englishman to his Eoman Catholic 
 fellow-subjects of the Sister Island. At least, let 
 us ourselves understand the true cause of the 
 evil as it now exists. To what and to whom 
 is the present state of Ireland maioly to be 
 attributed ? This should be the question : and to 
 this I answer aloud, that it is mainly attributable 
 to those, who during a period of little less than a 
 whole century used as a substitute what Providence 
 had given into their hand as an opportunity ; who 
 chose to consider as superseding the most sacred 
 duty a code of law, which could have been excused 
 only on the plea that it enabled them to perform it. 
 To the sloth and improvidence, the weakness and 
 wickedness, of the gentry, clergy, and governors of 
 Ireland, who persevered in preferring intrigue, 
 violence, and selfish expatriation to a system of 
 preventive and remedial measures, the efficacy of 
 
 N 2 
 
180 
 
 AIDS TO A EIGHT APPEECIATlOlSr 
 
 which had been warranted for them, alike by the 
 whole provincial history of ancient Eome, cui pacare 
 suhactos summa erat sapientia ; and by the happy 
 results of the few exceptions to the contrary scheme 
 unhappily pursued by their and our ancestors. 
 
 I can imagine no work of genius that would 
 more appropriately decorate the dome or wall of a 
 Senate house, than an abstract of Irish history 
 from the landing of Strongbow to the battle of 
 the Boyne, or to a yet later period, embodied in 
 intelligible emblems — an allegorical history-piece 
 designed in the spirit of a Bubens or a Buonarroti, 
 and with the wild lights, portentous shades, and 
 saturated colours of a Eembrandt, Caravaggio, and 
 Spagnoletto. To complete the great moral and 
 political lesson by the historic contrast, nothing more 
 would be required, than by some equally effective 
 means to possess the mind of the spectator with 
 the state and condition of ancient Spain, at less 
 than half a century from the final conclusion of an 
 obstinate and almost unremitting conflict of two 
 hundred years by Agrippa’s subjugation of the 
 Cantabrians, omnibus Sispanice populis devictis et 
 pacatis. At the breaking up of the Empire the 
 West Goths conquered the country and made 
 division of the lands. Then came eight centuries of 
 Moorish domination. Tet so deeply had Eoman 
 wisdom impressed the fairest characters of the 
 
OF THE ROMAN CATHOLIC ACT. 
 
 181 
 
 EomaH mind, that at this very hour, if we except 
 a comparatively insignificant portion of Arabic 
 derivatives, the natives throughout the whole Penin- 
 sula speak a language less difiering from the Bomana 
 rustica or provincial Latin of the times of Lucan 
 and Seneca, than any two of its dialects from each 
 other. The time approaches, I trust, when our 
 political economists may study the science of the 
 provincial policy of the ancients in detail, under 
 the auspices of hope, for immediate and practical 
 purposes. 
 
 In my own mind I am persuaded that the 
 necessity of the penal and precautionary statutes, 
 passed under Elizabeth and the three succeeding 
 reigns, is to be found as much in the passions and 
 prejudices of the one party as in the dangerous 
 dispositions of the other. The best excuse for this 
 cruel code is the imperfect knowledge and mistaken 
 maxims common to both parties. It is only to a 
 limited extent that laws can be wiser than the 
 nation for which they are enacted. The annals of 
 the first five or six centuries of the Hebrew nation 
 in Palestine present an almost continued history of 
 disobedience, of laws broken or utterly forgotten, 
 of maxims violated, and schemes of consummate 
 wisdom left unfulfilled. Even a yet diviner seed 
 must be buried and undergo an apparent corruption 
 before — at a late period — it shot up and could 
 
182 
 
 AIDS TO A EIGHT APPEECIATION 
 
 appear in its own kind. In our judgments 
 respecting actions we must be guided b j the idea, but 
 in appl3dng the rule to the agents by comparison. To 
 speak gently of our forefathers is at once piety and 
 poKcy. Nor let it be forgotten that only by making 
 the detection of their errors the occasion of our 
 own wisdom do we acquire a right to censure them 
 at all. 
 
 "Whatever may be thought of the settlement that 
 followed the battle of the Boyne and the extinction 
 of the war in Ireland, yet when this had been 
 made and submitted to, it would have been the far 
 wiser poUcy, I doubt not, to have provided for the 
 safety of the Constitution by improving the quality 
 of the elective franchise, leaving the eligibility 
 open, or like the former limited only by consider- 
 ations of property. StiU, however, the scheme of 
 exclusion and disqualification had its plausible side 
 The ink was scarcely dry on the parchment-rolls 
 and proscription-lists of the Popish Parliament. 
 The crimes of the man were generalised into 
 attributes of his faith ; and the Irish Eoman Catho- 
 lics collectively were considered accomplices in the 
 perfidy and baseness of King James. Alas! his 
 immediate adherents had afibrded too great colour 
 to the charge. The Irish massacre was in the 
 mouth of every Protestant, not as an event to be 
 ^ remembered, but as a thing of recent expectation, 
 
OF THE EOMAN CATHOLIC ACT. 
 
 183 
 
 fear still blending with the sense of deliverance. 
 At no time, therefore, could the disqualifying 
 system have been enforced with so little reclamation 
 of the conquered party, or with so little outrage 
 on the general feeling of the country. There was 
 no time, when it was so capable of being indirectly 
 useful as a sedative in order to the application of 
 the remedies directly indicated, or as a counter- 
 power reducing to inactivity whatever disturbing 
 forces might have interfered with their operation. 
 And had this use been made of these exclusive laws, 
 and had they been enforced as the precursors and 
 negative conditions, but above all as bond fide 
 accompaniments of a process of emancipation, 
 properly and worthily so named, the code would 
 at this day have been remembered in Ireland only 
 as when recalling a dangerous fever of our boyhood 
 we think of the nauseous drugs and drenching-horn, 
 and congratulate ourselves that our doctors now-a- 
 days know how to manage these things less coarsely. 
 But this angry code was neglected as an oppor- 
 tunity, and mistaken for a substitute : et Jiinc illce 
 lacrymcd ! 
 
 And at this point I find myself placed again in 
 connexion with the main, and which I contend to 
 be the pertinent, question ; namely, the evil being 
 admitted, and its immediate removal impossible, is 
 the admission of Eoman Catholics into both Houses 
 
184 
 
 AIDS TO A EIGHT APPEECIATION 
 
 of the Legislature likely to mitigate or to aggravate 
 it ? And here the problem is greatly narrowed by 
 the fact that no man pretends to regard this admis- 
 sibility as a direct remedy or specific antidote for 
 the diseases under which Ireland labours. No ! it 
 is to act, we are told, as introductory to the direct 
 remedies. In short, this emancipation is to be, like 
 the penal code which it repeals, a sedative, though 
 in the opposite form of an anodyne cordial, that 
 wiU itself be entitled to the name of a remedial 
 measure in proportion as it shall be found to render 
 the body susceptible of the more direct remedies 
 that are to follow. Its object is to tranquillise 
 Ireland. Safety, peace, and good neighbourhood, 
 infiux of capital, diminution of absenteeism, indus- 
 trious habits and a long train of blessings will 
 follow. But the indispensable condition, the causa 
 causarum et causatorvm, is general tranquillity. 
 Such is the language held by all the more intel- 
 ligent advocates and encomiasts of emancipation. 
 The sense of the question therefore is, will the 
 measure tend to produce tranquillity ? 
 
 Now it is evident that there are two parties to 
 be satisfied, and that the measure is likely to effect 
 this purpose accordingly as it is calculated to 
 satisfy reasonable men of both. Seasonable men 
 are easily satisfied : would they were as numerous 
 as they are pacable ! We must, however, under- 
 
OP THE ROMAN CATHOLIC ACT. 
 
 185 
 
 stand the word comparatively as including all those 
 on both sides, who by their superior information, 
 talents, or property, are least likely to be under the 
 dominion of vulgar antipathies, and who may be 
 rationally expected to influence (and in certain 
 cases, and in alliance with a vigorous government, to 
 over-rule) the feelings and sentiments of the rest. 
 
 T^ow the two indispensable conditions under 
 which alone the measure can permanently satisfy 
 the reasonable, that is, the satisfiable, of both 
 parties, upon the supposition that in both parties 
 such men exist and that they form the influencive 
 class in both, are these : first, that the Act for the 
 repeal of the exclusive statutes and the admission 
 of Eoman Catholics to the full privileges of British 
 subjects shall be grounded on some determinate 
 principle, which involving interests and duties 
 common to both parties as British subjects, both 
 parties may be expected to recognise, and required 
 to maintain inviolable : second, that this principle 
 shall contain in itself an evident definite and 
 unchangeable boundary, a line of demarcation, a 
 ne plus ultra^ which in all reasonable men and 
 lovers of their country shall preclude the wish to 
 pass beyond it, and extinguish the hope of so doing 
 in such as are neither. 
 
 But though the measure should be such as to 
 satisfy all reasonable men, still it is possible that 
 
186 
 
 AIDS TO A EIGHT APPEECIATION 
 
 the number and influence of these may not be 
 sufficient to leaven the mass, or to over-rule the 
 agitators. I admit this ; but instead of weakening 
 what I have here said, it afibrds an additional 
 argument in its favour. Tor if an argument satis- 
 factory to the reasonable part should nevertheless 
 fad in securing tranquillity, still less can the result 
 be expected from an arbitrary adjustment that can 
 satisfy no part. If a measure grounded on principle, 
 and possessing the character of an ultimatum^ 
 should still, through the prejudices and passions 
 of one or of both of the parties, fail of success, it 
 would be folly to expect it from a measure that left 
 full scope and sphere to those passions ; which kept 
 alive the fears of the one party, while it sharpened 
 the cupidity of the other. With confidence, 
 therefore, I re-assert that only by reference to 
 a principle, possessing the characters above 
 enumerated, can any satisfactory measure be 
 framed, and that if this should fail in producing 
 the tranquillity aimed at, it will be in vain sought 
 in any other. 
 
 Again, it is evident that no principle can be 
 appropriate to such a measure, which does not bear 
 directly on the evil to be removed or mitigated. 
 Consequently, it should be our first business to 
 discover in what this evil truly and essentially 
 consists. It is, we know, a compound of many 
 
OF THE ROMAN CATHOLIC ACT. 
 
 187 
 
 ingredients. But we want to ascertain what the 
 base is that communicates the quality of evil, of 
 political evil, of evil which it is the duty of a 
 statesman to guard against, to various other 
 ingredients, which without the base would have 
 been innoxious ; or though evils in themselves, yet 
 evils of such a kind as to be counted by all wise 
 statesmen among the tares, which must be suffered 
 to grow up with the wheat to the close of the 
 harvest, and left for the Lord of the harvest to 
 separate. 
 
 Further : the principle, the grounding and 
 directing principle of an effectual enactment, must 
 be one on which a Eoman Catholic might con- 
 sistently vindicate and recommend the measure to 
 Eoman Catholics. It must therefore be indepen- 
 dent of all differences purely theological. And the 
 facts and documents, by which the truth and 
 practical importance of the principle are to be 
 proved or illustrated, should be taken by preference 
 from periods anterior to the division of the Latin 
 Church into Eomish and Protestant. It should be 
 such, in short, that an orator might with strict 
 historical propriety introduce the framers and 
 extorters of Magna Charta pleading to their 
 Eoman Catholic descendants in behalf of the 
 measure grounded on such a principle, and invoking 
 them in the name of the Constitution, over the 
 
188 
 
 AIDS TO A RIGHT APPRECIATION 
 
 growth of which they had kept armed watch, and 
 by the sacred obligation to maintain it which they 
 had entailed on their posterity. 
 
 This is the condition under which alone I could 
 conscientiously vote, and which being fulfilled, I 
 should most zealously vote for the admission of lay 
 Eoman Catholics, not only to both houses of the 
 Legislature, but to all other ofEices below the Crown 
 without any exception. Moreover, in the fulfil- 
 ment of this condition, in the solemn recognition 
 and estabhshment of a principle having the 
 characters here specified, I find the only necessai^ 
 security — convinced that this, if acceded to by the 
 Eoman Catholic community, would in effect be such, 
 and that any other security will either be hoUow, 
 or frustrate the purpose of the Law. 
 
 Now this condition would be fulfilled, the re- 
 quired principle would be given, provided that the 
 law for the repeal of the sundry statutes affecting 
 the Eoman Catholics were introduced by, and 
 grounded on, a declaration, to which every possible 
 character of solemnity should be given, that at no 
 time and under no circumstances has it ever been, 
 nor can it ever be, compatible with the spirit or 
 consistent with the safety of the British Constitu- 
 tion to recognise in the Eoman Catholic priesthood, 
 as now constituted, a component Estate of the 
 realm, or persons capable, individually or coUec- 
 
OF THE ROMAN CATHOLIC ACT. 
 
 189 
 
 tivelj, of becoming tbe trustees and usufructuary 
 proprietors of that elective and circulative property, 
 originally reserved for tbe permanent maintenance 
 of tbe National Cburcb. And further, it is expe- 
 dient that tbe preamble of tbe Act should expressly 
 declare and set forth that this exclusion of tbe 
 members of tbe Eomisb Priesthood (comprehending 
 aU under oaths of canonical obedience to tbe Pope 
 as their ecclesiastical sovereign) from tbe trusts and 
 offices of tbe National Cburcb, and from all parti- 
 cipation in tbe proceeds of tbe Nationalty, is en- 
 acted and established on grounds wholly irrelative 
 to any doctrines received and taught by tbe Eomisb 
 Church as articles of faith, and protested against 
 as such by tbe Churches of the Eeformation; but 
 that it is enacted on grounds derived and inherited 
 from our ancestors before tbe Eeformation, and by 
 them maintained and enforced to tbe fullest extent 
 that tbe circumstances of tbe times permitted, with 
 no other exceptions and interruptions than those 
 effected by fraud, or usurpation, or foreign force, 
 or tbe temporary fanaticism of tbe meaner sort. 
 
 In what manner tbe enactment of this principle 
 should be effected is of comparatively small impor- 
 tance, provided it be distinctly set forth as that 
 great constitutional security, tbe known existence 
 of which is the ground and condition of tbe right 
 of tbe Legislature to dispense with other less 
 
190 
 
 AIDS TO A RIGHT APPRECIATION 
 
 essential safe-guards of the constitution, not unne- 
 cessary, perhaps, at the time of their enactment, but 
 of temporary and accidental necessity. The form, I 
 repeat, the particular mode in which the principle 
 should be recognised, the security established, is 
 comparatively indifferent. Let it only be under- 
 stood first, as the provision, by the retention of 
 which the Legislature possesses a moral and consti- 
 tutional right to make the change in question ; as 
 that, the known existence of which permits the 
 law to ignore the Eoman Catholics under any other 
 name than that of British subjects ; and secondly, 
 as the express condition, the basis bf a virlmal 
 compact between the claimants and the nation, 
 which condition cannoj) be broken or evaded with- 
 out subverting (morally) the articles and clauses 
 founded thereon. 
 
 I do not assert that the provision here stated is 
 an absolute security. My positions are, — first, that 
 it may with better reason and more probability be 
 proposed as such, than any other hitherto devised ; 
 secondly, that no other securities can supersede 
 the expediency and necessity of this, but that this 
 » will greatly diminish or altogether remove the 
 necessity of any other : further, that without this 
 the present measure cannot be rationally expected 
 to produce that tranquillity, which it is the aim and 
 object of the framers to bring about ; and lastly. 
 
OF THE ROMAN CATHOLIC ACT. 
 
 191 
 
 that the necessity of the declaration, as above given, 
 formally and solemnly to be made and recorded, is 
 not evacuated by this pretext, that no one intends 
 to transfer the Church Establishment to the Eomish 
 priesthood, or to divide it with them. 
 
 One thing, however, it is of importance that I 
 should mention, namely, that the existing state of 
 the elective franchise * in Ireland, in reference to 
 the fatal present of the Union ministry to the 
 landed interest, that true Deianira shirt of the 
 Irish Hercules, is altogether excluded from the 
 theme and purpose of this disquisition. It ought 
 to be considered by the Legislature, abstracted 
 from the creed professed by the great majority of 
 these nominal freeholders. The recent abuse of 
 the influence resulting from this profession should 
 be regarded as an accidental aggravation of the 
 mischief, which displayed rather than constituted 
 its malignity. It is even desirable that it should 
 be preserved separate from the Eoman CathoHc 
 Question, and in no necessary dependence on the 
 fate of the Bill now on the eve of presentation to 
 
 * Although, since the text was written, the forty shilling 
 freeholders no longer possess the elective franchise, yet as 
 this particular clause of the Act already has been, and may 
 hereafter be, made a pretext for agitation, the paragraph has 
 been retained, in the belief that its moral uses have not been 
 altogether superseded by the retraction of this most unhappy 
 boon. 
 
192 
 
 AIDS TO A RIGHT APPRECIATION 
 
 Parliament. Whether this be carried or be lost, 
 it will still remain a momentous question, urgently 
 calling for the decision of the Legislature — ^whether 
 the said extension of the elective franchise has 
 not introduced an uncombining and wholly incon* 
 gruous ingredient into the representative system, 
 irreconcilable with the true principle of election, 
 and virtually disfranchising the class, to whom, on 
 every ground of justice and of policy, the right 
 unquestionably belongs ; — under any circumstances 
 overwhelming the voices of the rest of the com- 
 munity ; in ordinary times concentering in the 
 great land-owners a virtual monopoly of the 
 elective power ; and in times of factious excitement 
 depriving them even of their natural and rightful 
 influence. 
 
 These few suggestions on the expediency of re- 
 vising the state of the representation in Ireland are, 
 I am aware, but a digression from the main subject 
 of the Chapter. But this in fact is already com- 
 pleted, as far as my purpose is concerned. The 
 reasons, on which the necessity of the proposed de- 
 claration is grounded, have been given at large in 
 the former part of the volume. Here, therefore, I 
 should end ; but that I anticipate two objections 
 of sufiicient force to deserve a comment and form 
 the matter of a concluding paragraph. 
 
 Pirst, it may be objected that, after abstracting 
 
OF THE ROMAN CATHOLIC ACT. 
 
 193 
 
 the portion of evil which may be plausibly attributed 
 to the peculiar state of landed property in Ireland, 
 there are evils directly resulting from the Itomanism 
 of the most numerous class of the inhabitants, 
 besides that of an extra-national priesthood, and 
 against the political consequences of which the 
 above declaration provides no security. To this I 
 reply, that as no bridge ever did or can possess the 
 demonstrable perfections of the mathematical arch, 
 so can no existing State adequately correspond to 
 the idea of a State. In nations and governments 
 the most happily constituted there wiU be deform- 
 ities and obstructions, peccant humours and irregu- 
 lar actions, which affect indeed the perfection of 
 the State, but not its essential forms ; which retard, 
 but do not necessarily prevent its progress ; — 
 casual disorders which, though they aggravate the 
 growing pains of a nation, may yet, by the vigorous 
 counteraction which they excite, even promote its 
 growth. Inflammations in the extremities and 
 unseemly boils on the surface must not be con- 
 founded with exhaustive misgrowths, or the poison 
 of a false life in the vital organs. Nay, — and this 
 remark is of special pertinency to the present pur- 
 pose — even where the former derive a malignant 
 character from their co-existence with the latter, 
 yet the wise physician wiU direct his whole atten- 
 tion to the constitutional ailments, knowing that 
 
194 
 
 AIDS TO A RIGHT APPRECIATION 
 
 when the source, the fons et fames veneni, is sealed 
 up, the accessories will either dry up of themselves, 
 or, returning to their natural character rank among 
 the infirmities which flesh is heir to ; and either 
 admit of a gradual remedy, or where this is imprac- 
 ticable, or when the medicine would be worse than 
 the disease, are to be endured as tolerabiles ineptice, 
 trials of patience, and occasions of charity. I have 
 here had the State chiefly in view ; but a member 
 of the Church in England will to little purpose have 
 availed himself of his free access to the Scriptures, 
 will have read at least the Epistles of St. Paul 
 with a very unthinking spirit, who does not apply 
 the same maxims to the Church of Christ ; who 
 has yet to learn that the Church militant is a floor 
 lohereon wheat and chaff are mingled together ; that 
 even grievous evils and errors may exist that do not 
 concern the nature or being of a Church, and that 
 they may even prevail in the particular Church, to 
 which we belong, without justifying a separation 
 from the same, and without invalidating its claims 
 on our afiection as a true and living part of the 
 Church Universal. And with regard to such evils 
 we must adopt the advice that Augustine (a man 
 not apt to ofiend by any excess of charity) gave to 
 the complainers of his day — ut misericorditer corri- 
 plant quod possunt, quod non possunt patienter 
 ferant^ et cum delectione lugeant, donee aut emendet 
 
OF THE ROMAN CATHOLIC ACT. 
 
 195 
 
 Deus^ aut m messe eradicet zizania et paleas 
 ventilet. 
 
 Secondly, it may be objected that the declaration, 
 so peremptorily by me required, is altogether un- 
 necessary; that no one thinks of alienating the 
 Church property, directly or indirectly ; that there 
 is no intention of recognising the Eomish Priests 
 in law, by entitling them as such to national 
 maintenance, or in the language of the day by 
 taking them into the pay of the State : in short, 
 that the National Church is no more in danger 
 than the Christian. And is this the opinion, the 
 settled judgment, of one who has studied the signs 
 of the times ? Can the person who makes these 
 assertions, have ever read a certain pamphlet by 
 Mr. Croker? — or the surveys of the counties, 
 published under the authority of the now extinct 
 Board of Agriculture ? Or has he heard, or atten- 
 tively perused, the successive debates in both 
 Houses during the late agitation of the Eoman 
 Catholic question ? If he have — why then, rela- 
 tively to the objector, and to as many as entertain 
 the same opinions, my reply is : — the objection is 
 unanswerable. 
 

 
APPENDIX 
 
 NOTES ON THE HISTORY OF ENTHUSIASM. 
 
 DEMOSIUS AND MYSTES. 
 
GLOSSAEY TO THE APPENDED DIALOGUE. 
 
 As aU my readers are not bound to understand 
 Greek, and yet, according to my deepest convictions, 
 the truths set forth in the following combat of wit 
 between the man of reason and the man of the 
 senses have an interest for all, I have been induced 
 to prefix the explanations of the few Greek words, 
 and the words minted from the Greek : 
 
 Cosmos — world. Toutos-cosmos^ — this world. 
 Heteros — the other, in the sense of opposition to, 
 or discrepancy with, some former ; as heterodoxy, 
 in opposition to orthodoxy. Alios — another 
 simply and without precluding or superseding the 
 one before-mentioned. Allocosmite — a denizen of 
 another world. 
 
 Mystes, from the Greek fivco — one who muses 
 with closed lips, as meditating on ideas which may 
 indeed be suggested and awakened, but cannot, like 
 the images of sense and the conceptions of the 
 understanding, be adequately expressed by words. 
 
 Where a person mistakes the anomalous mis- 
 
 EuphonicB gratia.— -Yidi. 
 
200 GLOSSARY TO THE APPENDED DIALOGUE. 
 
 growths of his own individuality for ideas or truths 
 of universal reason, he may, without impropriety, 
 be called a mystic, in the abusive sense of the term ; 
 though pseudo-mystic or phantast would be the 
 more proper designation. Heraclitus, Plato, Bacon, 
 Leibnitz, were mystics in the primary sense of the 
 term ; lamblichus and his successors phantast s. 
 
 ’'ETrea C^ovra — living words. — The words following 
 from Plato (page 223) may be Englished ; — “ the 
 commune and the dialect of Gods with or toward 
 men ; ” and those attributed to Pythagoras ; — “ the 
 verily subsistent numbers or powers, the most 
 prescient (or provident) principles of the earth and 
 the heavens.” 
 
 And here, though not falling under the leading 
 title. Glossary, yet, as tending to the same object 
 of fore-arming the reader for the following dialogue, 
 I transcribe two or three annotations which I had 
 pencilled, (for the book was lent to me by a friend 
 who had himself borrowed it) on the margins of a 
 volume, recently published, and intituled, “ The 
 Natural History of Enthusiasm.” They will, at 
 least, remind some of my old school-fellows of the 
 habit for which I was even then noted: and for 
 others they may serve as a specimen of the 
 Marginalia, which, if brought together from the 
 various books, my own and those of a score others, 
 would go near to form as bulky a volume as most 
 
GLOSSARY TO THE APPENDED DIALOGUE. 201 
 
 of those old folios, through which the larger portion 
 of them are dispersed.* 
 
 HISTOEy OF ENTHUSIASM. 
 
 I. 
 
 “ AVhateyer is practically important on religion 
 or morals, may at all times be advanced and argued 
 in the simplest terms of colloquial expression.” — 
 
 p. 21.t 
 
 Note. 
 
 I do not believe this. Be it so, however. But 
 why ? Simply, because, the terms and phrases of 
 the theological schools have, by their continual 
 iteration from the pulpit, become colloquial. The 
 science of one age becomes the common sense of a 
 succeeding. The author adds — “ from the pulpit, 
 perhaps, no other style should at any time be 
 heard.” Now I can conceive no more direct means 
 of depriving Christianity of one of its peculiar attri- 
 butes, that of enriching and enlarging the mind, 
 while it purifies and in the very act of purifying 
 the will and afiections, than the maxim here pre- 
 scribed by the historian of enthusiasm. From the 
 
 * See the Author’s Literary Remains. — Ed, f 7th edit. 
 
202 
 
 NOTES ON ISAAC TAYLOR^S 
 
 intensity of commercial life in this country, and 
 from some other less creditable causes, there is 
 found even among our better educated men a 
 vagueness in the use of words, which presents, 
 indeed, no obstacle to the intercourse of the 
 market, but is absolutely incompatible with the 
 attainment or communication of distinct and precise 
 conceptions. Hence in every department of exact 
 knowledge a peculiar nomenclature is indispensable. 
 The anatomist, chemist, botanist, mineralogist, yea, 
 even the common artisan and the rude sailor dis- 
 cover that “ the terms of colloquial expression,” are 
 too general and too lax to answer their purposes : 
 and on what grounds can the science of self- 
 knowledge, and of our relations to God and our 
 own spirits, be presumed to form an exception? 
 Every new term expressing a fact, or a difference, 
 not precisely and adequately expressed by any 
 other word in the same language, is a new organ of 
 thought for the mind that has learned it. 
 
 11 . 
 
 “ The region of abstract conceptions, of lofty 
 reasonings, of magnificent images, has an atmos- 
 phere too subtle to support the health of true piety. 
 # # # In accordance with this, the Supreme * * 
 in his word reveals barely a glimpse of his essential 
 glories. By some naked afi&rmations we are. 
 
HISTORY OR ENTHUSIASM. 
 
 i^03 
 
 indeed, secured against grovelling notions of tlie 
 divine nature ; but these bints are incidental, and 
 so scanty, that every excursive mind goes far 
 beyond them in its conception of the infinite 
 attributes.’’ — p. 26. 
 
 Note. 
 
 By “abstract conceptions” the Author means 
 what I should call ideas, which as such I contra- 
 distinguish from conceptions, whether abstracted 
 or generalised. But it is with his meaning, not 
 with his terms, that I am at present concerned. 
 Now that the personeity of God, the idea of God 
 as the I AM, is presented more prominently in 
 Scripture than the (so called) physical attributes, 
 is most true ; and forms one of the distinctive 
 characters of its superior worth and value. It was 
 by dwelling too exclusively on the infinites that 
 the ancient Greek philosophers, Plato excepted, 
 fell into pantheism, as in later times did Spinoza. 
 “I forbid you,” says Plato, “to call God the 
 infinite ! If you dare name him at all, say rather 
 the measure of infinity.” Nevertheless, it would 
 be easy to place in synopsi before the Author such 
 a series of Scripture passages as would incline him 
 to retract his assertion. The Eternal, the Omni- 
 present, the Omniscient, the one absolute Good, 
 the Holy, the Living, the Creator as well as Eormer 
 
204 
 
 NOTES ON ISAAC TAYLOR's 
 
 of the Universe, the Father of Spirits — can the 
 Author’s mind go far beyond these? Yet these 
 are all clearly affirmed of the Supreme One in the 
 Scriptures. 
 
 III. 
 
 The following pages from p. 26 to p. 36 contain 
 a succession of eloquent and splendid paragraphs 
 on the celestial orders, and the expediency or 
 necessity of their being concealed from us, lest we 
 should receive such overwhelming conceptions of 
 the divine greatness as to render us incapable of 
 devotion, and prayer on the Scripture model. 
 
 Were it,” says the eloquent writer, “ indeed 
 permitted to man to gaze upw^ards from step to 
 step, and from range to range, of these celestial 
 hierarchies, to the lowest steps of the Eternal 
 Throne, what liberty of heart would afterwards be 
 left him in drawing near to the Father of Spirits ?” 
 But the substance of these pages will be found 
 implied in the following reply to them. 
 
 Note. 
 
 More weight with me than all this Pelion upon 
 Ossa of imaginary hierarchies has the single remark 
 of Augustine, that there neither are nor can be but 
 three essential differences of being, namely, the 
 absolute, the rational finite, and the finite irrational; 
 
HISTORY OF ENTHUSIASM. 
 
 205 
 
 that is, Grod, man, and brute. Besides, the whole 
 scheme is un- Scriptural, if not contra-Scriptural. 
 Pile up winged hierarchies on hierarchies, and 
 outblaze the Cabalists, and Dionysius the Areopa- 
 gite ! yet what a gaudy vapour for a healthful mind 
 is the whole conception (or rather phantasm) 
 compared with the awful hope holden forth in the 
 Gospel, to be one with God in and through the 
 Mediator Christ, even the living, co-eternal Word 
 and Son of God ! 
 
 But through the whole of this eloquent decla- 
 mation I find two errors predominate, and both, it 
 appears to me, dangerous errors. First, that the 
 rational and consequently the only true ideas of 
 the Supreme Being are incompatible with the spirit 
 of prayer and petitionary pleading taught and 
 exemplified in the Scriptures. Second, that this 
 being the case, and “ supplication with arguments 
 and importunate requests” being irrational and 
 known by the supplicant to be such, it is neverthe- 
 less a duty to pray in this fashion. In other words, 
 it is asserted that the Supreme Being requires 
 of his rational creatures, as the condition of their 
 offering acceptable worship to him, that they should 
 wilfully blind themselves to the light, which he had 
 himself given them, as the contradistinguishing 
 character of their humanity, without which they 
 could not pray to him at all; and that, drugging 
 
206 NOTES ON ISAAC TAYLOE^S 
 
 their sense of the truth into a temporary doze, they 
 should make believe that they know no better! 
 As if the Grod of Truth and Father of all lights 
 resembled an oriental or African despot, whose 
 courtiers, even those whom he had himself enriched 
 and placed in the highest rank, are commanded to 
 approach him only in beggars’ rags and with a 
 beggarly whine. 
 
 I on the contrary find the Scripture model of 
 devotion,” the prayers and thanksgiving of the 
 Psalmist, and in the main of our own Church 
 Liturgy, perfectly conformable to the highest and 
 clearest convictions of my reason. (I use the word 
 in its most comprehensive sense, as comprising 
 both the practical and the intellective, not only as 
 the light but likewise as the life which is the light 
 of man. John i. 3.) And I do not hesitate to 
 attribute the contrary persuasion principally to the 
 three following oversights. First (and this is the 
 queen bee in the hive of error), the identification 
 of the universal reason with each man’s individual 
 understanding, subjects not only difierent but 
 diverse, not only «ZZogeneous but heterogeneovi^. 
 Second, the substitution of the idea of the infinite 
 for that of the absolute. Third and lastly, the habit 
 of using the former as a sort of superlative syno- 
 nyme of the vast or indefinitely great. Now the 
 practical difference between my scheme and that of 
 
HISTORY OF ENTHUSIASM. 
 
 207 
 
 the Essayist, for whose talents and intentions I feel 
 sincere respect, may perhaps be stated thus. 
 
 The Essayist would bring down his understanding 
 to his religion : I would raise up my understanding 
 to my reason, and find my religion in the focus 
 resulting from their convergence. We both alike 
 use the same penitential, deprecative and petitionary 
 prayers ; I in the full assurance of their congruity 
 with my reason, he in a factitious oblivion of their 
 being the contrary. 
 
 The name of the author* of the Natural History 
 of Enthusiasm is unknown to me and unconjectured. 
 It is evidently the work of a mind at once observant 
 and meditative. And should these notes meet the 
 Author’s eye, let him be assured that I willingly 
 give to his genius that respect which his intentions 
 without it would secure for him in the breast of 
 every good man. But in the present state of 
 things, infidelity having fallen into disrepute even 
 on the score of intellect, yet the obligation to show 
 a reason for our faith having become more generally 
 recognised, as reading and the taste for serious 
 conversation have increased, there is a large class of 
 my countrymen disposed to receive, with especial 
 favour, any opinions that will enable them to make 
 a compromise between their new knowledge and 
 their old belief. And with these men the Author’s 
 
 Mr. Isaac Taylor. — Ed. 
 
208 
 
 DIALOGUE BETWEEN 
 
 evident abilities will probably render the work a 
 high authority. Now it is the very purpose of my 
 life to impress the contrary sentiments. Hence 
 these notes. 
 
 DIALOGUE BETWEEN DEMOSIUS 
 AND MYSTES.* 
 
 Mt deae , 
 
 In emptying a drawer of rose-leaf bags, old (but, 
 too many of them) unopened letters, and paper 
 scraps, or brain fritters, I had my attention directed 
 to a sere and ragged half-sheet by a gust of wind 
 which had separated it from its companions, and 
 whisked it out of the window into the garden. — 
 Not that I went after it. I have too much respect 
 for the numerous tribe, to which it belonged, to lay 
 any restraint on their movements, or to put the 
 Vagrant Act in force against them. But it so 
 chanced that some after-breeze had stuck it on a 
 standard rose-tree, and there I found it, as I was 
 pacing my evening walk alongside the lower ivy- 
 wall, the bristled runners from which threaten to 
 entrap the top branch of the cherry tree in our 
 neighbour’s kitchen garden. I had been meditating 
 a letter to you, and as I ran my eye over this 
 
 See ante, p. 142. —Ed. 
 
DEMOSIUS AND MYSTES. 
 
 209 
 
 fly-away tag-rag and bob-tail, and bethought me that 
 it was a by-blow of my own, I felt a sort of fatherly 
 remorse, and yearning towards it, and exclaimed, 
 
 “ If I had a frank for , this should help to make 
 
 up the ounce.” It was far too decrepit to travel 
 per se — besides that the seal would have looked like 
 a single pin on a beggar’s coat of tatters — and yet 
 one does not like to be stopped in a kind feeling, 
 which my conscience interpreted as a sort of 
 promise to the said scrap, and therefore, (frank or 
 no frank), I will transcribe it. A dog’s leaf at the 
 top was worn off, which must have contained, I 
 presume, the syllable Ye 
 
 “ E/ily,” quoth Demosius of 
 
 Toutoscosmos, Grentleman, to Mystes the Allocos- 
 mite, “ thou seemest to me like an out-of-door 
 patient of St. Luke’s wandering about in the rain 
 without cap, hat, or bonnet, poring on the elevation 
 of a palace, not the house that Jack built, but the 
 house that is to be built for Jack, in the suburbs of 
 the city, which his cousin-german, the lynx-eyed 
 Dr. Gruithuisen has lately discovered in the moon. 
 But through a foolish kindness for that face of 
 thine, which whilome belonged to an old school- 
 fellow of the same name with thee, I would get 
 thee shipped off under the Alien Act, as a non ens, 
 or pre-existent of the other world to come.” — 
 
210 
 
 DIALOGUE BETWEEN 
 
 To whom Mystes retorted : — “Verily, friend Demo- 
 silts, thou art too fantastic for a genine Toutoscosmos 
 man ; and it needs only a fit of dyspepsy, or a cross 
 in love, to make a Heterocosmite of thee ; this same 
 Seteroscosmos being in fact the endless shadow 
 which the Toutoscosmos casts at sun-set. But not 
 to alarm or afiront thee, as if I insinuated that thou 
 wert in danger of becoming an Allocosmite, I let 
 the whole of thy courteous address to me pass 
 without comment or objection, save only the two 
 concluding monosyllables and the preposition (jpre) 
 which anticipates them. The world in which I 
 exist is another world indeed, but not to come. It 
 is as present as (if that be at all) the magnetic 
 planet, of which, according to the astronomer 
 Halley, the visible globe which we inverminate is 
 the case or travelling trunk ; — a neat little world 
 where light still exists in statu perfuso, as on the 
 third day of the creation, before it was polarised 
 into outward and inward, that is, while light and 
 life were one and the same, neither existing for- 
 mally, yet both eminenter : and when herb, flower, 
 and forest rose as a vision, in proprio lucido, the 
 ancestor and unseen yesterday of the sun and 
 moon. Now, whether there really is such an Elysian 
 mundus mundulus incased in the macrocosm, or 
 great world, below the adamantine vault that 
 supports the mother waters, which support the 
 
DEMOSIUS AND MYSTES. 
 
 211 
 
 coatingcrust of that mundus irrmundus on which 
 we and others less scantily furnished from nature’s 
 storehouse crawl, delve, and nestle — (or, shall I say 
 the Lyceum, where walk oi tovtov koo-^aov (j)LK6(To(j)oi) 
 — Dr. Halley may, perhaps, by this time have 
 ascertained : and to him and the philosophic ghosts, 
 his compeers, I leave it. But that another world is 
 inshrined in the microcosm I not only believe, but 
 at certain depths of my being, during the more 
 solemn sabbaths of the spirit, I have holden com- 
 mune therewith, in the power of that faith, which 
 is the substance of the things hoped for, the living 
 stem that will itself expand into the flower, which it 
 now foreshows. How should it not be so, even on 
 grounds of natural reason, and the analogy of 
 inferior life ? Is not nature prophetic up the whole 
 vast pyramid of organic being ? And in which of 
 her numberless predictions has nature been con- 
 victed of a lie ? Is not every organ announced by 
 a previous instinct or act ? The larva of the stag- 
 beetle lies in its chrysalis like an infant in the coffin 
 of an adult, having left an empty space half the 
 length it occupies ; and this space is the exact 
 length of the horn which distinguishes the perfect 
 animal, but which, when it constructed its temporary 
 sarcophagus, was not yet in existence. Do not the 
 eyes, ears, lungs, of the unborn babe give notice 
 and furnish proof of a transuterine, visible, audible. 
 
212 
 
 DIALOGUE BETWEEN 
 
 atmosplieric world ? We have eyes, ears, touch, 
 taste, smell ; and have we not an answering world 
 of shapes, colours, sounds, and sapid and odorous 
 bodies ? But likewise — (alas ! for the man for whom 
 the one has not the same evidence of fact as the 
 other) — the Creator has given us spiritual senses, 
 and sense organs — ideas I mean — the idea of the 
 good, the idea of the beautiful, ideas of eternity, 
 immortality, freedom, and of that which contem- 
 plated relatively to will is holiness, in relation to 
 life is bliss. And must not these too infer the 
 existence of a world correspondent to them ? There 
 is a light, said the Hebrew sage, compared with 
 which the glory of the sun is hut a cloudp veil : and 
 is it an ignus fatuus given to mock us and lead us 
 astray ? And from a yet higher authority we know, 
 that it is a light that lighteth every man that cometh 
 into the world. And are there no objects to reflect 
 it ? Or must we seek its analogon in the light of 
 the glow-worm, that simply serves to distinguish 
 one reptile from all the rest, and lighting, inch by 
 inch, its mazy path through weeds and grass, leaves 
 all else before, and behind, and around it in dark- 
 ness ? Ho ! another and answerable world there 
 is ; and if any man discern it not, let him not, 
 whether sincerely, or in contemptuous irony, pre- 
 tend a defect of faculty as the cause. The sense, 
 the light, and the conformed objects are all there 
 
DEMOSIUS AND MYSTES. 
 
 213 
 
 and for all men. The difference between man and 
 man in relation thereto results from no difference 
 in their several gifts and powers of intellect, but 
 in the will. As certainly as the individual is a 
 man, so certainly should this other world be present 
 to him : yea, it is his proper home. But he is an 
 absentee and chooses to live abroad. His freedom 
 and whatever else he possesses which the dog and 
 the ape do not possess, yea, the whole revenue of 
 his humanity, is derived from this ; — but as with the 
 Irish land-owner in the theatres, gaming-houses, 
 and maitresseries of Paris, so with him. He is a 
 voluntary absentee. I repeat it again and again, — 
 the cause is altogether in the will : and the defect 
 of intellectual power, and ‘ the having no turn or 
 taste for subjects of this sort,’ are effects and con- 
 sequences of the alienation of the will, that is, of 
 the man himself. There may be a defect, but 
 there was not a deficiency, of the intellect. I 
 appeal to facts for the proof. Take the science of 
 political economy. Ho two professors understand 
 each other ; — and often have I been present where 
 the subject has been discussed in a room full of 
 merchants and manufacturers, sensible and well- 
 informed men : and the conversation has ended in 
 a confession that the matter was beyond their 
 comprehension. And yet the science professes to 
 give light on rents, taxes, income, capital, the 
 
214 
 
 DIALOGUE BETWEEN 
 
 principles of trade, commerce, agriculture, on wealth, 
 and the ways of acquiring and increasing it, in short 
 on all that most passionately excites and interests 
 the Toutoscosmos men. But it was avowed that 
 to arrive at any understanding of these matters 
 requires a mind gigantic in its comprehension, and 
 microscopic in its accuracy of detail. Now compare 
 this with the effect produced on promiscuous crowds 
 by a Whitfield, or a Wesley; — or rather compare 
 with it the shaking of every leaf of the vast forest 
 to the first blast of Luther’s trumpet. Was it only 
 of the world to come that Luther and his compeers 
 preached ? Turn to Luther’s Table Talk, and see if 
 the larger part be not of that other world which 
 now is, and without the being and working of which 
 the world to come would be either as unintelligible 
 as Abracadabra, or a mere reflection and elongation 
 of the world of sense — Jack Eobinson between 
 two looking-glasses, with a series of Jack Eobiusons 
 in scdcula scBCulorum,'^^ 
 
 “ Well, but what is this new, and yet other world? 
 The brain of a man that is out of his senses ? A 
 world fraught with castles in the air, well worthy 
 the attention of any gentleman inclined to idealise 
 a large property ? ” 
 
 “ The sneer on that lip, and the arch shine of 
 that eye, friend Demosius, would almost justify me, 
 
DEMOSIUS AND MYSTES. 
 
 215 
 
 though I should answer that question by retorting 
 it in a parody. What, quoth the owlet, peeping 
 out of his ivy-bush at noon, with his blue fringed 
 eye-curtains dropped, what is this light which is 
 said to exist together with this warmth we feel, and 
 yet is something else ? But I read likewise in that 
 same face, when thou wast beginning to prepare 
 that question, a sort of misgiving from within, as if 
 thou wert more positive than sure that the reply, 
 with which you would accoromodate me, is as wise 
 as it is witty. Therefore, though I cannot answer 
 your question, I will give you a hint how you may 
 answer it for yourself. Learn the art and acquire 
 the habit of contemplating things abstractedly from 
 their relations. I will explain myself by an instance. 
 Suppose a body floating at a certain height in the 
 air, and receiving the light so equally on aU sides as 
 not to occasion the eye to conjecture any solid 
 contents. And now let six or seven persons see it 
 at difierent distances and from difierent points of 
 view. For A it will be a square ; for B a triangle ; 
 for C two right-angled triangles attached to each 
 other ; for D two unequal triangles ; for E it will be 
 a triangle with a trapezium hung on to it ; for F it 
 will be a square with a cross in it ^ ; for Gr it will 
 be an oblong quadrangle with three triangles in it 
 ; and for H three unequal triangles. 
 
 “ Now it is evident that not one of all these is the 
 
216 
 
 DIALOGUE BETWEEN 
 
 figure itself, (which in this instance is a four-sided 
 pyramid,) hut the contingent relations of the figure. 
 Now transfer this from geometry to the subjects 
 of the real (that is, not merely formal or abstract) 
 sciences, — to substances and bodies, the materia 
 subjecta of the chemist, physiologist and naturalist, 
 and you will gradually (that is, if you choose and 
 sincerely will it) acquire the power and the disposi- 
 tion of contemplating your own imaginations, wants, 
 appetites, passions, and opinions, on the same prin- 
 ciples, and distinguish that which alone is and abides 
 from the accidental and impermanent relations 
 arising out of its co-existence with other things or 
 beings. 
 
 “ My second rule or maxim requires its jprolego- 
 mena. In the several classes and orders that mark the 
 scale of organic nature, from the plant to the highest 
 order of animals, each higher imphes a lower as the 
 condition of its actual existence ; — and the same 
 position holds good equally of the vital and organic 
 powers. Thus without the first power, that of 
 growth, or what Bichat and others name the vege- 
 tive life or productivity, the second power, that 
 of totality and locomotion (commonly but most 
 infelicitously called irritability) could not exist, that 
 is, manifest its being. Productivity is the necessary 
 antecedent of irritability, and in like manner irrita- 
 bihty of sensibility. But it is no less true that in 
 
DEMOSIUS AND MYSTES. 
 
 217 
 
 the idea of each power the lower derives its intelli- 
 gibility from the higher : and the highest must be 
 presumed to inhere latently or potentially in the 
 lowest, or this latter will be wholly unintelligible, 
 inconceivable ; — you can have no conception of it. 
 Thus in sensibility we see a power that in every 
 instant goes out of itself, and in the same instant 
 retracts and falls back on itself: which the great 
 fountains of pure MatJiesis, the Pythagorean and 
 Platonic geometricians, illustrated in the production 
 or self-evolution of the point into the circle. Imagine 
 the going-forth and the retraction as two successive 
 acts, the result would be an infinity of angles, a 
 growth of zig-zag. In order to the imaginability 
 of a circular line, the extroitive and the retroitive 
 must co-exist in one and the same act and moment, 
 the curve line being the product. IN'ow what is 
 ideally true in the generations or productive acts of 
 the intuitive faculty (of the pure sense, I mean, or 
 inward vision — the reine Anschauung of the German 
 philosophers) must be assumed as truth of fact in 
 all living growth, or wherein would the growth of a 
 plant differ from that of a crystal ? The latter is 
 formed wholly by apposition ah extra : in the former 
 the movement ab extra is in order of thought con- 
 sequent on, and yet coinstantaneous with, the move- 
 ment ah intra. Thus, the specific character of 
 sensibility, the highest of the three powers, is found 
 
218 
 
 DIALOGUE BETWEEN 
 
 to be the general character of life, and supplies the 
 only way of conceiving, the only insight into the 
 possibility of, the first and lowest power. And yet, 
 even thus, growth taken as separate from, and 
 exclusive of, sensibility would be unintelligible, nay, 
 contradictory. Tor it would be an act of the life, 
 or productive form of the plant, having the life 
 itself as its source, (since it is a going forth from 
 the life), and likewise having the life itself as its 
 object, for in the same instant it is retracted : and 
 yet the product (that is, the plant) exists not for 
 itself, by the hypothesis that has excluded sensibility. 
 For all sensibihty is a self-finding; whence the 
 German word for sensation or feeling is EmjpJindung, 
 that is, an inward finding. Therefore sensibility 
 cannot be excluded : and as it does not exist actually, 
 it must be involved potentially. Life does not yet 
 manifest itself in its highest dignity, as a self- 
 finding ; but in an evident tendency thereto, or a 
 self-seekiug ; — and this has two epochs or intensities. 
 Potential sensibility in its first epoch, or lowest 
 intensity, appears as growth : in its second epoch, it 
 shows itself as irritability or vital instinct. In both, 
 however, the sensibility must have pre-existed, or 
 rather pre-inhered, though as latent: or how could 
 the irritability have been evolved out of the growth, 
 (as in the stamina of the plant during the act of 
 impregnatmg the germen) : — or the sensibility out 
 
DEMOSIUS AND MYSTES. 
 
 219 
 
 of the irritability, — as in the first appearance of 
 nerves and nervous bulbs in the lower orders of the 
 insect realm? But, indeed, evolution as contra- 
 distinguished from apposition, or superinduction ah 
 aliunde, is implied in the conception of life : and is 
 that which essentially differences a living fibre from 
 a thread of asbestos, the floscule or any other of the 
 moving fairy shapes of animalcular life from the 
 frost-plumes on a window pane. 
 
 “ Again : what has been said of the lowest power 
 of life relatively to its highest power — growth to 
 sensibility, the plant to the animal — applies equally 
 to life itself relatively to mind. Without the latter 
 the former would be unintelligible, and the idea 
 would contradict itself. If there had been no self- 
 retaining power, a self-finding would be a perpetual 
 self-losing. Divide a second into a thousand, or if 
 you please, a million of parts, yet if there be an 
 absolute chasm separating one moment of self- 
 finding from another, the chasm of a millionth of a 
 second would be equal to all time. A being that 
 existed for itself only in moments, each infinitely 
 small and yet absolutely divided from the preceding 
 and following, would not exist for itself at all. And 
 if aU beings were the same, or yet lower, it could 
 not be said to exist in any sense, any more than 
 light would exist as light, if there were no eyes or 
 visual power : and the whole conception would break 
 
220 
 
 DIALOGUE BETWEEN 
 
 up into contradictory positions — an intestine conflict 
 more destructive tlian even that between the two 
 cats, where one tail alone is said to have survived the 
 battle. The conflicting factors of our conception 
 would eat each other up, tails and all. Ergo : the 
 mind, as a self-retaining power, is not less indis- 
 pensable to the intelligibility of life as a self-finding 
 power, than a self-finding power, that is, sensibility, 
 to a self-seeking power, that is, growth. Again : a 
 self-retaining mind — that is, memory, (which is 
 the primary sense of mind, and the common people 
 in several of our provinces still use the word in 
 this sense) — a self-retaining power supposes a self- 
 containing power, a half-conscious being. And this 
 is the definition of mind in its proper and distinc- 
 tive sense, a subject that is its own object,— or 
 where A contemplant is one and the same subject 
 with A contemplated. Lastly, (that I may com- 
 plete the ascent of powers for my own satisfaction, 
 and not as expecting, or in the present habit of 
 your thoughts even wishing you to follow me to a 
 height, dizzy for the strongest spirit, it being the 
 apex of all human, perhaps of angelic, knowledge to 
 know that it must be : since absolute ultimates can 
 only be seen by a light thrown backward from the 
 penultimate ; John i. 18.) — lastly, I say, the self- 
 containing power supposes a self-causing power; 
 causa suiy olria v7r€pov(TLos» Here alone we find a 
 
DEMOSIUS AND MYSTES. 
 
 221 
 
 problem which in its very statement contains its 
 own solution — the one self-solving power, beyond 
 which no question is possible. Yet short of this 
 we dare not rest ; for even O ON, the Supreme 
 Being, if contemplated abstractly from the Absolute 
 Will, whose essence it is to be causative of all being, 
 would sink into a Spinozistic deity. That this is 
 not evident to us arises from the false notion of 
 reason as a quality, property, or faculty of the 
 real : whereas reason is the supreme reality, the 
 only true being in all things visible and invisible ; 
 the pleroma, in whom alone God loveth the world ! 
 Even in man will is deeper than mind ; for mind 
 does not cease to be mind by having an ante- 
 cedent ; but will is either the first (ro ael npoTTpcorov^ 
 TO nunquam positum, semjper sujpponendim) , or it is 
 not will at all. 
 
 “ And now for the practical rules which I pro- 
 mised, or the means by which you may educate in 
 yourself that state of mind which is most favour- 
 able to a true knowledge of both the worlds 
 that now are, and to a right faith in the world 
 to come. 
 
 “ I. — Eemember that whatever is, lives. A thing 
 absolutely lifeless is inconceivable, except as a 
 thought, image, or fancy, in some other being. 
 
 “ II. — In every living form, the conditions of its 
 existence are to be sought for in that which is 
 
222 
 
 DIALOGUE BETWEEN 
 
 below it ; the grounds of its intelligibility in that 
 which IS above it. 
 
 III. — Accustom your mind to distinguish the 
 relations of things from the things themselves. 
 Think often of the latter as independent of the 
 former, in order that you may never think of the 
 former apart from the latter, that is, mistake mere 
 relations for true and enduring realities : and with 
 regard to these seek the solution of each in some 
 higher reality. The contrary process leads demon- 
 strably to atheism, and though you may not get 
 quite so far, it is not well to be seen travelling 
 on the road with your face towards it. 
 
 “ I might add a fourth rule : Learn to distinguish 
 permanent from accidental relations. But I am 
 willing that you should for a time take permanent 
 relations as real things — confident that you will 
 soon feel the necessity of reducing what you now 
 caU things into relations, which immediately arising 
 out of a somewhat else may properly be contem- 
 plated as the products of that somewhat else, and 
 as the means by which its existence is made known 
 to you. But known as what ? not as a product ; 
 for it is the somewhat else, to which the product 
 stands in the same relation as the words which 
 you are now hearing bear to my living soul. But 
 if not as products, then as productive powers : 
 and the result will be that what you have hitherto 
 
DEMOSIUS AND MYSTES. 
 
 223 
 
 called tilings will be regarded as only more or 
 less permanent relations of things, having their 
 derivative reality greater or less in proportion as 
 they are regular or accidental relations; deter- 
 mined by the pre-established fitness of the true 
 thing to the organ and faculty of the percipient, 
 or resulting from some defect or anomaly in 
 the latter. 
 
 With these convictions matured into a habit of 
 mind, the man no longer seeks, or beheves himself 
 to find, true reality except in the powers of nature ; 
 which living and actuating powers are made known 
 to him, and their kinds determined, and their forces 
 measured, by their proper products. In other 
 words, he thinks of the products in reference to 
 the productive powers, rols ovrcos vnapxovG-LV apiOpois 
 rj dvvdpecri, cus tol^ TTpopadeardraLs dp^cus tov irdvros 
 ovpdvov Kal yris, and thus gives to the former (to 
 the products I mean) a true reality, a life, a beauty, 
 and a physiognomic expression. For him they are 
 the €7760 ^daovTay dpikia kol rj bidXcKTOs B€a>v irpos 
 dvOpdiTTovs. The Allocosmite, therefore, (though he 
 does not bark at the image in the glass, because he 
 knows what it is), possesses the same world with 
 the Toutocosmites ; and has, besides, in present 
 possession another and better world, to which he 
 can transport himself by a swifter vehicle than 
 Fortunatus’s wishing cap. 
 
224 
 
 DIALOGUE. 
 
 ETC. 
 
 Finally, what is reason ? Ton have often asked 
 me ; and this is my answer ; 
 
 Whene’er the mist, that stands ’twixt God and thee, 
 Defecates to a pure transparency, 
 
 That intercepts no light and adds no stain — 
 
 There reason is, and there begins her reign ! 
 
 “ But, alas ! 
 
 tu stesso ti fai grosso 
 
 Col f also immaginai\ s\ che non vedi 
 do che vedresti se Vavessi scosso.** 
 
 Dante, Par. Canto I. 88. 
 
 THE EI?D. 
 
 londok: 
 
 BKADBUBT and EVANS, PKINTBBS, WHITBEBIAKS. 
 
■'C-w: 
 
 
 
 

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