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 The sta-te and -the church 
 
THE BALDWIN LECTURES FOR 1898 
 
 The State and the Church 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM PRALL 
 
 Ph. D. (Heidelberg), LL. B. (Columbia), 
 Hon. S. T. D. (Hobart) 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 THOMAS WHITTAKER 
 
 2 AND 3 BIBLE HOUSE 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1900, 
 
 By THOMAS WHITTAKER 
 
TO 
 
 NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER 
 
 Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy 
 Columbia University 
 
 This Volume of Lectures is Dedicated as a Slight 
 Tribute to Lifelong Friendship 
 
EXTRACT FEOM THE DEED OF TRUST, 
 
 IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PROVISIONS OF 
 
 WHICH THE BALDWIN LECTURES 
 
 WERE INSTITUTED. 
 
 " This Instrument, made and executed be- 
 tween Samuel Smith Harris, Bishop of the Prot- 
 estant Episcopal Church in the Diocese of Michi- 
 gan, of the City of Detroit, Wayne County, 
 Michigan, as party of the first part, and Henry 
 P. Baldwin, Alonzo B. Palmer, Henry A. Hay- 
 den, Sidney D. Miller, and Henry P. Baldwin, 
 second, of the State of Michigan, Trustees under 
 the trust created by this instrument, as parties of 
 the second part, witnesseth as follows : — 
 
 " In the year of Our Lord, one thousand eight 
 hundred and eighty -five, the said party of the 
 first part, moved by the importance of bringing 
 all practicable Christian influences to bear upon 
 the great body of students annually assembled at 
 the University of Michigan, undertook to pro- 
 mote and set in operation a plan of Christian 
 work at said University, and collected contribu- 
 tions for that purpose, of which plan the follow- 
 ing outline is here given, that is to say : — 
 
 7 
 
8 EXTRACT FROM THE DEED OF TRUST. 
 
 "1. To erect a building or hall near the Uni- 
 versity, in which there should be cheerful parlors, 
 a well-equipped reading-room, and a lecture-room 
 where the lectures hereinafter mentioned might 
 be given ; 
 
 "2. To endow a lectureship similar to the 
 Bampton Lectureship in England, for the estab- 
 lishment and defence of Christian truth ; the 
 lectures on such foundation to be delivered 
 annually at Ann Arbor by a learned clergyman 
 or other communicant of the Protestant Episcopal 
 Church, to be chosen as hereinafter provided: 
 such lectures to be not less than six nor more 
 than eight in number, and to be published in 
 book form before the income of the fund shall be 
 paid to the lecturer ; 
 
 "3. To endow two other lectureships, one on 
 Biblical Literature and Learning, and the other 
 on Christian Evidences : the object of such lec- 
 tureships to be to provide for all the students 
 who may be willing to avail themselves of them 
 a complete course of instruction in sacred learn- 
 ing, and in the philosophy of right thinking and 
 right living, without which no education can 
 justly be considered complete ; 
 
 " 4. To organize a society, to be composed of 
 the students in all classes and departments of the 
 University who may be members of or attached 
 to the Protestant Episcopal Church, of which 
 
EXTRACT FROM THE DEED OF TRUST. 9 
 
 society the Bishop of the Diocese, tiie Rector, 
 Wardens, and Vestrymen of St. Andrew's Parish, 
 and all the Professors of the University who are 
 communicants of the Protestant Episcopal Church 
 should be members ex officio, which society should 
 have the care and management of the reading- 
 room and lecture-room of the hall, and of all ex- 
 ercises or employments carried on therein, and 
 should moreover annually elect each of the lec- 
 turers hereinbefore mentioned, upon the nomina- 
 tion of the Bishop of the Diocese. 
 
 " In pursuance of the said plan, the said society 
 of students and others has been duly organized 
 under the name of the ^Hobart Guild of the 
 University of Michigan ' ; the hall above men- 
 tioned has been builded and called ^Hobart 
 Hall'; and Mr. Henry P. Baldwin of Detroit, 
 Michigan, and Sibyl A. Baldwin, his wife, have 
 given to the said party of the first part the sum 
 of ten thousand dollars for the endowment and 
 support of the lectureship first hereinbefore men- 
 tioned. 
 
 "Now, therefore, I, the said Samuel Smith 
 Harris, Bishop as aforesaid, do hereby give, 
 grant, and transfer to the said Henry P. Bald- 
 win, Alonzo B. Palmer, Henry A. Hayden, Sid- 
 ney D. Miller, and Henry P. Baldwin, second, 
 Trustees as aforesaid, the said sum of ten thou- 
 sand dollars to be invested in good and safe in- 
 
10 EXTRACT FROM THE DEED OF TRUST. 
 
 terest-bearing securities, the net income thereof 
 to be paid and applied from time to time as here- 
 inafter provided, the said sum and the income 
 thereof to be held in trust for the following 
 uses : — 
 
 " 1. The said fund shall be known as the En- 
 dowment Fund of the Baldwin Lectures. 
 
 "2. There shall be chosen annually by the 
 Hobart Guild of the University of Michigan, 
 upon the nomination of the Bishop of Michigan, 
 a learned clergyman or other communicant of 
 the Protestant Episcopal Church, to deliver at 
 Ann Arbor and under the auspices of the said 
 Hobart Guild, between the Feast of St. Michael 
 and All Angels and the Feast of St. Thomas, in 
 each year, not less than six nor more than eight 
 lectures, for the Establishment and Defence of 
 Christian Truth ; the said lectures to be published 
 in book form by Easter of the following year, 
 and to be entitled ' The Baldwin Lectures ' ; and 
 there shall be paid to the said lecturer the income 
 of the said endowment fund, upon the delivery of 
 fifty copies of said lectures to the said Trustees 
 or their successors ; the said printed volumes to 
 contain, as an extract from this instrument, or in 
 condensed form, a statement of the object ^jid 
 conditions of this trust." 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 I 
 
 THE BASIS OF THE STATE 
 
 The Necessity of Studying the Subject Matter of the Lectures. 
 — The Influence of Prejudice. — Hobbes. — Rousseau. — 
 Mulford.— The Theory of Hobbes.— The Theory of Rous- 
 seau.— The Theory of Mulford.— The Basis of the State.— 
 The Prize Essay of George H. Smith. — The Importance 
 of the Family. — The Individual. — Aristotle's Principle. — 
 The Causal Origin of the State. — The Declaration of 
 Burke. — The Historical Origin. — Sir Henry Maine. — 
 Ancient Law. — The State a Natural Phenomenon. — The 
 Social State the Natural State. — The State of Nature. — 
 The Form of Government. — Elements in the Family and 
 State. — Drummond. — Motherhood and Fatherhood. — The 
 Human Family. — Giddings. — Marriage an Universal Insti- 
 tution. — Westermarck. — The Family of Ancient and of 
 Modern Times. — The Family as an Institution. — Maurice 
 on " Social Morality." — The Distinction between Author- 
 ity and Dominion. — A Man's Right to Govern His 
 Family. — Hobbes' Assertion. — Authority and Obedience. 
 — The Province of the Mother. — The Family and the 
 State. — The Preservation of the Family. — The Importance 
 of Monogynous Marriage. — Contrast between the Earlier 
 and Later Roman Law. — Seneca, Tertullian, on the Mor- 
 als of their Times. — Divorces in the Later Jewish Com- 
 monwealth. — Josephus. — The Pronouncements of Christ. 
 — The Idea of Marriage Before and After Christ's Advent. 
 — Marriage in India. — Christian Marriage. — The Stati' 
 11 
 
12 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 of the Woman. — The Status of the Man. — Divorce Laws 
 of European States. — Divorce Procedure, — Individual- 
 ism. — Distinction between Communistic and Particularis- 
 tic Societies. — Demolins. — Particularistic Societies of the 
 Anglo-Saxon Peoples. — The Family of the Anglo-Amer- 
 ican. — Westermarck on the Durability of Marriage. — 
 Marriage a Divine Order. — Marriage the Touchstone of 
 Civilization. — Development of Society. — Woman Suffrage. 
 — The Christian Church and Marriage. — The Roman 
 Catholic and the Protestant Episcopal Churches. — The 
 Responsibility for Loose Views. — The Necessity of Laws 
 to Regulate Marriage. — Must be Viewed as Sacramental 
 in Character. — Individualism in Marriage Impossible. — 
 The Multiplication of Divorces a Symptom of Decay. — 
 The Protection of the Family,— The Task of Religion 
 and Education 19 
 
 II 
 
 THE ANCIENT STATE 
 
 The Sources of Development of the Modern State. — The Sig- 
 nificance of the Civil History of the Hebrews. — The 
 Stories of Abraham and Job. — The Rise of the State of 
 Israel. — The Patriarchal Family, — The Powers of Gov- 
 ernment. — The Distinction between the Hebrew Patri- 
 archs and Other Chieftains. — Jehovah of the Hebrews. — 
 The Gods of the Gentiles. — St. Paul's Speech on Mars' 
 Hill, — Settlement of the Israelites in Canaan, — The Gen- 
 esis of the City-States of the Greeks and Romans. — 
 Fowler. — Fustel de Coulanges. — The Characteristics of 
 Village Communities. — Kinship. — Leadership. — The 
 City-State of Athens. — Thucydides. — The City-State of 
 Rome — The Family of the Aryans. — The Power of Re- 
 ligion. — The Roman Gentes. — The Kings as Judges. — 
 Grote. — The Village Communities of the Latin People. 
 
CONTENTS, 13 
 
 PAGE 
 
 — Ancient Rome. — The Origin of Jerusalem. — The Book 
 of Judges. — The Differences between the Early History 
 of Israel and of Other Nations. — Church and State in 
 Jewish History. — The City of David. — The Family Idea 
 among the Hebrews. — Among the Greeks and Romans. 
 — Israel a Community. — The Cities of the Greeks and 
 Romans, Federations. — The Social Order in Israel. — The 
 Aim of Moses. — The Meaning of Socialism. — Its General 
 Aim. — Graham. — The Failure of Socialism in Israel. — 
 The Development of Individualism. — The Prophets, — 
 The Jewish Commonwealth at the Time of Christ. — The 
 Reason for its Decadence. — The Decline of the Grecian 
 Cities. — The Civic Life of Greece in Athens. — Inelasticity 
 of Citizenship. — The War of the People against the Eu- 
 patrids. — Democracies and Oligarchies. — Factions and 
 Seditions. — Peloponnesian War. — Thucydides, — The 
 Lack of Unity. — Caste and Caste Distinction. — The Lack 
 of Benevolence. — The Cause of the Decline of the City- 
 State of Rome. — Contrast between the Privileged and 
 the Unprivileged. — Elasticity of Roman Citizenship. — 
 Its Final Extension.— The Weight of Rome.— The Im- 
 possibility of Further Transformation, — The Loss of the 
 Family Idea. — The Lack of a Feeling of Brotherhood. — 
 Christianity too Late to Effect a Change in the State . , , 6i 
 
 III 
 THE MODERN STATE 
 
 Many Contrasts between the Modern and the Ancient State. — 
 The Separation between Civic and Ecclesiastical Powers. 
 — The Secular State, — The Place of Religion, — Sover- 
 eignty. — George H. Smith. — Limited and Unlimited Sov- 
 ereignty,— The Will of the State,— Aristotle,— The Abso- 
 lute Power of the City-States. — Constitutional Law. — 
 Public and Private Law. — The Points of Departure of 
 Ancient and of Modern Law. — Impossibility of a State- 
 
14 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 less Condition. — Man, not the State, now Supreme. — The 
 Consequence of this Change in Principle. — The Popular 
 Assemblies of Ancient Times. — The Representative As- 
 semblies of Modern. — The Rise of Representative Gov- 
 ernment. — The Modern Return to Direct Participation 
 by the People. — The Source of the English Parliament. 
 — Adams. — Representative Monarchy of England. — Rep- 
 resentative Democracy of the United States. — Interna- 
 tional Law. — Roman Dominion and the Right of Con- 
 quest. — The Origin of International Law. — The Increas- 
 ing Internationality of Interests. — The Peace Conference 
 at the Hague. — The One Thing Common in Ancient and 
 in Modern States.— The Origins of the Ancient States 
 Obscure. — Not so of the Modern. — The Philosophy of 
 the Common Will.— Willoughby. — The Social Instinct. — 
 
 ^ Bluntschli. — The Meaning of Nationality. — Brotherhood. 
 
 ' —The Relation of the State to the Soil.— The Political 
 Side of the Family Life. — The Meaning of Politics. — 
 Political and Social Science. — The Difference between 
 a New State and a New Government. — Historical Ex- 
 amples. — The State of Watauga. — Roosevelt. — The 
 Rise of the States of our Western Civilization. — The 
 Roman Empire. — More Reasons for the Decline of that 
 Empire. — The Inroad of the Germans, — The Beginnings 
 of the Modern States of the West. — The Elemental Forces 
 Which Have Produced Them. — The Roman Law and 
 System of Government. — The Corpus Juris Civilis. — 
 Clovis. — Charlemagne. — The Culture of Greece. — Grecian 
 Philosophy, Poetry and Art. — Mahaffy. — Their Indirect 
 Influence. — Civilization and the Modern State. — The 
 Teutonic Peoples. — The Transformation of the Idea of 
 the Relation of Man and the State. — The Working of Chris- 
 tianity and Germanic Thought. — Forms Through Which 
 the Modern States Have Developed. — The Motive Power. 
 — The Greatest Contribution of the Germans 95 
 
CONTENTS. 15 
 
 IV 
 
 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH 
 
 The State and the Church in the Ancient World. — The House 
 and the Hearth. — Agamemnon. — Romulus. — The Kingly 
 and Priestly Offices. — The Pontifex Maximus. — The 
 
 -—- -Priests and the Kings in Israel. — The Religious Life of 
 the Jews. — Church and State in Israel and in England. — 
 Marcus Varro. — Theology of the Classical Peoples. — St. 
 Augustine. — Status of Religions at Rome at the Founding 
 of the Church. — Jesus Christ and His Teaching. — The 
 Ancient Religions and the Pagan Philosophers. — The 
 Attitude of Christ toward the Polity of Israel.— The 
 Kingdom of God. — The Attitude of Christ toward the»< 
 Civil Authority. — The Attitude of the Church toward th^ . 
 State. — The Antagonism between the Church and Clas- 
 sical Civilization. — The Reasons for the Persecution of 
 Christians.— The Growth of the Church.— The Visible 
 and the Invisible Church. — The Christian Ministry. — 
 The Catholic Church. — Constantine and the Church. — 
 The City of the World and the City of God.— The Supe- 
 riority of the Heavenly City. — Constantine's Conversion. 
 — Robertson. — Gibbon. — The Labarum. — Eusebius. — 
 The Dualism between Church and State. — Bluntschli. — 
 Constantine to Charlemagne. — The Establishment of the 
 Papacy. — The Lombard Conquest and the Bishop of 
 Rome. — Gregory the Great. — Roman Society and the 
 Sack of Rome. — The Council of Sardica and the Roman 
 See. — The Dominion of the Franks and the Advancement 
 of the Papacy. — The Coronation of Charles the Great. — 
 Feudalism. — The Alliance between the Franks and the 
 Church.— The Dangers Thereof.— The Effort of the State 
 to Absorb the Church.— The Capitularies of Charles the 
 Great.— The Effort of the Church to Absorb the State.— 
 The Unity of the Empire and the Unity of the Church. 
 — The Power of Ideas in the Middle Ages. — The Holy 
 
16 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Church. — Bryce. — 
 The Growth of the Papal Pretensions. — The Triumph of 
 Hildebrand. — King John of England. — Green. — Inno- 
 cent in. and the Translation of the Empire. — The Ref- 
 ormation. — The Change of Ideas. — The Union of Church 
 and State in the Nation. — The Theory of Hooker. — 
 Gladstone, on Church and State. — Macaulay. — Religion 
 in the National States. — The Church in France. — The 
 American Idea. — The Present Crisis in England. — The 
 Constitution of the United States. — Religion in the North 
 American Colonies. — Religious Toleration the Gift of the 
 Dutch.— New Amsterdam. — Separation of Church and 
 State the Gift of the American People. — Religion in the 
 United States. — Christianity and Christian Observances. — 
 The American Principle the Principle of Apostolic Times, 131 
 
 V 
 
 THE LAW OF THE STATE 
 
 The Definition of Law. — Sidgwick. — Willoughby. — Austin. — 
 Smith's Analysis of the Term Law as Used by Austin. — 
 Jus and Lex. — Roman Law. — The Law of Rome 
 Originally Customary. — Definitions of Jus and Lex. — 
 The Historical School of Jurists. — Sir Henry Maine and 
 " Ancient Law." — Edward Jenks and " Law and Politics 
 in the Middle Ages." — Religion and Ancient Law. — De 
 Coulanges. — Codes of Law. — The Family in Relation to 
 Law. — Jehovah in Relation to Jewish Law. — The Hebrew 
 Idea of Justice. — Justice among the Classical Peoples. — 
 Political Justice. — jftis Genthini and Jtis Nattirale. — 
 Edict of the Praetors. — Philosophy of the Stoics and Jtis 
 Nattirale. — Zeno. — Stoicism and the Religious Conscious- 
 ness of the East. — Lightfoot. — The Development of Sto- 
 icism in Rome. — The Corpus Juris. — The Early Law of 
 England. — «' Domsday Book and Beyond." — Maitland. — 
 Jenks. — The Norman Conquest and Lanfranc and Anselm. 
 — The Civil and the Canon Law. — The Treatise of Bracton. 
 
CONTENTS. 17 
 
 PAGE 
 
 — Philosophy of the Rise of Law in the Middle Ages. — 
 The Recovery of the Principles of the Corpus Juris. — 
 Review of the Development of Law and the Idea of Jus- 
 tice. — The Question of Right and Wrong. — The Test of 
 Conduct, — Protagoras. — Plato. — Aristotle. — Fourth Ec- 
 logue of Virgil. — Isaiah. — The Advent of Jesus Christ. — "^'^ 
 His Teaching. — The Mind of Christ. — The Sermon^ on 
 the Mount. — Effect of Christianity upon Law.^^Effect of 
 Stoicism. — Christ's Attitude toward the Civil Law. — The 
 Unity of Law and Tertullian. — The Aspiration of Justin- 
 ian. — Milman. — The Effect of Christianity upon our 
 Civilization. — Kidd and " Social Evolution." — The De- 
 structive and Constructive Powers of Christianity. — 
 Lecky and " European Morals." — The Decay of the Old 
 Religions and Ethical Systems. — Froude. — The Decay of 
 Roman Morals. — The Lives of Some of the Csesars. — 
 — — — ^The Teachings of Christ. — The Natural and the Universal 
 Family of Man. — Justice in the Universal Family. — The 
 Ideal of Justice. — The Family of States. — The Bond of 
 the Family, Love. — Brotherhood in the Middle Ages. — 
 St. Francis. — Feudalism and Christian Brotherhood. — 
 The Breaking Up of Feudalism. — The Expansion of the 
 Idea of Brotherly Love. — Justice in England and in the 
 United States 175 
 
 VI 
 
 THE PEOPLE 
 
 The Citizen in the Ancient and in the Modern State. — Who 
 and What are the People ? — BluntschH. — The Race Fac- 
 tor. — The Semitic and the Aryan Races. — The Latin, the 
 Teuton and the Slav. — The Recent Changes in their Re- 
 lations to One Another. — The Greatness of the Teutonic 
 Race. — The Anglo-American. — The German Empire. — 
 The State among the Latin Peoples. — French and Eng- 
 lish Methods of Education. — Demolins. — The Self-Reli- 
 ance of the Americans. — De Tocqueville. — Self-Help 
 
18 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 and the Anglo-Saxon Colonies. — The Attitude of Amer- 
 icans toward the State. — Silent Changes in the Constitu- 
 tion. — Aristocracy and Democracy. — The Sovereignty of 
 the People. — The Popular Will and Public Opinion. — 
 Bryce. — Public Opinion and Religion. — Kidd. — Christian- 
 ity in the United States. — The Ethical Standard and Com- 
 mon Sense. — Common Feeling in the United States. — The 
 Disappearance of Classes. — The Purpose of the Modern 
 State. — Lecky on the Rise of the Democratic Spirit. — 
 Democracy and Property. — Condition of the Poor in the 
 Past. — Harriet Martineau. — Lecky and Prejudice. — The 
 Decline of Representative Government. — Direct Partici- 
 pation by the People. — Government and Business. — The 
 Rule of Democracy. — Corporations. — The Higher Inter- 
 ests of Governments. — Democracy and the Lord's Prayer. 
 — The Two Questions of the Day. — The Alliance of Busi- 
 ness with Politics. — The Dangers Thereof, — The Remedy, 
 — The Election of United States Senators. — The Concen- 
 tration of Wealth. — Inequality and State Socialism. — 
 The Remedy for too Great Inequalities. — Religious Sanc- 
 tion of Conduct. — Individualism and the Family. — The 
 Family in the United States. — Joint Ownership. — The 
 Ideal of the Family in the Nation. — The Strength of the 
 Community. — The Maximum Day of Labor. — Democracy 
 and Intellectual Life. — The Material Development of the 
 United States. — The American People and Imagination. 
 — Higher Education. — Venice and Art. — Bread and the 
 Word of God.— The Truly Beautiful,— The Kingdom of 
 God, — The Preaching of John Baptist and of Christ. — 
 '—— - Fatherhood and the Rule of God. — Brotherhood and De- 
 mocracy. — Liberty, Equality and Brotherhood. — The Ele- 
 ment of Transgression. — Christ as the Supporter of the 
 State. — The Church and Society. — The State and the 
 Church and Humanity. — The Church the Upholder of 
 Democracy 219 
 
LECTUKE I. 
 
 THE BASIS OF THE STATE. 
 
 It is patent to all who read, and who reflect, 
 in these days of social unrest, that men have out- 
 grown their old ideas of state and church, the 
 two great organizations of society, and that these 
 institutions must be reexamined carefully and 
 critically, in order to see what errors have been 
 made in the past, and to lay again, for the fu- 
 ture, right foundations for the proper conception 
 of the one and the other. As regards the state, 
 the fact is that men have studied it for the most 
 part with prejudices born of the circumstances of 
 their lives. I have no time to lay before you the 
 stories of the lives of all the great jurists and 
 philosophers, but let us consider three of them, 
 that of Hobbes, that of Kousseau, that of our 
 own countryman, Dr. Mulford. ^ 
 
 Hobbes was born in the year 1588 and did not 
 write his first original work, " Elementa Philos- 
 ophica de Cive^'' until 1642, and it was not until 
 1651 that he published the best known of his 
 
 ' The lives of these men are taken for examples because they 
 are the most familiar to the American student. 
 
 19 
 
20 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 writings, ''Leviathan." In this work he con- 
 tends, as he had done in his previous publica- 
 tions, in favor of a pure monarchy, and comes to 
 the conclusion that the " rights," or just powers 
 of the sovereign over the lives and fortunes of 
 his subjects are unlimited, and that there is a 
 corresponding duty on the part of the subject to 
 obey. Hobbes was, as we know, the son of a 
 clergyman and was educated at Oxford. At the 
 age of twenty years he entered the household 
 of Lord Hardwicke, subsequently the Earl of 
 Devonshire, and with a few breaks thereafter, he 
 continued to be connected with the Devonshire 
 family until the day of his death. When we re- 
 flect that Charles I. began to reign in the year 
 1625, that the Long Parliament sat from 1640 to 
 1653, and that the Commonwealth prevailed 
 from 1649 to 1660, we can understand why 
 Hobbes exalted so much the sovereign power, 
 and contended for an absolute monarchy. 
 
 It is curious to observe that to reach this con- 
 clusion Hobbes was compelled to assume the ex- 
 istence of an imaginary contract between the in- 
 dividual members of the state, not with the sov- 
 ereign power, but with each other, by which an 
 unlimited right or power was conferred upon 
 the sovereign ; and that Kousseau should have 
 founded his peculiar views of the state and gov- 
 ernment upon the identical basis of contract. 
 
THE BASIS OF THE STATE. 21 
 
 But Eousseaii, we know, drew entirely different 
 deductions froin the social contract from those of 
 Hobbes. In his mind the contract that was 
 originally entered into between all the citizens 
 of a state was a contract by which every man 
 should be equal, and no man should have the 
 lordship, or sovereignty, over any other. The 
 opening words of the first chapter of his famous 
 book read : " Man is born free, and in all places 
 he is in chains." And in the chapter on the 
 Social Agreement, further on, he says : " Each 
 one gives himself entirely ; the condition is the 
 same for all, and the condition being the same 
 for all, no one has any interest to render it oner- 
 ous for others." ^ His " Contrat Social " was 
 published in the year 1762. But this is the one 
 point that I desire to make. Eousseau's ideas 
 were the result of his prejudices. He was born 
 in the year 1712, a free citizen of the free city of 
 Geneva. And he lived, for the most part, in 
 down-trodden France, in which country he died 
 in the year 1778. He lived in the times imme- 
 diately preceding the French Eevolution, and he 
 imbibed the ideas that were then prevalent, and 
 gave them forth to the world. 
 
 It is evident, that, fantastic as were many of 
 Rousseau's ideas, the deductions that he drew 
 were just as logical as those of Hobbes, perhaps 
 
 »(Chap. vi.) 
 
22 THE STATE AND THE CHUBCH. 
 
 more so ; for Hobbes, besides assuming that the 
 individual members of the state entered into an 
 imaginary contract by which government was 
 established, supposed further that the contract 
 was unconditional, and that it was irrevocable. 
 Whereas, Eousseau, with, I think clearer insight 
 into the nature of man, avers that, if the social 
 agreement became violated, each one enters into 
 his full rights, and takes up again his natural 
 liberty. But the fault is not so much with the 
 deductions of each philosopher, as it is with his 
 premises. As a matter of fact, there was no w^ar 
 of all against all, such as Hobbes declared to 
 have been the original status of mankind, by 
 which they w^ere induced to make a contract that 
 one should have absolute right or sovereignty 
 over the rest, for their protection ; nor was there 
 originally such a state of life as that which 
 Rousseau imagined, a state of nature, wherein 
 men lived free and idyllic lives. The history of 
 the origin of the state and government tells us 
 another thing, and so does the causal origin, but 
 we will study these later on. Let us first ex- 
 amine the conception of Dr. Mulford, which, by 
 the way, was probably derived from the late Mr. 
 Gladstone's book, " The State in its Relations 
 with the Church." ' 
 
 In chapter four of " The Nation," Dr. Mulford 
 
 ' {Vide, Vol. I., Chap, ii., Parti., 68-75.) 
 
THE BASIS OF THE STATE. 23 
 
 says : " The evidence of the origin of the nation is 
 in its necessary nature. — The nation is an organic 
 unity ; it is not an artificial fabric nor an ab- 
 stract system, but it has a life which is definite 
 and disparate, and has a development ; therefore 
 it has not its origin in the individual nor the 
 collective will of man, but must proceed from a 
 power which can determine the origin of organic 
 being ; " and again he says : " The evidence of 
 the origin of the nation is also in its being as a 
 moral person. There is and can be for personal- 
 ity, as it transcends physical nature, only a 
 divine origin, and its realization is in a divine 
 relation. The subsistence of the human per- 
 sonality is in the divine personality, and its reali- 
 zation is in its divine relations, and as with the 
 individual personality, so also with the moral 
 personality of the nation, — its origin and its con- 
 sistence can be only in God." ^ In other words, 
 Dr. Mulford considers the nation to be an organ- 
 ism that has life in itself, and will and moral de- 
 termination ; that it is, in one word, a moral 
 person created by God. 
 
 In the first place, we have to remark that Dr. 
 Mulford uses the word " nation " instead of the 
 term " state " and that therefore he excludes 
 from his idea of the state not only the village 
 and the tribe, but also the city, which, with the 
 
 >(p. 55.) 
 
24 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 Greeks and Komans, was the onl}^ form of the 
 state existing. But obviously this conception of 
 the state is too restricted. For though in mod- 
 ern times when we use the term " state " we 
 generally have in view the modern, European, 
 national state, yet we habitually apply the term 
 more extensively. We understand by the state 
 any and all autonomous human societies in which 
 men may live. 
 
 In the second place, we must remark that Dr. 
 Mulford begs the whole question. There is ab- 
 solutely nothing upon which to base the assertion 
 that God created the state and endowed it with 
 body and soul, and conscience, and other like 
 organs. It is a beautiful metaphor to say that 
 the state is a " moral organism," a " moral per- 
 sonality," but these expressions mean nothing 
 more than that the state is a corporation, having 
 the attributes of a corporation, being not an 
 actual, but a fictitious person. 
 
 Dr. Mulford was born in the year 1833, and 
 "The J^ation" was published in the year 1870. 
 It is evident that he was at work upon his book 
 during the long years of the War of the Eebel- 
 lion, and probably during the longer years of de- 
 bate that preceded the war. The questions, the 
 burning questions of his day were : Were the 
 people of the United States a mere aggregation 
 of individuals, to be separated at the desire of 
 
THE BASIS OF THE STATE. 25 
 
 any number of individuals? Was the union a 
 union of a number of states to be divided at the 
 will of any state ? Or, Were the people a com- 
 pacted and articulated body, the union a single 
 sovereign whole ? Those who looked upon the 
 people as being a mere aggregation of individ- 
 uals, and the union as being a number of distinct 
 and independent states, took a low view of the 
 corporate life of the nation, if they had any view 
 of it at all. Those who looked upon the people 
 as living in a union of states that was, indeed 
 and in truth, one distinct and sovereign power, 
 grew to the conception of the nation as a high 
 ideal of righteous living ; and such an one was Dr. 
 Mulf ord. And these last gave to the nation all the 
 attributes of personality, conscience, will, moral 
 sense and unity of parts in one whole. The ideal 
 was pleasing to the men of the past generation, 
 it is pleasing to us still, but it is only an ideal. 
 
 But what is the state, and what is the basis of 
 it ? Mr. George H. Smith, in his admirable prize 
 essay, " The Theory of the State " ^ considers that 
 all human autonomous societies, with the excep- 
 tion of the single family, are states, and he founds 
 his views on Aristotle's principle, which, as we 
 know, is now universally accepted as the funda- 
 mental fact of political science, that, " Man is a 
 
 ' (Eeprinted Dec. 14th, 1895, from Proceedings of the Ameri- 
 can Philos. Society, Vol. XXXIV.) 
 
26 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 political animal, and therefore he must neces- 
 sarily always be a citizen, or member of a state." ^ 
 In other words, it is contrary to man's nature, 
 as universally observed, for him to exist in a 
 stateless condition. If this deduction be true, 
 then when there was but one family on the face 
 of the earth, there must have been a state, and 
 this Mr. Smith seems to admit when he says : 
 " Even with regard to the family in its simplest 
 form, as consisting merely of man and woman, 
 this, also, if Ave could conceive of it existing in- 
 dependently — as, for instance, in the case of 
 Adam and Eve in Paradise — might, with pro- 
 priety, be called a State, or, at least, a State in 
 embryo." ^ A family, then, can be a state, if it can 
 exist independently of all the other families in the 
 world, as, for example, the family of Abraham, 
 in the land of Canaan. In the family the state 
 took its rise. By the family it is conditioned. 
 For the family it should exist. And this has 
 been the cause of many of the erroneous deduc- 
 tions that have been made by writers upon the 
 state and government. They have regarded the 
 state as a kind, some kind, of aggregation of 
 men, and have sought for the germ and reason of 
 its development in the nature of the individual, 
 or, if they have looked upon the state as made 
 up of families, they have neglected to think of 
 Hp. 55.) •'{Id.) 
 
THE BASIS OF THE STATE. 27 
 
 the state as the development of the family, and 
 the family, therefore, as the pattern of the state 
 and as furnishing the type for its government. 
 The great principle of Aristotle himself that *' the 
 State is a natural institution, and that Man is 
 naturally a political animal,"^ has conduced to 
 this very thing, that men have regarded man 
 as individual men, and not man as made up 
 of men and women and children, as man there- 
 fore in family relations. And yet, it is evident 
 that they who have so regarded this principle 
 of Aristotle have never read or understood his 
 argument ; for he shows conclusively that his 
 reason why " man is naturally a political animal " 
 is that he naturally must combine the male and 
 the female " in order to the procreation of chil- 
 dren, nor is there anything deliberate or arbi- 
 trary in their so doing; on the contrary, the 
 desire of leaving an offspring like oneself is 
 natural to man as to the whole animal and vege- 
 table word." ^ 
 
 And then he goes on to show the genesis of 
 the state : " The associations of male and female, 
 master and slave, constitute the primary form of 
 household, and Hesiod was right when he wrote, 
 
 ' Get thee 
 First house and wife and ox to plow withal,' 
 
 ' (Politics, Book I., Chap, ii., p. 5, Welldon's Translation.) 
 
 ^{Id. p. 2.) 
 
28 THE STATE AND TEE CHURCH. 
 
 for an ox is to the poor what a servant is to the 
 rich. Thus the association naturally formed for 
 the supply of everyday wants is a household ; its 
 members, according to Charondas, are ' those 
 who eat of the same store,' or, according to the 
 Cretan Epimenides, ' those ^vho sit around the 
 same hearth.' Again, the simplest association of 
 several households for something more than eph- 
 emeral purposes is a village. It seems that the 
 village in its most natural form is derived from 
 the household, including all the children of 
 certain parents and the children's children, or, as 
 the phrase sometimes is, 'all who are suckled 
 upon the same milk.' . . . Lastly, the asso- 
 ciation composed of several villages in its com- 
 plete form is the State, in which the goal of full in- 
 dependence may be said to be first attained. For 
 as the State was formed to make life possible, so 
 it exists to make life good. Consequently if it be 
 allowed that the simple associations, i, e. the 
 household and the village, have a natural ex- 
 istence, so has the State in all cases ; for in the 
 State they attain complete development, and 
 Nature implies complete development, as the 
 nature of anything, e. g. of a man, a house, or a 
 horse, may be defined to be its condition when 
 the process of production is complete." ^ 
 f Man is naturally, then, a political animal be- 
 
 > (Id. pp. 3, 4. 5.) 
 
THE BASIS OF THE STATE. 29 
 
 cause he is a member of a family, and for no 
 other reason. His political attributes disappear 
 when he becomes an outcast, like Cain ; and 
 this is the causal origin of the state. Hence, 
 we must agree with Burke, that, "The state 
 ought not to be considered as nothing better 
 than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper 
 and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such 
 low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary 
 interest and to be dissolved by the fancy of the 
 parties. It is to be looked on with other rever- 
 ence ; because it is not a partnership in things 
 subservient only to the gross animal existence of 
 a temporary and perishable nature. It is a 
 partnership in all science ; a partnership in all 
 art ; a partnership in every virtue and in all per- 
 fection." ^ ) 
 
 And with this conclusion the account we have 
 of the origin of the state in history agrees. 
 When we regard modern states, we are generally 
 able to trace back the history of each to its 
 beginning, but when we look at the ancient 
 states, we see that their origins are obscured b}^ 
 many legends and the mists of mythology. /AH, 
 therefore, that we can know of the rise and 
 growth of the primitive state, with the exception 
 of a few historical facts, is the inferences that we 
 
 ' (Reflections on the Revolution in France, second Ed., J. 
 Dodsley, Pub., p. 143.) 
 
30 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 draw from the nature of man; but from this, if 
 we reason rightly, the general course of the 
 genesis and development of the state may be 
 learned. In the beginning man is found in 
 families, and out of the family society must 
 grow, as from a germ. When society becomes 
 in any way organized, we call its organization a 
 state, whether it be the village, the clan, the 
 tribe, the city or the nation. And this is the 
 order of the development of man in political 
 relations as uniformly observed!) Other causes 
 may concur in the growth of the state, the chief 
 of which is war, conquest and colonization, but 
 without these the course of development, if it had 
 not been arrested, would invariably have taken 
 place in a state of Aryan and Semitic people as 
 stated above. 
 
 For this statement of the manner of growth 
 and development of the family into the state we 
 have many authorities Avhich might w^ell be cited, 
 but I will quote only the words of Sir Henry 
 Maine, the founder and chief exponent of the mod- 
 ern school of historical jurisprudence. " Archaic 
 law," says Sir Henry, . . . "is full, in all its 
 provinces, of the clearest indications that society 
 in primitive times was not what it is assumed to 
 be at present, a collection of individuals. In 
 fact, and in view of the men who composed it, it 
 was an aggregation of families. The contrast may 
 
THE BASIS OF THE STATE. 31 
 
 be most forcibly expressed by saying that the miit 
 of an ancient society was the Family, of a modern 
 society the Individual." ^ I do not care to discuss 
 at present what would be the result in our modern 
 state if we should regard society as composed of 
 an aggregation of families. I will do this later 
 on. My simple desire now is to show that the 
 family is the basis of the state and the origin of 
 it, and that the state cannot, if true to its basis 
 and origin, depart from the family form and 
 idea. 
 
 From what has been said of the origin, both 
 of the causal and the historical origin, of the 
 state, it is evident that it does not need the 
 refined hypothesis of a social contract, nor, 
 indeed, of any direct ordination from heaven to 
 justify its existence, but it is to be regarded as a 
 phenomenon naturally existing in the same way 
 as man himself exists. The state is a part of 
 man's humanity. Hence it is absurd to speak of 
 the " state of nature " as different from the social 
 state, for the social state is the natural state of 
 man, and the "state of nature "is but another 
 name for it. The term " state of nature " is very 
 commonly used to denote what may be properly 
 called the anarchic state, that is, society without 
 government. But in this sense it denotes a purely 
 fictitious idea, an idea which has probably never 
 
 1 (Ancient Law, Chap, v., p. 121.) 
 
32 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 existed at all, and which can only exist in the 
 perfected democracy of God, for it is evident 
 that the nature of man is such as to impel him 
 irresistibly to live in society, and that in order 
 for him to live a social life, government of some 
 kind is essential. "When human nature shall be 
 perfected, then, and not till then, will men be 
 able to live without any government except the 
 will of God as revealed in the Incarnation. 
 
 Hence, it is wrong to lay too great stress upon 
 the outward form of government. The chief 
 thing in government is that there shall be a head 
 or a source of authority, who will understand 
 that his (or their) power is that of a father, and 
 that it is his (or their) duty to secure the end for 
 which the state exists, namely, the welfare and 
 happiness of all its members. And this is really 
 the prevalent idea of our age ; the German Em- 
 peror, personally, the Queen of Great Britain, 
 vicariously, by her ministers ; the President of 
 the United States, associated with congress, per- 
 ceive and perceive very clearly that it is not only 
 necessary for them to see that the laws be carried 
 out, and made effective, but to care for the social 
 well-being of all their subjects and fellow-citizens 
 from the least unto the greatest. And this is the 
 reason why the idea of the state of the socialists is 
 so weak they desire to erect a paternal govern- 
 ment without a head. Only a strongly consti- 
 
THE BASIS OF THE STATE. 33 
 
 tuted source of authority could see to it that their 
 principles, when made laws, should be carried 
 into effect ; and such an authority they do not 
 want. 
 
 We see, then, the great influence of the family 
 as the basis of the state in its causal and histor- 
 ical origin ; let us see how important it is as the 
 preserver of its life. In the family are contained 
 all the elements of the state, order, authority, 
 love, care, respect, obedience, and that mutual 
 regard for and consideration of the rights and 
 duties of others, that make us to feel and to 
 know that the family is divinely constituted. 
 The germs of all social obligations and duties 
 are found in it. When a man comes into the 
 world, it is a long time before he understands 
 that he is an American or an Englishman or a 
 German. It is a long time before he understands 
 that he lives under the government of a republic, 
 or of a constitutional monarchy, or of a benevo- 
 lent war-lord; but he understands almost with 
 the first words that he learns to use, that he has 
 a father and a mother, and perhaps brothers and 
 sisters, and he learns, too, before long, in properly 
 constituted families, that order and authority be- 
 long to his father, and that love and care belong 
 to his mother, and that his brothers and sisters 
 have equal rights to all the good things of life 
 with himself. And again he learns that all the 
 
34 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 members of the family must conduct themselves, 
 each to the other, with due regard and consider- 
 ation of the fact that each one is a member also 
 of a community, of which the head is God, who 
 is the Father of all living souls. It is easy to 
 see how, in such a family, respect and obedience 
 will arise in the hearts of all the children. There 
 are some exceptions to the rule that all the mem- 
 bers of a family have equal rights to the good 
 things of life, because of the desire to keep up 
 the family position and tradition, but these ex- 
 ceptions never quite destroy the feeling of equal- 
 ity that exists between the children of the same 
 father and mother. 
 
 A recent writer. Professor Drummond ^ has said 
 that the one motive of organic nature was to make 
 mothers, and he has laid the greatest stress upon 
 the place of motherhood in the family life. Far be 
 it from me to derogate, or seem to derogate, in 
 any way from the position of woman and her won- 
 derful influence upon the life of her offspring ; but 
 I cannot but deplore the fact that Professor 
 Drummond, as well as many others who have con- 
 sciously or unconsciously followed him, have in 
 their exaltation of motherhood lost sight of the 
 true significance of fatherhood in the life of the 
 family and of the state. The fact of mother- 
 hood, wonderful as it is, does not suffice to 
 
 * (Ascent of Man, Chap, viii., p. 267.) 
 
THE BASIS OF THE STATE. 35 
 
 teach the world of men the things that belong 
 to the family and the social life. Nor will the 
 sweet feminine virtues of patience, sympathy and 
 loving-kindness be sufficient to meet the require- 
 ments of the state and government. There must 
 be first of all authority and obedience. Author- 
 ity and obedience are evolved out of the fact of 
 fatherhood. Keason the process of evolution 
 back as far as you will, the child, who knows 
 nothing of the process of birth, is just as soon 
 impressed by the fatherhood of the man as by 
 the motherhood of the woman. We are none of 
 us grateful for the care and protection that either 
 of our parents has bestowed upon us, until the 
 advancing years have taught us what their care 
 and protection mean and have meant. 
 
 If the basis of the state is the family, the basis 
 of the family is authority, for without some au- 
 thority, some headship, children would not be 
 born into a family but into a horde or group. 
 Indeed, there is no reason to believe that the 
 family would ever have become instituted with- 
 out authority. Headship or authority a man 
 must have if he is to protect his wife and chil- 
 dren, and obedience is the price of protection. 
 It may have been that the earliest and simplest 
 form of the human family was "a pairing ar- 
 rangement of relatively short duration," ^ and 
 
 ' (Giddings, Principles of Sociology, Chap, iii., p. 155.) 
 
36 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 that the oldest ethnical organization was the 
 metronymic group, that is, a group in which all 
 relationships are traced through mothers ; and 
 yet we must observe that out of such a group a 
 state never took its rise and developed. The pa- 
 tronymic family must first have been established, 
 or at least the headship and autocracy of the 
 father acknowledged. We must take the world 
 of men as we see them, and as history shows 
 them. " Everywhere," says Westermarck, " we 
 find the tribes or clans composed of several fam- 
 ilies, the members of each family being more 
 closely connected with one another than with 
 the rest of the tribe. The family, consisting of 
 the parents, children, and often also of their next 
 descendants, is a universal institution among ex- 
 isting peoples. And it seems extremely probable 
 that, among our earliest human ancestors, the 
 family formed, if not the society itself, at least 
 the nucleus of it." ^ And again, he says, " I do 
 not, of course, deny that the tie which bound 
 the children to the mother was much more in- 
 timate and more lasting than that which bound 
 them to the father. But it seems to me that the 
 only result to which a critical investigation of 
 facts can lead us is, that in all probability there 
 has been no stage of human development where 
 marriage has not existed, and that the father has 
 
 * (History of Human Marriage, Chap, iii., p. 41.) 
 
THE BASIS OF THE STATE. 37 
 
 always been, as a rule, the protector of his fam- 
 ily."^ 
 
 But we must not think of the family of ancient 
 times, as shown to us in archaic law, as being 
 exactly that which the family is to-day. The 
 family in ancient times was like, and yet it was 
 in many ways unlike, the family of to-day. " In 
 order to reach the ancient conception, we must 
 give to our modern ideas an important extension 
 and an important limitation. We must look on 
 the family as constantly enlarged by the absorp- 
 tion of strangers within its circle, and we must 
 try to regard the fiction of adoption as so closely 
 simulating the reality of kinship, that neither 
 law nor opinion makes the slightest difference 
 between the real and an adoptive connection. 
 On the other hand, the persons theoretically 
 amalgamated into a family by their common 
 descent are practically held together by common 
 obedience to their highest living ascendant, the 
 father, grandfather, or great-grandfather. The 
 patriarchal authority of a chieftain is as neces- 
 sary an ingredient in the notion of the family 
 group as the fact (or assumed fact) of its having 
 sprung from his loins ; and hence we must un- 
 derstand that if there be any persons who, how- 
 ever truly included in the brotherhood by virtue 
 of their blood-relationship, have nevertheless de 
 
 ^{Id. p. 50.) 
 
38 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 facto withdrawn themselves from the empire of 
 its ruler, they are always, in the beginnings of 
 law, considered as lost to the family. It is this 
 patriarchal aggregate — the modern family thus 
 cut down on one side and extended on the other 
 — which meets us on the threshold of primitive 
 jurisprudence. Older probably than the State, 
 the Tribe and the House, it left traces of itself 
 on private law long after the House and the 
 Tribe had been forgotten, and long after con- 
 sanguinity had ceased to be associated with the 
 composition of States."^ It is in the family, 
 then, that there is first found authority, and 
 not only authority but obedience, the two 
 great pillars of government and the state. 
 And the family as looked at from the stand- 
 point of ancient jurisprudence, or historically, 
 is not the natural family, but the natural 
 family and something besides, the natural 
 family with the principles of adoption and ex- 
 clusion added. And herein we have outlined 
 the distinction and yet practical agreement in 
 a state of the natural born and naturalized 
 citizen. 
 
 In his lectures on " Social Morality " ^ Maurice 
 has shown us the great place that authority has 
 in the life of the family and state. His words 
 
 * Maine, Ancient Law, Chap, v., p. 128, et seq.) 
 2 (Lecture II., p. 22.) 
 
THE BASIS OF THE STATE. 39 
 
 are so clear and his reasoning so cogent that it 
 seems wiser for me to quote them than to make 
 a paraphrase of his ideas; and yet the things 
 that I desire to bring before you are so mixed 
 with others that are not pertinent, that I will 
 have to do so. At the basis of all relationship 
 is the fact that we are sons. I cannot be the 
 centre of the circle in which I find myself, be it 
 as small as it may ; I must refer myself to an- 
 other, there is a root behind me. There is an 
 author of my existence ; and herein lies the great 
 significance of the fact. As soon as I recognize 
 an author of my being, I recognize an authority 
 over me. It will not do to say that a child 
 knows anything about the meaning of the terms 
 " author " and " authority," but it understands 
 that there is a tie which it must observe, which 
 binds it and another together. In the very fact 
 of fatherhood authority is involved, and this all 
 men learn in the filial relation. It is strange, 
 but experience teaches us that children do not 
 learn what authority means from their mothers ; 
 they learn what love means from them, but au- 
 thority they refer to their fathers. Maurice goes 
 on to show the distinction between authority and 
 dominion, and this distinction, it seems to me, we 
 ought always to have in mind, for it is a great 
 and useful one. If it had been understood and 
 observed in the past, the course of history would 
 
40 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH, 
 
 have been far different from what it has been, 
 and many of the cruel internecine wars that his- 
 tory records would have been avoided. Domin- 
 ion is the power that men possess over things (it 
 may be over men as well) which has in it nothing 
 of an ethical or moral obligation. Authority is 
 always bound up with ethical and moral con- 
 siderations. It has in it the conception of re- 
 ciprocal relations and duties. Authority carries 
 with it the idea of author. The thing or person 
 over which authority is had has relation to the 
 author, and the author to it or him. Where 
 there is dominion, there is subjection; where 
 there is authority, there is obedience. Authority 
 and obedience are the distinctive principles of 
 the family life, and these are the fundamental 
 principles of society. 
 
 What right has a man to govern his family ? 
 The right of author. What right have men to 
 govern in society ? The same right of author, if 
 not the actual, the delegated rights of the many ; 
 for no man ever had the right of dominion over 
 his brothers. Men have usurped and acquired 
 powers of dominion over others, but they have 
 never had the right of dominion. God's own 
 right is the right of author over the children 
 whom He calls His sons. He has limited Him- 
 self to such right when He showed men that He 
 was their Father. No men, no set of men, can 
 
THE BASIS OF THE STATE. 41 
 
 have rights superior to those of the Creator. 
 It is to be observed that Hobbes^ asserts that 
 men have the right of dominion over their 
 children. "Dominion," he says, "is acquired 
 two ways ; by generation and by conquest. The 
 right of dominion by generation is that which 
 the parent hath over his children and is called 
 * paternal.' " With the change of view in regard 
 to the right of sovereigns has come the change 
 in regard to the right of parents, and vice versa. 
 On the other hand, everybody owes the duty of 
 obedience where there is authority, for obedi- 
 ence, as distinct from subjection, is implied in 
 the very fact of authority. But obedience, like 
 authority, has in it a moral and not a physical 
 obligation. It is when the moral obligation is 
 lost sight of, that authority becomes dominion, 
 and obedience subjection. It is true that this 
 has often occurred even in families, but then the 
 life of that family was not the normal life of 
 man, rather was it the life of brutes. The life 
 of man can only exist where there is love, the 
 life of brutes can exist where there is only fear. 
 Now, it is the province of the woman, of the 
 mother, to awaken love. She makes the son to 
 see that the father's authority is not dominion, 
 but that it is based on good will and right in- 
 tent, and she makes the father to understand 
 
 ' (Leviathan, Chap, xx., p. 96, Morley's Universal Library.) 
 
42 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 that the son's obedience is not subjection, but 
 that it is based on reverence and proper re- 
 spect. It is strange that the place of woman 
 is so well understood in the family, but that 
 it has rarely been understood in the state. In 
 the modern state many women desire to have 
 the place of authority that men ought to have, 
 and thus they miss their real and essential voca- 
 tipn. 
 
 ( The family, then, is the basis of the state, and 
 out of it the state has grown. In it the state 
 finds its type and model. In it it should find its 
 effective power. How necessary, then, for the 
 preservation of the life of the state are the life 
 and stability oi the family! The bond of the 
 family is marriage; the union usually of one 
 man with one woman and the children that 
 spring from that union. ) It is true that in some 
 countries polygynous and polyandrous mar- 
 riages have, and do, prevail ; but states wherein 
 polygamy exists are weak. Polyandry is an in- 
 stitution of low and barbarous peoples, such as 
 can scarcely be said to have founded states. 
 Government by authority and submission by 
 obedience cannot be postulated of polygamous 
 states. The rule of the Sultans of Islam has 
 been, and is, only dominion, the relation of their 
 subjects to /them has been, and is, only one of 
 subjection. ; How important, then, is monogamy, 
 
THE BASIS OF THE STATE. 43 
 
 that is, the marriage qf one man with one 
 woman, and that for life.O 
 
 And yet, as it seems during the last years of 
 this century, more has been done to destroy the 
 institution of marriage in Christendom than in 
 any of the ages of the world since Christ came 
 on earth and reestablished it. The trouble in 
 regard to marriage has arisen out of the modern 
 conception that it is merely a civil contract with 
 which the individuals only are concerned; 
 though it is admitted that the state has a right 
 of oversight for its own purposes. This was 
 certainly the view that was prevalent in the Eo- 
 man world at the time of the advent of our 
 Lord; but it had not always been so. Mar- 
 riages earlier in Greece and Kome had generally 
 been contracted with religious ceremonies, and 
 for many years divorces were unknown at Kome. 
 Under the later Eoman law marriage became a 
 mere contract and a man could put away his 
 wife and a woman could put away her husband 
 
 ' " As a general rule, human marriage is not necessarily con- 
 tracted for life, and among most uncivilized and many ad- 
 vanced peoples a man may divorce his wife whenever he likes. 
 Nevertheless, divorce is an exception among a great many 
 races, even among races of the lowest type; and numerous na- 
 tions consider, or have considered, marriage a union which must 
 not be dissolved by the husband, except for certain reasons 
 stipulated by custom or law." (History of Human Marriage, 
 Chap, xxiv., p. 549.) 
 
44 THE CHURCH AND THE STATE. 
 
 for any cause, so that Seneca speaks in one of 
 his writings of " daily divorces," and, in another 
 well-known passage of his works, of " illustrious 
 and noble women who reckoned the number of 
 their years, not by the consuls, but by their hus- 
 bands." ^ " Illustres qucedaTTi ac nohiles foeminoe 
 non consulum numero, sed Ttiaritorum annos suos 
 computanV) And Tertullian, denouncing the de- 
 generacy of the Koman matrons of his day, says : 
 " Where is that happiness of married life ever so 
 desirable which distinguished our earlier man- 
 ners, and as the result of which for about six 
 hundred years there was not among us a single 
 divorce? Now, women have every member of 
 the body heavy laden with gold; wine-bibbing 
 is so common among them, that the kiss [of 
 salutation to their relatives] is never offered with 
 their will ; and as for divorce, they long for it as 
 though it were the natural consequence of mar- 
 riage."^ 
 
 And divorces seem to have grown very com- 
 mon in the later Jewish commonwealth, as 
 common, indeed, as in the Eoman.^ In the 
 Jewish law, however, there was a protection 
 to the woman that the Eoman law did not pro- 
 vide. The man who put away his wife had to 
 
 ' {De Benef. Lib. III., Cap. XVI.) 
 
 ^ {Apol Chap. vi. ) 
 
 3 (Life of Flavius Josephus, Sec. 76.) 
 
THE BASIS OF THE STATE. 45 
 
 give her a bill of divorcement, stating the reason 
 why he put her away. But Christ said : " It was 
 said also, Whosoever shall put away his wife, let 
 him give her a writing of divorcement: but I 
 say unto you, that every one that putteth away 
 his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, 
 maketh her an adulteress : and whosoever shall 
 marry her when she is put away, committeth 
 adultery." ^ And again he said : " Have ye not 
 read, that He which made the7n from the begin- 
 ning made them male and female, and said. For 
 this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, 
 and shall cleave to his wife ; and the twain shall 
 become one flesh? So that they are no more 
 twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath 
 joined together, let no man put asunder."^ 
 Herein we see an entirely different conception of 
 marriage from that which prevailed in the world 
 before Christ's advent. Not that marriage had 
 not, previous to this announcement by Christ, 
 been looked upon as a thing that had in it some 
 religious character. The Koman patricians at 
 their nuptials made a sacrifice to the gods, and the 
 contracting couples were united with prayer. It 
 is probable also that a consecration took place 
 on the day of the betrothal or wedding among 
 the Hebrews ; but never, before Christ taught, 
 had men and women been looked upon as con- 
 ' (St. Matt. V. 31, 32, K. v.) ^ (St. Matt. xix. 4-7.) 
 
46 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 stituting one flesh because of a religious sanc- 
 tion. In the early Koman law of marriage, the 
 wife became not one with, and thus equal, with 
 the man, but she came under his ipower j—patria 
 potestas — as a daughter. In the oldest Eoman 
 law a woman was considered to be under per- 
 petual tutelage, and though released from her 
 father's authority by his decease, she continued 
 to be subject to her nearest male relations, or to 
 her father's nominees as her guardians. In In- 
 dia this system survives in absolute complete- 
 ness to this day, and by its operation a Hindu 
 woman frequently becomes the ward of her own 
 sons. 
 
 It was the making of woman one flesh with 
 man, and the conception of what this thing 
 really meant, that raised her to the high place 
 she has ever since held in the history of the 
 world, and made monogamy the only form of 
 marriage known to Christendom. Indeed, so 
 strict did the early Christians become in their 
 ideas concerning marriage that monogamy with 
 them was not what it had been in the Koman 
 law and what it is with us to-day, the union of 
 one man with one woman for life ; rather was it 
 regarded as the union of one man with one 
 woman forever. A second marriage after bap- 
 tism disqualified a man for being ordained ; ^ and 
 
 i(Ap. Can. XVII.) 
 
THE BASIS OF THE STATE. 47 
 
 although persons who had been twice married 
 were permitted by indulgence to communicate 
 after a short time spent in prayer and fasting ^ a 
 presbyter was forbidden to be a guest at the 
 nuptials of persons contracting second marriages ^ 
 " for if," (as it said) " the bigamist is worthy of 
 penance, what shall the presbyter be, who, on 
 account of the feast, sanctions the marriage?" 
 It is true that woman has been under many and 
 severe legal disabilities in the so-called Christian 
 states, but this has been by reason of the sur- 
 vival of old heathen manners, and a too strict 
 following by canonists of the early Eoman 
 law. 
 
 It is to be remembered that at the time of the 
 later Eepublic and early Empire, the ancient 
 forms of marriage having fallen into disuse, a 
 fashion of marriage came in, founded on an old 
 form of marriage between plebeians, that was 
 nothing more than a civil contract, by which the 
 wife was "deposited" with her husband, the 
 rights of her family being retained. And, as 
 these rights had been reduced to a minimum by 
 the decrees of the Praetors, the woman became 
 absolutely free to do as she chose. Hence arose 
 the many marriages of the same woman with 
 many men, and the ever-recurring divorces that 
 disgraced and demoralized society in the days of 
 
 ' (Can. Laod. I.) ' (Can. Neo.-Caes. VII.) 
 
48 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH, 
 
 the early Caesars. It was against these marriages 
 and their concurrent divorces that the church 
 resolutely set its face. At an early period of the 
 church's history no marriage was said to be 
 Christian without the blessing of the priest. In 
 the middle ages a religious ceremony was gen- 
 erally made obligatory by law. With us to-day, 
 as we know, owing to the " Married Woman's 
 Acts," a woman is not only absolutely free in 
 the disposal of herself, but she retains all her 
 rights to her own property. A married woman 
 is as free as a single one so far as the law goes. 
 And there are in nearly all the states so many 
 causes for which she can obtain a divorce from 
 her husband that it can be said that she can ob- 
 tain a divorce at will. 
 
 Of the status of the man it is not necessary to 
 speak, as, except where the institution of patria 
 potestas has prevailed, he has been free to dis- 
 pose of himself, and has, within certain restric- 
 tions, had the ownership of his own property. 
 For the most part, too, he has had the right of 
 divorcing his wife for cause and for no cause. 
 His rights to-day over his person and property 
 are no greater than those of the woman, if they 
 are as great. Thus, in some states of the union 
 the " estate by the courtes}'' " having been abol- 
 ished, married women can conve}^ and alienate 
 their real property without the consent of their 
 
THE BASIS OF THE STATE. 49 
 
 husbands ; but wives have still an inchoate right 
 of dower in their husbands' lands. As to mar- 
 riage, the drift in the past century in all coun- 
 tries of Europe and America, has been to regard 
 it ever more and more as a purely civil contract. 
 Yet among Christian people it is the custom to 
 ask the benediction of the church. In many 
 countries the priests and other ministers of God 
 are made the officers of the state to perform 
 marriage. 
 
 It is not necessary to examine the divorce laws 
 of the European states. The English Divorce 
 Act was not passed until the year 1857, the laws 
 of Germany and Switzerland were not enacted 
 until 1874 and 1875, and that of France as re- 
 cently as 1884. And yet so many and so fre- 
 quent have been the applications for divorce, 
 especially in France, that even the politicians 
 have become alarmed for the safety of society. 
 Let us glance at the laws relating to divorce in 
 our own land. It is, as I take it, the chief fault 
 of the constitution of the United States that the 
 status of its citizens, with the exception of the 
 negro, is determined by the laws of the several 
 states ; that is, that the citizens of the United 
 States are citizens, first, of their respective states 
 of the union, and then of the United States. 
 Thus it is that the laws that relate to marriage 
 and divorce, as well as to many other things, 
 
50 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH, 
 
 have to be enacted by the states. It would be 
 impossible for me here to classify and to enumer- 
 ate all the various causes that have existed or 
 that do exist for divorce. One may say, on look- 
 ing over the various provisions that the different 
 state legislatures have made : " Quot homines, 
 tot sententicB J quot civitates, tot leges.^'' At the 
 present moment there are in the United States 
 competent courts in every state but one to which 
 restless and unhappy men and women can have 
 recourse. The petitioner can take his or her 
 choice, subject to a trifling delay and residence 
 for the purpose of jurisdiction, of forty-nine dif- 
 ferent laws. There are forty-one different causes 
 which will entitle him or her to absolute relief, 
 and thirty-two giving limited divorce.^ 
 
 When we read of such legislation as this and 
 learn of the lax manner of procedure under the 
 divorce laws in the various state courts of the 
 union, we can easily see how strong are the 
 blows that have been struck at the basis of so- 
 ciety, how fast are the state and government 
 tending to disintegration here in the United 
 States. It is true that individualism has done 
 much to develop the spirit of humanity and to 
 rear the fabric of freedom, and yet the individ- 
 ualism that arose and struck off the bonds of 
 ecclesiastical and monarchical governments was 
 
 ' (Publications Mich. Pol. Science Asso., April, 1895, p. 59.) 
 
THE BASIS OF THE STATE. 51 
 
 not the individualism of to-day, which would 
 break up the family life and society into monads ; 
 rather was it the individualism of the heads of 
 families, demanding for all their members the 
 rights of family life, and for society its proper 
 mould and form. 
 
 The distinction made by M. Demolins between 
 society of a communistic and of a particularistic 
 formation^ has undoubtedly a basis of truth. 
 All societies have a tendency toward either 
 one or the other of these modes of existence; 
 but to say that they divide upon this forma- 
 tion and that upon this division hangs their 
 strength or lack of strength, is to allege too 
 much, and begs the question propounded in his 
 book. It is evident that societies where there is 
 a tendency to rely upon oneself, and not upon 
 the community, will be superior to those where 
 the tendency is to rely upon the community, and 
 not upon oneself, and that the former will suc- 
 ceed in the long run in the struggle for life bet- 
 ter than the latter. But we must have a care ; 
 the societies of a particularistic formation (if the 
 Anglo-Saxon peoples are their best exponents) 
 are not exactly what M. Demolins seems to imply 
 that they are : societies wherein the individual is 
 all in all and the family is of secondary impor- 
 
 ' {A quoi tient la superioritS des Anglo-Saxons^ Liv. I., Chap. 
 iii., p. 53.) 
 
52 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH, 
 
 tance. The family of the Anglo-Saxon (or Ameri- 
 can) has never had the same form it has had in 
 France or in Germany, owing probably to the 
 fact that the Koman law was never the common 
 law of England and America, and its early rigid 
 maxims therefore of as high a value as its later 
 liberal principles ; but it has had no less stability, 
 and has been of no less consequence in the de- 
 velopment of the Anglo-Saxon and American 
 peoples. 
 
 The Anglo-Saxons have taken their homes 
 and all their home institutions with them every- 
 where under the sun. As colonists they have 
 always emigrated with their women and chil- 
 dren, to the bleak shores of Massachusetts, to 
 the fertile river bottoms of Virginia, to the 
 colonies of the African Cape, to India, yes, even 
 to Australia, though at first the men went to that 
 island alone. On the other hand, women have 
 ever had to be sent to the French colonies ; and 
 it is the same to-day as it was three hundred 
 years ago. And this custom that we have ob- 
 served to exist in the Anglo-Saxons we see like- 
 wise in the Americans. They rarely, if ever, be- 
 come mere coureurs de hois and outlaws. Where- 
 ever they went as pioneers into the wilderness of 
 their broad land they built themselves cabins 
 with the first work of their axes, and therein 
 they placed their wives and little ones, and estab- 
 
THE BASIS OF THE STATE. 53 
 
 lished homes, each man for himself, yet each re- 
 lying upon his neighbor for support and defence. 
 And these homes they made as comfortable as 
 possible, as soon as possible. And this trait of 
 the Anglo-Saxons and Americans has not escaped 
 the notice of M. Demolins.^ *' The man," he says, 
 ** who does not rely any more upon the community, 
 cares less for the outside of life and more for the 
 hearth. He regards the hearth as the true citadel 
 of his independence. He names it, and defines it 
 by a word that is untranslatable [in French] in 
 which he puts all his soul — the home." Societies 
 in which the home is of primary importance can 
 not be said to be particularistic, or if it be so said, 
 their particularism is not of the individual, but of 
 the family. 
 
 It may seem to be exaggeration to say that the 
 cause of the present low state of public spirit in 
 the United States is the result of a low view of 
 the marriage bond, but history tells us that when 
 there has been a low view of marriage, there has 
 been a low view of public duties and obligations. 
 Certainly when divorces are granted as frequently 
 as they are in the various states of the union, 
 there must result a tendency that will weaken 
 the idea of authority and the necessity of obe- 
 dience. "There is abundant evidence," says 
 Westermarck, "that marriage has, upon the 
 
 » {Id. Liv. II., Chap, iv., p. 192.) 
 
54 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 whole, become more durable in proportion as the 
 human race has risen to higher degrees of culti- 
 vation, and that a certain amount of civilization 
 is an essential condition of the formation of life- 
 long unions."^ The modern movement in the 
 direction of promiscuous marriages, easy sepa- 
 rations and temporary relationships is a dis- 
 tinct reversion to barbaric and even brutal con- 
 ditions ; it cannot help but tend to the destruc- 
 tion of the vast and complex work of society 
 which man in his long struggle for the higher 
 and nobler life has so laboriously built up. We 
 must understand that marriage is not a human 
 contrivance. It is a divine order, and it runs 
 back to the very beginning of creation. It is in- 
 deed the law of life ; not only of the animal but 
 also of the vegetable order of creation, and the 
 higher life rises in the scale of being, the nearer 
 does it approach to both monogyny and per- 
 petuity. For Christ did not propound a new 
 view of marriage ; He reaffirmed the old and un- 
 changeable order. God in the beginning created 
 man in His own image — " In the image of God 
 created He him; male and female created He 
 them " ; ^ and when He blessed them and sent 
 them forth to replenish the earth and subdue 
 it. He sent them forth, not singly, but in pairs, 
 
 * (History of Human Marriage, Chap, xxiii., p. 535.) 
 UGen. i. 27, R. V.) 
 
TEE BASIS OF THE STATE. 55 
 
 as two yet one, as a family and as society in 
 embryo. All history shows that when the 
 family has been strong then has the state been 
 strong, and that when the family has been weak, 
 then has the state been weak. It follows in- 
 evitably, that the dissolution of the family is the 
 dissolution of society, and that the state directly 
 reflects society, which is conditioned by the 
 family life. 
 
 Marriage is the one institution that has en- 
 dured from the beginning of civilization until 
 now, and it is its best and truest touchstone. As 
 men have conducted themselves in the marital 
 relation, so have they conducted themselves in 
 the social life, so have they influenced their gov- 
 ernments. We, here in the United States, who 
 have grown out of conceit with our state legisla- 
 tures, like to think that the condition of govern- 
 ment does not reflect the condition of social life, 
 but we veil our eyes in vain. Government, and 
 by government now I mean the laws that estab- 
 lish and maintain the social order, is the mirror 
 of the condition of society. When the laws are 
 lax and uncertain and the observance of them 
 negligent and insufficient, society is in process of 
 decay. When they are firm and sure, then is 
 the observance of them likewise so, and society 
 moves on to better and nobler ends. A health- 
 ful development of society is always desirable, 
 
56 TEE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 and we must look for change in the way of so- 
 cial life. It is only the unhealthful development 
 that we deplore, and the development cannot be 
 other than unhealthful when the basis of the 
 state is made weak and dissoluble. It is for this 
 reason that the giving of suffrage to women must 
 be viewed with alarm, and deplored. There is 
 no inequality between the man and the woman ; 
 the one is the complement of the other, and 
 neither can exist alone and have the race survive. 
 But the giving of suffrage to women means an- 
 other blow aimed at the stability of the marriage 
 relation. It has a tendency to divide authority, 
 and thus to destroy it. As the suffrage is not a 
 natural but a political right, the better way 
 would be to give every married voter an addi- 
 tional vote in right of his wife. The married 
 have, as a rule, far greater interest in the stabil- 
 ity of the community than the unmarried. It is 
 the glory of the Christian Church that it has 
 ever held a high view of the married state, and 
 it is greatly to the credit of the Eoman Catholic 
 and Protestant Episcopal churches to-day that 
 they stand, as they have stood in times past, for 
 the sanctity of marriage. The Eoman Church, 
 on principle, recognizes no dissolution of the mar- 
 riage tie for causes arising after marriage ; the 
 Protestant Episcopal admits that for the cause 
 of adultery alone an absolute divorce can be had, 
 
THE BASIS OF THE STATE. 57 
 
 in which case the innocent party may remarry 
 again. ^ 
 
 After all, the citizens of the state generally 
 are members of the various Christian churches 
 and denominations. Upon them rests the respon- 
 sibility for the loose views of marriage that pre- 
 vail. It seems to me that no greater thing can 
 be done for the good of society than to convince 
 the various members of the various Christian 
 churches and sects of their shortcomings in this 
 regard. It is hard, of course, where the husband 
 treats his wife with cruelty, or where he wilfully 
 deserts her, to say to the woman, you must re- 
 main this man's wife until death do you part ; 
 but if there were no possibility of divorce there 
 would not be so much cruelty, there would prob- 
 ably be fewer desertions, there would certainly 
 be fewer improvident marriages. What is 
 wanted is a law to prevent all marriages until 
 both parties are of the age of twenty-one, with- 
 out the consent of the parents of both. And a 
 law, also, putting a heavy penalty upon the man 
 who is the father of illegitimate children would 
 likewise be useful; men would probably prefer 
 to have legitimate ones. Marriage ought also to 
 
 ' There is a strong movement on foot in the Episcopal Church 
 to prohibit a remarriage of divorced persons, except of course in 
 the case where parties seeking to be remarried have been di- 
 vorced from one another. 
 
58 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 legitimate all children of parents born before 
 wedlock. It is wrong to punish the innocent. 
 
 But our laws and policies will be useless unless 
 men and women understand that marriage is not 
 a civil relationship, unless they are persuaded 
 that it is a sacrament, or, at least, that it is sac- 
 ramental in character. And this brings us to a 
 recognition of the fact that Jesus Christ is the 
 great teacher of morality, and that He laid down 
 the principle upon which marriage is based, and 
 upon which it must continue, that God made 
 man two yet one ; and that the two made one 
 cannot dissever the marriage bond by the aid 
 and assistance of man. Men may write all the 
 rhetoric they please in regard to marriage, they 
 may speak of its ideal beauty and perfection, but 
 they will convince no one, not even themselves, 
 of its sanctity unless they believe in the author- 
 ity of Jesus Christ. And, strange as it may 
 seem to the secular mind, those who believe in 
 Christ, if they come together in marriage, are 
 more likely to live in peace and amity together 
 than those who do not. For they see God's im- 
 age in their companion in life and in their off- 
 spring, and they endeavor more and more to 
 conform to the teachings of the Son of God. 
 Who that loves Christ and who that loves wife 
 or husband will think of the trials and perplexi- 
 ties of married life ? Will they not rather look 
 
THE BASIS OF THE STATE. 59 
 
 upon them as means toward the development of 
 their characters ? The truth, yes, the primary 
 truth of a great many marriages, is that men and 
 women enter into them in order to have their 
 own way more effectually ; but this is impossi- 
 ble. Marriage is the surrender of self. It illus- 
 trates constantly our Lord's great words : " Who- 
 soever shall lose his life shall preserve it." ^ It is 
 God's way of neutralizing the inherent selfishness 
 of the individual. It is, so far as we can see to- 
 day, the only way of showing men what should 
 be the limit of aggressive competition, making 
 the world perceive that the final establishment of 
 individualism means the inevitable destruction of 
 society and the state. Out of the family life the 
 state arose, upon it it rests, for it it exists, with 
 its decline it will decay and fall away. 
 
 It must not be supposed that the multiplica- 
 tion of divorces is the direct cause of the decay 
 of society ; it is a symptom rather than a cause, 
 and to this conclusion all the best thinkers have 
 come. It is therefore the family that must be 
 protected and made strong, and the family life 
 that must be fostered and enlarged. How this 
 is to be done exactly it is difficult to say ; but 
 we perceive that religion must do its work and 
 so must education. Where the religion of Christ 
 is dominant, there a high view of the family life 
 
 »(St. Lukexvii. 33, E. V.) 
 
60 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 and of the marital relation is held, and men and 
 women are most unwilling to dissolve the mar- 
 riage bond. But the teaching of Christ does not 
 seem to be sufficient in these days to satisfy the 
 hearts of erring men, and education must come 
 in to its aid to convince their minds. And this 
 education should begin with the child. The true 
 function of the home should be dwelt upon ; the 
 necessity for its unity ; its worth in morality and 
 ethics ; the respective places of the man and the 
 woman ; the value of the sexes in relation to one 
 another ; the dignity of motherhood, and the 
 greatness of fatherhood. 
 
 Jesus Christ, then, we must understand, made 
 the family and not the individual the social unit, 
 and so do ancient law and history show it to be. 
 It must therefore be kept intact, or society will 
 dissolve, and the state will pass on to lower 
 and ever lower forms of existence. Upon its 
 preservation hangs the whole future of democ- 
 racy and the progress of humanity. Keligion 
 and education have a mighty task to perform. 
 
LECTUEE II. 
 
 THE ANCIENT STATE. 
 
 Let me first clear the ground for this lecture 
 by stating that I do not intend to examine the 
 history and structure of the states of Egypt, 
 Assyria and Persia ; not because the peoples of 
 these states have had no influence upon the de- 
 velopment of the states of Europe and the west, 
 but because their influence has been too remote 
 to be precisely traced, and because it was never 
 exerted directly. The sources of development of 
 the modern state are found in the history and 
 formation of the Greek and Eoman cities, in the 
 institutions and character of the Hindu and 
 Germanic peoples, and in the settlement and 
 polity of the Hebrews. With the settlement and 
 polity of the Hebrews I associate, of course, the 
 religions that we have obtained from them, both 
 the Jewish and the Christian. 
 
 Too little attention has, it seems to me, been 
 given by writers to the civil side of the history 
 of the Hebrews. Because all the acts of Israel 
 have in their history some religious significance, 
 students have in their examination of the source 
 
 61 
 
62 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 and rise of the development of civilization and 
 the state, ignored the evidences that they afford 
 of the ways in which the state took its rise, and 
 progressed on to articulated sovereignty. And 
 it has been on this account that for many gen- 
 erations the patriarchal theory was discredited. 
 Men hesitated to believe that the history of 
 Abraham was anything other than an exception 
 to the general ways of life of the ancient world, 
 if it were not a mere legend and tradition of the 
 Hebrews ; but Abraham's story, though it is dif- 
 ferent in its incidents and details, presents the 
 same points, so far as it shows the way how the 
 state took its rise, as does the story of Job ; and 
 the stories of these two patriarchs are paralleled 
 by that of the return of the Heraclidse in Grecian, 
 and of the adventures of ^neas and his fol- 
 lowers in Koman, history. History and com- 
 parative jurisprudence herein agree; they each 
 assert that the earliest condition of the human 
 race known to the one and to the other was 
 patriarchal. 
 
 Let us study the history of the state of Israel. 
 Where does it begin ? In the power of Abraham 
 over his own family and household. When 
 Abraham as yet dwelt in Ur, in the land of the 
 Chaldees, he was under the authority of his 
 father, but when his father died in Haran, and 
 he came away and went as a stranger into the 
 
THE ANCIENT STATE. 63 
 
 land of Canaan, he and his wife, and Lot, his 
 nephew, and the souls they had gotten in Haran, 
 with the substance they had gathered, he became 
 the head of an independent and autonomous 
 state. We have become accustomed to think 
 that no state can exist without legislative, judi- 
 cial, and executive powers fully articulated. 
 These powers adhere in all states ex necessitate^ 
 but it has not always been necessary to define 
 them. In the ancient state they were united in 
 the king or chief, without any attempt to dis- 
 criminate between them, indeed, without any 
 thought of their existence. It was reserved for 
 the modern constitutional state to analyze its 
 sovereignty, and to declare its constituent ele- 
 ments. Yet it is not easy, even to-day, when 
 they are so well understood, to keep them de- 
 fined. The courts constantly legislate, and the 
 legislative power frequently executes the laws. 
 
 We perceive that Abraham, when we examine 
 his history, possessed all the powers of govern- 
 ment. He decided what was right for his family, 
 and he carried his decisions into effect. And 
 this was the way of all primitive society. It was 
 only after the states had grown and their mem- 
 bers had become numerous, whose interests had 
 become diversified, that it became necessary to 
 anticipate differences by set rules. In primitive 
 times the chiefs or kings decided every case upon 
 
64 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH, 
 
 its merits. Their judgments did not rest upon 
 anything which we can call law ; for the earliest 
 society knew nothing of law, nor did it have 
 any record of it. Out of these judgments some 
 principles gradually came to be recognized, and 
 a public opinion grew up that demanded that the 
 principles recognized here and there, be laid down 
 with exactness. Hence arose the Codes of Solon 
 and Lycurgus, the law of the Twelve Tables of 
 Kome and of the Two Tables of the Hebrews. 
 The history of the Hebrews from the time of 
 Abraham to that of Moses is that of a patriarchal 
 state, pure and simple. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, 
 and probably Joseph afterward, ruled in every 
 sense of the word, and they ruled over their de- 
 scendants and brethren. Hence it was that their 
 rule had something in it of a moral and constrain- 
 ing power, and was looked upon as an authority, 
 and the attitude of their subjects was one of 
 obedience and not of subjection. 
 
 The only distinction to be made between the 
 rule of Abraham and the Hebrew patriarchs, and 
 the other kings and chieftains of the ancient 
 world, is this, that the Hebrews had a higher 
 conception of the Almighty Godhead than the 
 others ; for all ancient rulers, so far as we know, 
 rested their authority upon the approval of their 
 gods ; and all of them claimed to be descended 
 from gods and demigods. But this distinction 
 
THE ANCIENT STATE. 65 
 
 is of vast importance, and has been full of mean- 
 ing for us, who have received our religion and 
 so many of our social and political ideas from the 
 Hebrews. Let me not be misunderstood : it is 
 evident that the Hebrews at first looked upon 
 Jehovah as a tribal God, though as greater and 
 more powerful than all other gods ; but the God 
 of the Hebrews was not a deified man : He was 
 not their ancestor, nor the ancestor of their great 
 father Abraham, but his God. And so it came 
 about naturally, as the Hebrews were taught by 
 prophet and seer more and more concerning the 
 being of God, that they understood that Jehovah 
 was the creator of all the universe and the father 
 of all souls, that they perceived, however dimly, 
 that all men are of one universal family. The 
 Greek, too, as we know, had arrived at this same 
 idea, but not by means of religion, but by process 
 of thought. Yet the Greek, unlike the Hebrew, 
 never acted upon this idea, nor did he bring it to 
 its logical conclusion. 
 
 The speech of St. Paul on Mars' Hill is the 
 greatest one that has ever proceeded out of the 
 mouth of man, those of the Son of Man alone 
 excepted : " The God that made the world, and 
 all things therein. He, being Lord of heaven and 
 earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands ; 
 neither is He served by men's hands, as though 
 He needed anything ; seeing He Himself giveth 
 
66 TEE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 to all life, and breath, and all things ; and He 
 made of one every nation of men for to dwell on 
 all the face of the earth, having determined their 
 appointed seasons, and the bounds of their habi- 
 tations ; that they should seek God, if haply they 
 might feel after Him, and find Him, though He 
 is not far from each one of us : for in Him we 
 live, and move, and have our being ; as certain 
 even of your own poets have said. For we are also 
 His offspring." ^ It seems strange that it needed 
 the teachings of Christ to make the Jews and the 
 world generally to realize and understand this 
 great truth, when the story they had of the crea- 
 tion showed them the unity of the race, and 
 pointed out that God, though He were a Father 
 to men, was not a father after the flesh. 
 
 The history of the Israelites, after they came 
 to the land of Canaan, followed in many respects 
 the same lines that the histories of the Greek and 
 Koman peoples did ; indeed, it followed the same 
 lines as those of the ancient peoples generally. 
 The people drove out the old inhabitants, as far 
 as they were able ; then they took the land into 
 possession and divided it between their various 
 tribes and families, and they dwelt in cities and 
 villages, the near to the near of kin. What the 
 size of the early cities of Canaan was, we do not 
 know, but it is evident that they must have been 
 
 i(Actsxvii. 24-29, B. V.) 
 
THE ANCIENT STATE, 67 
 
 insignificant, when we consider their great num- 
 ber. It is not probable that they were any thing- 
 like those that afterward arose to greatness in 
 Greece and Italy and in Palestine itself. Speak- 
 ing of the genesis of the City-State of the Greeks 
 and Eomans, Mr. Fowler says : " A vast amount 
 of research has of late years been made and pub- 
 lished on this subject ; and the chief result of it 
 which concerns us here has been to show (1) that 
 before the final settlement on the land takes 
 place, the main stock is always found to consist 
 of groups or cells, held together by the tie of 
 Kinship ; (2) that after the settlement has taken 
 place, these groups or cells are still found, but 
 now fixed upon the land in forms which may 
 roughly be described as village communities y con- 
 sisting of a number of families united together." ^ 
 Mr. Fowler does not undertake to show what it 
 is that holds these kinsfolk together, but M. Fustel 
 de Coulanges proves conclusively that it is reli- 
 gion, the religion of the family and of the gens 
 and of the tribe. " An excellent picture of the 
 way in which these local groups may be supposed 
 to have come into existence is supplied by Sir 
 Henry Maine in one of his most valuable lectures 
 on these subjects. He quotes the words of an 
 Indian poetess, describing the immigration of a 
 people called the Yellalee, into that part of India 
 
 » (The City-state, Chap, ii., p. 28.) 
 
68 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 which was once famous as Arcot. * The poetess 
 compares the invasion to the flowing of the juice 
 of the sugar cane over a flat surface. The juice 
 crystallizes, and the crystals are the various village 
 communities. In the middle is one lump of par- 
 ticularly fine sugar, the place where is the temple 
 of the god. Homely as the image is, it seems in 
 one respect peculiarly felicitous. It represents 
 the tribe, though moving in a fused mass of men, 
 as containing within itself a principle of coal- 
 escence which began to work as soon as the move- 
 ment was over.' We cannot, of course, be sure 
 that such an image as this would exactly represent 
 the way in which Greeks and Latins, or Celts and 
 Teutons, settled down on the lands which they 
 conquered ; for the history of man, as of plants 
 and animals, presents local variation everywhere. 
 But I know of no better way of getting a general 
 idea of what we suppose to have happened at this 
 momentous era in the progress of a people, than 
 by laying to heart this singularly happy illustra- 
 tion." ' 
 
 The first great characteristic of these early vil- 
 lage communities was kinship ; this is shown con- 
 clusively by Maine and Fowler and de Coulanges, 
 indeed, by all who have written on the origin of 
 civil society. And this we see likewise to be the 
 case when we read the history of the settlement 
 
 » {Id., pp. 29, 30.) 
 
THE ANCIENT STATE. 69 
 
 of Israel in the books of Joshua and Judges. It 
 is hardly necessary for me to undertake to show 
 how these communities came together in various 
 groups and founded great and famous cities, but 
 it is probable that there was in some community, 
 or group of communities, a leading family in 
 whose veins the blood of a common ancestor was 
 supposed to run the purest. From the members 
 of this family a leader would, as a rule, be chosen 
 for some military expedition, whose authority, if 
 he were successful, would be augmented, and he 
 would have a larger share of the land appropri- 
 ated from the conquered village societies ; and 
 thus he would become powerful and be elevated 
 eventually to the place of chief or king. 
 
 Of the rise of the city-states of Athens and of 
 Kome, as well as of Jerusalem, we have accurate 
 historical accounts. But we must always under- 
 stand that behind the city-states of the classic 
 peoples there is an older civilization, the same as 
 there is behind the Holy City of the Jews. It is 
 of the older and original civilization that Sir 
 Henry Maine treats generally, that is, of the 
 state of life of which we have glimpses in the 
 books of Joshua and of Judges. Let us see how 
 the City-State of Athens arose ; we have an ac- 
 count of it by Thucydides, which scholars ac- 
 cept as generally true. He says ^ " In the days 
 »(ii. 15.) 
 
70 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 of Cecrops and the first kings down to the reign 
 of Theseus, Attica was divided into communes, 
 having their own town halls and magistrates. 
 Except in case of alarm, the whole people did 
 not assemble in council under the king, but ad- 
 ministered their own affairs, and advised together 
 in their several townships. Some of them at 
 times even went to war with him, as the Eleu- 
 sinians under Eumolpus with Erectheus. But 
 when Theseus came to the throne, he, being a 
 powerful as well as a wise ruler, among other 
 improvements in the administration of the coun- 
 try, dissolved the councils and separate govern- 
 ments, and united all the inhabitants of Attica 
 in the present city, establishing one council and 
 town hall. They continued to live on their own 
 lands, but he compelled them to resort to Athens 
 as their metropolis, and henceforward they were 
 all inscribed on the rolls of her citizens. A great 
 city thus arose, which was handed down by 
 Theseus to his descendants, and from his day 
 to this the Athenians have regularly celebrated 
 the national festival of the Synoecia, or * union 
 of the communes,' in honor of the Goddess 
 Athene."^ 
 
 The genesis of Rome was different in detail, 
 and yet it manifests the same general features as 
 that of Athens. We know from historical re- 
 
 * ( Jowett's Thucydides, p. 104, Am. Edition. ) 
 
THE ANCIENT STATE. 71 
 
 search and a study of the laws of Kome, that the 
 family was the unit and centre of all society and 
 government. We perceive, too, that the various 
 families were associated together in different 
 groups, called gens. How the different families 
 grew and developed into the various gentes, it is 
 impossible to tell exactly, we can only imagine. 
 A family, of course, at the beginning, had but 
 one trunk or branch, and the other and younger 
 branches gathered around it later on, some nat- 
 urally, and some by adoption. De Coulanges 
 says: "The Aryan race appears to have been 
 composed of an indefinite number of societies of 
 this nature, during a long succession of ages. 
 These thousands of little groups lived isolated, 
 having little to do with each other, having no 
 need of one another, united by no bond religious 
 or political, having each its own domain, each its 
 internal government, each its gods."^ 
 
 It was religion which held the family together ; 
 it was religion which held the gens^ it was re- 
 ligion which held the city. Each family had its 
 own special divinities, its Penates, and its ances- 
 tors. Each gens had its gods or demigods, each 
 city its protecting divinities. A curious story is 
 related to show the strong hold that the worship 
 of the ge7is had upon the Eoman people, of Fa- 
 bius, who was called " the shield of Kome." It 
 
 ' (The Ancient City, Book II., Chap, x., p. 153.) 
 
72 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 was during the second Punic war, and Fabius 
 was making head against Hannibal. Certainly 
 it does seem that it was of first importance that 
 he should remain with his army ; but he left it 
 in the hands of an imprudent and incompetent 
 lieutenant and went to Eome, because the anni- 
 versary of the sacrifice of his gens had arrived, 
 and it was his duty to perform the sacred act. 
 The gods of the various cities were legion. 
 There were first the gods that were of the same 
 nature as those of the primitive religion of the 
 family — Lares, Penates, Genii, Demons, Heroes. 
 Then there were the gods of other species, like 
 Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, toward whom the 
 aspect of nature had directed the thoughts of men. 
 Then there were the city gods who lived within 
 the walls of the various city-states. Xenophon 
 says that Athens had more religious festivals than 
 any other Grecian city. The whole territory of 
 Attica was covered with temples and chapels. 
 It is well known that Rome brought home the 
 conquered gods of the cities that she subdued. 
 And strange to say, law itself developed out of 
 religion and religious observances. And this de- 
 velopment of law we find among the Greeks and 
 the Eomans and the Hebrews alike. It was the 
 kings who were the judges in the earliest times, 
 and when a king decided a dispute by a sentence, 
 his judgment was assumed to be the result of 
 
THE ANCIENT STATE. 73 
 
 direct inspiration. " It is the king," says Grote, 
 "who is the grand personal mover of Grecian 
 heroic society. He is on earth the equivalent of 
 Zeus in the agora of the gods ; the supreme God 
 of Olympus is in the habit of carrying on his 
 government with frequent publicity ; of hearing 
 some dissentient opinions, and of allowing him- 
 self to be wheedled by Aphrodite, or worried 
 into compliance by Here ; but his determination 
 is at last conclusive, subject only to the overrul- 
 ing interference of the Moerae or Fates." ^ What 
 the king decides is what Zeus decides, and Zeus is 
 not so much a lawgiver as he is a judge. The 
 Hebrews we observe were for a long time gov- 
 erned by judges, raised up directly by God, and 
 inspired by Him to speak right judgments. 
 
 And so, when the families and gentes who lived 
 in various small communities came together to 
 build the city of Eome, they laid the foundation 
 thereof with religious observances. It is probable 
 that they erected first some fortified place of ref- 
 uge, which served also as a centre of worship and 
 traffic. Each citadel in Latium, and probably 
 in all Italy, was common, so far as we can 
 learn, to several village communities, and was 
 the object of special religious observances, 
 both in its foundation and in its maintenance, a 
 fact which became the source of the legend of 
 
 ' (History of Greece, Vol. II., Part I., Chap, xx., p. 74.) 
 
74 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 the building of Rome by Romulus. There can 
 be very little doubt that originally, and in the 
 very early period, the Latin people were grouped 
 together in clusters of village communities, each 
 possessing a citadel, which was the centre of a 
 common worship, probably that which afterward 
 became the worship of the various gentes. The 
 whole Latin race had a common political centre 
 and a common worship on the Alban Hill, where 
 Jupiter Latiaris was revered. One of the groups 
 of these communities, which participated in his 
 worship, had occupied as its citadel a square hill 
 some one hundred and sixty feet above the level 
 of the sea, whose rocky sides fell precipitously to 
 the south bank of the Tiber, Three different 
 communities seem originally to have had their 
 residence, as well as their refuge, on this hill, 
 while their farms lay around it ; these three old- 
 est settlements of Rome were the Cermalus, the 
 Yelia and the Palatium. The whole hill came 
 eventually to be called the Palatine Hill ; its 
 natural strength was increased by massive walls, 
 and its position, as commanding the Tiber and 
 the outposts of the Latin people toward Etruria, 
 marked it out for future greatness.^ 
 
 Of the origin of Jerusalem, which eventually be- 
 came the city-state of the Jews, absorbing all the 
 life and strength of Judea, we have an exact and 
 
 > (The City-state, Chap, ii., p. 54.) 
 
THE ANCIENT STATE. 75 
 
 accurate account. The Israelites, it must be re- 
 membered, had no proper family worship apart 
 from Jehovah at the place where the tabernacle 
 was pitched, or apart from the temple afterward 
 founded at Jerusalem. And they had no tribal 
 worship except as they set up the same unlawfully. 
 We know, of course, that the history of the Israel- 
 ites from the time of Moses to that of Ezra, is that 
 of apostasy after apostasy from the worship of Je- 
 hovah ; but these fallings away of Israel were not 
 to worship,as far as we can learn,the manes of their 
 ancestors and the heroes of their tribes, but rather 
 the gods many and the lords many of their neigh- 
 bors. It is probable that the principal reason 
 why the Israelites were prone to idolatry was 
 because the worship of these divinities was so at- 
 tractive, by reason of the sensual pleasures they 
 afforded. The counsel that Balaam gave, by which 
 the Israelites were so easily led to commit tres- 
 pass against the Lord, in the matter of Baal-peor, 
 showed the drift of their evil inclinations from 
 first to last. Let me say that I know of no his- 
 tory that is more full of sadness than that of the 
 Hebrews, as set forth in the book of Judges, dur- 
 ing those evil days when "there was no king 
 in Israel ; every man did that which was right 
 in his own eyes." ^ The story of the invasions 
 and insurrections and evil doings, and of the 
 
 * (Chap. xxi. 25, K. v.) 
 
76 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 quarrelings and murderings and killings, makes 
 us feel that mankind in the beginning of the 
 formation of society was not much raised above 
 the level of the brutes. 
 
 There is this difference to be noted between 
 the early history of Israel and that of the gentile 
 nations by whom they were surrounded, and that 
 is, that, whereas, the Israelites in the beginning 
 had no kings, these had many. And this differ- 
 ence we perceive when we study the early history 
 of Greece and of Italy. Every chief is called a 
 king, and so is often the head of a family and 
 tribe. Another difference is this, that the kings 
 of the Canaanites and the Greeks and Latins had 
 the power or right to sacrifice. Homer and 
 Yirgil represent the kings as continually occu- 
 pied with sacred ceremonies. Demosthenes tells 
 us that the ancient kings of Athens performed 
 themselves all the sacrifices that were prescribed 
 by the religion of that city. And Xenephon says 
 that the kings of Sparta were the chiefs of the 
 Lacedaemonean religion. And the same was 
 true of the Eoman kings. They were king- 
 priests, and were always inaugurated with re- 
 ligious ceremonies. The second king, Numa, 
 Livy tells us, fulfilled the greater part of the re- 
 ligious functions of the city-state, but as he fore- 
 saw that his successors, having often wars to 
 maintain, would not always be able to care for 
 
THE ANCIENT STATE. 77 
 
 the sacrifices, he instituted the diamines to replace 
 the kings, when the latter should be absent from 
 Kome. 
 
 In Israel the right to sacrifice and to care for 
 the things of religion were confined to the family 
 of Aaron, assisted by the whole tribe of Levi, 
 which were, as it is written, "set before Aaron, 
 the priest, that they might minister unto him." ^ 
 Aaron was made the High-Priest, and his sons the 
 common priests. After Aaron h is son Eleazar, and 
 after Eleazar, one of his descendants, from genera- 
 tion to generation, succeeded him in this great of- 
 fice. It seems strange, at first sight, that the 
 High-Priests of Israel never became kings until 
 the days of the Maccabees. But a little reflec- 
 tion, however, will show us why. Jehovah was at 
 first regarded as the king of the Hebrews, and 
 the priests who ministered before Him did not 
 dare to usurp the civil authority. The gods of 
 the Greeks and the Eomans, on the other hand, 
 were never considered to be the rulers of the 
 people, but only divinities whose anger was to be 
 appeased and whose appetites were to be satis- 
 fied. And so the laws of the Greeks and the 
 Komans in the beginning were not considered to 
 be based so much upon the principles of right 
 and wrong, but rather upon expediency and cus- 
 tom. But the laws of the Hebrews were held to 
 
 ' (Num. iii. 6, R. v.) 
 
78 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 be based upon the eternal principles of justice, to 
 have come, as it were, by direct revelation from 
 the fountain-head of truth. 
 
 It was because the people grew weary of the 
 rule of a moral governor, as expressed in moral 
 ordinances and statutes, that they desired to have 
 a king to rule over them like all the other nations, 
 and though Samuel, the judge, to whom they 
 applied, foretold what would be the manner of 
 their king, that he would oppress and afflict them 
 and treat them unjustly and bring them into 
 servitude, they yet refused to obey his voice and 
 would have a king to judge them and to go be- 
 fore them to fight their battles, like the nations 
 of the gentiles. It was not a man of a leading 
 tribe, nor yet of a leading family, that was taken 
 first by Samuel to be king over Israel, but rather 
 was it, " a young man and a goodly ; " one, " who 
 from his shoulders and upward was higher 
 than any of the people."^ How it was that 
 Saul and his family were set aside, and David 
 and his family were preferred in their stead, it 
 is not necessary to relate ; but it is worth our 
 consideration to note that, although the tribe 
 of Judah, to which David belonged, was a great 
 and strong tribe, and his family was what may 
 be called a leading one, yet there was nothing in 
 the outward condition of his father, Jesse, that 
 
 '(1 Sam. ix. 2. K. v.) 
 
THE ANCIENT STATE. 79 
 
 would lead Samuel to select David to be the king 
 of Israel, and to displace the obstinate and re- 
 bellious Saul. The kings of Judah and Israel did 
 not become such by reason of any imaginary de- 
 scent from some tribal hero or demigod, nor yet 
 were they elevated to their high position by the 
 people, like the tyrants of Greece and of Italy, in 
 order to make head against an oppressive aris- 
 tocracy or oligarchy, said to be descended from 
 such heroes and gods. The kings of Israel, or, at 
 any rate, the first kings, became such by the will 
 of God as expressed by His prophets and seers. 
 But the kings of Judah and Israel had not the 
 poAver or right of sacrifice. Church and state, if 
 we may so speak, religion and civil rule, were 
 divorced in the very beginning of Jewish history. 
 They were to support and supplement one an- 
 other, but they were not to be crossed and con- 
 fused. We think this a modern principle or idea," 
 to which we have come through many genera- 
 tions of struggle and tribulation, but it is as old 
 as the kings of the Hebrews. 
 
 How the city of Jerusalem arose to prominence 
 and became the centre of the life of the Jews, we 
 have, as I have said, an accurate account. Jeru- 
 salem, which was a city of the Jebusites, was 
 situated on the border between the tribes of 
 Benjamin and Judah. It consisted of an upper 
 and a lower city, and although the lower city had 
 
80 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH, 
 
 been taken by the tribes of Judah and Simeon 
 when they commenced their task of taking into 
 possession the land allotted to them, and after- 
 ward by the Benjaminites ; the upper city re- 
 mained secure in the possession of the Jebusites 
 until the time of David. It was after the death 
 of Saul, and the reunion of the elders and the 
 warriors of the various tribes under David at 
 Hebron, that David and all Israel proceeded to 
 Jerusalem and laid siege to it, and took it. David 
 immediately began to secure himself in his new 
 acquisition. He enclosed the whole city with a 
 wall and connected it with a citadel. In this 
 latter place he took up his own quarters, and the 
 Zion of the Jebusites became the city of David. 
 But it was the arrival of the Ark, the sacred de- 
 pository of religion, that gave to the city its chief 
 importance. The old tabernacle, being now 
 pitched on the height of Gibeon, a new tent was 
 spread on the fortress for the reception of the 
 Ark, and here "in its place," it was deposited 
 with the most impressive ceremonies, and Zion 
 became at once the sanctuary as well as the cit- 
 adel of the nation. It was, then, by reason of 
 two things that Jerusalem became so famous and 
 important and the centre of the national life of 
 the Hebrews, first, because of its strong and ad- 
 vantageous position ; secondly, because it became 
 
THE ANCIENT STATE. 81 
 
 the depository of the Ark, the place where the 
 temple was afterward built. 
 
 How it became the city of the whole people, 
 and not simply of Judah and Benjamin, we un- 
 derstand when we consider that the Hebrews 
 worshipped not the manes of their ancestors, nor 
 any tribal gods, but Jehovah, the self -existing One, 
 the Lord God Almighty ; and that their priests 
 had not been selected from the people by reason 
 of priority of birth, or of any other fancied superi- 
 ority, but by the will of God Himself ; as were also 
 their kings. It was because of these great facts 
 that there was no difference between man and 
 man, family and family, or tribe and tribe, among 
 the Jews, that they were all governed by the 
 same laws and subject to the same obligations, 
 that the family idea prevailed so strongly among 
 them, and that the principles of government for 
 the family became the principles of government 
 for the nation. The family, as we have seen, was 
 the basis of society among the Greeks and Ko- 
 mans, the origin of the state, as Aristotle shows ; 
 but, let us observe, because the family gods of 
 the classical nations were so small and so many, 
 the city-states of the Greeks and Eomans speedily 
 outgrew the family idea ; while in Israel the fam- 
 ily idea grew and expanded and took in all the 
 nation. The cities of the Greeks and Eomans 
 were federations, as it were, of families and gentes 
 
82 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH, 
 
 and tribes, while the city of the Jews was an ex- 
 tension of one family, that of Abraham, Isaac 
 and Jacob. Families in Greece and Kome which 
 had not been so fortunate as to join in the estab- 
 lishment of this or that city, had to push their 
 way in by many acts of violence ; but when the 
 city of the Jews was established, it extended it- 
 self to all the families of the nation at once. 
 Jerusalem became the centre of a family life, and 
 it possessed this great feature to the end, in spite 
 of the separated kingdoms of Judah and Israel. 
 Of course, here and there, there were prominent 
 men and leading families, but no men, or family 
 of men, among the Israelites ever esteemed their 
 brethren of less importance or dignity in the sight 
 of Jehovah than they esteemed themselves; all 
 regarded all as brethren. 
 
 It was for this reason that among the Hebrews 
 the state manifested in its life that order which 
 we have learned to call the social order, a state 
 where regard is not had simply for hard and fast 
 rules of law, which had become crystallized 
 through practice and submission, but where re- 
 gard is had for what is essentially right and in- 
 herently wrong, looking upon men as equal and 
 as members of one great family. "We are apt to 
 regard socialism as a new thing, but though the 
 word itself is new, in its essence it is as old as 
 the law of Moses. The reason why people gen- 
 
THE ANCIENT STATE. 83 
 
 erall}^ think of socialism as new is because of the 
 change that industrial life has made in the meth- 
 ods and manners of men, and because of the 
 changed way of the modern production of wealth 
 and of its accumulation. The aim of socialism 
 has ever been the same from its inception : a 
 more even distribution of the wealth of the period, 
 or of money or of money's worth, as a means of 
 human happiness. The agitation of socialism, in 
 the sense of a struggle for greater equality, be- 
 gan in the state immediately after the termina- 
 tion of the period of patriarchal society, and we 
 find this to be the case in Greece and Eome as 
 well as among the Hebrews. 
 
 We cannot say that the patriarchal period had 
 ended when Moses became the leader of the He- 
 brews, but it was coming to an end, and the laws 
 he promulgated were anticipatory of a state 
 wherein the claims of the family, pure and simple, 
 must not be ignored. This we must always re- 
 member of the Mosaic dispensation ; the socialism 
 of Moses was based upon the family idea. The aim 
 of Moses was, as we can clearly see, to prevent by 
 wise institutions great inequality among the He- 
 brews, preserving at the same time private prop- 
 erty and inheritance. " We find," says Graham,' 
 " in Leviticus a system of land-holding intended 
 to secure reasonable equality, and a very re- 
 
 ' (Socialism New and Old, Chap, ii., pp. 22, 23.) 
 
W4 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 markable institution, the Jubilee, designed to 
 prevent the Jewish people from being perma- 
 nently divorced from the land. We have un- 
 usual clemency shown to the honest debtor, by 
 which the purpose of a good Bankruptcy Law 
 was effected ; and a special provision for the poor, 
 if any such should appear under a general social- 
 istic polity, expressly designed to prevent extreme 
 poverty. The usurer as an evil possibility is fore- 
 seen by Moses, and is warned from exercising his 
 function, or practicing his methods, at the cost of 
 his brethren in their necessities. We find equal- 
 ity aimed at, and fraternity everywhere incul- 
 cated as the surest moral guarantee of equality. 
 But all this is of the essence of Socialism. More- 
 over, it is State Socialism or Socialism embodied 
 in fundamental institutions, and under the con- 
 secration and guardianship of Law ; and it had 
 the further consecration of Keligion, which was 
 in the beginning inseparably connected with 
 Law." 
 
 We know that the socialism of Israel failed. 
 Individualism, that is selfism, the curse of society 
 ancient and modern, gradually asserted itself, and 
 gross inequality of condition came into existence, 
 and the rich began to oppress the poor. But the 
 laws of Moses acted as a determent and clog, and 
 made the change from socialism to individualism 
 slow, and a return to the family idea always pos- 
 
THE ANCIENT STATE. 85 
 
 sible. Hence arose the prophets, who denounced 
 the proud and the rich continually. All the 
 prophets were socialists, and Isaiah, the greatest 
 of the prophets, was the greatest socialist of them 
 all. " Woe unto them that join house to house, 
 that lay field to field, till there be no room, and 
 ye be made to dwell alone in the midst of the 
 land," ^ said this great teacher. It was the in- 
 crease of the importance, and of the riches of 
 the few at the expense of the many that brought 
 so many evils upon the land. Israel is ex- 
 horted again and again to return to the days 
 of simplicity and righteous living. " Let the 
 wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man 
 his thoughts : and let him return unto the Lord, 
 and He will have mercy upon him ; and to our 
 God, for He will abundantly pardon." ^ At the 
 time when Jesus of Nazareth was born, the social- 
 istic features of the Jewish commonwealth had 
 practically disappeared. Men no longer felt the 
 strong impress of the family life,^ and the central 
 idea that the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and 
 Jacob were practically one family, and that each 
 one's prosperity was the prosperity of all, and each 
 one's adversity the adversity of all, had disap- 
 peared. The city and commonwealth of the Jews 
 were ripe for the destruction which very soon, 
 after the death of Christ, came upon them. 
 
 ' (v. 8, R. V.) 2 {Id., LV. 7, R. V.) 3 (St. Mark vii. 11.) 
 
86 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 It seems unnecessary for me to speak of the 
 decline and fall of Athens and of the Grecian 
 cities, and much less of the great Latin city of 
 Kome. The history of their decline is known to 
 all. The Greek city reached in Athens, under 
 Pericles, a perfection of civic life that was won- 
 derful, and that bade fair to be enduring, and 
 yet it speedily passed away The trouble with 
 Athens, and the Grecian cities generally, lay in 
 the inelasticity of their citizenship, and the fact 
 that there was always to be found in them the 
 unprivileged many making war against the 
 privileged few, demanding rights and powers 
 which the few would yield only because of force. 
 The war of the dr^fio^ against the eupatrids con- 
 tinued from the time of the overthrow of the 
 earliest monarchies to the da3^s of the Koman 
 conquest. Sometimes the people pushed in and 
 acquired rights and privileges, but more often 
 they were shut out and acquired none. But when 
 they did acquire full rights with the aristocracy 
 there was always another class, of aliens and 
 f reedmen and outlaws, outside, demanding recog- 
 nition and a share of political power. Hence it 
 was that factions were continually arising in the 
 Grecian states, consisting of the few, the rich, 
 the well-born, and the good, as they loved to call 
 themselves ; and these were at an endless feud 
 with the many, the poor, the base, and the low- 
 
THE ANCIENT STATE. 87 
 
 born, as their enemies loved to style them. It is 
 impossible here to relate the many struggles that 
 took place between the few and the many, the 
 oligarchies and the democracies, of the Grecian 
 cities. They were as numerous as the private 
 wars that arose in mediseval days; but I do 
 want to speak of the evil political spirit that 
 arose and that became the furies of Greece, and 
 the ultimate cause of its downfall, the spirit that 
 the Greeks called (rrdat^;^ or sedition, a disease of 
 society which sprang out of the great inequality 
 which existed between the rich and the poor, and 
 which may be defined as " a standing up in the 
 state of one party with a malicious intent toward 
 another." 
 
 During the Peloponnesian War this dreadful 
 thing caused so much anxiety in the mind of 
 Thucydides that he called the attention of his 
 countrymen to it in language so weighty and 
 so earnest that it is worth our while to see what 
 it is that this philosophic historian tried so 
 seriously to portray and define. ^' Kevolution," 
 he says,^ "brought upon the cities of Hellas 
 many terrible calamities, such as have been 
 and always will be while human nature re- 
 mains the same, but which are more or less 
 aggravated and differ in character with every 
 new combination of circumstances," and which 
 
 »(iii. 82.) 
 
88 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 are especially accentuated in war. " When trou- 
 bles had once begun in the cities, those who fol- 
 lowed carried the revolutionary spirit further 
 and further, and determined to outdo the report 
 of all who had preceded them b}^ the ingenuity 
 of their enterprises and the atrocity of their re- 
 venges. The meaning of words had no longer 
 the same relation to things, but was changed by 
 them as they thought proper. Keckless daring 
 was held to be loyal courage ; prudent delay was 
 the excuse of a coward ; moderation was the dis- 
 guise of unmanly weakness ; to know everything 
 was to do nothing. Frantic energy was the true 
 quality of a man. . . . He who could out- 
 strip another in a bad action was applauded ; and 
 so was he who encouraged to evil one who had 
 no idea of it. The tie of party was stronger than 
 the tie of blood, because a partisan was more 
 ready to dare without asking why." * 
 
 Thucydides says that ^'the cause of all these 
 evils," which led to the destruction of Greece, 
 "was the love of power originating in avarice 
 and ambition, and the party-spirit which is en- 
 gendered by them when men were fairly embarked 
 in a contest. For the leaders on either side used 
 specious names, the one party professing to up- 
 hold the constitutional equality of the many, the 
 other the wisdom of an aristocracy, while they 
 » (Jowett's Thucydides, p. 222.) 
 
THE ANCIENT STATE, 89 
 
 made the public interests, to which in name they 
 were devoted, in reality their prize. Striving in 
 every way to overcome each other, . . . 
 neither party observed any definite limits, either 
 of justice or public expediency, but both alike 
 made the caprice of the moment their law. 
 Either by the help of an unrighteous sentence, 
 or grasping power with the strong hand, they 
 were eager to satiate the impatience of party- 
 spirit." ^ 
 
 Party spirit, or sedition, however, was not the 
 ultimate, but the immediate cause of the disease 
 of the TToAi?. The ultimate cause was its lack of 
 unity. The Grecian state, with all the states of 
 ancient times, was founded upon the family and 
 the family idea. First came the family and then 
 its enlargement, the clans, but the clans never 
 extended themselves. The next step was a fed- 
 eration of clans rather than an extension of one 
 or many, and though the clans were afterward 
 broken up, or set aside, by another method of 
 grouping the people, that is, by classification by 
 wealth and ability to fight, caste distinction and 
 caste ideas never disappeared, and the members 
 of a city-state were never regarded as being 
 one great family, naturally or artificially consti- 
 tuted. Hence it was that love and good-will and 
 benevolence of all toward all, and of one toward 
 
 » {Id., p. 223.) 
 
90 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 the many, never came into play and operation. 
 In every city the well-born and the base-born, 
 the rich and the poor, were enemies living side 
 by side, the one coveting wealth, the other seeing 
 his wealth coveted. No religion, no service, no 
 labor united them ; there were no ties of blood 
 that were considered to exist between the well- 
 born and the low-born, and labor generally was 
 done by slaves. The poor sought to acquire 
 wealth by despoiling the rich, the rich could de- 
 fend their property only by their superior knowl- 
 edge, or by oppressing the poor. Both parties 
 regarded each other with hatred and aversion. 
 There was generally a double conspiracy in every 
 city : one of the poor who conspired from cupid- 
 ity, and one of the rich who conspired from fear. 
 Speaking of the numerous seditions in the 
 city-states of Greece Aristotle says that "the 
 main cause of revolutions in Democracies is the 
 intemperate conduct of the demagogues who 
 force the propertied class to combine partly by 
 instituting malicious prosecutions against individ- 
 uals — for the worst enemies are united by a com- 
 mon fear — and partly by inciting the masses 
 against them as a body."^ On the other hand, 
 he avers that revolutions in oligarchies generally 
 assume two conspicuous forms, the first is the 
 case, and the most usual one, " where the Oli- 
 
 » (Politics, Book VIII., Chap, v., p. 355.) 
 
THE ANCIENT STATE. 91 
 
 garchs oppress the masses," the second is where 
 seditions arise among the oligarchs themselves.^ 
 The cause of the decline and fall of the city- 
 state of Rome was a different one. Eome mani- 
 fested ever greater elasticity than the city-states 
 of Greece, and extended her rights and privileges 
 first to her plebs, then to the Latin cities around 
 her, then to the cities of Italy, then to her colo- 
 nies, and at last to all the cities throughout the 
 broad extent of her dominions. It was a long 
 and arduous fight that was waged by the unpriv- 
 ileged for the great right of Roman citizenship ; 
 and at one time, when the plebs withdrew to 
 Mons Sace7% it looked as if the commonwealth 
 of Rome would be impaired, and her great future 
 prevented ; but this danger of dissolution having 
 been overcome by concession and compromise, 
 other like dangers, as they arose, were success- 
 ively overcome in a like manner, and the great 
 city-state by the Tiber at last seemed as secure 
 on her seven hills, as the hills on the face of the 
 earth. It is true that there arose from time to 
 time in the history and development of Rome, 
 feuds and wars between the privileged and the 
 unprivileged, the high-born and the base-born, 
 the rich and the poor ; yet were these contests 
 ever happily terminated; and, though Rome was 
 governed always by an oligarchy or by an em- 
 
 »(/<i., Cbap. vi., p. 358.) 
 
92 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 peror, the political distinction between citizen 
 and citizen gradually became minimized, and, at 
 last, obliterated, until all stood on the same level 
 before the law. It is one of the strange facts of 
 history that the difference between citizen and 
 subject was so gradually obliterated that no one 
 can tell the date nor the name of the prince who 
 published the decree which granted the right of 
 citizenship to all freemen without distinction. 
 The reason why this decree did not strike the 
 imagination of contemporaries, and was not re- 
 corded by historians, is because the change of 
 which it was the logical expression had been ac- 
 complished years before. The inequality be- 
 tween citizen and subject, or, as we may say, be- 
 tween the privileged and the unprivileged, had 
 been lessened from generation to generation, 
 until the two had been brought together. Of 
 course, the distinction between the rich and 
 the poor remained, but this seems to have been 
 the only difference that existed between the 
 citizens of the Koman Empire during the last 
 centuries of its life. When Koman citizenship 
 became universal, all the cities of the ancient 
 world had gradually disappeared and the city 
 of Kome alone was left in her broad domain ; 
 and this city became so transformed that it was 
 the meeting-place, the union and the tie, for a 
 thousand nationalities, under one imperial sway. 
 
THE ANCIENT STATE. 93 
 
 It may be said that the city-state of Eome de- 
 clined and fell by reason of its own weight, and 
 to a certain extent this is true. It reached the 
 limit of its extension, and then it fell and became 
 something other. But the question arises, why 
 did it reach its limit ? why did it not transform 
 itself into something new, into something like 
 our modern national state ? Undoubtedly, as I 
 take it, because its citizens had lost the family 
 idea and mode of action. The Gauls, the Span- 
 iards, the Syrians, and the Greeks, did not feel 
 themselves to belong to one and the same family, 
 although they were all Eoman citizens. The 
 right of citizenship was a conventional thing, 
 something, indeed, that was established by law 
 and not by natural relationship, nor yet by any 
 spiritual bond. They never, themselves, had any 
 feeling of responsibility for others, nor did they 
 dream of others having a feeling of responsibility 
 for them. They never fulfilled any obligations 
 except those that were made necessary by the 
 invasion of a common enemy, and not always 
 then. The only factor in the world, when the 
 Koman Empire fell, that could have brought into 
 play the idea of brotherhood and the principle 
 of responsibility, was Christianity ; but this effect 
 of the teaching of Christ was only dimly per- 
 ceived, and the leaven of the new life of the 
 world had only just begun to work. But here 
 
94 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 we touch upon something that has made possible 
 the modern national state, and that makes man- 
 kind to hope for, and to look forward to, the es- 
 tablishment of the world-wide kingdom of Christ, 
 in which the Fatherhood of God shall be acknowl- 
 edged by a brotherhood of man. I must leave 
 the consideration of Christianity as a factor in 
 the development of the state to another lecture. 
 
LECTUEE III. 
 
 THE MODEEN STATE. 
 
 The modern state offers a great many con- 
 trasts to the ancient state, but in nothing is the 
 contrast so marked as in the fact that the state 
 is now regarded as having broken with the old- 
 world idea, that religion is the basis of society 
 and government. The civic and ecclesiastic 
 powers are becoming ever more and more sepa- 
 rated, and the state, while not considered to be 
 immoral, is often held by recent writers to be 
 non-moral^ and its many activities and interests 
 as independent of any religious sanction. The 
 Church of England is still the state church, but 
 it is evident that the identification of the church 
 with the state has become a matter of form, and 
 is a survival from the past, and will not long 
 continue in the present. In Eussia, it is true, 
 church and state, religion and civic life run along 
 concurrently, but the ideas of state and govern- 
 ment in Eussia belong rather to the old than the 
 new order of things. We cannot say .that re- 
 ligion is looked upon as having nothing to do 
 with law among the states of the "West ; indeed, 
 
 95 
 
96 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 the Christian religion is regarded as the last test 
 of all the laws of the peoples of Christendom. 
 IS'ot that Christianity is part of the law of the land 
 in the sense that courts must take notice of, and 
 base their judgments upon it, but its principles and 
 precepts, as they have become part of the mental 
 furniture of individual judges, have necessarily 
 been infused into thousands of opinions upon 
 which judgments are based. 
 
 The idea of the advisability of the separation 
 of the state from the church was many cen- 
 turies in developing, but since the constitution 
 of the United States has been formed, it has 
 steadily grown in favor, until now it is alto- 
 gether dominant, and a terminus ad quern of 
 most of the socialistic and juristic writers. The 
 sequence of the evolution of the secular idea 
 of the state has been from the theological, or 
 theistical, to the metaphysical, and thence on 
 to the positive stage. And yet we must perceive, 
 when we examine the current theory of the state, 
 that the old notion that religion is the basis of all 
 civic life has not been utterly abandoned ; it has, 
 for the most part, been simply shifted. God, or 
 the many gods, or the demi-gods, are not now 
 looked upon as the actual founders and preservers 
 of the state ; but for those who believe that man 
 was created in the Divine Image, there is always 
 the fundamental belief that the impulse to social 
 
THE 3I0DEEN STATE. 97 
 
 life and to the formation and development of the 
 state, comes from Him, and that He is therefore 
 concerned with all things pertaining to order and 
 government. 
 
 The second thing that marks the contrast be- 
 tween the modern and the ancient state is the 
 idea of sovereignty. It is a difficult task to de- 
 fine just what the modern writers mean by the 
 term ''sovereignty." Indeed, I have no hesita- 
 tion in affirming that if we could understand al- 
 ways what they mean, and that they would agree 
 upon a meaning and a philosophy of the term, 
 we would have a thorough and comprehensive 
 doctrine of the state. Etymologically "sover- 
 eign " denoted merely superiority, and hence in 
 a political sense simply monarch, or other superior 
 officer of a state ; and its correlative " sover- 
 eignty " the power vested in a sovereign. Both 
 terms are comparative, and there is nothing in 
 either of them to imply that the sovereign or 
 supreme power in the state is unlimited and ab- 
 solute ; all that is implied is that the sovereign is 
 superior to the other officers of the state, and his 
 power a superior power to theirs. Hence the 
 terms were originally applied not only to the 
 king or monarch, but to his feudatories, who each 
 were said to be sovereign in his own domains. 
 Afterward the term came to be restricted by the 
 French lawyers to the monarch, from whom it 
 
98 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 was transferred to the government and then to 
 the state as distinguished from the government.^ 
 But however the conception has grown, we 
 must come to the conclusion that the term sover- 
 eignty does not denote a mere collection of pow- 
 ers ; it does, indeed, include and necessitate the 
 possession of certain powers, such as, for exam- 
 ple, those of taxation, of contracting treaties, 
 maintaining armies and navies, etc. ; but its con- 
 tent is not exhausted by an enumeration of these 
 things. It is an entity of itself, an idea, if you 
 will, but one that has in it great power and em- 
 bodies the highest conception of political life. 
 Whether men to-day believe that sovereignty is 
 absolute and unlimited depends upon the fact 
 whether they consider that the state is all-pow- 
 erful. Is the state all-powerful, or has it limita- 
 tions that control it in its very nature ? It seems 
 to me that the state is limited, like as all facts or 
 things that we know in the creation of God. 
 Even if we give the state personality and endow 
 it with a supreme will, it does not make it om- 
 nipotent and its will irresistible. The will of the 
 state is supreme only within a given sphere. It 
 must be controlled by considerations of justice 
 and reason, as Guizot pointed out, or it ceases to be 
 will and becomes force. If you make will force, 
 you destroy personality. And herein we see the 
 
 1 (The Theory of the State, George H. Smith, p. 43, Xot€ E.) 
 
THE MODERN STATE. 99 
 
 keen insight and wisdom of Aristotle : " To in- 
 vest the law then with authority is, it seems, to 
 invest God and intelligence only : to invest a man 
 is to introduce a beast, as desire is something 
 bestial, and even the best of men in authority are 
 liable to be corrupted by anger." ^ 
 
 The ancients had no conception of sovereignty 
 such as we moderns have, as the supreme power 
 of the state that exists simply for the life of the 
 state and for the preservation of the rights of the 
 individual citizens. The city-states were abso- 
 lutely dominant in every way, as they embraced 
 the entire life of men in community, in religion 
 and law, in morals and art, in culture and sci- 
 ence. The Eomans, indeed, almost grasped the 
 idea of sovereignty in their conception of the 
 term " hnjperiiim^'' but " imjperiicm " has the 
 thought of command and dominion in it, rather 
 than supremacy and rule ; and its correlative is 
 " imperatory 
 
 The third distinguishing thing that makes the 
 difference between the ancient and the modern 
 state is that the government of the ancient state 
 was unlimited in the exercise of its powers, while 
 that of the modern state is restricted in many 
 ways. It is not correct to say that the ancient 
 states had no constitutions ; they certainly had 
 
 ^ (Politics, Book III., Chap, xvi., p. 154, Welldon's Transla- 
 tion.) 
 
100 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 none as we now understand the term constitution, 
 as the written, and sometimes unwritten, primary 
 laws of organization and government, which are 
 looked upon as possessing more dignity than any 
 other ; yet certainly the laws of Moses, of Lycur- 
 gus, of Solon, and of the Twelve Tables of Kome, 
 established certain things as fundamental, and as 
 we might properly say, constitutional. Still the 
 state was regarded by the ancients as superior to 
 any law. It was practically omnipotent and had 
 an absolute empire over its members. But it is 
 not so with us ; the power or sovereignty of the 
 state is regarded as subject to the constitutional 
 law of the same, and to have no lawful existence 
 apart from it. And the reason for this distinc- 
 tion is not far to seek. Man in ancient times had 
 only the rights of manhood as a citizen. Among 
 the Greeks no distinction was made between pub- 
 lic and private law. The Romans separated them 
 in principle, but in fact their private law remained 
 ever dependent upon the will of the state. There 
 was absolutely no recognition of the freedom of 
 the individual as against the state. But to-day 
 man has his rights as man first, and above all 
 other considerations. 
 
 Humanity is the point of departure of modern 
 law, and not the state. Private law is ever 
 distinguished from public law, and though it is 
 fostered by the state and often times formulated 
 
THE MODERN STATE. 101 
 
 and declared by its organs, it is not created by 
 the state. The freeman is not now absorbed 
 into the state. Although it can not be said 
 that he exists apart from it, for no man can 
 live in a stateless condition, the fact is he ex- 
 ists with, and is a part of, the state, and this 
 he is not for its ends, but for his own — that he 
 may be free. He has power to develop himself 
 and to exercise his manhood according to his 
 will, limited only by considerations of the gen- 
 eral good or well-being of all the people. It is 
 for these reasons that slavery cannot exist in the 
 modern state. That it has existed, we know, but 
 only as an anomaly and as a survival from an- 
 cient times. To-day, as every man has full 
 rights, all men are free, and no man ha§ any 
 property in any other. And hence it is, too, as 
 man is free, that labor is free, and has secured a 
 position of dignity that it never had in the an- 
 cient world. And with the freedom of all men 
 and the elevation of labor, has come the endow- 
 ment of all with political powers. In the ancient 
 state not one-half of its population were citizens. 
 The state to-day rests upon the broad basis of 
 humanity. As a rule, all men within its confines 
 are its citizens ; and all adult males, generally, 
 have political powers and the right of suffrage. 
 And this aggregate of humanity stands above all 
 promulgated law in that it has the power to 
 
102 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 change it, though, be it observed, it does not 
 stand above the consideration of reason and jus- 
 tice, for these things are integral parts of hu- 
 manity itself. Men do not exist for the state and 
 government, but the state and government exist 
 for them. 
 
 The fourth thing wherein the difference be- 
 tween the ancient and the modern state is mani- 
 fested is, that in ancient days public authority 
 was directly exercised by its holders, whereas, in 
 the modern state it is exercised vicariously by 
 the representatives of the people. In the ancient 
 republics the citizens appeared in great popular 
 assemblies and passed upon and decided all public 
 matters. In the modern constitutional states the 
 citizens choose from their number certain men to 
 act for them. And yet we must not understand 
 that there were no traces of representative gov- 
 ernment in the ancient state. The Senate of 
 Eome undoubtedly offered the model of many of 
 our modern representative chambers. It is true 
 that the people did not elect directly to it, but it 
 was made up largely of men who had been elected 
 by them to office and had served acceptably 
 therein. The rise and development of represent- 
 ative government is not hard to trace, for it is a 
 comparatively new thing in the life of mankind. 
 Neither the old village communities nor the city- 
 states knew of it, for they were based upon the 
 
THE 3I0DEBN STATE. 103 
 
 Opposite principle of direct and personal partici- 
 pation in the government. 
 
 To-day everywhere the representative prin- 
 ciple is the prevailing one, as well in the cities 
 and boroughs as in the national and provincial 
 legislatures. Yet there are places where the 
 old principle of direct and personal participa- 
 tion in government prevails, namely in the towns 
 and communal meetings, and in the referendum 
 and plehiscite. Indeed, one of the tendencies 
 of the present rule of democracy is the return 
 to the old ways as much as possible, for repre- 
 sentative government has in it much that is aris- 
 tocratic, which democracy fears. The origin of 
 the modern representative system has been shown 
 by Professor Adams to be found in the local 
 courts, the assemblies of the second grade, of the 
 early German states. The assemblies of the first 
 grade, the tribal or national councils, acted as 
 direct democracies in the election of kings and 
 chiefs, and in the pronouncing of decisions and 
 judgments. The local hundred and shire courts 
 were presided over by chiefs, it is true, who an- 
 nounced the verdict or judgment, but they de- 
 rived their validity from the decisions of the 
 assemblies, or, in later times, from those of a 
 number of their body appointed to act for the 
 whole. " These local courts, probably, as has been 
 suggested, because of the comparatively restricted 
 
104 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 character of the powers which they possessed, 
 were destined to a long life. On the continent 
 they lasted until the very end of the middle ages, 
 when they were generally overthrown by the in- 
 troduction of the Koman law, too highly scientific 
 for their simple methods. In England they lasted 
 until they furnished the model and probably the 
 suggestion for a far more important institution — 
 the House of Commons." ^ 
 
 The extension of representative government 
 does not concern us here, as it is a matter of gen- 
 eral history ; but it is noteworthy for us who are 
 citizens of the United States, that as representa- 
 tive monarchy developed in England, representa- 
 tive democracy has become fully established in 
 North America. The English colonists of New 
 England and Virginia, and the Dutch of New 
 York, brought from their old homes the love 
 of self-government, liberty and legality. They 
 brought also a faith in the honesty of humanity 
 and a belief that the common and mutual inter- 
 ests of all could be trusted to chosen representa- 
 tives who should act for all. There is no doubt 
 that the representative assemblies of the colonies 
 arose greatly out of the long distances that ex- 
 isted between the planters and farmers, yet the 
 principle of representation was a part of the 
 
 ' (Civilization During the Middle Ages, George Burton 
 Adams, Chap. v. p. 96.) 
 
THE MODERN STATE. 105 
 
 common stock of their political knowledge, and 
 was put into effect naturally. It was because 
 this principle was a part of their whole mental 
 make-up that the cry arose so easily of "no taxa- 
 tion without representation." One would sup- 
 pose, in reading the history of the American 
 Eevolution, that this cry was as old as govern- 
 ment itself, whereas it was a comparatively new 
 thing among the children of men. 
 
 The fifth and last thing that we will notice, 
 wherein the difference between the ancient and 
 the modern state is shown, is, that, whereas the 
 ancient state felt itself to be limited externally 
 only by the power of resistance of other states, 
 the modern state recognizes that there is an inter- 
 national law acting in limiting its dominion, and 
 as a principle of conduct in its relation to other 
 states. International law has become the shield 
 and protection of all the states of western civili- 
 zation, rejecting imperatively the dominion of 
 one state over any other which does not desire to 
 submit to it. Rome pursued relentlessly the do- 
 minion of the world as her natural privilege, and 
 though she made an advance upon the idea of 
 conquest that prevailed in the world before her 
 in the finding of a jus gentium^ she never looked 
 upon other peoples as having rights of existence 
 as against herself. The idea of the right of con- 
 quest was revamped in the beginning of the cen- 
 
106 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 tury by J^apoleon and the French in Europe, and 
 the Germans have more recently shown a leaning 
 towards it ; still the idea of the right of dominion 
 of one state over another and of the making of 
 independent states into dependents and tribu- 
 taries has faded away among the nations of our 
 western civilization, except in their dealings with 
 the lower races of mankind. And thus it is that 
 we see that although Eussia and England and 
 the other European nations may parcel out the 
 moribund Empire of China, and the United States 
 may buy the " sovereignty " of the Philippine 
 Islands, and subjugate their inhabitants with im- 
 punity, a Charles the Bold would not be suffered 
 to attack Switzerland to-day, nor a Philip 11. the 
 Netherlands. All the great powers would inter- 
 fere and put down such actions as against the 
 common policy of Europe. 
 
 The source or origin of international law is to 
 be found in the^W gentium of Eome, which law 
 or body of laws arose out of the fact that ancient 
 Rome was a place of refuge and a centre of ac- 
 tivity of the many neighboring peoples, and, as 
 the jios civile of Pome could not be applied to 
 any but citizens of that city, there came a neces- 
 sity for finding some rules and customs that were 
 common to Rome and these outside and foreign 
 peoples. Hence grew the jus gentium, or the 
 law that is common to nations. " Jus gentium 
 
THE MODERN STATE, 107 
 
 was, in fact the sum of the common ingredients 
 in the customs of the old Italian tribes, for they 
 were all the nations whom the Komans had the 
 means of observing, and who sent successive 
 swarms of immigrants to Eoman soil." ^ It is not 
 necessary here to point out how the jus gentium 
 under the influence of the Stoic philosophers and 
 jurists became closely identified with the law of 
 nature, nor how the law of nature, in the thought 
 of the schoolmen, became part of the eternal law 
 of God. It was after ih.QJus gentium had passed 
 through and had been developed by these ideas 
 that it came into the hands of Grotius and 
 Hobbes, and received a scientific treatment. By 
 these the natural and divine laws were separated, 
 and nature was looked upon as providing rules 
 for the conduct of man, by reason of his very 
 nature. Then by a logical extension, but a mis- 
 translation, /t^^ gentium was made to mean the 
 law between nations, and thus a fictitious validity 
 was given it, which went far toward securing its 
 recognition at the hands of sovereign rulers who 
 had already accepted the idea of natural law 
 binding upon men, and of natural rights secured 
 to them by natural law. 
 
 It is to be noted that one of the great distin- 
 guishing facts that marks the difference between 
 the ancient and modern life of the race is the 
 
 • (Maine, Ancient Law, Chap, iii., p. 47.) 
 
108 TEE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 ever increasing internationality of interests. The 
 principles of international comity and conduct 
 that are generally accepted by all civilized peo- 
 ples to-day constitute a body of law that is con- 
 siderable in extent, and that is constantly grow- 
 ing in bulk and importance. States are united 
 now by treaties, not simply for the purposes of 
 military and naval offence and defence, but for 
 the regulation and control of common political 
 and economic interests. In many cases joint ad- 
 ministrative organs have been established, and 
 international commissions for the regulation of 
 the navigation of rivers and canals, for the pres- 
 ervation and control of fisheries, and for the 
 proper conduct of postal, telegraph and railway 
 services, are constantly in session. The state 
 undertakes to-day to protect its citizens beyond 
 its own borders, and, with the assistance of 
 friendly powers, to bring back its criminals to 
 justice. And when it fears that justice cannot 
 be had, that is, among barbarous and semi-civi- 
 lized peoples, it asserts the right of its consular 
 agents to exercise judicial and administrative 
 functions, which right is secured by definite 
 treaties. The Peace Conference summoned by 
 invitation of the Tzar at The Hague, was a great 
 step in advance, taken to bring all the external 
 affairs of the nations under definite rules and to 
 make the international interests of each the in- 
 
THE MODERN STATE. 109 
 
 terest of all. The plan for arbitration set forth 
 by it gives us an additional reason to look for- 
 ward to the day to which the noblest minds of 
 Christendom have aspired : 
 
 " Till the war drum throbs no longer, and the battle flags are 
 furl'd, 
 In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world." 
 
 It seems, when we compare the ancient and 
 the modern ideas of the state, that the differ- 
 ences between them are numerous and decided. 
 In fact, the states of the old and of the new 
 world have so little in common, that they appear 
 to belong to other and different dispensations of 
 Providence. It may be said literally that the 
 one thing in common that they have is human 
 nature, and because of this, and this alone, the 
 arts that Greece developed, the law that Kome 
 perfected, the morality that the Jews strove to 
 attain, are as true and as basal to-day as in the 
 past. Of course, it is understood there has been 
 and there can be, no state without organiza- 
 tion, whether definite or indefinite ; and for the 
 organization of a state there must have been — 
 there must always be — the three great powers, 
 the judicial, the executive and the legislative, no 
 matter whether they be exercised by the same 
 or by different heads or bodies. 
 
 Another thing we must remark when we con- 
 
110 THE STATE AND TEE CHURCH. 
 
 sider and compare the ancient and the modern 
 state is that, whereas, in ancient times the origins 
 of states are shrouded and obscured by igno- 
 rance or mythological tradition, the beginnings 
 of all the states of our western civilization can 
 be traced with absolute certainty. But before 
 we seek to trace the rise of the modern state, let 
 us keep well in mind the difference between a 
 new state and a new government. It is gener- 
 ally proclaimed in these days of rising democracy 
 that a new state can come into existence at any 
 time by and through the will of the people. A 
 national or common feeling, it is said, must exist, 
 but granted that there be a national or common 
 feeling, a national or common will will arise of 
 necessity. This we all perceive ; but we per- 
 ceive something more, that this national or com- 
 mon will is a different thing from the sum of the 
 particular wills of all the citizens ; and that it 
 may be something more or something less than 
 the sum of the wills of the majority. And this 
 Kousseau himself recognized. " There is often a 
 great deal of difference between the will of all 
 and the general will. The last has regard only 
 for the common interest ; the other for private 
 interest, and is only the sum of particular wills." ^ 
 How the national or common will comes into 
 existence is the vital question. Kousseau goes on 
 
 * iContrat Social, Liv. II., Chap, iii.) 
 
THE 310 BERN STATE. Ill 
 
 to say : " Take from the particular wills the more 
 or less which neutralize themselves, and their re- 
 mains for the sum of the differences the general 
 will." ^ But this is absurd. The common or gen- 
 eral will cannot be ascertained by any mathemat- 
 ical calculation ; it must be a unit in itself, other- 
 wise the state has no unity and no personality, 
 and personality is the distinguishing mark of the 
 state in both the scientific and the popular mind. 
 The true philosophy of the national or com- 
 mon will seems to me to be stated by Dr. Wil- 
 loughby. "In a political society every human 
 being may be regarded in a double aspect ; as an 
 independent individual endowed with freedom of 
 self-determination of action ; and as a citizen, or 
 member of the body politic in which he lives. 
 As a citizen he can never be considered apart 
 from the whole, of which he is an integral and 
 inseparable part. Nor, consequently, can his will 
 as such be separated from the General Will. It 
 is in this second capacity that he is related to 
 the State, and contributes by his will to the for- 
 mation of its sovereign will. And it is upon him 
 in this same capacity that the authority of the 
 State is exercised. He is coerced by the law, 
 not as a free autonomous person, but as a con- 
 stituent element of the authority that coerces 
 him. He is an integral and inseparable part of 
 '{Id.) 
 
112 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 the political body, and his will cannot be sepa- 
 rated from its will." ^ 
 
 But why a man as a citizen cannot be con- 
 sidered apart from the whole of society in which 
 he lives, and why he is, ex necessitate^ an "in- 
 tegral and inseparable part " thereof, neither Dr. 
 Willoughby nor any of the modern secular 
 writers seek to discover and set forth. They 
 take us back to the old saying of Aristotle that 
 man is by nature a political animal, and some- 
 times they lay stress upon the fact which Maine 
 has shown by historical research that originally 
 men lived in families, and in communities that at 
 first resembled families. But this key to their 
 theories they refuse logically to apply. They 
 refuse to see the truth that the social instinct 
 or impulse of man is in the development of the 
 family life, and that a permanent family life is 
 his natural state, for without it there could be 
 no such thing as humanity. How closely the 
 family is interwoven with men's first ideas of the 
 state is shown by the late Professor Bluntschli in 
 his chapter on the " Family Kingship Among the 
 Greeks and Germans." He shows that the very 
 name of "king," among the Germans " Chim- 
 ing " or " Kun-ing,"*^ comes from " chun " or 
 " cliuni^^ family.^ Yet Bluntschli himself misses 
 
 1 Willoughby, The Nature of the State, Chap, vi., p. 125.) 
 '(The Theory of the State, Book VI., Chap, viii., p. 362.) 
 
THE MODERN STATE. 113 
 
 the very point he has made. He says in another 
 place, on "The Kelation of the State to the 
 Family:" "Ancients and moderns alike have 
 found in the family the pattern of the State. 
 The State, they say, is an extension of the family, 
 the head of the State being the father, the peo- 
 ple his children. This comparison is only true in 
 a limited sense ; it only applies to the patriarchal 
 State, not to the higher forms of the State which 
 are based on nationality or humanity." ^ 
 
 But " nationality," all writers agree, is a vary- 
 ing and fluctuant term, and some states are not 
 based upon nationality at all, if we use Blunt- 
 schli's definition ; ^ for example, the states of 
 Switzerland, and of the United States, and the 
 Empire of Austria ; and if we use our own gen- 
 erally accepted definition, a nation can exist only 
 subsequent to the state itself. 
 
 All states are based upon humanity, but though 
 the state be based upon humanity, it is not hu- 
 manity in the abstract, for there is no such thing ; 
 
 >(/(?., Book II., Chap, xix., p. 195.) 
 
 ""In English the word 'people,' like the French ^peuple,^ 
 implies the notion of a civilization, which the Germans (like 
 the old Eomans in the word ^natio ') express by Nation. The 
 political idea is expressed in English by ' Nation, ' and in Ger- 
 man by Volk. Etymology is in favor of German usage, for the 
 word natio ( from nasci) points to birth and race, Volk and 
 populus rather to the public life of a State (TroAfj)." (Jd, 
 Book II., Chap, ii., p. 86.) 
 
114 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 nor can it be upon humanity in the individual, 
 else would Hobbes' or Kousseau's theories hold 
 true. ]N'o, the state is based upon humanity in 
 families, and it is only a well-organized state as 
 it takes cognizance of this truth. The fact that 
 the tie of the family is marriage does not militate 
 against this, for the result of marriage is brother- 
 hood. Brotherhood is the ideal of every people, 
 of all humanity. The great truth promulgated 
 by St. Paul has been accepted to-day by all 
 mankind, that God " made of one every nation 
 of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth." 
 That the state has no necessary relation to the 
 soil, as Bluntschli and many others aver, and can 
 exist apart from it, is shown by the fact that the 
 Hebrew state existed while it was yet in the years 
 of its pilgrimage, and so did the Frankish and 
 Burgundian and other Germanic states, while as 
 yet the people had no fixed domiciles. It was 
 the feudal system which made the state to be 
 conterminous with and based upon land. The 
 kings of the Franks became kings of France ; 
 but with the destruction of this system the king 
 or emperor of Finance became king or emperor 
 of the French, and thus the head of the state 
 took his rightful place, not as the lord and master 
 of the land and of its inhabitants, but as the 
 father and protector of the people who happened 
 to live under his authority and rule on the land. 
 
THE MODERN STATE. 115 
 
 And this same change has been, and is in process 
 of becoming among the other peoples of the 
 world. The king of the upper half of the old 
 IsTetherlands is not the king of Belgium, but of 
 the Belgians, and there is no king of Greece, but 
 of the Hellenes. It is worthy of remark also in 
 this connection that when the present German 
 Empire was established, the title conferred by 
 the assembled princes at Versailles upon the king 
 of Prussia, was not Emperor of Germany but 
 German Emperor. It is true that the Queen of 
 Great Britain and Ireland is still styled Queen 
 of the land, but every one knows that the term 
 "queen" in Great Britain stands for the term 
 " state," and that her power has passed to the 
 House of Commons, which has, and which exer- 
 cises, an absolutely paternal power over all the 
 interests and peoples of the realm. One of the 
 most striking things in regard to the state and 
 government of that great empire in these times 
 is the contrast that is offered by observing that 
 one day there will be a bill before Parliament 
 for the protection of a British subject in some 
 far-off island of the Pacific, the next a bill for 
 building some war ships for coast defence, the 
 next a bill for the regulation of the affairs of 
 government of millions of subjects in India. 
 
 Again, I desire to draw attention to the fact 
 that the contention that Professor Bluntschli and 
 
116 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 his school make, that the state is political and that 
 the family is not, has no bearing upon the matter. 
 He says that the family and the state differ in char- 
 acter, the head of the family is the father whose 
 authority " is essentially a guardianship " ( Yo7'- 
 mimdschaft) while " in the nation the different 
 classes have interests apart from those of the 
 prince, their head " ; that "the government of the 
 State is political." ^ After all, what do we mean by 
 the term "• political " ? We know that it comes 
 from the word 7z6Xi<i and that the -noXi? was the city- 
 state of the Greeks. " Politic " or " politics " is the 
 science that pertains to the order and government 
 of the state and its life and conduct, although, 
 be it observed, it is sometimes held by non-Gre- 
 cian writers to mean only the last half of this 
 definition, and '^ Staatsrechf^^ or public law, to 
 mean the first half. " Political " is the adjective 
 of " politic." 
 
 We speak to-day generally of Political Science 
 and of Social Science : By Social Science we mean 
 the ascertainment of the laws and customs and 
 usages that govern men in the aggregate, living 
 together and united by mutual interests and re- 
 lationships. By Political Science we mean the 
 ascertainment of the laws and customs and usages 
 that govern men organized in some form of gov- 
 ernment or order. The body politic may be de- 
 
 1 {Id. Book II., Chap, xix., p. 196.) 
 
THE MODERN STATE. 117 
 
 fined as the organized social body. But has the 
 family no sociological and political features ? I 
 submit that it has. Human society can be said 
 to exist only when the social condition is so far 
 developed that social relations exist, not only ob- 
 jectively as physical facts, but subjectively also 
 in the thought and feeling and purpose of its as- 
 sociated members. It is the subjective fact that 
 differentiates the human from animal communi- 
 ties, that is, the human family from the family 
 of brutes. There is, there must be, a subjective 
 thought, feeling and purpose in every family, 
 otherwise the family, in spite of its objective 
 side, becomes a mere aggregation of accidental 
 physical relationships. Look at the history of 
 the Hebrews ; it is not so much the objective 
 side of their life as the subjective that has held, 
 yes, that does hold, that great people together. 
 
 But has the family no political side? Cer- 
 tainly. The gentes of Kome had, and so has 
 every individual family had that has arisen to 
 greatness since the world began. There is ex 
 necessitate an organization in the family life, 
 there is a head, and the father is that head. We 
 must admit, of course, that the family has only 
 an embryonic organization; it is not highly 
 organized like the state, still it will not do to 
 say that it has no trace of the political in it, 
 and therefore that it could not have been the 
 
118 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 source of the state and its permanent type and 
 symbol.^ 
 
 The difference between a new state and a new 
 government is not easy to determine, for no 
 principle can be stated that will invariably mark 
 it. We know, for instance, that a new state was 
 made on the North American continent after the 
 war of the colonies with Great Britain, but we 
 are not sure whether the constitution of the 
 Union, adopted in the year 1787, created a new 
 state or a new government for the former Con- 
 federation. It is probable that a new state was 
 created, but the question was not settled until at 
 the close of the war of the rebellion, when it was 
 decided that the sovereignty of the different 
 states of the Union never had any existence as 
 against that of the United States. The doctrine 
 of *' state sovereignty " has since passed into ob- 
 livion. On the other hand, we do know that, 
 when the German Empire was formed in the 
 year 1871, a new state arose into existence out 
 of the unification of the former members of the 
 old Confederation with the South German states. 
 We see also that the men of 1870 and 1871 in- 
 tended to create a new empire and not to revive 
 
 ' That there was very little family life in the Spartan state 
 does not disturb us ; that state was anomalous, and it never 
 exhibited the best points of a political life ; it was merely a 
 fighting machine. 
 
THE MODERN STATE. 119 
 
 "the Holy Eoman Empire of the German peo- 
 ple." Again, we perceive that neAv states have 
 arisen, and have passed away, in Italy with each 
 successive generation for many hundred years ; 
 but that only new governments have come into 
 existence in Spain since the days of the unity of 
 that kingdom under Ferdinand and Isabella. 
 The question cannot be stated philosophically ; 
 it must be looked at historically and a judgment 
 given after all the facts have been taken into 
 consideration. The nearest approach to a prin- 
 ciple of determination is the question : has a new 
 sovereignty come into existence out of the union 
 or subjection of older sovereignties, or it may be, 
 out of entirely new elements of political life ? 
 
 It is impossible for us to picture in a short 
 sketch the rise of all, or of any, of the pres- 
 ent states of Christendom. It could be done, 
 though not as easily as that of the State of 
 Watauga, which Mr. Koosevelt^ has so graphic- 
 ally described. But the making of England 
 and the beginnings of E'eAV England have each 
 been drawn by competent and loving hands. 
 What I desire is to study with you, for the re- 
 maining time I have, the origin of all the states 
 of our western civilization collectively : To go 
 back, that is, to the breaking up of the Roman 
 Empire and the rise of the so-called mediaeval 
 
 » (The Winning of the West, Vol. I., Chap, vii., p. 184, et seq.) 
 
120 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 states. The Eoman Empire, as you know, em- 
 braced within its dominion all of the ancient 
 sources of our political life, the Greeks and the 
 Hebrews, as well as the Romans themselves. 
 These last created an empire that was conter- 
 minous with the known civilization of the world, 
 that seemed to have within it the elements of 
 eternity. It is not necessary to ascertain the 
 causes which produced the decline and fall of the 
 Empire and of the Romanized states which suc- 
 ceeded it; we are familiar with them all to a 
 greater or less degree ; it is sufficient to say that 
 they were social rather than political, for the 
 political power of Rome was undoubtedly better 
 organized and better administered in the later, 
 than in the earlier days of the Empire ; nor were 
 there wanting, even to the end, many brave and 
 noble hearts to lead the armies to the defence of 
 the boundaries of Rome. But for the most part 
 the strength of the classical peoples had been 
 sapped by indulgence and excesses, by a profli- 
 gacy and a wantonness, to which only the pen 
 of a Farrar or of a Sienkiewicz can do justice. 
 Progress ceased in the western world after the 
 time of Constantine, and all the vast energy of 
 the early Romans died. Civilization was brought 
 up to a certain point, but beyond it neither Rome 
 nor the Romanized nations seemed to have been 
 able to carry it. We are not to understand that 
 
TEE MODERN STATE. 121 
 
 there was no chance of recovery for the Roman 
 world ; there was a leaven at work which would 
 undoubtedly have regenerated the Western, as 
 it did the Eastern Empire, but the opportunity 
 was not afforded it ; I mean, of course, the 
 leaven of Christianity. The Germans, who had 
 been hammering at the gates on the Rhine and 
 Danube ever since the days of the early Caesars, 
 watching for an unguarded moment to rush in 
 and sack and destroy, now attacked the Empire 
 with greater frequency and boldness, using the 
 very discipline that they had learned in their 
 conflicts with Rome eventually to overcome her 
 power. 
 
 The year a. d. 476 is generally fixed as the 
 date that marks the close of ancient history, and 
 the knell of the ancient state. It was in that 
 year that Odoacer extinguished the title and 
 office of Emperor of the West, and assuming the 
 title of Patrician, ruled over Italy, nominally as 
 vicar of the Eastern Emperor, but in reality as a 
 German king. At this time all the provinces of 
 the West were occupied or about to be occupied by 
 Teutonic chieftains, some faintly acknowledging 
 the supremacy of the empire, others repudiating 
 any and all dependence upon it. With the break- 
 ing up of the Empire of the West, the east and the 
 west parted company, and the development of 
 our so-called western civilization began. Out of 
 
122 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 this civilization have grown the states which we 
 now see in the world. There are no states to- 
 day that were in existence so long an age ago, 
 but there are many which run back and rest upon 
 some of the foundations of those which were then 
 laid. Indeed, all of the modern states of the 
 west have for their beginning the forces and 
 things which were existent when the great uni- 
 versal city-state of antiquity ceased to exist. 
 
 What are these forces and things ? The ele- 
 mental ones are four in number : the forms of 
 government and the body of law of the old 
 world-empire; the arts and culture that it had 
 acquired from Greece ; the new blood and inde- 
 pendent ideas of the invading Germanic peoples ; 
 and the inspiring influence and powerful ideals 
 of Christianity. Let me say a word in regard to 
 the first three of these chief forces and things. 
 Of the last, of Christianity as an inspiring in- 
 fluence and impelling power of our modern civi- 
 lization, I shall speak later on. 
 
 Kome, it has often been remarked, was defi- 
 cient in comparison with Greece, on the intel- 
 lectual and artistic sides of life. We could not 
 afford to be without the Latin literature, some of 
 it is of the highest order ; yet on the whole, the 
 literature of Eome lacks originality and power. 
 And the same thing can be said of Eoman art 
 an(J science and philosophy. All the Romans 
 
THE MODERN STATE. 123 
 
 who achieved distinction in these departments 
 were students of the Greeks. They annotated, 
 expounded and put in practice the things that 
 the Greeks taught them. The great work of 
 Rome for civilization was political and legal. 
 The world had no conception of an universal 
 civil law until Eome hammered out her magnifi- 
 cent system. It is to be observed that the Ro- 
 mans themselves, in the beginning, had no idea 
 of a civil law which could be useful for others 
 than Romans, that is, patricians ; but gradually, 
 through their finding of a jus gentium, and the 
 confounding of it with the jus naturale of phi- 
 losophy, their civil law became more and more 
 humane, until at last, by the influence of the 
 leges, the edicts of the Praetors, and the phi- 
 losophy of the Stoics, it grew to be not only the 
 most comprehensive, but the one body of civil 
 law that the world knew. It is remarkable, as 
 Sir Henry Maine observes, that the most cele- 
 brated system of jurisprudence known to the 
 world, began and ended with a code. 
 
 It is not necessary for us to glance at the laws 
 of Rome, as expressed in the Twelve Decemviral 
 Tables ; the statutes of those old days would be 
 of no greater significance than those of any other 
 Latin or Grecian city, were it not for their af- 
 ter development in the expansion of the people 
 and power of Rome. It is the resjponsa j^ruden- 
 
124 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 ti'um, and the treatises of the great Eoman 
 lawyers and jurisconsults, which enlarged and de- 
 veloped the body of the law along the lines, and 
 by the means, which I have already indicated. 
 Some of the results of these respoTisa and com- 
 mentaries were put into special leges^ some were 
 embodied in the perpetual edict of the Praetors, 
 and some were to be found only in institutes 
 and treatises for students. For a long number 
 of years the Eoman law was in a chaotic condi- 
 tion, as the English common law is now ; but 
 finally, under Justinian, the w^hole body of law, 
 both of civil law and of equity, was reformed, 
 and these two great branches of jurisprudence 
 were fused into one body, the Corpus Juris 
 Civilis. It is the Corpus Juris Civilis which is 
 the basis of the civil law of Europe to-day. It 
 was the recovery of the Pandects, and the study 
 and application of the rules and principles 
 therein found, in the University of Bologna in 
 the twelfth century, that gave the impetus to 
 the development of law and of the science of 
 jurisprudence and government that made pos- 
 sible the growth and development of the modern 
 aCates of Europe. 
 
 ( I cannot stop now to point out the fact that it 
 was Eome that taught the world how to govern 
 the world. Full of abuses, indeed, was the Eo- 
 man imperial system of the government of dio- 
 
TEE MODERN STATE, 125 
 
 ceses and provinces, of cities and parishes, but its 
 system became the system of the church, and its 
 officers the pattern of the officers of the church, 
 and the church was the instructor of the barbaric 
 kingdoms which were erected upon the remnants 
 of the empire. Theodoric continued in opera- 
 tion in the Ostrogothic kingdom of Italy not 
 only the Eoman law but the judicial tribunals 
 and the administrative system of Kome. And 
 Clovis, when he founded the kingdom of the 
 Franks, brought the Komans and the Germans 
 together upon equal terms, using the institutions 
 and systems of both as he found one or the other 
 convenient for his government. Charlemagne 
 continued in the same way and established his 
 empire on the old lines, endeavoring to keep 
 both NJihe institutions and the traditions of 
 Eome. ] 
 
 I have spoken of the fact that the arts and 
 culture of Greece were adopted by the Eomans, 
 and became the dominant and only form in the 
 civilization of the ancient world. It would take 
 a treatise to show this fully, but it is not neces- 
 sary ; the work of the Greeks in literature and 
 in art is too well understood to need more than 
 a passing notice. Greek thought, it is conceded, 
 lies at the foundation of all modern speculation, 
 and Aristotle and Plato are still revered as the 
 great masters of the educated. All the problems 
 
12(5 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 of life were directly or indirectly attacked by 
 the Greeks, and their varying solutions were 
 formulated before the close of their intellectual 
 activity in many splendid systems of philosophy. 
 These systems of thought of the Greeks furnished 
 the Komans with their philosophical beliefs, and 
 affected deeply the speculative theology of the 
 Christian church ; indeed, without them and the 
 finely wrought language of Greece, the JN'icene 
 Creed and many Christian dogmas which we 
 now have would not have been formulated, as 
 there would have existed no proper means of ex- 
 pressing them. 
 
 The science of the Greeks did not in any way 
 equal their philosophy. Aristotle, it is true, 
 pointed out the right way to knowledge, the way 
 that Lord Bacon afterward showed more clearly ; 
 but the Greeks preferred to speculate rather than 
 to investigate. The art and the poetry of Greece, 
 on the other hand, have been as permanent as its 
 philosophy. At no time and under no circum- 
 stances have the conception of the beautiful, and 
 the power of the expression of truth and beauty 
 in the world of nature and men, been so great 
 and so marvelous as it was in Athens in the time 
 of Pericles. ^' In art we may maintain without 
 the smallest fear of contradiction," says Dr. Ma- 
 haffy, " that the modern world, with all its inven- 
 tions, has not even approached the perfection of 
 
THE MODERN STATE. 127 
 
 this golden age." ^ The buildings on the Acrop- 
 olis were certainly the most beautiful and per- 
 fect in the world. 
 
 And what shall we say of the poetry of Greece, 
 of the epic, lyric and tragic muse, whose songs 
 have never ceased to be heard in the ears of men ? 
 The poetry and the art of Greece seem to have 
 had very little to do with the foundation and de- 
 velopment of the state. They certainly had no 
 direct bearing upon the political side of man's 
 life, but indirectly they have exercised an im- 
 mense influence, for they go to make up the sweet 
 and pleasant side of the social life of mankind, 
 out of which, and because of which, the political 
 is so finely organized. As I have already said, 
 Kome had no art and no philosophy and but lit- 
 tle culture of her own ; she borrowed and adapted 
 those of her more highly gifted neighbor. 
 
 Of the third great factor in the building up of 
 the modern state, of the Teutonic peoples, I must 
 speak at greater length. We have ceased to re- 
 gard the " barbarians who broke down the Em- 
 pire as constitutional noblemen traveling incog- 
 nito,"^ and have grown a little sceptical of 
 the assurance that the German writers so con- 
 stantly give us that men's first ideas of constitu- 
 tional freedom arose in the depths of the dark 
 
 1 (A Survey of Greek Civilization, Chap, v., p. 149.) 
 
 ■^ (Nash, Genesis of the Social Conscience, Chap, vi., p. 185.) 
 
128 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 forests of their fatherland, and that they have 
 developed by means of their own inherent strength 
 into the splendid civil liberty of our age. The 
 fact is, as we can observe everywhere, savage and 
 uncivilized peoples are apt to be tenacious of their 
 freedom, and to have many customs and institu- 
 tions which establish and protect it ; it was so in 
 an especial way with the Korth American In- 
 dians ; still, we must not ignore that the iron rule 
 of Rome and the almost universal prevalence of 
 slavery had well-nigh extinguished the idea of 
 personal liberty in the ancient world, and that 
 the high Teutonic ideals of personal independ- 
 ence, and of the value of man, as compared with 
 the state, have been of inestimable benefit in the 
 remodeling of society and in the rebuilding of the 
 state and government. Somewhere, at some 
 time, between the ancient days and the present, 
 the thought of the relation of men to the state 
 has become transformed. In ancient days the 
 state was all-in-all, and men existed but for its 
 welfare ; to-day man is of the first importance, 
 and the state exists for the good of all. In the 
 philosophy of Eousseau it is said that the state 
 now exists for the benefit of the individual, but 
 as has already been shown, mankind does not live 
 as units, but as members of the family, and in 
 family relations. It will not do to say that the 
 German ideals of freedom wholly produced the 
 
THE MODERN STATE. 129 
 
 change we have noted. Christianity had an 
 equal, if not a greater, influence in such produc- 
 tion. We must say that Christianity and the 
 Germanic ideals worked together to this great 
 end. The feeling was Germanic, the force was 
 Christian. 
 
 The great contribution of the Teutonic peoples 
 to the state was the institutions out of which 
 arose the forms of constitutional government. 
 The assemblies of the Koman Kepublic gradually 
 died away; and, besides, these assemblies were 
 only of a city, and not of a province or of a king- 
 dom, and were never representative in character. 
 The political arrangement of the primitive Ger- 
 mans as drawn by Tacitus, were those of the 
 primitive Greeks as shown by Homer, and were 
 closely allied ; but while the classical nations, start- 
 ing from the same beginning, failed to create en- 
 during free governments and ended in an uni- 
 versal despotism, the Teutonic peoples, or better, 
 the nations which gained an infusion of Teutonic 
 blood, fought their way through an era of abso- 
 lute monarchy, and passed on to the stage of con- 
 stitutional government and liberty. The work 
 of Christianity for the state in this great devel- 
 opment has been, as I believe, ignored ; it will be 
 my purpose to show how much it has done for 
 the state in my next lecture. But one thing of 
 the Germans can be justly said ; their institutions 
 
130 THE STATE AND TEE CHURCH. 
 
 formed the moulds through which the newer and 
 better organization of the state has passed. 
 After all, ideas are old. The Greeks and the 
 Romans had thought out and put into practice 
 in one way or another most of the political no- 
 tions we now have. What the world needed at 
 the breaking up of the Empire and the influx of 
 the Germans into the then civilized world, was a 
 new motive and some new blood. Christianity 
 furnished the motive, the Germans the blood. 
 Their greatest contribution to the development 
 of the modern state was themselves. 
 
LECTUEE lY. 
 
 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 We have seen in a previous lecture that the 
 ancient state was founded directly upon a reli- 
 gious basis, and that religious rites and ceremonies 
 were ever associated with the laws of the state 
 and with the rules of action of its many different 
 organs. The ancient state had no conception of 
 a dualism between civil and religious life such as 
 we have ; it had no idea whatsoever of a church 
 as distinct from the state. Keligion, or, perhaps 
 it would be better to say, the religious feeling of 
 the men of antiquity prescribed that the hearth, 
 which they held to be the centre of all worship, 
 should always have a priest. The house had a 
 hearth and a priest, who was always the father 
 of the family. The phratry had a hearth and a 
 priest, who was the phratriarch ; and the city had 
 a hearth and it had its supreme priest, who bore 
 the name king. Sometimes they gave other titles 
 to their king. As he was especially the priest of 
 the prytaneum or public hall of the city, the 
 Greeks called him pr3^tanis, and sometimes they 
 called him archon or ruler. Under the different 
 
 131 
 
132 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 names of prytanis, archon and king we see a per- 
 sonage who, whatever else his office may have 
 been, was above all the chief of public worship. 
 He kept up the fire, he oifered the sacrifice, he 
 pronounced the prayer and he presided at the reli- 
 gious repasts of the community.^ And so when 
 we find Agamemnon sacrificing for the whole 
 host, we are in no ways surprised, for we know 
 that the kingly and the priestly offices, among the 
 peoples of antiquity were originally one, and that 
 it was only gradually that they became separated, 
 as necessity required, or as certain kingly families 
 became reduced to the ranks of the people, who, 
 losing their rights of ruling, yet retained their 
 rights of sacrificing, possessing the secrets of cer- 
 emony and ritual. 
 
 In Koman history we find the kingly and the 
 priestly offices combined in Romulus, the founder 
 of the city ; and we see them united in the most 
 significant way in Numa, the second ruler, who 
 was more priest than king. It was Kuma who 
 established and ordered the religious ceremonies 
 of the growing state. He appointed many to 
 minister in sacred things, such as the pontiffs, 
 who were to see that all things relating to the 
 gods were duly observed by all ; the augurs, who 
 taught men the pleasure of the gods concerning 
 
 '(De Coulanges, The Ancient City, Book III., Chap, ix., p. 
 231.) 
 
THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 133 
 
 things to come ; and the flamens, who ministered 
 in the temple. Livy tells us that he did these 
 things because he foresaw that his successors 
 would often have wars to maintain and would 
 not be able to take care of the sacrifices. But 
 whatever was his reason, we see that the Koman 
 priesthood was an emanation from primitive roy- 
 alty, and we see also why it was that the noblest 
 of the Eomans coveted the position of Pontifex 
 Maximus^ the head of the college of the pontiffs. 
 During the empire the functions of Pontifex 
 Maximus were discharged by the emperors, who 
 reserved to themselves the title. It is a curiosity 
 of history that the name survived even the estab- 
 lishment of Christianity as a state religion. After 
 it was dropped by the emperors it was taken up 
 by the popes. 
 
 In the distinctively theocratic state of Judah, 
 as I have shown, the priestly and the kingly 
 offices were separated, except in later years under 
 the Maccabean kings. The priestly office was 
 the first to be established and the last to be de- 
 stroyed ; yet, though there was this separation in 
 the offices of the commonwealth of Judah, we 
 must not understand that there was any antago- 
 nism between them, such as we see arise between 
 the civil and the priestly powers in the middle 
 ages. There was no secular side to the life of 
 the Jewish people whatsoever; all was sacred, 
 
134 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 and the king regarded himself as much the min- 
 ister of Jehovah as did the High-Priest, each 1;^ 
 his own sphere of action. Of course, as we know, 
 differences sometimes arose, but this was when 
 certain kings or certain priests were not true to 
 the Law and the genius of Israel ; who were, in 
 fact, apostates from the commonwealth of Jeho- 
 vah. The status of religion and government in 
 the kingdom of Judah was analogous to that of 
 the church and state in England from the time of 
 the Eeformation to our day. The church in Eng- 
 land, or as it is termed specifically, '* the Church 
 of England as by law established," is older than 
 the kingdom, and the office of the Archbishop of 
 Canterbury antedates that of the king by several 
 centuries ; yet his power is not superior to, but 
 rather is it subservient to the royal power, as the 
 power of the Aaronic priesthood became subserv- 
 ient to that of the house of David. 
 
 Marcus Yarro, whom Cicero calls without any 
 doubt the most learned of the Komans, divided 
 the theology of the classical peoples into three 
 kinds, namely, the mythical, the physical and the 
 civil. He says : " They call that kind mythical 
 which the poets chiefly use ; physical, that which 
 the philosophers use ; civil, that which the peo- 
 ple use." ^ "We have not time to dwell upon the 
 
 1 (St. Augustine, The City of God, Book VI., Sec. 5, p. 238, 
 Dods' Translation.) 
 
THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 135 
 
 mythical and the physical, but let us look at the 
 civil theology of Yarro. " The third kind," says 
 he, " is that which citizens in cities, and especially 
 the priests, ought to know and to administer. 
 From it is to be known what god each one may suit- 
 ably worship, what sacred rites and sacrifices each 
 one may suitably perform." ^ And this distinction 
 we must always keep in mind when we think of 
 the religion or religions of Greece and Kome. The 
 poets were continually imagining things about 
 the gods, and most of their imaginings were evil, 
 so evil, indeed, that Plato wanted to banish the 
 poets from his ideal republic. The philosophers 
 were ever trying to find analogies between nature 
 and human reason, which would answer the long- 
 ings of men's hearts for the divine ; some of 
 which findings went far to anticipate the truths 
 revealed by Christ concerning the Godhead. The 
 civil authorities and the priests accepted the tra- 
 ditions of the past and cared for and cultivated 
 the civil rites and ceremonies, which constituted 
 the religion of the state, and were held to pre- 
 serve its life, and to secure its welfare. It is dif- 
 ficult, of course, to distinguish between these 
 three kinds of theologies, and especially between 
 the mythical and the civil, as St. Augustine him- 
 self has so graphically pointed out ; but the dis- 
 tinction existed, and was a part of the religious 
 
 '(i<^., p. 240.) 
 
136 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 consciousness of the peoples of Greece and Eome ; 
 but mark, it was precisely on account of the con- 
 fusion between the mythical and the civil, that 
 the civil authorities were willing to harbor every 
 new kind of cultus or religion ; that Athens set 
 up an altar to the (or an) Unknown God, and 
 that Kome admitted any god to her Pantheon 
 which did not immediately seek to subvert and 
 overthrow the standing of the others. 
 
 It would be impossible here to tell the state of 
 religion, or better, the status of the religions of 
 Eome at the time of the founding of the church 
 of Christ. There was the old civil religion which 
 was ordered by l^uma and was bound up with 
 the life of the city-state, and there were an hun- 
 dred different others, some that had come from 
 Greece (though these were similar to the myth- 
 ical rites that had grown up indigenously in 
 Kome), others that had come from Egypt and 
 the orient, that had no relation or connection 
 whatever with classical thought. The worship 
 of Isis was very popular, but that of Mithra was 
 more so, and even threatened at one time to be- 
 come a rival of Christianity. And all these 
 different systems of religious belief and worship 
 of the empire were tolerant of one another, all, 
 of course, except the cultus of the Jews, which 
 could not and would not allow that any worship 
 other than that of the one, almighty, self -existent 
 
THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 137 
 
 God, their Jehovah, was right. And it was pre- 
 cisely because of this attitude of the Jews that 
 the devotees of the other gods and goddesses 
 hated them and combined against them and 
 persecuted them without mercy. 
 
 Christ came into the world, was born, as we 
 believe, of the Virgin Mary, of the tribe of 
 Judah, of the people of Abraham, and He was, 
 as we know, the supreme religious teacher of the 
 world. Let us first see whether we can find any 
 inevitable antagonism between the teachings of 
 Christ and the traditions of the Jews in regard 
 to the relations of religion and life to one another. 
 Then let us see why the Jewish church opposed 
 its Messiah and crucified Him ; and then let us 
 study how an antagonism arose between the re- 
 ligion and church of Christ and the religions and 
 government of the empire. 
 
 At the time when Christ came into the world 
 there was a decided breach between state and 
 church among the Jews. The power of govern- 
 ment, or, as we may say, the civil authority, was 
 vested in the Emperor and his lieutenants, and 
 the direction of religion, the ecclesiastical au- 
 thority, was vested in the High-Priest and the 
 Sanhedrim. What did Christ proclaim ? A new 
 method of worship ? A new form and manner 
 of government? Not precisely. Christ taught 
 that religion is not so much a matter of outward 
 
138 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 form and observance, but rather that it has to do 
 with the inner motive of men. Secondly, He 
 ') showed men whom they were to worship ; not a 
 ■ mass of gods and goddesses, mythical, physical 
 and civil, but one, the eternal Godhead ; the 
 universal Father, the omnipotent Saviour and 
 the unfailing Sanctifier of all who seek after 
 Him. Thirdly, He pointed out that He, the 
 Saviour of men, had come to establish a king- 
 dom, not of force by force, but of righteousness 
 by righteousness. The ancient pagan religions, 
 we must understand, had nothing whatever to 
 do with the morals of their devotees, strange as 
 it may seem, and all as incomprehensible as it is 
 to us since Christ taught the world. 
 
 The pagan religions were simply concerned with 
 securing the favor of this or that god or goddess, 
 or in propitiating this or that one because of some 
 misfortune or mischance that had come upon 
 men or the state. Men resorted to the philoso- 
 phers for moral teaching and for the precepts 
 which we now hold to be the essential things of 
 religion. It is Christ that taught the world the 
 blessedness of a religious, that is to say, of a 
 moral character. Not that He was the first that 
 taught this great truth, for many of the prophets 
 of Israel had proclaimed what were the essential 
 things of religion, and notably Micah. God 
 " hath showed thee, O man, what is good : and 
 
TBE STATE AND THE CHURCB. 139 
 
 what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do 
 justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly 
 with thy God." ^ Yet the Jews, as all the rest 
 of the world of antiquity, laid the chief stress 
 in religion upon rites and ceremonies, endeavor- 
 ing to keep all the minor ordinances of the law 
 blamelessly, even to the tithing of "mint and 
 anise and cummin," and neglecting its vital, es- 
 sential principles. It needed the authoritative 
 teaching of Christ, of one sent from God, to 
 show the Jews, and all mankind as well, that 
 "judgment and mercy and faith" are the 
 weightier matters of religion, and that though 
 ceremonial observances ought to be fulfilled, yet 
 that they, without the weightier matters, are but 
 as chaff before the wind. 
 
 But what was the attitude of Christ toward 
 the church and the state ? That is the question 
 with which we are now concerned. In the Ser- 
 mon on the Mount Christ said of Himself, "I 
 came not to destroy " the law or the prophets, 
 " but to fulfil." ^ And again He said, " Except 
 your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness 
 of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no wise 
 enter into the kingdom of heaven." ^ By these 
 words we understand that Christ's attitude toward 
 the church was the friendly attitude of a reformer 
 
 » (vi. 8, K. v.) 2 (St. Matthew v. 17, E. V.) 
 
 3(i<^., 20, E. V.) 
 
140 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 and not the antagonistic attitude of a destroyer. 
 He declared that the moral truths which were 
 embodied in the law, and which had been re- 
 iterated again and again by the prophets, should 
 be carried into effect, and He showed that right- 
 eousness consists in such observance and not in 
 the observance of ceremonies great and small. 
 And again, Christ said, "The scribes and the 
 Pharisees sits on Moses' seat: all things there- 
 fore whatsoever they bid you, these do and ob- 
 serve ; but do not ye after their works." ^ Here 
 is no intention to push these teachers of morality 
 from their stools, but rather is there a commenda- 
 tion of their teachings, but not of their actions. 
 
 But what was the attitude of Christ toward the 
 priesthood of Israel, toward, that is, the organized 
 church ? It was undoubtedly antagonistic. There 
 was certainly a manifest intention to set it aside. 
 We see this first negatively, and then positively. 
 We see this negatively in that Christ never com- 
 mended the priesthood, nor suggested that there 
 was any further use for it. Positively, in that 
 Christ proclaimed at the outset of His preaching, 
 the fact that St. John Baptist had previously 
 announced, that "the time is fulfilled and the 
 kingdom of God is at hand." "^ The sway of 
 the kingdom of God could not be otherwise 
 
 J (St. Matthew xxiii. 2, 3, E. V.) 
 »(St. Marki. 15, R. v.) 
 
THE STATE AND TEE CHURCH. 141 
 
 than subversive of the rule of the high prldsts, 
 and the enmity of Annas and Caiaphas and their 
 followers to Jesus, after they had refused to 
 accept Him as their Messiah, was natural. Just 
 how Christ would have changed the religious 
 polity of the Jews, in such a case, we cannot im- 
 agine ; but we must believe that the two great 
 Christian ordinances of Baptism and the Lord's 
 Supper would have been instituted, and that the 
 rite of circumcision and the bloody sacrifices 
 would have been set aside; and probably He 
 would have chosen twelve chief pastors or judges 
 to have governed the new kingdom of Israel, 
 like as He chose twelve apostles and sent them 
 forth, under different conditions, to bring the 
 kingdoms of the world into the church of God. 
 But the priests and rulers did not accept Jesus as 
 their Messiah, and it is a vain thing to speculate 
 upon what would have occurred if they had so 
 done. What we must perceive is that Christ in- 
 tended to, and that He did, set aside the whole 
 religious polity of Israel, and that He substituted 
 another in its place ; but that religious, that is, 
 moral laws, commandments and precepts were in 
 no wise changed or altered, rather that they 
 found a fulfilment in His teachings and in His 
 great example. 
 
 The polity that Christ substituted in the place 
 of the old polity of Israel is the kingdom of God. 
 
142 THE STATE AND TEE CHURCH. 
 
 But what is the kingdom, or as we may say, the 
 city, or the church of God ? Christ speaks con- 
 stantly in His discourses of His kingdom, and He 
 says that He is its King, notably when questioned 
 by Pontius Pilate in regard to His royal char- 
 acter. But He does not tell us exactly what His 
 kingdom is, or in what it consists. He simply 
 says, "My kingdom is not of this world." "To 
 this end have I been born, and to this end am I 
 come into the world, that I should bear witness 
 unto the truth." ^ He allows us to infer that the 
 kingdom of God is a kingdom or dominion 
 founded upon truth, and that truth has its origin 
 and centre of influence, not in the hearts of men, 
 but in the bosom of God. At another time He 
 says, "I am the truth." ^ He who is the truth is 
 the King of the kingdom of God. But what was 
 the attitude of Christ toward the state, or as we 
 may better say, toward the civil authority ? It 
 was certainly friendly. We see this both in His 
 answer to the Pharisees and Herodians at the 
 time when they asked Him whether it were law- 
 ful to give tribute unto Csesar or not ^ and also in 
 His demeanor when brought before the judgment 
 seat of Caesar's representative the morning of His 
 iniquitous trial and crucifixion.'' It was undoubt- 
 edly Christ's words "to render unto Caesar the 
 
 ^ (St. John xviii. 36, 37, R. v.) « (gt. John xiv. 6.) 
 
 3 (St. Matthew xxii. 21.) * (St. John xviii. 33., et seq.) 
 
THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 143 
 
 things that are Caesar's " and His subsequent sub- 
 mission to the civil authority, that prompted the 
 Apostle of the Gentiles, when writing to the con- 
 verts to Christ in Rome, to say, " let every soul 
 be in subjection to the higher powers : for there is 
 no power but of God ; and the powers that be are 
 ordained of God." ^ And this was the exact at- 
 titude of the church for centuries after it had 
 been established by Christ, and had gone forth to 
 bring the world into subjection to Him. The 
 state was not to be overthrown by the church, 
 nor were the members of the church to refuse it 
 obedience, except when its laws interfered with 
 the dictates of conscience, and sought to compel 
 the doing of things that were repugnant to the 
 teachings of Christ. Order is the first rule of 
 God, in heaven and in earth, and the church 
 was not antagonistic to order ; it sought not to 
 subvert it but always to uphold it. " Render " 
 therefore, says the apostle, " to all their dues : 
 tribute to whom tribute is due ; custom to whom 
 custom ; fear to whom fear ; honor to whom 
 honor." ^ 
 
 The things to which the Christian Church was 
 antagonistic were the polytheism of the ancient 
 world, and its evil ways of living. The question 
 now arises, why was it then that the Empire was, 
 in the beginning, so fearful of the church and so 
 
 ' (Romans xiii. 1, R. v.) ^ (Id., v. 7.) 
 
144 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 determined to stamp out the sect of the Naza- 
 renes? Certainly not because Christianity was 
 antagonistic to the civil authority ; no, but be- 
 cause it seemed to be. We must remember that 
 there was no difference between church and 
 state in the ancient world. Keligion, anyway 
 civil religion, and civil authority, were one and 
 the same thing. Christianity was necessarily 
 antagonistic to the civil religion and seemed to 
 be, therefore, to the civil authority, and " the 
 powers that be " believed that it ought to be put 
 down as subversive of the one and the other. 
 There were minor reasons also, but we need not 
 dwell upon them. One was the strange and 
 wicked misrepresentation of the worship of 
 Christ that floated about among the ignorant, 
 and another the fact that His doctrines, when 
 they became known, reflected upon the ways of 
 living of the classical peoples, and enraged those 
 who would not be converted from their evil 
 doings. 
 
 It is not necessary to speak of the reasons why 
 the church of Christ grew ; what we are con- 
 cerned with now is the fact that the church did 
 grow, like the famous grain of mustard seed 
 spoken of by its founder, and became in three 
 short centuries the greatest institution of the 
 world, except the world-wide empire itself. I 
 speak of the church as an institution ; and thus 
 
TEE STATE AND THE CHURCH, 145 
 
 we must regard it. It was an institution of 
 which Christ laid the foundation, and a wholly- 
 new thing, one the like of which the world had 
 never known or dreamed of before. The fact 
 that Christ intended to found a new institution 
 is plainly seen in more than one passage of the 
 gospels. We see it in His words to Mcodemus : 
 " except a man be born anew, he cannot see the 
 kingdom of God ; " Mn those to Peter, " upon this 
 rock " (the confession of faith in Him as Christ) 
 " I will build my church ; " ^ in those to Pilate, 
 " My kingdom is not of this world ; " (that is, not 
 founded upon the things of this world) but My 
 rule is that of a ruler which necessitates My hav- 
 ing a kingdom.^ But more especially do we see 
 it in His acts ; in His setting apart of the twelve 
 apostles and of the other seventy ; in the estab- 
 lishment of the sacraments of Baptism and of the 
 Lord's Supper ; in His great commission to His 
 apostles to go into the world, to make disciples 
 of all nations, baptizing them in the holy I^ame. 
 But the main question is, did our Lord intend 
 to found a visible or an invisible kingdom, for it 
 is admitted generally that He did establish a 
 church. It is impossible to go into the argument 
 with any degree of fulness, nor is it necessary. 
 " It is evident unto all men, diligently reading 
 
 » (St. John iii. 3, R. v.) « (gt. Matthew xvi. 18, E. V.) 
 
 3 (St. John xviii. 36, et seq. E. v. ) 
 
146 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. . 
 
 Holy Scripture and ancient Authors, that from 
 the Apostles' time there have been these Orders 
 of Ministers in Christ's Church, — Bishops, Priests 
 and Deacons."^ It is evident again that, as we 
 watch the history of the development of Chris- 
 tian thought, we discover a great number of re- 
 ligious bodies all owing their existence and their 
 purpose to Christian belief and Christian ideas, 
 yet " in the midst of these we discern also some- 
 thing incomparably more permanent and more 
 universal — one great continuous body — the Cath- 
 olic Church. There it is ; none can overlook its 
 visible existence, let us say from the time when 
 Christianity emerges out of the gloom of the 
 sub-apostolic age down to the period of the Kef- 
 ormation." ^ It is evident, also, that these bishops, 
 priests and deacons, the ministry of the more per- 
 manent. Catholic Church, were from the begin- 
 ning a highly organized and finely articulated 
 body, visible to the eyes of all who cared to see 
 them, preaching the invisible "Word, but minis- 
 tering the visible sacraments. Besides all which, 
 there is a natural argument in favor of a visible 
 church. As all the social and political ideas of 
 men are preserved in life and put into effect in 
 the common and universal organ of society which 
 we call the state, so we conclude that all the 
 
 ' (Preface to the Ordinal in the Book of Common Prayer. ) 
 ' (Gore, The Church and the Ministry, Chap, i., p. 11.) 
 
THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 147 
 
 moral and spiritual ideas which are the offspring 
 of Christianity should be preserved in life and 
 put into effect in some organization, and this 
 organization we perceive to be the church. It 
 is worthy of remark in this connection that one 
 of the five secondary causes given by Gibbon, by 
 means of which the Christian faith obtained its 
 remarkable victory over the established religions 
 of the earth (the chief cause being the truth of 
 the doctrine itself and the ruling providence of 
 its Author), was " the union and discipline of the 
 Christian republic, which gradually formed an 
 independent and increasing state in the heart of 
 the Koman Empire." ^ And this union and dis- 
 cipline we perceive displayed from the very first 
 days of the church in the Book of the Acts of 
 the Apostles, and in the pastoral epistles of St. 
 Paul. 
 
 (^It was this strongly uniformed and disciplined 
 republic or church that Constantine found flour- 
 ishing in the Koman Empire at the time of his 
 accession to power, a society acknowledging the 
 supremacy of the civil authority in regard to all 
 things that made for the outward order of the 
 state, but repudiating it in regard to those things 
 that concerned conscience and the inner life. It 
 does not represent the truth to say, with St. Au- 
 
 ' (The Decline and Fall of the Eoman Empire, Vol. II., Chap. 
 XV., p. 264.) 
 
148 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 gustine, that the world was then, as it had Lc^en 
 from the time of the expulsion of man from 
 Paradise, divided into two great contrasting and 
 antagonistic cities — the city of man and the city 
 of God. It is impossible to stigmatize the mode 
 of the life of the empire as wholly evil ; it con- 
 tained many things that were absolutely good, 
 and many more that were relatively so. There 
 were some principles of the civil law which were 
 quite as humane as some of the doctrines of 
 Christianity. And the social spirit of the Ko- 
 mans, which led them to discern a jus gentium^ 
 and to extend the citizenship of Kome to all the 
 civilized world, has never been surpassed by any 
 people, ancient or modern, and it is scarcely 
 equaled by the nations of the present age.] The 
 difficulty lay in the mixture of the good with 
 the bad, and the lack of any fixed and definite 
 standard to determine the bad. One cannot read 
 St. Augustine's great work, however, without 
 seeing that there has always existed a contrast, 
 in the world of men, between those who have 
 sought for righteousness, and those who have 
 sought for the gratification of self, and that 
 those whose minds have been set upon righteous- 
 ness have been, for the most part, the people, or 
 peoples, who have believed in one, eternal and 
 immutable God ; and that those whose minds 
 have been set on mundane affairs have been gen- 
 
THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 149 
 
 erally those who have believed in lords many 
 and gods many. " The City of God " is undoubt- 
 edly the first effort of the human intellect to set 
 forth a philosophy of history, and most splen-, 
 didly was the task performed. The Christian' 
 world has almost universally taken the distinc- 
 tion drawn by the great Bishop of Hippo to be 
 true, that all things in the earthly city are evil, 
 and that all things in the heavenly are good. 
 They have forgotten that the saint himself has a 
 long account of the civic virtues of the ancient 
 Eomans, which obtained for them the merits and 
 aid of the one true God, because of which He 
 enlarged their borders.^ And they have for- 
 gotten likewise the words of Christ Himself, that 
 the church is made up, like the world itself, of 
 the good and the bad, the wheat and the tares.^ 
 
 That the church was far superior to the world 
 when Constantine came into power (a.d. 306) in 
 all the great moral and spiritual virtues, we 
 know ; indeed, it is probable that never was the 
 contrast so marked as it was at that time between 
 the " heavenly " and the " earthly " city. It is 
 futile to discuss the exact motive of Constantine 
 in making the religion of Christ a lawful religion 
 and in taking the church under his protection. 
 It is probable that he had been trained in the 
 
 » (The City of God, Book V., Sec. 12, p. 198, et seq.) 
 «(St. Matthew xiii. 24.) 
 
150 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 faith of his father, which was an eclectic system 
 founded on a belief in the one supreme God, and 
 that during the years of his youth, which w^ere 
 spent as a hostage in the court of Diocletian he 
 had seen with aversion the deceits and machina- 
 tions practiced by the pagan priesthoods upon 
 that misguided man. ^ But it is evident that his 
 motives had less relation to his religious convic- 
 tions or opinions, than to the fact that the Chris- 
 tian Church was a well-organized and disciplined 
 body, and would give him a firm support in his 
 struggle for the empire. Gibbon speaks of the 
 motives of Constantine's conversion as being 
 " variously deduced from benevolence, from 
 polity, from conviction, or from remorse." ^ And 
 it is probable that all of these feelings entered 
 into the heart and mind of the emperor at some 
 time in his career; but when, hailed by the 
 legions in Britain as his father's successor, he ex- 
 tended the toleration of Constantius to the Chris- 
 tians, it would seem that he was influenced 
 primarily by political considerations. 
 
 It would be interesting, here, to examine the 
 story of the vision of the cross, as related by 
 Eusebius and other ecclesiastical writers, but it 
 
 ' (Robertson, The Christian Church, Vol. I., Book II., Chap, 
 i., p. 254.) 
 
 2 (The Decline and Fall of the Eoman Empire, Vol. II., Chap, 
 xvi., p. 469.) 
 
THE STATE AND THE CHURCH, 151 
 
 has little relation to our subject. It is evident 
 that some remarkable omen happened to Con- 
 stantine as he was on his march against Maxen- 
 tius ; whether it was a vision or a hallucination, 
 the result of the excitement of his mind, we can- 
 not tell, for some such thing only can account 
 for the labarum — a banner made up of Christian 
 symbols, under which his armies marched to vic- 
 tory, and for the statue of himself which he after- 
 ward erected in Eome, in which he held a cross 
 in his right hand and under which there was an 
 inscription, attributing his success to the power 
 of that saving sign. ( Our query is, what was the 
 position of the church after Constantine became 
 identified with Christianity and had made it the 
 dominant religion of the empire ? In the ancient 
 world,. as we have seen, religion and government, 
 or church and state, were one and the same thing, 
 and so they remained from century to century in 
 theory and generally in fact, until the time of 
 Constantine. And even after his accession, the 
 old civil religion formed part of the state. The 
 emperor was the Pontifex Maximus^ and as such 
 he took part in heathen ceremonies, regarding 
 them as attached to his imperial functions. 
 
 But what was the status of the Christian 
 church ? The church was an organization separate 
 and distinct from the state. Whatever may have 
 been the desire of Constantine, as he became 
 
152 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 more and more convinced of the truths of Chris 
 tianity, of making the church one with the state, 
 it was during his reign, and it remained for j^ears 
 after his decease, as Gibbon puts it, a republic 
 or state within the state. It had itself become 
 convinced of the fact that it had a peculiar spir- 
 itual foundation and a separate spiritual exist- 
 ence, and it could not regard itself as a state in- 
 stitution, or as part of the state. A new idea 
 had grown up with it in history, that the whole 
 religious life of the community, although not 
 withdrawn from the care and influence of the 
 state, was yet essentially independent of it. A 
 marked dualism between church and state was 
 inevitably seen, and the state became limited and 
 circumscribed in its sphere of conduct and action. 
 It became now only a community of law and 
 politics, and no longer also of religion and wor- 
 ship. ^ And this, as I take it, is the most signifi- 
 cant fact in the history of western civilization. 
 
 The history of the relation between church 
 and state from the time of Constantine to Char- 
 lemagne is very difficult to trace ; and the rea- 
 sons are manifest. This period is the time of 
 stress and storm, of fever and unrest, of modifi- 
 cation and adjustment, of the breaking up of the 
 old order and the establishment of the new. For 
 
 ' (Bluntsohli, The Theory of the State, Book I., Chap, iv., 
 p. 41.) 
 
THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 153 
 
 a while the empire seemed to hold its own against 
 the uncouth peoples of the north, but gradually 
 the strength of the giant ebbed away, and the 
 eternal city became the prey of the barbarians. 
 It was the withdrawal of the seat of government 
 from Eome to Constantinople that gave the 
 bishop of that city his great and wonderful op- 
 portunity, which led inevitably to the establish- 
 ment of the papacy. The head of the state, if 
 he had remained in Eome, could easily have kept 
 the head of the church in the second place ; but 
 no exarch of the emperor, with his seat of gov- 
 ernment at Eavenna, was able to maintain prior- 
 ity over the bishop, especially when he had be- 
 come the first citizen of the city, and all the peo- 
 ples of the empire still called themselves " Eo- 
 mans." And if no exarch of the emperor of the 
 East could maintain the rights of the empire 
 over the bishop, much less could the kings of the 
 invading barbarous tribes. Odoacer and Theo- 
 doric never indeed seemed to desire to subject 
 the bishop to their will. They rarely resided in 
 Eome, and Theodoric left it to be governed im- 
 mediately by two consuls, the one appointed by 
 the eastern monarch, the other by himself. 
 
 After the Lombard conquest of Italy, the po- 
 litical control of the eastern emperor over the 
 city of Eome and its bishop became hardly more 
 than nominal. The Exarch of Eavenna was in 
 
154 THE STATE AND TEE CHURCH. 
 
 name the representative of the emperor, but he 
 could do nothing to help Kome in its struggle for 
 life with the terrible enemy, and the conduct of 
 the defence, and even of the political administra- 
 tion of the city, soon passed into the hands of the 
 bishop. In this way there was gradually added 
 to the general ecclesiastical power which was ac- 
 cruing to him, the internal independent political 
 government of a state. This incipient temporal 
 power was gradually extended by Gregory I. 
 (a. d. 590) and made firm and secure. Gregory 
 the Great was born of a family of senatorial 
 rank and had attained, in his early manhood, to 
 the office of praetor of Eome. At thirty-five he 
 abandoned his worldly pursuits and entered upon 
 a monastic life. At the death of Pope Pelagius 
 II. he was chosen by the senate, the clergy and 
 the people, to fill the vacant chair. It would be 
 difficult to narrate all the affairs which occupied 
 the time and attention of this splendid pope. It 
 is sufficient to say that he set apart and com- 
 missioned civil and military, as well as ecclesias- 
 tical offices ; that he made peace independentl}^ 
 of the empire, and that he generally took charge 
 of all the affairs, little and big, of the Eoman 
 people. Another event, the sack of Eome by 
 Alaric, had aided the growth of the power of 
 its bishop. The aristocratic society of the city, 
 with the usual conservatism of an aristocracy, 
 
THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 155 
 
 has remained pagan. Alaric largely spared the 
 Christians, and scattered and destroyed the pagan 
 society, leaving the bishop and his clergy with- 
 out social, as they had been without official, ri- 
 vals. And still another thing contributed to this 
 same end : the orthodox character of the bishops 
 of Eome, and the appeals which the catholic 
 bishops made to them in their controversy with 
 the Arian heretics. The Council of Sardica di- 
 rectly authorized this thing, and decreed a lim- 
 ited right of appeal to Julius, at that time bishop 
 of Kome.^ 
 
 But the most important cause for the advance- 
 ment of the papacy was the dissolution of the 
 western empire itself, and the establishment of 
 the dominion of the Franks. This alliance, for 
 though there was no open agreement, it was in 
 truth a combination and alliance that was en- 
 tered into between the Frankish rulers and the 
 popes of Eome, was the most important ever 
 made in the history of the world. By it the 
 great and holy see of Rome became emancipated 
 from all allegiance to the emperors of the East 
 and entered on the splendid role it afterward 
 played so fearlessly — the role of arbiter of kings 
 and supreme ruler over the peoples of the western 
 world. And by it, it received immediately the 
 
 * (Can. 3, Hefele's Hist. Councils of the Church, Vol. II., p. 
 112.) 
 
156 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 territory that had belonged to the exarchate of 
 northern Italy, which gradually grew into the 
 States of the Church, and which, making the 
 pope a temporal, as well as a spiritual monarch, 
 enabled him the easier to enter into the political 
 iife of Europe. What the Frankish rulers re- 
 ceived was very little in fact, though it appeared 
 very much ; they were granted, first, the title of 
 Patrician of Rome, and then, in the person of 
 Charlemagne, they were raised to the exalted 
 rank of Augustus and Emperor of the Western 
 Roman Empire. 
 
 The coronation of Charles the Great is the 
 central point of the middle ages, and a factor in 
 the development of European civilization which 
 has not yet spent its force. It is one of the few 
 great events of history, that is, one that has per- 
 manently changed the mode and form of the de- 
 velopment of mankind.^ In the day when Charles 
 was crowned, as indeed throughout all the mid- 
 dle ages of the history of Europe, two great an- 
 tagonistic forces were striving for the mastery in 
 the world of politics, the force that makes for 
 separation and the force that makes for unity. 
 The force that made for separation found its me- 
 diate outcome in feudalism, the force that made 
 for unity found its immediate exposition in the 
 kingdom of Charles. It is true that feudalism 
 ' (Biyce, The Holy Roman Empire, Chap, v., p. 50.) 
 
THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 157 
 
 arose eventually out of the fragments of the 
 Carlovingian Empire, but behind the sovereign 
 feudatories and the free cities of western Europe 
 there loomed up ever the fact that they all had 
 their root in an empire that had been almost uni- 
 versal, and which in its turn found its historical 
 basis in the old dominion of Kome. Feudalism 
 had many abuses, and we are well rid of it, but 
 we cannot but perceive when we study the con- 
 ditions of life in mediaeval days that it was a 
 necessity in the times of ignorance and disorder 
 that came upon Christendom after the death of 
 Charles, for it was the system by which the in- 
 dividualism of the barbaric princes and their 
 fierce descendants was curbed and controlled, 
 and the probable outcome of the force that made 
 for separation prevented. It was feudalism that 
 stood in the way of absolute anarchy. And this 
 institution, the medium through which the Chris- 
 tian nations have come from savagery to civiliza- 
 tion, would not have been possible but for the 
 empire of Charles; although, be it observed, 
 Charles did not have it in mind. It was the 
 institution of feudalism also that the papacy 
 made use of, when, after the decline of the em- 
 pire of the Franks, it came forward to offer to 
 the world another basis of unity, the church of 
 God. 
 
 But out of this alliance between the Franks 
 
158 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 and the church two dangers immediately arose, 
 a danger to the church and a danger to the state. 
 The danger was similar to both, and was either 
 that the state should absorb the church, or the 
 church the state. And first the danger came to 
 the church. At several times in the history of 
 the East the empire threatened to make the 
 church a part of itself, like as was the old civic 
 religion of Eome. Indeed it did so under some 
 of the early emperors ; even as it has so done un- 
 der the later Tzars. The Carlovingian state 
 threatened to do the same thing ; and we must 
 believe that it was only the strongly organized 
 institution of the Holy Eoman Church, governed 
 by one single and supreme head, which rescued 
 Christendom from this fate. The extent of the 
 effort of Charles the Great to absorb the church 
 in his state is seen in his Capitularies, and the 
 rank and authority he bestowed upon the bishops 
 and other ecclesiastics in his wide domain. It is 
 seen also in the fact that he himself summoned 
 synods and revised the canons proposed by them, 
 and gave them their validity. JThe Capitularies 
 of Charles are both' intricate and numerous, and 
 they touch upon every conceivable subject, both 
 in the religious and in the civil life of the many 
 peoples under his sway. In them matters of 
 church and state are mixed up inextricably. 
 They have all been examined and classified, 
 
THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 159 
 
 though not, as I understand, with the care that 
 they deserve. They contain according to the 
 analytical table prepared by Guizot,^ eleven hun- 
 dred and fifty articles, of which eighty refer to 
 moral legislation, two hundred and seventy-three 
 to politics, one hundred and thirty to penal, one 
 hundred and ten to civil, eighty-five to religious, 
 three hundred and nine to canonical, seventy- 
 three to domestic and twelve to occasional sub- 
 jects, a heterogeneous mass of matter which 
 would now by common consent be divided be- 
 tween church and state without question or de- 
 bate. That the church was not absorbed into 
 the state under the rule of the Carlovingians 
 arose also out of the fact that the descendants of 
 Charles had not the strength of mind and body 
 that distinguished that great monarch, and the 
 division that Lewis the Pious, the son and heir 
 of Charles, made of the empire among his sons. 
 If the empire had remained united in one strong- 
 hand, it might have been able to make the church 
 a part of itself. And if not, it would certainly 
 have had the power to resist the danger which 
 afterward threatened it of being engulfed by the 
 church. 
 
 The effort of the church to absorb the state is 
 the most remarkable phenomenon in the history 
 
 * (History of Civilization in France, Vol. III., Twenty-first 
 Lecture. ) 
 
160 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 of Europe. It seems incredible that the institu- 
 tion of the gentle and mild-mannered Jesus, in a 
 few hundred years, should become not only the 
 dominant but the dominating power of the 
 world. Why was it ? Some of the causes for 
 the rise of the papacy I have briefly touched 
 upon ; but there were many others, and the chief 
 among them was the force of an idea. The Ro- 
 man dominion gave the world a common lan- 
 guage and a common law, and united the nations 
 by these strong ties together in an empire of in- 
 ternal peace that was most desired and desirable. 
 When the old empire of Rome was divided and 
 broken ; and again, when the new empire of the 
 Carlo vingians declined and fell away, men who 
 had learned to love a unity of life and who be- 
 lieved that disunion meant a return to barbarism, 
 turned their eyes ever more and more to the 
 great successor of the emperors at Rome, the 
 pope. The pope, again, placed before them an 
 institution in which they could find as firm a 
 basis of unity as the empire had offered, the Ro- 
 man or catholic church. Indeed, this unity 
 which the church represented was a higher and 
 nobler thing than that of the empire, for it was 
 based upon humanity and not on law ; on love, 
 and not on force. No wonder, then, that the 
 church was so passionately revered. The power 
 of ideas in the middle ages was enormous in 
 
THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 161 
 
 every way and can scarcely be realized by us to- 
 day. We can see this especially in the Crusades. 
 J^ot the gift of Charlemagne, not the position of 
 the first see in Christendom, not the fact, true or 
 supposed, that the pope's chair was St. Peter's, 
 not all the fortuitous circumstances which fa- 
 vored the rule of the bishop of Eome, yes, not 
 even the false and favorable decretals, can ac- 
 count for the tremendous growth and strength of 
 the papacy. They arose out of the idea that the 
 Koman empire which had gathered all the known 
 peoples of the earth within its folds, was eternal, 
 and that the quality of eternity had passed by 
 right divine to the Church of Christ, and with it 
 the rule of the world. It is true that this idea 
 was somewhat long in coming to maturity. We 
 find but few traces of it until after the Carlovin- 
 gian rulers had passed away ; yet these were the 
 periods of uncertainty and dissension ; men were 
 not quite sure which was the rightful successor 
 to the old Koman power, the Kaiser or the Pope, 
 (it is from the coronation of Otto the Great 
 (a. d. 962) that a new era begins, a new phase 
 for the Holy Koman Empire and for the Holy 
 Koman Church. Now it is that the ideas that 
 had been floating in men's minds took shape, and 
 we see the relations of the emperor and the pope 
 presented under the figure of the body and the 
 soul. " The Pope, as God's vicar in matters spir- 
 
162 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 itual, is to lead men to eternal life ; the Emperor, 
 as vicar in matters temporal, must so control 
 them in their dealings with one another that 
 they may be able to pursue undisturbed the spir- 
 itual life, and thereby attain the same supreme 
 and common end of everlasting happiness." ^ At 
 the outset the church and the empire worked to- 
 gether harmoniously -enough, but gradually the 
 church asserted that as the soul's interests are 
 superior to those of the body, so the interests of 
 the pope, and consequently his poAver, are su- 
 perior to those of the emperor, and the emperor 
 ceased to be the vicar of God in things temporal 
 and became the vicar of the pope. And so it 
 came about naturally that the great fathers of 
 the church of the middle ages declared that the 
 pope was the sole representative of God on the 
 earth, and they came to the conclusion that 
 church and state were as two swords which God 
 had given to Christendom for its protection, that 
 both of them, however, were given by Him to the 
 pope, and the temporal sword was by him handed 
 to the rulers of the states. 
 
 In view of such notions it is easy to understand 
 how the papal pretensions grew. We perceive 
 that the claim of Gregory YII. (a. d. 1073) to an 
 absolute supremacy over the whole Christian and 
 pagan world was a logical necessity. Such a 
 
 > (Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire, Chap, vii., p. 105.) 
 
THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 163 
 
 claim was the inevitable outcome of such ideas. 
 Look one moment at the acts of this imperious 
 man. The kings of the growing Spanish states 
 are reminded that territory conquered from the 
 infidel belongs of right to the pope as vassal ter- 
 ritory. The king of Munster in Ireland is in- 
 formed that all sovereigns are subjects of St. 
 Peter, and that all the world owes obedience to 
 him and to his successor. The fealty of England 
 is demanded from William the Conqueror. Im- 
 perious letters are written to the kings of France. 
 Political affairs are even noticed in Russia. And 
 the triumph of Hildebrand over the Emperor 
 Henry lY., at Canosa, is the most significant as 
 well as the most dramatic incident in the history 
 of the papacy. It is true that many of these 
 claims and most of this conduct are founded upon 
 the so-called donation of Constantine of the west 
 to Bishop Sylvester, which the mediaeval world 
 generally believed ; but the donation, or the be- 
 lief in it, would have been of no avail except for 
 the belief in the idea that has been previously set 
 forth that a world-wide empire was a most de- 
 sirable thing, and that the pope was logically its 
 ruler, both as inheritor of the Roman power and 
 as chief bishop in the catholic church. The 
 Holy Roman Empire of the German People, 
 especially after the rise of the kingdoms of Spain, 
 France and England, was perceived to be a 
 
164 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 limited and contracted thing, and the emperor 
 " a king of shreds and patches " rather than a 
 strong and po^verful ruler. When John, King of 
 England, knelt before the Koman legate Pandulf, 
 and surrendered his kingdom to the Koman See, 
 taking it back as a tributary vassal, it was be- 
 lieved in after times that all England thrilled at 
 the news with a sense of national shame and 
 humiliation. But " we see,'- says Green ^ " little 
 trace of such a feeling in the contemporary ac- 
 counts of the time. All seem rather to have re- 
 garded it as a complete settlement of the diffi- 
 culties in which the king and the kingdom were 
 involved." ) 
 
 It is fdreign to our study to enter upon the 
 history of the struggle between the church and 
 the empire and the kingdoms of Christendom. 
 Everywhere it went on, and for a while, it looked 
 as if the civil authority would be utterly sub- 
 merged. The outcome can best be seen as we 
 study the range of the theory so strenuously 
 maintained by Pope Innocent III., called the 
 Theory of the Translation of the Empire. In- 
 nocent alleged that the empire was taken from 
 the Greeks and given to the Germans in the per- 
 son of Charles by Pope Leo III. as God's repre- 
 sentative, and that what Leo gave could by his 
 
 1 (Hist, of the English People, Vol. I., Book III., Chap, i., 
 p. 236.) 
 
THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 165 
 
 successor be taken away and bestowed upon an- 
 other. It is probable that the consciousness of 
 nationality, which gradually grew into life after 
 the decline of feudalism, and the patriotic feel- 
 ings that flowed from it, would have been strong 
 enough to have modified, if not to have destroyed 
 the claim of the papal church to universal 
 dominion, even if no ecclesiastical scandals had 
 arisen, and no fiery reformers had appeared to 
 question the rule of the popes. As it was, this 
 consciousness was undoubtedly the greatest fac- 
 tor in the period of the reformation, and did 
 most to make it effective. The idea of the neces- 
 sary unity of the western world never quite took 
 root in the British Isles; they were the last 
 countries incorporated in, and the first released 
 from, the Eoman Empire ; and even in those 
 countries where it had taken root, it gradually 
 faded away, as distinct languages were formed 
 and customary laws hardened into legal systems ; 
 and soon there arose the conviction that each 
 people was sufficient unto itself, and that it ought 
 to have, and ought to govern, its own distinctive 
 church. This new idea did not by any means 
 become universal even after the Keformation had 
 become an accomplished fact, that is, after the 
 Treaty of Westphalia had been signed (a. d. 
 1648), because many nations remained Eoman in 
 form, and in many that became Protestant, 
 
166 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 masses of the people continued to be attached to 
 the old Koman church and ideas. 
 
 The new way of looking at things is best seen 
 in England, where the church became distinctively 
 one with the nation (a. d. 1529) and conterminous 
 with it, governed for the most part by its parlia- 
 ment and subject to the same head as the state. 
 The theory that the church and state are one and 
 the same society contemplated from two different 
 aspects, and that the Christian state has a perfect 
 right to legislate for the church, is most fully set 
 forth by Kichard Hooker in his celebrated 
 treatise on the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.^ 
 Hooker, it is to be remarked, is not so extreme in 
 his views of the duty of the state to religion and 
 the church as was the late Mr. Gladstone. 
 Hooker regarded the state and the church as 
 naturally existing historical facts in the order of 
 Christendom, of which one is providentially the 
 complement of the other, while Mr. Gladstone 
 sought to prove that the state ought to establish 
 and endow a religion, and more particularly that 
 England ought to maintain the establishment of 
 Christianity and the endowment of the English 
 Church.^ But we need not stop to study Mr. 
 
 ^Book VIII., Chap. i. 2, and Chap. vi. 8, Keble's Ed.) 
 
 ' (The State in its Relations with the Church, Vol. I., Chap. 
 
 ii., Part I., 87 and 97-99. And see also Vol. II., Chap. \a., 
 
 Sec. 1.) 
 
THE STATE AND TEE CHURCH. 167 
 
 Gladstone's theories. They have been critically 
 examined, and as it seems to me, demolished by 
 Lord Macaulay in his essay on "Gladstone on 
 Church and State." ' 
 
 We find Hooker's ideas more or less prevalent 
 in other countries in his age ; in Protestant Ger- 
 many, Denmark and Sweden, in the united Prov- 
 inces of IS'etherlands, and in the republic of Ge- 
 neva. Church and state became for the most 
 part one and the same society, which society is 
 termed a commonwealth as it lives under the 
 form of secular law and government ; a church as 
 it has the spiritual law of Jesus Christ. Eeli- 
 gion was, and is, still taught in the schools, and 
 provision was, and is still, made by the different 
 civil governments for the support of the ministers 
 of the church. Spain, we know, has remained 
 under the dominion of the pope, though ever in 
 a less and less degree, until it can now be said 
 that his authority is recognized only in reli- 
 gious matters. The Spanish- American republics, 
 though Koman Catholic in form, are decidedly 
 hostile to the claims of the papacy. France has 
 alternated with her rulers; sometimes she has 
 submitted to the pope, sometimes she has set his 
 authority aside, and sometimes she has made 
 agreements, concordats, limiting it in some cases, 
 and agreeing to acknowledge it in others ; but 
 
 * (Macaulay 's Essays, Vol. II., p. 107, Trevelyan's Ed.) 
 
168 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH, 
 
 during all the time the idea of a Gallican church 
 for the Gallic people has grown. Some day, 
 perhaps, we shall see it un fait accompli^ or it 
 may be we shall see adopted in France by the 
 consent of all, the American idea of the entire 
 separation of church and state, that is, the 
 abandonment by the state of all interference 
 with religion, and the relinquishment by the 
 church of all subsidies to her ministers and teach- 
 ers. It seems to me that this will be the only 
 solution of the vexatious war that has been car- 
 ried on between the clericals and the anti-cleri- 
 cals since the overthrow of the Second Empire. 
 
 And this can be the only solution of the many 
 difficulties that have sprung up in church and 
 state in England. The various controversies 
 that have lately arisen seem difficult to under- 
 stand, and they are difficult to understand in de- 
 tail, but when we remember that Parliament, 
 which has full power of legislating for the church, 
 is to-day made up not of churchmen nor yet nec- 
 essarily of Christians, but of Anglicans, JSTon-con- 
 formists, Koman Catholics, Jews and infidels, we 
 perceive the crux of the whole matter. In Kef- 
 ormation times it was far different. Then Par- 
 liament was an assembly of churchmen whose 
 title to speak in church matters was the same as 
 a lay House of Convocation ; but what church- 
 man will listen to the voice of Parliament as at 
 
THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 1G9 
 
 present constituted, or give adherence to the de- 
 cisions of the civil courts erected by it, the judges 
 of which may be nominated by men who are in- 
 imical to the church, or it may be to religion it- 
 self ? On the other hand, the decisions that have 
 been rendered by the Archbishops of Canterbury 
 and their Assessors are not decisions in the sense 
 of judgments that must be followed, rather are 
 they counsels of advice. How are these contro- 
 versies, then, to be decided ? Some recommend 
 the disestablishment and the disendowment of 
 the church, some the creation of new state courts 
 with new and extraordinary powers, some again 
 the endowment of ecclesiastical courts with the 
 whole power of the state. Without making any 
 attempt to discuss the ways suggested of solving 
 the question, it seems to me that the drift is in- 
 evitably toward disestablishment, and to this 
 end there works not only the change that we see 
 in the status of Parliament and therefore of its 
 relation to the church, but the change that has 
 taken place in regard to the royal supremacy. 
 In theory still the sovereign, as God's vice-regent 
 on earth, is the supreme governor of the church, 
 but in fact and in practice the ecclesiastical, like 
 the other prerogatives of the crown, are no 
 longer exercised by the Queen personally, but by 
 her ministers, responsible to Parliament itself. 
 It is the prime minister who nominates the 
 
170 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 bishops and other dignitaries of the church. It 
 is the minister who nominates the ecclesiastical 
 judges. 
 
 We must understand that it was not until the 
 adoption of the Constitution of the United States 
 with its first ten amendments (a. d. 1Y89) that 
 the idea came to maturity that a state can foster 
 and encourage religion, and not establish any 
 church or make provision for religious instruction 
 and worship. The Puritans, when they founded 
 their commonwealth in Massachusetts, estab- 
 lished a church or rather many affiliated churches. 
 Virginia established the established Church of 
 England in her colony, and the Dutch provided 
 for public worship after the manner of the re- 
 formed Dutch Church of Holland in their settle- 
 ment. But the Dutch had learned the great 
 lesson of religious toleration, and had learned 
 that lesson well. It is noteworthy that the first 
 settlers of New Amsterdam provided for a 
 schoolmaster and for a visitor of the sick before 
 they did for a minister. While the Puritans 
 were persecuting the Quakers, and the Quakers 
 were ordering that no "Jew, Turk, infidel or 
 heretic " should live within their colony, New 
 Amsterdam gave a home to everything that was 
 human. There men of all sorts and conditions 
 met together ; even Komanists and Protestants 
 fraternized, and did kindly acts, the one for the 
 
THE STATE AND THE CHURCH 171 
 
 other. There, too, the national differences were 
 minimized; Dutch, French and English, were 
 spoken each by so many people that public docu- 
 ments had to be written in all three tongues. ^ I 
 do not think that there is any doubt that it was 
 religious toleration, the conception of William 
 the Silent, the great product of the civilization 
 of the Dutch, that was the seed-idea out of which 
 grew the American principle of an entirely dis- 
 tinct separation between church and state. 
 When Peter Stuyvesant was forced to surrender 
 his charge to Colonel Nichols, one of his chief 
 stipulations was that the Dutch should continue 
 to enjoy liberty of conscience in divine worship 
 and church discipline. Although the Church of 
 England was afterward established in New York 
 by a trick of Governor Fletcher, religious liberty 
 was the keynote and idea of this most cosmo- 
 politan of all the colonies that engaged in the 
 great struggle for civil liberty in 1YT6. Tolera- 
 tion in religion, which President Eliot claims to 
 be the best fruit of the last four centuries of civ- 
 ilization, ^ is the great gift of the Dutch to the 
 world. Separation of church and state, with 
 mutual consideration and regard, as of two 
 friendly pillars of society, is the great gift of the 
 
 ' (McConnell, Hist, of the Am. Episcopal Church, Chap, v., 
 p. 62.) 
 ^(Am. Contributions to Civilization, p. 385.) 
 
172 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 American people. This gift is set forth in the 
 first amendment of the Constitution of the 
 United States, and reads as follows : " Congress 
 shall make no law respecting an establishment 
 of religion or prohibiting the free exercise 
 thereof." 
 
 And yet we must not understand by these 
 words that the framers of this amendment in- 
 tended and that the people of the United States 
 understood that all religions are to be tolerated. 
 Congress has taken action in stamping out Mor- 
 monism so far as it conflicts with the morals of 
 Christianity as embodied in the municipal law of 
 W . the land, and the Chinese are excluded from citi- 
 - — zenship because of their crass paganism. We are 
 to understand by the term religion the religions 
 of the different Christian churches. The state 
 fosters Christianity because the citizens of the 
 state are for the most part Christian in char- 
 acter. At the meetings of Congress and of other 
 legislatures, a clergyman usually offers a prayer 
 in Christ's name to Almighty God.^ Chaplains 
 are employed for the army and navy out of a 
 state polity that is Christian in character. The 
 Lord's day, as one of the institutions of Chris- 
 tianity, is protected by law from desecration in 
 order to secure to the community the privilege 
 of undisturbed worship, as well as to all who 
 ' (Except of course where a Jew is requested to officiate.) 
 
THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 173 
 
 labor a day of rest and of cessation from toil. 
 The different states have laws by which the or- 
 ganizations of various denominations and churches 
 of Christendom are encouraged and facilitated. 
 In nearly all the states the property of churches 
 is exempt from taxation, and because the prop- 
 erty of the churches is exempt, so is that of the 
 Jewish synagogues. On the other hand, the 
 churches support the state by precept and ex- 
 ample; they have learned and they teach their 
 members the great maxim of the founder of 
 Christianity, to render unto Caesar the things 
 that are Csesar's, while giving to God the things 
 that are God's. They see that society has a ;' 
 double organization, both conducive to the wel- 1 
 fare of men : the state, which provides for the ! 
 external order of things by law and politics ; the 
 church, which cares for the internal motives of 
 men and their worship of Almighty God. And ; 
 they believe that these two must mutually sus- 
 tain and support the one the other in a common 
 polity which, as it approaches more and more the 
 doctrine and the precepts of Christ, realizes more 
 and more on earth the will of God in Heaven. 
 
 Yet we must understand that the American 
 principle of the entire separation of church and 
 state is not a new thing in history. It is the 
 principle that was in operation during the apos- 
 tolic and sub-apostolic times, and the one there- 
 
174 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH 
 
 fore which takes us back to the teachings of 
 Christ ; and yet there is a difference to be noted. 
 Until the time of Constantine and at certain 
 periods afterward the state was inimical toward 
 the church and often its dreadful persecutor. 
 The American principle is a free state and a free 
 church existing side by side in peace and amity, 
 each one upholding the power and dignity of the 
 other, yet neither asking for favors nor for pe- 
 cuniary support, both working in their respective 
 spheres for the welfare and happiness of men. 
 
LECTUEE Y. 
 
 THE LAW OF THE STATE. 
 
 It is scarcely possible to give an exact and 
 comprehensive definition of the term " law " as 
 the word is used in our English tongue, because 
 many English and American jurists have con- 
 founded the Latin term lex with^^^. Thus Sidg- 
 wick says, " We must define Laws to be Rules of 
 Conduct, which we are morally bound to obey, 
 not solely on account of their intrinsic rightness 
 but on account of the Rightful Authority from 
 which they are derived." ^ And Willoughby says, 
 " The State has been defined as a society viewed 
 from its organized side, that is, considered in its 
 aspect as a political organization for the attain- 
 ment of an orderly existence and a possible de- 
 velopment. In the effectuation of these pur- 
 poses its activities are largely manifested in the 
 utterance and enforcement of commands ad- 
 dressed to its citizens. Such commands we des- 
 ignate laws, and in the aggregate they constitute 
 what is known as ^ the law of the land.' " ^ 
 
 ' (Methods of Ethics, Book III., Chap, vi., p. 266.) 
 2 (The Nature of the State, Chap, vii., p. 142. ) 
 175 
 
176 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 These definitions follow, as we know, more or 
 less blindly, the theory of Austin, the father of 
 modern English jurisprudence, which makes all 
 law to be nothing else than the aggregation of 
 rules set by men as politically superior or sov- 
 ereign to men as politically subject. Austin's 
 theory, as Mr. Smith has conclusively shown, 
 arose primarily from a confusion by him of the 
 Latin word or term ^'^5 with that of lex. He de- 
 fined law as the equivalent of lex but used it 
 habitually as including jtis} "The theory of 
 Austin is in fact wholly based upon the ambi- 
 guity of the term law ; which is defined by him 
 as though equivalent to the Latin lex, but habit- 
 ually used as though including the whole law, or 
 jus. Thus, — taking for illustration the famous 
 position of Austin, that judicial decisions are in 
 fact commands or expressions of the will of the 
 State, and therefore in no wise different in essen- 
 tial nature from laws or statutes — it is obvious 
 that the conclusion is deduced by an apparent 
 syllogism of which the major premise is the 
 proposition that all law is an expression of the 
 will of the State or government, and the minor, 
 that judicial decisions constitute part of the law / 
 from which — assuming that the term law be used 
 in the same sense in both propositions — the con- 
 
 ^ (I give Mr, Smith's analysis and criticism of the term law 
 as used by Austin verbatim. ) 
 
THE LAW OF THE STATE. 177 
 
 elusion must necessarily follow. But, in fact, in 
 the major premise it is used in the sense of lex^ 
 and in the minor in that of jus. 
 
 "The same fallacy is also illustrated by the 
 equally famous position of the same writer, that 
 custom does not constitute part of the law — the 
 argument being as follows : (1) As before : All 
 law (lex) is an expression of the will of the State. 
 (2) Custom is not an expression of the will of 
 the State. M^go, (3) Custom is not part of the 
 law (jus).^^ ^ "We must understand that it is not 
 always easy to distinguish the term jus from 
 that of lex in the Eoman law, for the different 
 lawyers who expanded and expounded the law 
 of Eome have not always been careful to keep 
 the two words distinct ; but this can be said, that 
 though ^i^^ in its general significance means law, 
 and in this sense includes all law, whether made 
 by statute or otherwise, in a narrower sense it is 
 opposed to lex, which is an especial written en- 
 actment — strictly a transaction entered into be- 
 tween the magistrate and the people. We must 
 observe, however, that the term lex is sometimes 
 used for law of every kind ; — as where natura 
 being made the equivalent of jus gentium, the 
 term " leges " is employed for jus civile.^ Still in 
 
 * (The Theory of the State, p. 30, Reprinted from Proceedings 
 of the American Philos. See., Vol. XXXIV.) 
 2 (Cicero De Off. III., V., g 23.) 
 
178 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 its strict sense of a written enactment it is al- 
 ways opposed to jios. And again we must ob- 
 serve that jus (or rather jura) may be used to 
 express a rule or set of rules of law contained in 
 a lex or part of a lex, but it is never confounded 
 with it. The reason for this is that the term^W 
 (or jura) is often taken in a strict ethical sense 
 to mean that which is right or lawful, that is, a 
 rule, or rules, of law that have received exposi- 
 tion in a lex. 
 
 " The law of Rome was originally a body of 
 customary law ; and though it came in course of 
 time to be based on statute, custom was still re- 
 garded as one of its original sources. This is the 
 jus which is said to be morihus constitutum — 
 not to be confounded with ho7ii mores. The 
 ultimate foundation of customary law was con- 
 sidered to be the common consciousness of the 
 people of following a custom in obedience to a 
 rule of law : the evidence of this consciousness is 
 usage— repeated and continued use — ' lo7iga, in- 
 veterata, diuturna, antiquitus jprobata et servata 
 tenaciter consuetudo.^ . . . The Eoman writ- 
 ers indeed frequently refer to a large part of 
 their law as founded on mores or on the mos ma- 
 jorum, and not on Leges. Thus, Ulpian says that 
 the jus jpatrim potestatis is morihus receptum.^^ ^ 
 
 ' (Smith, Die. of Greek and Roman Antiquities, Third Ed., 
 Vol. I., p. 1042.) 
 
THE LAW OF THE STATE. 179 
 
 Let me draw your attention also to the fact 
 that the Digest of the Roman Law of Justinian 
 begins/ " The Jus Civile or civil law of Rome is 
 divided into jus inMiGiim and jits prwatum, 
 Puhlicum jus is defined to be that which has re- 
 gard to the condition of the commonwealth 
 {quod ad statum rei Homanoe s;pectat). Priva- 
 tum jus that which has regard to the welfare 
 of individuals {quod ad singidorem titilitatem).^^ 
 In Section 9 under said book and title, Gains 
 says : " All people who are governed by law and 
 custom {legihus et morihus) use partly their own 
 law {jios) and partly that which is common to 
 all mankind. For the law {jus) which a people 
 establishes for itself is peculiar to that state, and 
 is called jus civile, as the law {jus) peculiar to 
 that state. But the law {jus) which reason has 
 established as natural among all mankind, is 
 equally observed among all, and is called ^^^^ gen- 
 tium, as being that law {jtcs) which all nations 
 igentes) use." 
 
 It is under Title III. of said Book L, Section 1, 
 that lex is defined by Papinian. "Lex is the 
 common precept, the counsel of wise men, the 
 punishment of crimes which through wilfulness 
 or ignorance have been committed, the common 
 agreement of the republic." Under Section 7 of 
 said Title and Book, the virtue of law {lex) is 
 ' (Book I., Title I., Section 1.) 
 
180 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 said to be " to command, to forbid, to permit, to 
 punish." The difference between ^'^^^^ and lex in 
 the Koman law is seen at once. Indeed, in the 
 works of the Eoman writers and jurists, lex is 
 ahnost invariably used to denote an enactment 
 of any body (or even individual) constitutionally 
 empowered to legislate. Properly it was used 
 to denote the enactments of the Comitia Centii- 
 riata, although, as I have said, it afterward came 
 to have a more extended meaning, wh^njus was 
 taken to mean the thing that was right. 
 
 Strange that Austin and his followers should 
 have lost sight of the distinction the Eomans 
 themselves drew between jus (that which is right 
 or just) and lex (that which is agreed upon and 
 commanded). How did it come about ? Through 
 the desire of men, as I believe, to find some ulti- 
 mate and exact source of law, through their ef- 
 forts to find an authority for all rules of con- 
 duct; through their dread of depending upon 
 custom or opinion for the revelation of right ; 
 through their misprision of human nature. 
 
 And so we turn to the historical or ethical 
 school of jurists and ask them to tell us what they 
 found to be the way law came into being and ef- 
 fect. Sir Henry Maine, in a well-known passage 
 of his treatise on ancient law, says : " The ear- 
 liest notions connected with the conception, now 
 so fully developed, of a law or rule of life are 
 
THE LAW OF THE STATE. 181 
 
 those contained in the Homeric words * Themis ' 
 and ' Themistes.' ^ Themis,' it is well known, 
 appears in the later Greek pantheon as the God- 
 dess of Justice, but this is a modern and much 
 developed idea, and it is in a very different sense 
 that Themis is described in the Iliad as the as- 
 sessor of Zeus. . . . When a king decided a 
 dispute by a sentence, the judgment was assumed 
 to be the result of direct inspiration. The divine 
 agent, suggesting judicial awards to kings or to 
 the gods, the greatest of the kings, was Themis. 
 The peculiarity of the conception is brought out 
 by the use of the plural. Them.istes^ Themises, 
 the plural of Themis, are the awards themselves 
 divinely dictated by the judge. Kings are spoken 
 of as if they had a store of ' Themistes ' ready to 
 hand for use ; but it must be distinctly under- 
 stood that they are not laws, but judgments. 
 *Zeus, or the human king on earth,' says Mr. 
 Grote in his History of Greece, ' is not a law- 
 maker, but a judge.' " ^ And in this connection I 
 would cite the words of Mr. Edward Jenks in 
 his admirable work on " Law and Politics in the 
 Middle Ages."^ " As we go back upon the his- 
 tory of Law, we very soon reach a point at which 
 the Austinian theory is helpless to explain the 
 facts. Here is a ^ source ' of law, an authority 
 which, for some reason or another, great masses 
 
 » (Chap, i., p. 3, et seq. ) ^ ( Chap, i., p. 2. ) 
 
182 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 of men feel themselves bound to follow, not be- 
 cause they choose, but because they must. And 
 yet it is certainly not a command of the State, 
 direct or indirect. Upon critical examination it 
 may turn out to be the work of a mere private 
 composer. Why do men obey it ? Further back 
 again, we find a purely impersonal document, 
 compiled, no one knows exactly how or by 
 whom, and yet it is the controlling force which 
 shapes the daily conduct of men. They do not 
 even consider the possibility of disregarding it. It 
 is not the work of the State, it may not even be 
 recognized by the State, there may be no State to 
 recognize it. Yet the essential ideas of Law, the 
 evident ancestors -of our modern juristic notions, 
 are clearly there." 
 
 But we must not understand that the kings 
 and judges of ancient times, nor yet the compil- 
 ers of law of the Middle Ages, sought for the 
 thing that was abstractly just. Human law was 
 not originally based upon equity, but rather upon 
 custom and family observances. "Man," says 
 M. Fustel de Coulanges, "believed that the 
 sacred hearth, in virtue of the religious law, 
 passed from father to son ; from this it followed 
 that the house was hereditary property. The 
 man who had buried his father in his field be- 
 lieved that the spirit of the dead one took posses- 
 sion of this field forever, and required a perpetual 
 
THE LAW OF THE STATE. 183 
 
 worship of his posterity. As a result of this, the 
 field, the domain of the dead, and place of sacri- 
 fice, became the inalienable property of a family. 
 Religion said, * The son continues the worship — 
 not the daughter ; ' and the law said, with the 
 religion, ' The son inherits — the daughter does 
 not inherit; the nephew by the males inherits, 
 but not the nephew on the female side.' This 
 was the manner in which the laws were made. 
 They presented themselves without being 
 sought." ^ In other words, the laws arose neces- 
 sarily out of the conditions of the patriarchal 
 family, and the patriarchal family rested, as we 
 know, upon religious observances. We find this 
 last fact attested to as strongly by the status of 
 the family under the Mosaic dispensation as in 
 the early histories of Greece and Eome. 
 
 From this idea of a divine agency suggesting 
 judgments in especial cases that would uphold 
 the family and family religion, there is a wide 
 difference to the conception of the Deity dictat- 
 ing an entire code or body of law ; yet to this 
 conception most ancient peoples came, and they 
 came to it logically. The Cretans attributed 
 their laws to Jupiter and not to Minos ; the 
 Lacedemonians believed that their legislator was 
 Apollo and not Lycurgus ; the Romans believed 
 that Numa wrote under the direct inspiration of 
 » (The Ancient City, Book III., Chap, xi., p. 251.) 
 
184 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 the goddess Egeria ; and both the Hindus and the 
 Hebrews held that the laws of Manu and of 
 Moses respectively were given directly by God 
 Himself. That we hold together with the He- 
 brews that their laws were God-given is not the 
 question now. Nor is the question the reason 
 why we believe this. The question is simply the 
 well-nigh universal phenomenon of belief current 
 among men, that God, or the gods, at one time 
 inspired men directly to pronounce judgments ; 
 and at another gave a body or bodies of laws to 
 mankind. 
 
 And these bodies of law, upon what did they 
 rest ? Upon the family and upon the religious 
 observances of the family. Yet not entirely upon 
 these, upon also the character of the god or gods 
 who inspired them. Men's idea of the beings 
 they worshipped (however they acquired them) 
 gave rise invariably to their earliest ideas of 
 right or justice. And this is the glory of the 
 Mosaic dispensation, as received and acted upon 
 by the Hebrews. Moses' idea of God was great 
 and glorious. It was only as God Almighty that 
 the Deity had been known to the patriarchs ; * 
 but to Moses was God known by the name Je- 
 hovah, by, as we understand. His inner attri- 
 butes ; and these inner attributes were revealed 
 in the proclamation wherein God declared Him- 
 
 ' (Exodus vi. 3.) 
 
THE LAW OF THE STATE. 185 
 
 self to be " the Lord, the Lord, a God full of 
 compassion and gracious, slow to anger, and 
 plenteous in mercy and truth; keeping mercy 
 for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgres- 
 sion and sin : and that will by no means clear 
 the guilty ; visiting the iniquity of the fathers 
 upon the children, and upon the children's chil- 
 dren, upon the third and upon the fourth genera- 
 tion." ^ 
 
 It was by, or from out, this great personality 
 that the laws of the Hebrews were given, and 
 they found their truest exposition therein. And 
 hence there arose among the Hebrews very early 
 in their history the great idea of divine and ab- 
 stract justice. Jehovah was full of compassion, 
 and plenteous in mercy, forgiving iniquity and 
 transgression and sin, but He would by no means 
 clear the guilty, rather would He visit iniquity 
 upon the family of the transgressor for three or 
 four generations. Herein it is shown that it is 
 not so much the doing of the things that fulfil 
 the law of ordinances (as necessary as they were 
 by the Levitical system) that are pleasing to 
 Jehovah, and therefore just, but the avoiding of 
 things that are essentially wrong and iniquitous, 
 the becoming, and being compassionate and gen- 
 erous, kind, merciful and truthful toward man, as 
 Jehovah was ; yet not forgetting to punish the 
 ' (Exod. xxxiv. 5, 6, 7, B. V.) 
 
186 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 guilty. Above the law there always stood the 
 supreme idea of the justice of God, and the same 
 idea, it was obvious, ought to be found in man. 
 Again and again the prophets tried to make the 
 people understand this, but they would not act 
 upon the truth; they invariably preferred the 
 Levitical ordinances to the essence and. spirit of 
 the Law. Nothing could be plainer than the 
 words of Micah: "He hath showed thee, O 
 man, what is good ; and what doth the Lord re- 
 quire of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, 
 and to walk humbly with thy God." ^ And yet 
 Christ said, some hundreds of years after, to the 
 men of His generation, " Ye tithe mint and anise 
 and cummin, and have left undone the weightier 
 matters of the law, judgment and mercy and 
 faith : but these ye ought to have done, and not 
 to have left the other undone." ^ 
 
 But the idea of justice arose in an entirely 
 different way among the classical peoples. " More 
 than once," says Sir Henry Maine, " the juris- 
 prudence of Western Europe has reached a stage 
 at which the ideas which presided over the original 
 body of rules are found to have been driven out 
 and replaced by a wholly new group of notions, 
 which have exercised a strong and in some cases 
 an exclusively controlling influence on all the 
 subsequent modifications of the law. Such a 
 
 » (vi. 8, R. V.) 2 (Matt, xxiii. 23, E. v.) 
 
THE LAW OF THE STATE. 187 
 
 period was arrived at in Koman law, when the 
 theory of a Law of Nature substituted itself for 
 the notions which lawyers and politicians had 
 formed for themselves concerning the origin and 
 sanctions of the rules which governed the ancient 
 city. A similar displacement of the newer legal 
 theory took place when the Koman law, long 
 since affected in all its parts by the doctrine of 
 Natural Law, became, for certain purposes and 
 within certain limits, the Canon law — a source of 
 modern law which has not yet been sufficiently 
 explored." ^ 
 
 Let us ask ourselves how it was that the law of 
 nature came into being and usurped the place of 
 the older sanctions for the rules of the Koman 
 law? The question has been confused by the 
 poetical conception of a golden age of man, ex- 
 isting before the organization of man in society, 
 creeping into juristic writings, but this concep- 
 tion plays but little part in the development of 
 the jurisprudence of Kome, and cannot be said to 
 have become popular in the world until the time 
 when Kousseau adopted it. The Koman doctrine 
 of Jus naturale originated with Aristotle ; and 
 that in his mind it had no connection with the 
 impossible hypothesis of a golden state of nature, 
 is shown by his definition of man, as being, by 
 nature, a political animal, and by his conception 
 ' (Village Communities, Lect. i., p. 19.) 
 
188 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 of justice as "complete virtue, although not 
 complete in an absolute sense but in relation to 
 one's neighbors," ^ and " political justice, i. e.^ 
 such justice as exists among people who are asso- 
 ciated in a common life with a view to independ- 
 ence " ^ as the only kind of justice ; for man is al- 
 ways found in the social or political state, and al- 
 ways therefore subject to political law. 
 
 Aristotle alleged further, that " political jus- 
 tice is partly natural and partly conventional. 
 The part which is natural is that which has the 
 same authority everywhere, and is independent 
 of opinion ; that which is conventional is such 
 that it does not matter in the first instance 
 whether it takes one form or another, it only 
 matters when it has been laid down, e. g., that the 
 ransom of a prisoner should be a mina, or that a 
 goat and not two sheep should be offered in 
 sacrifice, and all legislative enactments which are 
 made in particular cases, as the sacrifice in honor 
 of Brasidas at Amphipolis, and the provisions of 
 an Act of Parliament."^ It was this distinction 
 that ' was made by Aristotle between " the 
 natural" and "the conventional," that the 
 Koman jurists adopted. They began to regard 
 the law as consisting of two parts, namely, the 
 jus gentium or naUirale, and ilnQJus civile, even 
 
 ' (Ethics, Book V., Chap, iii., p. 137, Welldon's Translation.) 
 « ild., Chap. X., p. 157.) 3 {Id., p. 159.) 
 
THE LAW OF THE STATE. 189 
 
 as we have seen in the definition of Gains given 
 in the Pandects. But the jus naturale had no 
 relation in the beginning to the fancied state of 
 nature in a golden age. It is probable that the 
 idea of jus gentiuin took its rise before the 
 kindred idea of natural justice came in to sub- 
 stantiate the thought of what was just among 
 men ; but it was nevertheless enlarged by it when 
 the lawyers began to study and to treat the law 
 from the standpoint of philosophy. 
 
 We have seen how the jus gentiicm came into 
 existence, through the concourse of many people 
 of the old Italian tribes in Kome who could not 
 be judged by the jus civile, because they were 
 not Quirites, and who could therefore not have 
 the benefit of the Quiritarian law. Therefore it 
 was that the Pra3tors resorted to the expedient 
 of selecting the rules of law common to Eome 
 and the different communities from which the 
 immigrants came. The Praetors for some hun- 
 dreds of years issued at the beginning of their 
 respective terms of office an edict setting forth 
 the rules which would govern them in their office 
 of judge, and it became the custom for each 
 Praetor to issue his predecessor's edict, with such 
 changes and additions as seemed to him wise and 
 expedient. The Praetors' proclamations thus be- 
 came lengthened year by year, and obtained the 
 name of the perpetual edict, until the issuance of 
 
190 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 the edict of Salvius Julianus, in the reign of the 
 Emperor Hadrian. He arranged the edict in a 
 systematic order ; hence the edict was subse- 
 quently called by the Koman lawyers the " edict 
 of Julianus." 
 
 Herein in the edicts, as promulgated by the 
 Pr^tors, came the opportunity of influence of 
 Grecian thought and philosophy. It was the 
 Stoical philosophers, we observe, who took up the 
 idea of living according to the law of nature and 
 made it popular ; and the Stoical philosophy be- 
 came the prevalent philosophy of Eome. The 
 alliance of the lawyers with Stoical philosophy 
 continued through many centuries, and the long 
 diffusion of the ideas of the philosophers among 
 the members of the juristic profession was sure 
 to affect greatly the art which they practiced. 
 But we must not look to see any number of 
 Stoical dogmas incorporated in the body of the 
 Koman law. The influence of Stoicism is not 
 perceived in the number of specific doctrines 
 which it contributed to the law, but rather in the 
 single idea it lent to it of natural law or justice. 
 After nature had become a household word in the 
 mouths of the Komans, the belief gradually 
 spread among the lawyers that jus gentium, ay as 
 in fact nothing other t\\2^>njus naturale, and that 
 the Praetor in forming his edict on the principle 
 of jus gentium^ was gradually approaching a 
 
THE LAW OF THE STATE. 191 
 
 type of natural or divine justice. It is true, that 
 in the minds of some of the Roman lawyers 
 there arose a conception of nature as a state of 
 the people that had been lost, but, for the most 
 part, the teaching of Aristotle was not departed 
 from, as we can see in the definitions of law al- 
 ready given from the Pandects. In other words, 
 the idea that became prevalent among the Roman 
 lawyers, through the working upon the jus 
 gentium of the jus naturale^ and their identifica- 
 tion, was that justice and right is a part of the 
 law. And this idea, we have seen, was the Jew- 
 ish idea, as the same received exposition by 
 Moses and the prophets. This is not to say 
 that the Roman law became like the Jewish, 
 but only that justice became the end and 
 aim of the one and the other. And thus the 
 civil law came into line with philosophy and re- 
 ligion. 
 
 We have seen that it was the Stoical philoso- 
 phy which furnished the Roman lawyers with 
 the idea of a state of nature and led them to the 
 thought and definition of Aristotle. But whence 
 did the Stoical philosophers get their impulse and 
 the moral earnestness, which is their most honor- 
 able characteristic? Zeno, the founder of the 
 school of the Porch, was a native of Citium, a 
 Phoenician colony in Crete, and probably of 
 Semitic ancestry. He is called "the Phoenician." 
 
192 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 To Eastern affinities Stoicism was without doubt 
 largely indebted for the features which distin- 
 guishes it from other schools of Grecian philoso- 
 phy. The contrast between the light, reckless 
 gaiety of the Hellenic spirit, as witnessed to in 
 the school of Epicurus, the other of the two last 
 phases of classical philosophy, and the stern, un- 
 bending, almost fanatical ideas of the philosophy 
 of Zeno, is as complete as can be imagined. 
 " Stoicism was in fact the earliest offspring of the 
 union between the religious consciousness of the 
 East and the intellectual culture of the West. 
 The recognition of the claims of the individual 
 soul, the sense of personal responsibility, the 
 habit of judicial introspection, in short, the sub- 
 jective view of ethics, were in no sense new, for 
 they are known to have held sway over the mind 
 of the chosen people from the earliest dawn of 
 their history as a nation. But now for the first 
 time, they presented themselves at the doors of 
 Western civilization and demanded admission. 
 The occasion was eminently favorable. The con- 
 quests of Alexander, which rendered the fusion 
 of the East and West for the first time possible, 
 also evoked the moral need which they had thus 
 supplied the means of satisfying. By the over- 
 throw of the state the importance of the indi- 
 vidual was enhanced. In the failure of political 
 relations, men were thrown back on their inward 
 
THE LAW OF THE STATE. 193 
 
 resources and led to examine their moral wants 
 and to educate their moral faculties." ^ 
 
 But though the element of Stoicism was de- 
 rived from the East and received its first devel- 
 opment in Grecian soil, its practical success was 
 best attained in the field of Eome. It is this 
 later, or Eoman, period, which has attracted to 
 itself so much attention, and this not only be- 
 cause its practical influence became most mani- 
 fest in the lives of the Komans, but because it 
 became so great a power in the development 
 of the civil law. In the time of the Antonine 
 Caesars, which men agree to be the golden age 
 of Eoman jurisprudence, the most renowned ju- 
 rists were associated with Stoicism, and many 
 were the actual disciples of that philosophy. 
 Herein we see, in corroboration of what has 
 gone before, the influence of religion, or better, 
 of morality, upon philosophy, and of moral phi- 
 losophy, or better, of ethics, upon law ; the ten- 
 dency being ever stronger and stronger toward 
 justice and right. Let us see what the influence 
 of the greatest religious and moral teacher of the 
 world has been upon the law or body of laws of 
 the world ; for all the world recognizes to-day 
 that the common law, or body of common law, 
 of civilized society is one and the same, and that 
 it is essentially that law that was developed in 
 ' (Lightfoot, Dissertations on the Apostolic Age, iv., p. 253.) 
 
194 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 Eome, and became under Justinian the Cor_piis 
 Juris Civilis. 
 
 Many English jurists have striven to show 
 that the common law of England was some- 
 thing other. It is true that it was something- 
 other in its origin, yet a knowledge of the con- 
 ditions of the life of the English people as re- 
 vealed in " Domsday Book and Beyond," ^ must 
 soon convince an impartial reader that there was 
 very little that can properly be called " law " be- 
 fore the l^orman conquest. There were customs, 
 of course, and rights and responsibilities, but little 
 or nothing of jurisprudence. Mr. Jenks, who is 
 one of the many writers who have minimized the 
 effect of the Roman law upon the law of Eng- 
 land, is yet found to say,^ " At the time of the 
 E^orman conquest England is from a legal stand- 
 point the most backward of all Teutonic coun- 
 tries save only Scandinavia." But the Norman 
 conquest soon effected a great change. " As sol- 
 diers, as ecclesiastics, as administrators, above all 
 as jurists, they (the Normans) had no equals, at 
 least North of the Alps."^ It is known and un- 
 derstood by all who have studied these times that 
 they had been trained by Lanfranc and Anselm, 
 the great Prior and the great Abbot of Bee, who 
 
 1 (Maitland, Three Essays in the Early History of England. ) 
 ' TLaw and Politics in the Middle Ages, Chap, ii., p. 32.) 
 ^{Id., p. 33.) 
 
TEE LAW OF THE STATE. 195 
 
 were Italians and who were well acquainted with 
 the Civil and with the Canon law. These tAvo 
 ecclesiastics afterward occupied in succession the 
 primary see of Canterbury for nearly forty years. 
 We observe, with Mr. Jenks, that the immediate 
 effect of the conquest upon the history of law in 
 England was to set aside all the local laws and 
 to set up a " common law " for all the land, be- 
 cause England became one great fief in the hands 
 of the king and was to have one law. The phrase 
 " common law " was not new, however ; canon- 
 ists had used it in speaking of the general law of 
 the church as distinguished from local customs 
 of particular countries. The English judges and 
 jurists borrowed the term from the Canon law 
 and applied it to the law of the royal court. 
 And they borrowed from the same source many 
 rules and principles and doctrines.^ And the 
 Canon Law, though based directly upon the can- 
 ons of councils, the sentences of the fathers, the 
 decretals, true or false, of the popes, and the 
 canonical replies made to questions put at vari- 
 ous times to the Eoman pontiffs, is yet rooted in 
 the Civil law of Kome, and draws from it much 
 of its strength and vitality. But the English 
 judges and jurists did not only resort to the 
 Canon law and thus to the Civil for instruction 
 and inspiration, they turned to the Corjpus Juris 
 
 ' {Id., Chap, iv., p. 119.) 
 
196 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 directly. "Whole texts were taken from it with 
 the terms unaltered, though their origin was 
 never acknowledged by the older justices and 
 chancellors of the realm. The most striking 
 illustration of this fact is found in the treatise 
 of Bracton, with reference to which Sir Henry 
 Maine makes the following observation : " That 
 an English writer of the time of Henry III. 
 should have been able to put off on his country- 
 men as a composition of pure English law a trea- 
 tise of which the entire form and a third of the 
 contents were directly borrowed from the Corjnis 
 Juris^ and that he should have ventured on this 
 experiment in a country where the systematic 
 study of the Koman law was formerly proscribed, 
 will always be among the most hopeless enigmas 
 in the history of jurisprudence."^ 
 
 The philosophy of the rise of the law in the 
 middle ages is as it seems to me expressed by 
 Maitland.^ Speaking of the legal ideas in which 
 feudalism is expressed, he says : " If we approach 
 them from the standpoint of modern law, if we 
 approach them from the standpoint of the clas- 
 sical Eoman law, they are confused ideas. In 
 particular, no clear line is drawn between public 
 and private law." But the question arises whether 
 we are right in applying to this state of things 
 
 ' (Ancient Law, Chap, iv., p. 79.) 
 
 "^ (Domsday Book and Beyond, Essay II., p. 224.) 
 
TEE LAW OF THE STATE. 197 
 
 such a word as ^' * confusion,' a word which im- 
 plies that things that once were distinct have 
 wrongfully or unfortunately become mixed up 
 with each other, a word which implies error or 
 retrogression. ]N"ow, no doubt, from one point of 
 view, namely, that of universal history, we do see 
 confusion and retrogression. Ideal possessions 
 which have been won for mankind by the thought 
 of the Koman lawyers are lost for a long while 
 and must be recovered painfully. Lines that have 
 been traced with precision are smudged out, and 
 then they must be traced once more. If we re- 
 gard western Europe as a whole, this retrogres- 
 sion appears as a slow change." ^ Certainly there 
 was no " confusion " when we regard the law of 
 the peoples of the middle ages in relation to their 
 own earlier and primitive law ; but there was 
 great " confusion " when we regard their law in 
 relation to the Civil law of Kome. And this 
 was the effort of the barbarous peoples of western 
 Europe during the dark days of their history — 
 to push back and nearer to the clear shining 
 light of the Corpus Juris Civilis. The process 
 was slow and painful and the steps by which the 
 retrogression was made were often obscure, but 
 little by little the great principles of the Koman 
 law were recovered and became the common 
 
 {Id.) 
 
198 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 property of the canonists and jurists, and then 
 of the peoples of Europe. 
 
 We have seen that law took its rise in the 
 dicta of kings and the customs of the family, 
 which customs were always religious. We have 
 seen also that the idea of law being and becom- 
 ing just arose in Israel out of the idea of the 
 justice of Jehovah, and in Eome out of the com- 
 mon agreement of the neighboring gentes in what 
 was right or just. And in Koman law we have 
 seen, moreover, that the idea of justice was en- 
 larged by the philosophy of the Greeks, and 
 more especially by that of Aristotle, that there 
 is a common law, or jus 7iaturale, that pertains 
 to all civilized men. And, lastly, we have seen 
 how this idea of ihQJus naturale was associated 
 with the principal tenet of Stoicism, to live ac- 
 cording to nature. And Stoicism, we have 
 learned, was a seed brought from the eastern 
 soil of rightness of conduct, nourished by the 
 thought of the Greeks and brought to maturity 
 by the practical turn of mind of the Eomans. 
 Dicta and custom and tribal observances and 
 natural right and personal morality have thus 
 been brought together in the development of the 
 law. Our task is now to see what the teaching 
 of Christ has done for its progress and expansion. 
 
 But first we must recognize that, although in 
 the abstract questions of right and wrong pre- 
 
THE LAW OF THE STATE. 199 
 
 sent many difficulties, yet in the concrete most 
 of them disappear, and thus there results a una- 
 nimity in the moral judgments of mankind in 
 regard to the common actions of man, in the 
 same, and often in different states of civilization, 
 which would be wonderful were it not for the 
 fact of our belief in the unity of the race and in 
 its divine origin. Thus, for instance, no man 
 within the pale of civilization can contemplate 
 an act of robbery or murder with approbation, 
 nor does any person regard the retention of a 
 pledge when payment of a loan has been made 
 as right, and all men have held that for every 
 kind of injury done some compensation should 
 be made. It is such principles as these that fur- 
 nish the test by which the various theories of 
 morality are to be judged, and it is to them that 
 the advocates of all theories make their last ap- 
 peal. "But the difficulty," says Mr. Smith, 
 " consists in expressing satisfactorily the ultimate 
 test or criterion by which conduct is to be 
 judged ; and on this point the wildest difference 
 of opinion prevails." ^ 
 
 It is not necessary for me to show how the 
 differences as to the test and criterion of conduct 
 arose ; nor to what results, theoretical and prac- 
 tical, they have led. I wish rather to point you 
 to a fact which most publicists have partly, if 
 1 (The Theory of the State, p. 106. ) 
 
200 TEE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 not wholly, ignored in their endeavors to find an 
 end that ought to regulate conduct ; and that is 
 the fact that, since the gospel has been preached, 
 men have had as a means of measurement 
 (within Christendom at least) the mind of Christ, 
 and that consciously or unconsciously they have 
 ever consulted it. It was the Grecian philosopher 
 Protagoras, who said that, " man is the measure 
 of all things , of the things that are, that they 
 are, of the things that are not, that they are not. 
 Just as each thing appears to each man so is it 
 for him. All truth is relative. The existence of 
 the gods is uncertain."^ Therefore, man, or 
 man's thought, according to Protagoras, is the 
 sole test or criterion of what is just and right. 
 With Plato there came in a newer and higher 
 view of life and conduct. This deep thinker re- 
 ferred everything to God. The Platonic philos- 
 ophy centred in the Theory of Ideas, and the 
 highest idea was the idea of the good, which is 
 God. Speaking of God, the creator and artificer 
 of the universe, Plato says, " He was good ; and 
 in the good envy is never engendered about 
 anything whatever. Hence, being free from 
 this (envy) He desired that all things should as 
 much as possible resemble himself." ^ God, then, 
 who is good and who desires all things to resem- 
 
 » (Ueberweg, Hist, of Phil., Vol. I., § 28.) 
 ^ (The Timaeus, Chap, x., p. 333, Bohn's Ed.) 
 
THE LAW OF THE STATE. 201 
 
 ble Himself, is the measure of all things, and jus- 
 tice, by which Plato does not mean simply the 
 virtue of rendering to all their dues, but which 
 with him stands for the harmonious development 
 of the soul, consists in the fulfilment by man of 
 his proper functions in relation to God, and in 
 his efforts to resemble his Maker. This theory 
 of Plato was a beautiful theory and one that we 
 recognize to-day as Christian in character. But 
 how was man to know the Idea of ideas and to 
 perceive His thought ? He could not climb up 
 to the place of God and see the world and hu- 
 man affairs from His point of view. This diffi- 
 culty Aristotle, the great disciple of Plato, sought 
 to avoid by looking at man as he ought to be, as 
 a perfect citizen in a perfect state. 
 
 Man, avers the Stagirite, has need of man for 
 his own development and for the attainment of 
 the real ends of life. Only in a state is the 
 ethical problem capable of solution. Man is by 
 nature a political animal and must live in an or- 
 ganized society, for " in the order of Nature the 
 State is prior to the household or the individual." ^ 
 The state arose originally for the protection of 
 life, but it ought to exist for the attainment of 
 the supreme good, as it is the supreme association 
 and embraces all the other associations of life. 
 The supreme good which is first obtained in a 
 ' (Politics, Book I., Chap, ii., p. 6, Welldon's Trans.) 
 
202 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 state is independence, and independence can be 
 had only where law and justice are observed and 
 practiced. " Just action," he says, " is bound up 
 with the existence of a State ; for the adminis- 
 tration of justice is an ordinance of the political 
 association and the administration of justice is 
 nothing else than the decision of what is just." ^ 
 Again, as necessarily follows from such ideas, 
 Aristotle declared that justice is " the supreme 
 virtue, 'more glorious than the star of eve or 
 dawn ' ; or as the proverb runs, 
 
 * Justice is the summary of all Virtue.' " "^ 
 
 And justice, we have seen, he defined to be the 
 " complete virtue," but complete only " in rela- 
 tion to one's neighbors."^ We see then, when 
 we come to ask what is the test or criterion of 
 conduct in the philosophy of Aristotle, t?iat it is 
 the just, or as w^e may say, the perfect man. 
 But where was such an one to be found ? Surely 
 not in the city-states of Greece, nor yet in the 
 great republic or empire of Kome, although in 
 both Grecian and Eoman history we find many 
 examples of lofty, though faulty, character dis- 
 played, as Plutarch has shown us in his " Parallel 
 Lives " of illustrious Greeks and Eomans ; but 
 
 » (/c?., p. 7.) 2 (Ethics, Book V., Chap, iii., p. 137.) 
 
 '{Id.) 
 
THE LAW OF THE STATE, 203 
 
 not in vain did Yirgil, on the eve of a revelation 
 of a better life, proclaim : 
 
 *' The latest era of Cumaean song 
 Hath now arrived ; afresh the mighty round 
 Of ages is begun. And now returns the virgin, 
 Returns the dynasty of Saturn, Now 
 A new succession is from heaven on high 
 Let fall."' 
 
 Isaiah, in the loftiest strains of prophecy, had 
 years before foretold the advent of such a one. 
 " There shall come forth a shoot out of the stock 
 of Jesse, and a branch out of his roots shall bear 
 fruit ; and the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon 
 him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the 
 spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowl- 
 edge, and of the fear of the Lord ; and his delight 
 shall be in the fear of the Lord ; and He shall 
 not judge after the sight of His eyes, neither re- 
 prove after the hearing of His ears ; but with 
 righteousness shall He judge the poor, and re- 
 prove with equity for the meek of the earth." ^ 
 And so in the era of Augustus, there was born 
 of the Virgin Mary, espoused to Joseph, of the 
 lineage of Jesse, Jesus, the Christ, the Saviour of 
 men. 
 
 Whatever we may think of the virgin-birth of 
 the son of God and of Man is not the question 
 
 ' (Eclogue iv., Pollio.) ^ (Isaiah xi. 1-4, E. V.) 
 
204 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 here : we are not concerned in any way with the 
 doctrine of the Incarnation, but this all men 
 must admit, that Jesus Christ was and is the 
 greatest teacher of morality that the world has 
 ever known, and that He offered and offers still 
 in Himself the best and safest test and criterion 
 of what is just and right ; that He is, therefore, 
 the highest and the perfect man, the measure of 
 all things human. When we look for an exposi- 
 tion of the teachings of Christ in the gospels, we 
 must say that we can ignore none of His words 
 and but few of His actions ; and yet we quickly 
 see that the sermon called the " Sermon on the 
 Mount " is the first and greatest revelation of His 
 doctrine, and we will therefore confine our atten- 
 tion now to it. What is it that distinguishes this 
 sermon from every other discourse that we have 
 of men ? (1) The authoritative way in which it 
 is expressed, so different from the tentative meth- 
 ods of the scribes of Israel and the philosophers 
 of Greece; (2) the constant dwelling upon the 
 spirit of the law rather than upon its letter ; (3) 
 the accommodation of the individual to the social 
 life of man. In the beginning, the blessedness of 
 certain personal characteristics is published, and 
 then, after the proclamation that the possession 
 of such characteristics are the light and salt of 
 the earth, and the announcement that the law of 
 Moses and the teachings of the prophets must be 
 
THE LAW OF THE STATE. 205 
 
 fulfilled, comes an exposition of how they are to 
 be carried into effect in their widest and truest 
 significance. The inference is that only those 
 who have the qualities pronounced to be blessed 
 can fulfil the law and the teachings of the proph- 
 ets, can be just and upright in their dealings with 
 their fellow-men, and are therefore fit for the 
 highest social life and the kingdom of God. 
 These only can organize society as it should be 
 organized, can make the noblest state. ^ 
 
 It is no exaggeration to say that since the time 
 when this sermon was first preached, even to this 
 present day, there is not a man, who has heard 
 it, who has not been influenced by its precepts in 
 his conduct in some degree ; and that every law 
 that has arisen in Christian society in any way, 
 by usage or custom, by judgment of prince or 
 court, by act of synod or of legislature, has had 
 some reference to it and its great Preacher. 
 Since Christ came, men have consciously or un- 
 consciously had a conception of what the perfect 
 man should be in a perfect society, and they have 
 therefore striven to carry out His teaching and 
 to make His ideal of right prevail therein — not 
 always, of course, but always when they have fol- 
 lowed their noblest aspirations. And so when 
 men ask for the true test and criterion of conduct 
 of men in society, we must answer in the words 
 
 ' (St. Matthew, Chap, v., et seq.) 
 
206 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 of Jesus Christ's greatest disciple, St. Paul, " We 
 have the mind of Christ." ^ 
 
 And yet some men, when they see how little 
 direct effect the teaching of Christ had upon the 
 development of the Koman law, say the world 
 could have gotten on and perhaps would have 
 gotten on better without His teaching. Let us 
 see. But first let us note what was the effect of 
 Christianity upon the law of Eome. Koman 
 law, we have seen, reached its highest state of 
 perfection in the era of the Antonine emperors, 
 and that era was over a hundred years before 
 the accession of Constantine. When, after the 
 empire had become Christian, the emperors 
 sought to simplify the body of the law by their 
 edicts and decrees, so vast and unwieldy had it 
 become, it was a difficult thing to make an im- 
 pression upon it. " When Justinian ascended the 
 throne, the reformation of the Roman jurispru- 
 dence was an arduous but indispensable task. In 
 the space of ten centuries, the infinite variety of 
 laws and legal opinions had filled many thousand 
 volumes, which no fortune could purchase, and 
 no capacity digest. Books could not easily be 
 found ; and the judges, poor in the midst of 
 riches, Avere reduced to the exercise of their illit- 
 erate discretion."^ Besides we must not look to 
 
 1 (1 Corinth, ii. 16, R. v.) 
 
 2 (Gibbon, Vol. VIII., Chap, xliv., p. 33.) 
 
THE LAW OF THE STATE. 207 
 
 Christianity for direct rules of laAv. Christ did 
 not undertake to lay down new principles, but to 
 give old ones a new and spiritual significance. 
 It was with Christianity as it was with Stoicism. 
 Says Sir Henry Maine, spealiing of the influence 
 of this philosophy on Koman law, " It is a se- 
 rious, though a very common, error to measure 
 the influence of Stoicism on Eoman law by 
 counting up the number of legal rules which can 
 be confidently affiliated on Stoical dogmas. It 
 has often been observed that the strength of 
 Stoicism resided not in its canons of conduct, 
 which were often repulsive and ridiculous, but in 
 the great though vague principle which it incul- 
 cated of resistance to passion." ^ And there is 
 another thing which we must take into consid- 
 eration when we try to measure the influence 
 that the teaching of Christ had upon the devel- 
 opment of the civil law, and that is that Jesus 
 Christ, when brought before Pontius Pilate, rec- 
 ognized both by his words and by his de- 
 meanor that the law that Pontius Pilate was set 
 to administer had in it the element of justice. 
 And why not ? AYhy should we take a narrow 
 view of life, and of life's history, and believe that 
 justice was simply revealed to the Jews, and that 
 they alone knew the principles of morality? 
 "The invisible things of Him," says St. Paul, 
 
 ' (Ancient Law, Chap, iii., p. 53.) 
 
208 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 " since the creation of the world are clearly seen, 
 being perceived through the things that are 
 made, even His everlasting power and divinity." ^ 
 And TertuUian, one of the first of the great 
 Latin Fathers, a scholar learned in the law of 
 Eome, wrote : " Why should God, the Founder 
 of the universe, the Governor of the whole 
 world, the Fashioner of humanity, the Sower of 
 universal nations, be believed to have given a 
 law through Moses to one people, and not be said 
 to have assigned it to all nations ? For unless 
 He had given it to all by no means would He 
 have habitually permitted even proselytes out of 
 the nations to have access to it. But — as is con- 
 gruous with the goodness of God, and with His 
 equity as the Fashioner of mankind — He gave to 
 all nations the self-same law, which at definite 
 and stated times He enjoined should be observed, 
 when He willed, and through whom He willed, 
 and as He willed."^ 
 
 But why multiply authorities ? It is self-evi- 
 dent that as God made of '^ one every nation of 
 men for to dwell on all the face of the earth," 
 He gave them all the same laws of right con- 
 duct; though to the Hebrews were the two 
 tables of the Law especially given, or added, be- 
 
 > (Eomansi. 20, E. V.) 
 
 ' (The Ante-Nicene Fathers, TertuUian, "An Answer to the 
 Jews," Chap, ii.) 
 
THE LAW OF THE STATE, 209 
 
 cause of offences. It was these same laws of 
 right conduct (as they had been declared by 
 Moses) that Christ expounded on the mount. In 
 those principles wherein the Koman law was 
 just (and there were many of them) it would nec- 
 essarily stand; in those commands wherein it 
 was unjust, it would necessarily have to be modi- 
 fied or done away. The jurisprudence of the old 
 Eoman Empire admitted at first only in a limited 
 degree this modifying power, but gradually, as 
 larger numbers of the subjects of the Empire be- 
 came adherents of Christ, it had, per force, to 
 take Christ's teaching more and more into con- 
 sideration, both as creating a necessity for new 
 laws conforming to the changed order of things, 
 and also because, the minds of many of the legis- 
 lators becoming dominated by Christian ideals, it 
 could not help but do so. 
 
 Justinian sought to consolidate in his eternal 
 legislation all the ancient and modern laws and 
 customs of the realm. " But the change which 
 had come over the Koman empire is manifest at 
 once. That Justinian is a Christian Emperor 
 appears in the front of his jurisprudence. Before 
 the august temple of the Eoman law there is, as 
 it were, a vestibule in which the Emperor seats 
 himself as the religious legislator of the world in 
 its new relation toward God." ^ And so, what we 
 > (Milman, Lat. Chris. Vol. I., Book III., Chap, v., p. 485.) 
 
210 THE STATE AND TEE CHURCH. 
 
 ought to look for and at is the influence of the 
 teaching of Christ, or as we may say, of Chris- 
 tianity, upon the Koman world and the world of 
 the barbaric nations that followed that of Kome. 
 We have seen in a former lecture that there 
 were four great things or elements that, coming 
 together, made the modern state, and that they 
 were, the philosophy of Greece, the law of Eome, 
 the Germans, and Christianity. We are now to 
 study the eifect of Christianity upon the civiliza- 
 tion of the world. I have touched upon it so 
 often that it will not be necessary to go into de- 
 tails. I desire simply to point out now some 
 heretofore unnoticed things. " The new force 
 which was born into the world with the Chris- 
 tian religion was evidently, from the very first, 
 of immeasurable social significance." ^ The orig- 
 inal impulse appeared to be weak, but it was in 
 fact tremendous. Who would ever have sup- 
 posed that the preaching of a few illiterate fish- 
 ermen and of an apparently " mad " Pharisee, 
 would have completely changed the hearts of 
 men and the trend of civilization ? Who would 
 ever have believed that it would have under- 
 mined and destroyed the most powerful and 
 most carefully organized society that mankind 
 had up to that time, perhaps ever, evolved ? 
 Who would ever have believed that it would 
 
 1 (Kidd, "Social Evolution," Chap, vi., p. 123.) 
 
THE LAW OF THE STATE. 211 
 
 have built up in men's hearts and minds the ideal 
 of a newer and nobler order of social life ? And 
 yet it did all these things. Christianity not only 
 destroyed, but it constructed, and it is this that 
 gives it its greatest claim upon humanity. Apart, 
 of course, from its revelation of the Godhead in 
 relation to man, the constructive principle of the 
 Christian life was of primary and chief impor- 
 tance. Men were transformed. The old motives 
 and ideas which had moved them, moved them 
 now no more. In the place of the fact of citizen- 
 ship, there came the ideal of brotherhood. In 
 the place of faith in the eternity of Eome, there 
 came a belief in the eternal fatherhood of God. 
 In the place of indifference to decency and mo- 
 rality, there came a frenzy to be pure and clean. 
 In the place of a neglect of the claims of human- 
 ity, there came a love for mankind that touched 
 the stars. " There has probably never existed 
 upon earth a community whose members were 
 bound to one another by a deeper or purer affec- 
 tion than the Christians, in the days of the per- 
 secution." ^ 
 
 It is not necessary to inquire just why these 
 things came to pass, but apart from the divine 
 order we can see that, before the teaching of 
 Christ was made known to men, the old religion 
 and the ethical system or systems upon which 
 
 ' (Lecky, Hist, of European Morals, Vol. I., Chap, iii., p. 424. ) 
 
212 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 the dominion of Eome had been built had begun 
 to decay, and men were longing for something 
 better. "Keligion, once the foundation of the 
 laws and rule of personal conduct, had subsided 
 into opinion. The educated, in their hearts, dis- 
 believed it. Temples were still built with in- 
 creasing splendor ; the established forms were 
 scrupulously observed. Public men spoke con- 
 ventionally of Providence, that they might throw 
 on their opponents the odium of impiety ; but of 
 genuine belief that life had any serious meaning, 
 there was none remaining beyond the circle of 
 the silent, patient, ignorant multitude." ^ A few 
 short years after the empire had been established 
 a Nero could command that the worthiest citizen 
 should take his own life, and the despot's desire 
 formed the command to do so. Later on, a 
 Commodus could drag the majesty of the purple 
 through the blood and mud of the arena, and 
 yet he could compel the senate to decree that he 
 was the Eoman Hercules. And still later; a 
 Heliogabalus could bring with him the effemi- 
 nate dress of an Oriental priest of the sun to the 
 throne, and make the Komans to submit to his 
 wild and wanton manners. And all these, and 
 thousands of men, their minions and followers, 
 and thousands, the minions and followers of 
 other emperors and rulers, indulged in excesses 
 
 ' (Froude, Caesar, Chap, i., p. 7.) 
 
THE LAW OF THE STATE. 213 
 
 and orgies so horrid and vile that they cannot 
 be named in our honest English, but must be 
 left untranslated in the Latin tongue. 
 
 But, as we have said, the preaching of Christ 
 changed all these things. What was it in His 
 teaching that gave hope to a despairing world, 
 and animated the effete society with new motives 
 and ideas ? Principally the facts, and the belief 
 in the facts, of the Fatherhood of God, the Son- 
 ship of Christ and the brotherhood of all men as 
 sons of God and brothers of Christ. In spite of 
 the best thought of the best philosophers, that 
 God was one and indivisible, it needed a divine 
 revelation to convince mankind that their " gods 
 many and lords many " were ridiculous, and that 
 their worship, running off, as it did, into all sorts 
 of debauchery, was debasing to the soul, and sub- 
 versive of the foundations of society and the 
 state. And yet this revelation would not in all 
 probability have destroyed the polytheism of the 
 classical nations, unless with the revelation there 
 had been vouchsafed to mankind the assurance 
 that God was, and is, the Father of all men, and 
 that Jesus Christ, His only-begotten Son, is our 
 brother. And in the fatherhood of God and the 
 brotherhood of Christ men went back (as they 
 must ever do) to the idea of a family ; only the 
 natural family was no longer the ideal of society, 
 but the universal family of mankind. It is, as I 
 
214 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 take it, out of the conception of tlie universal 
 family of mankind that has come all the best 
 and noblest things of our western civilization, 
 and it is this conception that is the impulse of 
 all our efforts for the attainment of justice among 
 men. It has taken a long while for the ideal to 
 develop, indeed, it has not by any means devel- 
 oped fully even now, yet when we read history 
 closely we can see that Christ's teaching is grad- 
 ually becoming better understood. The ideal ex- 
 pands, and with the expansion of the ideal grow 
 our beneficent laws and our softer and gentler 
 ways of living. "When we think of an universal 
 famil}^, it is not necessary to think of an univer- 
 sal empire, and it is here that Bluntschli made 
 his greatest mistake. Bluntschli looked at man 
 as an individual and mankind as a whole, and 
 declared that they are " the original and perma- 
 nent antithesis of creation." ^ We must not look 
 at man as an individual, but at man as grouped 
 in families. And so we need not look at an uni- 
 versal state, but at a family of states. The 
 glory of the universe is diversity in unity. The 
 idea of the universal state has departed with the 
 idea of the universal church ; neither the one nor 
 the other will rise again on earth. The king- 
 doms of the world will become the kingdom of 
 Christ, and the churches will become the church 
 
 1 (The Theory of the State, Book I., Chap, ii., p. 26.) 
 
THE LAW OF THE STATE. 215 
 
 of Christ, like as the Anglican and the American 
 churches are one and yet not one — one as are 
 the members of a family. 
 
 The question forces itself at once upon our 
 minds, Avhat is the bond of the family, and what 
 is its controlling power ? And the answer comes 
 at once, love. It is futile to go back into an 
 imaginary past and declare that love originated 
 in the care of a mother for her offspring, and 
 then passed over to the father. Man is only man 
 as he manifests this divine quality in every mem- 
 ber of the race ; and yet we must observe that it 
 was Christ who made man more of a man than 
 he ever was before. It was love that became the 
 great religious force of the new era of Chris- 
 tianity. In the practical workings of Chris- 
 tianity, this great thing was not confined to the 
 family ; nor did it remain a mere idea in society. 
 As it burned in the hearts of all the followers of 
 Christ it became a force that transformed all 
 their ideas of, and all their actions in, life. And 
 it was love that made them just ; men cannot be 
 unjust to those they love, and thus the ideal of 
 justice in law became modified. 
 
 We must admit, when we read the history of 
 the peoples of Europe in the times subsequent to 
 Charlemagne until our own era, that the ideals of 
 the brotherhood of man and of brotherly love 
 fell greatly in abeyance ; but this is precisely 
 
216 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 why we call these ages the '' dark ages " ; and 
 yet we find even in those times many evidences 
 of love in the works of Christian brotherhoods of 
 St. Francis and of other of the saints of the 
 church, and in the high principles of chivalry. 
 But it is certainly not until the old ideas of an 
 universal Koman empire and of an universal 
 Roman church had received their deathblows at 
 the reformation of the church and the reorgani- 
 zation of society in the breaking up of feudalism, 
 that the great conception of the universal family 
 of man in the universal fatherhood of God grew 
 strong and expanded. Feudalism had so many 
 various causes, and presents so many variable 
 aspects, it is impossible to describe it here. It 
 grew undoubtedly, as we have seen, out of a 
 movement in retrogression from the government 
 and civilization of Charlemagne, and was founded 
 primarily upon the fief, an estate held by an in- 
 ferior of a superior, on condition of military or 
 other service. The fief was a fragment of the 
 Frankish empire. It arose, as all human institu- 
 tions do, out of necessity, as the only means that 
 could be devised of keeping the fierce, warlike, 
 self-assertive society of the barbarous peoples in 
 medieeval Europe together. We are concerned 
 here with but one aspect of feudalism. Its hier- 
 archical gradations of sovereigns, and vassals, and 
 freemen, and villains, and serfs, stood in the way 
 
THE LAW OF THE STATE. 217 
 
 of the natural expansion of the ideal of Christian 
 brotherhood, and thus of the development of 
 our western civilization. It was not until the 
 abolition of feudal tenures in England by Parlia- 
 ment in 1660, and the breaking up of the same in 
 France by the people in 1793, that men began to 
 understand that rank and order are formal things, 
 and that no rank and no order can neutralize the 
 great fact of the brotherhood of man. At first 
 the idea of brotherhood grew only within the 
 different states, developing a force that put down 
 factions and factious wars ; but now it is grow- 
 ing among the nations themselves, making it ever 
 more and more difficult for any state to oppress 
 and harass another in the family of Christian na- 
 tions. 
 
 But the idea of brotherly love has not stopped 
 within the state with the putting down of in- 
 ternecine wars ; it has gone on working ever 
 more and more, softening the manners of all 
 sorts of men, and ameliorating the conditions of 
 life of those who in darker ages were compelled 
 to bear all the burdens of society and govern- 
 ment. And this divine force law has been com- 
 pelled to recognize in every way. It is this that 
 has changed the whole conception of criminal 
 law and of punishment for its infraction. It is 
 this that has placed many acts for the protection 
 of " working " men and women and children on 
 
218 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 the statute books ; it is this that has secured for 
 all classes a minimum of education ; it is this that 
 has made municipal corporations to care for the 
 housing of the poor; it is this that is making 
 common carriers, and other quasi-public corpora- 
 tions, recognize the fact that they exist primarily 
 for the benefit of the people, and that they must 
 conduct their businesses in justice with regard to 
 all. Justice to-day in Great Britain and in the 
 United States is commensurate with the ideal of 
 brotherly love of these two peoples, and law is 
 gradually becoming the expression of that love. 
 And what is this but to say that all the law and 
 all the teaching of men is summed up in the love 
 of God and of man, even as Christ said : For he 
 who loves God, the father of all, will understand 
 justice, and he who loves his fellow-men, his 
 brothers of the universal family named of Christ, 
 will deal justly with them, and the rules of con- 
 duct which such men form will be based on love. 
 
LECTUKE YI. 
 
 THE PEOPLE. 
 
 
 
 ^We have seen in a former lecture that one of 
 the great distinctions between the modern and 
 the ancient state is that, whereas in ancient times 
 the state was all important, and the citizens ex- 
 isted primarily for its benefit, to-day the point 
 of view, or of departure in state law and politics, 
 has changed. It is now the citizen that is of 
 chief importance and the state exists exclusively 
 for his benefit. The principal object of the 
 study of law and politics should therefore be the 
 citizen, or as we may say, the masses of citizens, 
 the people. Who, and what are the people? 
 " Peoples and Nations," says Bluntschli, " are the 
 products of history. A People comes into being 
 by a slow psychological process, in which a mass 
 of men gradually develop a type of life and so- 
 ciety which differentiates them from others, and 
 becomes the fixed inheritance of their race." j 
 
 " A mere arbitrary combination or collection 
 of men has never given rise to a People. Even 
 the voluntary agreement and social contract of a 
 number of persons cannot create one. To form 
 
 219 
 
220 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 a People the experiences and fortunes of several 
 generations must cooperate, and its permanence 
 is never secured until a succession of families, 
 handing down its accumulated culture from gen- 
 eration to generation, has made its characteris- 
 tics hereditary." ^ We see, then, that the two 
 chief marks or notes of a people are race and 
 family ; a people must possess certain character- 
 istics which make it different in race from other 
 peoples, and these characteristics are preserved 
 and transmitted from generation to generation 
 in the family. It is scarcely necessary for me to 
 define the term " nation." We know that " na- 
 tion " suggests to us a political idea rather than 
 a social ; and so w^e may say in a general way a 
 nation is a people organized into a state. 
 
 We perceive, w^hen we look back over the 
 broad fields of history, that race has been the 
 dominant factor in the birth and growth of the 
 state from time immemorial, and that it has for the 
 most part conditioned its progress and determined 
 its bounds. It is not my purpose to study with 
 you all the races, or even all the peoples of any 
 race — we have not time to do so. We have in- 
 cidentally studied one people of the Semitic and 
 three of the Aryan race, both of which great 
 families of men belong to the division of the 
 white race, ^' the children of the sun and heaven," 
 ' (The Theory of the State, Book II., Chap, ii., p. 87.) 
 
THE PEOPLE. 221 
 
 as the ancients called them. All the higher re- 
 ligions which unite man to God were first re- 
 vealed among them ; all the philosophy, the 
 whole body of the law, and the perfection of art, 
 issued from the workings of their mind. In con- 
 tact with other races they have always ended in 
 subduing them. They have dominated, and, in- 
 deed, they yet dominate the world. The func- 
 tion of the Semitic race is a religious one ; on 
 the other hand, the Aryan race has done most 
 for the development of the state and the estab- 
 lishing and maintenance of the rights of men. 
 Each of these two great races of the human 
 family is divided into several minor races, and 
 these minor races again into many peoples. The 
 subidivisions of the Semitic race we will not re- 
 gard, but only the subdivisions of the Aryan, 
 and of these we will regard only three, the Latin, 
 the Teuton and the Slav. The Anglo-American 
 people, commonly called the Anglo-American 
 race, because of its greatness, is a branch of the 
 Teutonic race, and we will study it as such. 
 
 When we look over the field of Europe, the 
 home of the chiefest part of the Aryan race, we 
 find these three great subdivisions confronting 
 each other and striving for the mastery. On the 
 continents of America only two, the Latin and 
 the Teutonic, are to be found.^ The Slav has as 
 
 ' (Since Russia sold Alaska to the United States. ) 
 
222 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 yet scarcely entered upon the battle for suprem- 
 acy; he may, therefore, be briefly dismissed. 
 What the future may have in store for this pa- 
 tient, plodding, religious race of men we do not 
 kno\Y ; but it is evident that the Slav will not 
 strongly contend with the rest of the nations un- 
 til the battle between the Latin and the Teutonic 
 races shall have been brought to its final termi- 
 nation. We sometimes think that the " mills of 
 God grind slowl}^," and yet, when we think so 
 we ought to call to mind how vast have been the 
 progress of events and the march of history. 
 Why, it is but four hundred years since Pope 
 Alexander YI. undertook to give the lands found 
 and to be found west of a meridian one hundred 
 leagues west of the Azores and the Cape Yerde 
 Islands to the kings of Castile, their heirs and 
 successors forever; Pope Eugenius lY. having 
 previously granted all the lands to the east to 
 the kings of Portugal. It was only three hun- 
 dred years ago that Philip II. of Spain, the great- 
 est monarch of his age, sent his invincible Ar- 
 mada to conquer the realm of England. It is 
 scarcely two hundred years ago when Louis XIY. 
 of France obscured the other potentates of his 
 day, and sought to absorb the light of the sun. 
 It is not a hundred years since Napoleon Bonaparte 
 trampled upon the persons and properties of all 
 the kings who opposed his way, and tried to set 
 
THE PEOPLE. 223 
 
 up an universal empire ; and yet, to-day, Portu- 
 gal is nothing more than a commercial depend- 
 ency of England ; Spain is shorn of her colonies 
 and is bankrupt ; her remaining dependencies, 
 having revolted against her misrule, have been 
 taken from her forcibly. Italy, which has not 
 sent out a colony since the days of the Caesars 
 until this age, has been obliged to surrender al- 
 most her only foreign possession. France is 
 weighed down with debt and care ; the popula- 
 tion of '•Ha grande nation'''' declines slightly 
 every year. Though feverishly putting forth 
 her strength to colonize Algeria and Tongking 
 and Madagascar and other parts of Africa ; she 
 holds what she cannot use. 
 
 The Teutonic race, on the other hand, goes on 
 to greatness every year. This race, it is evident, 
 came to absolute preeminence when the new 
 German empire was formed. During the time 
 of the division of Germany into many sovereign 
 states, subjects for French ambition and in- 
 trigues, there was a question whether the Latin 
 or the Teutonic race would acquire " the sceptre,'* 
 in spite of the rapid growth in numbers and 
 power of the English speaking peoples. The 
 question probably would have been decided in 
 favor of the Teutonic race even if Germany had 
 remained divided, because of the progress of 
 Great Britain and her offspring, the United 
 
224 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 States. But, however it might have been, it was 
 the entrance of Germany as a united state into 
 the family of nations which decided the question 
 absolutely in favor of the Teutons. And yet 
 Germany in many ways is Latinized. She holds 
 a secondary place among the Teutonic peoples, 
 although she possesses the home of the greatest 
 of the Germanic tribes. It is the Anglo-Saxons, 
 or, better, the Anglo-Americans, that are first in 
 power and preeminence among the Teutons, and 
 the whole family of the Aryans, a race which if 
 it sprang chiefly from the Angles and Saxons, yet 
 has in it a strain of the Northmen and something 
 of the Celts, and of the other peoples of Europe, 
 at least in its North American branch. But how 
 is Germany Latinized ? In her idea or plan of 
 government. Germany possesses under her pres- 
 ent ruling dynasty the Koman or military type 
 of state, which tends ultimately to Ca3sarism ; 
 that is, to the rule of an emperor founded upon 
 the obedience of all the people. It is vain for 
 the Kaiser to try to revive the institutions, with 
 the glamour of the middle ages ; his rule rests 
 not upon the old Stdnde (Estates) of the Holy 
 Eoman empire ; (feudalism was done away with 
 by the revolution which the French inaugurated) ; 
 it rests directly upon the backs of a toiling peo- 
 ple. The Germanic empire is a state in which 
 the Kaiser is the chief or war-lord, and between 
 
THE PEOPLE. 225 
 
 him and the people there is nothing but a titular 
 nobility. In Germany the people still live pri- 
 marily for the state. The thought of the ancient 
 world perpetuates itself where we would least 
 have thought to find it, and thus Germany is a 
 laggard in the family of the Teutonic nations ; 
 but Germany has always had a strange longing 
 for the things across the Alps, always a fatal ad- 
 miration for the things across the Khine. 
 
 Among the Latin peoples we find, as may be 
 expected, that the old idea of the great impor- 
 tance of the state has survived. It has been 
 somewhat modified by the rise and growth of the 
 democratic spirit, yet in monarchical Spain and 
 Italy, as well as in republican France, the state 
 is still first in the estimation of the people and 
 they look to it for rule and guidance in every 
 way of life ; it is still the great patron and dis- 
 penser of awards and honors. This may be seen 
 in many things, but especially in the education, 
 or lack of education, of the Spanish and Italian 
 and French boys ; in the custom of the father 
 making provision for the maintenance of each of 
 his children ; in the eagerness Avith which men 
 desire to secure some place under the govern- 
 ment ; in the bureaucratic methods of adminis- 
 tration ; but chiefly in the lack of self-reliance 
 that these peoples display. 
 
 " Ask a hundred young Frenchmen, graduating 
 
226 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 from college," says Edmond Demolins, "for what 
 careers they are destined, and three-quarters of 
 them will reply that they are candidates for posi- 
 tions under the government." And as it is by 
 examinations that positions are obtained, it re- 
 sults, "that to succeed at examination is the 
 principal preoccupation of the young French- 
 man, since all his future depends upon his first 
 success." ^ 
 
 On the other hand, M. Demolins shows that the 
 prime object of education in the new conditions 
 of modern life should be to make children self- 
 reliant and to create in them a power of initia- 
 tion, and this object he states is accomplished by 
 the English. "More advanced than we are in 
 the way of modern transformations, they feel 
 still more the obligation of responding to their 
 great necessities. These are essentially to make 
 young men ready a se tirer aux-memes d"* affaire 
 in all the difficulties and in all the situations of 
 life ; that is, to make practical and energetic 
 men, and not functionaries and litterateurs, who 
 know life only as they learn it in books, that is to 
 say, but very little." ^ 
 
 And this ability and power to rely upon one- 
 self de Tocqueville considers to be the most 
 
 * {A quoi tient la superiorite des Anglo-Saxons, Liv. I., Chap, 
 i., p. 3.) 
 
 '{Id., Chap, iii., p. 54.) 
 
THE PEOPLE. 227 
 
 striking characteristic of Americans, who, as we 
 know, have the same origin as the English, have 
 lived for centuries under the same laws, are using 
 the same language, and are constantly exchang- 
 ing opinions and ideas, and who thus acquire the 
 same methods and manners. After alluding to 
 the fact that the Americans have no [political] 
 school of philosophy and care very little for 
 those into which Europe is divided, he says it is 
 " nevertheless easy to perceive that almost all the 
 inhabitants of the United States conduct their 
 understanding in the same manner and govern it 
 by the same rules," and these rules he declares to 
 be : " to evade the bondage of system and habit, 
 of family-maxims, class opinions, and, in some 
 degree, of national prejudices ; to accept tradi- 
 tion only as a means of information, and existing 
 facts only as a lesson used in doing otherwise and 
 doing better; to seek the reason of things for 
 oneself, and in oneself alone ; to tend to results 
 without being bound to means, and to aim at the 
 substance through the form ; — such are the princi- 
 pal characteristics of what I shall call the phil- 
 osophical method of the Americans."^ 
 
 It is precisely by reason and by means of this 
 
 self-reliance, or, as Demolins calls it, " self-help," 
 
 that the foundations of the English colonies were 
 
 laid so securely on the bleak shores of the ]N"orth 
 
 ' (Democracy in America, Part II., Book I., Chap, i., p. 1.) 
 
228 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 Atlantic, and it was by reason and by means of 
 this very thing that the colonies overcame the 
 French in the long war for the possession of the 
 North American continent ; and this thing it was 
 that made these young colonies a great and mas- 
 terful people, able to stand alone in the family 
 of nations ; and this " self-help " of the colonies 
 it was too that taught the mother countrj^ a 
 lesson, both how to deal with her other children 
 abroad and how to further their interests at 
 home. It is self-reliance, " self-help," that makes 
 the men of the Anglo-American race not to wait 
 upon the state, but rather to act for themselves. 
 And this gives them the effective power of initia- 
 tion that has made them to seek for new routes 
 and new possessions everywhere throughout the 
 wide world. And this leads us to the conclusion 
 that not all the people of the Aryan race can be 
 said to possess the ideal of the state which we 
 call modern, but only those of the Teutonic sub- 
 division, and of this subdivision Germany, though 
 she has the ideal of the modern state in her phi- 
 losophy, yet has she the ideal rather than its 
 substance. "We will therefore study principall}^ 
 the Anglo-American peoples, and of them that 
 which we know best, the American. 
 
 Let us ask ourselves, then, what is our attitude 
 toward the state ? Is it that of a subject ? Xo ; 
 we never speak of ourselves as such. Is it that 
 
THE PEOPLE. 229 
 
 of a client? No; we do not depend upon the 
 state for life and liberty. Is it that of a master ? 
 No ; we do not dominate our fellow-citizens by 
 means of government. (^The attitude of Ameri- 
 cans toward the state is that of a part owner, 
 the part being infinitesimal because of the mul- 
 titude of owners, but none the less real though 
 it be small. And it is this ownership that makes 
 us to delight in the state, that makes us to de- 
 termine that nothing that is harmful shall come 
 to it. And this makes us to understand also that 
 the state exists for us, and not we for the state. 
 As wonderful as we believe the constitution of 
 the United States to be, yet we know and feel 
 that it was and is a creation of man and was 
 made by man for his good, because man cannot 
 live in a stateless condition. It is because its 
 work has been so beneficent that it is so much 
 admired and revered ; and yet, silently and un- 
 obtrusively, we have changed much of its spirit 
 where we have not altered a letter. J We well 
 understand that the men who made the consti- 
 tution, though they were democratic in many 
 things, were yet in others aristocratic, and this 
 is seen particularly in the status of the supreme 
 court and in the machinery for the election of 
 the president. And again we see this in the fact 
 that Washington and Lee, Livingston and Ham- 
 ilton, Otis and Hancock, and the chief actors in 
 
230 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 the great drama for liberty generally were aris- 
 tocrats, if not by birth, by education and feeling. 
 It is to be remarked that Lafayette and Rocham- 
 beau were ever in sympathy with the oiRcers of 
 our revolution, and that they were not so with 
 those who subsequently made the French. It 
 was not until the presidency of Jefferson that 
 democracy became a real factor in the govern- 
 ment of the United States. And it was not until 
 the presidency of Lincoln that it became the 
 dominant one ; and this can be said in spite of 
 the equality of legal conditions which existed in 
 the United States since the founding of its gov- 
 ernment. It was during the w^ar of the rebellion 
 that the people absolutely came to the front in 
 the North, which place they have occupied since 
 in the North, and, also, in the South, for the 
 southern aristocracy was annihilated in the war. 
 We have to-day — we have had since the time of 
 Lincoln — a government by the people, of the peo- 
 ple, and for the people, and the only one on the 
 face of the earth. The state of Great Britain, as 
 the House of Commons has gradually acquired 
 more political power in the extension of the fran- 
 chise and in the spread of education, is fast 
 becoming a democracy, but as yet it possesses 
 many aristocratic characteristics, and these are 
 still dominant in that great empire. 
 ( It is in the United States alone that the people 
 
THE PEOPLE. 231 
 
 are absolutely sovereign, and this they are in fact 
 without any theory of hoio. It is simply ad- 
 mitted that the people possess all power and can 
 do as it wills. Not that it can do no wrong, as 
 was the rule in regard to kings, but that it can 
 do as it wills. The difficulty of course is to as- 
 certain the will of the people.} How do we learn 
 it ? Ostensibly by sending men, representing the 
 people, to this or that council, or assembly, or 
 legislature, or senate. These men come together 
 and after the discussion of the various questions 
 that arise, determine them. This they seem to 
 do, but in reality, the questions of the day are 
 determined outside of these bodies. They are 
 determined partly by the voice of the people as 
 expressed in the elections, but chiefly by that 
 voice as it expresses itself day by day in the 
 newspapers, in the magazines, and in the speeches 
 and conversation of men who understand public 
 affairs and perceive the trend of public senti- 
 ment ; by, that is, the force of the new ruler in 
 democratic governments, public opinion. 
 ( I speak of public opinion as a new ruler, and 
 yet as Mr. Bryce has so admirably shown, all 
 governments have rested upon the opinion, un- 
 spoken it may have been and unconscious, but 
 none the less real and potent, of the masses of 
 the people. "The despotisms of the East, al- 
 though they usually began in conquest, did not 
 
232 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 stand by military force but by popular assent. 
 So did the feudal kingdoms of mediaeval Europe. 
 So do the despotisms of the Sultan (so far at 
 least as regards his Mussulmen subjects), of the 
 Shah, and of the Chinese Emperor at this mo- 
 ment." ^ 
 
 We must understand that in the earlier and 
 simpler forms of government opinion is always 
 passive and never active — it acquiesces in the ex- 
 isting state of things because it knows no better, 
 or, if it knows, perceives no way that betterment 
 may be had. And very often, too, it is overlaid 
 by superstition and false religious notions. " The 
 difference, therefore, between the despotically 
 governed and free countries does not consist in 
 the fact that the latter are ruled by opinion and 
 the former by force, for both are generally ruled 
 by opinion. It consists rather in this, that in 
 the former the people instinctively obey a power 
 which they do not know to be really of their 
 own creation, and to stand by their permission ; 
 whereas in the latter the people feel their su- 
 premacy, and consciously treat their rulers as 
 their agents, while the rulers obey a power 
 which they admit to have made and to be able 
 to unmake them — the popular will."^ j 
 
 ^ (The American Commonwealth, Part IV., Chap. Lxxvii., p. 
 255. ) 
 
 2(/d., p. 257.) 
 
THE PEOPLE. 233 
 
 But the question is, what is it that directs pub- 
 lic opinion toward the right and keeps it true ? 
 All history confirms the words of the prophet 
 Jeremiah that " the heart is deceitful above all 
 things and is desperately sick." ^ It needs some- 
 thing to cure and to subdue it, and that some- 
 thing man has found in his religions. We shall 
 not attempt to study how religions generally 
 have affected the hearts of men — our study now 
 is as to the effect of Christianity upon the white 
 race, and more especially upon that part of it 
 which is called the American people. The effect 
 of the teachings of Christ upon the civilization of 
 the west is the subject matter of Mr. Kidd's well- 
 known treatise on " Social Evolution." He has 
 shown, and to the most of his critics, has shown 
 conclusively, that the central feature of human 
 history is not the philosophy, but the religion of 
 man, and that human progress does not consist 
 in the development of the intellect, but rather in 
 the growth of moral, that is, of religious feeling. 
 Before the coming of Christ, religion, as we 
 know, was generally divorced from morality ; 
 and it is because Christ brought religion and 
 morality together and made them one and the 
 same thing, that His teaching has become the 
 light of the world. 
 
 It is precisely in the United States that the re- 
 
 > (xvii. 9, E. V.) 
 
234 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH, 
 
 ligion of Christ is freest to do its beneficent work 
 for the hearts of men. Here there is no estab- 
 lished church and no sect of the church that is in 
 any way favored and assisted by the different 
 governments of the states, or by that of the 
 United States ; and yet there is no people within 
 the circle of the influence of western Christendom 
 that is more devoted to the teachings of Christ 
 than is the American people, none that is more 
 truly religious. The religious side of the life of 
 the American people was clearly perceived and 
 remarked upon by our first great critic, de 
 Tocqueville,^ and although Mr. Bryce, our last 
 critic, does not express himself in as strong terms 
 as does de Tocqueville, he yet avers that the 
 ethical standard of the average man in the 
 United States is the Christian standard. " The 
 average man has not thought of any other stand- 
 ard, and religious teaching, although it has be- 
 come less definite and less dogmatic " than that of 
 Protestant Europe, "is still to him the source 
 whence he believes himself to have drawn his 
 ideas of duty and conduct." ^ 
 
 Even a superficial knowledge of the people of 
 the United States must convince a man of the 
 truth of Mr. Bryce's assertion. The American 
 people have long since passed outside the bands 
 
 ^ (Democracy in America, Part II., Book I., Clmp. i., p. 4.) 
 '^ (The American Commonwealth, Part VI., Chap, cvii., p. 723.) 
 
THE PEOPLE. 235 
 
 of mediaeval theology and they no longer care 
 for dogmatic teaching, but they believe, and they 
 believe most thoroughly, in the fatherhood of 
 God that made them, and in the sonship of 
 Christ, the universal brother of the whole broth- 
 erhood of man. And it is practically these two 
 beliefs that direct public opinion toward the right 
 and keep it true. 
 
 But public opinion is but a breath, at most a 
 thought or an idea. Does it not rest upon some- 
 thing ? Yes, upon common sense, or, as we may 
 say, upon the sound practical judgment of the 
 people. That it be sound, means that it be un- 
 warped by prejudice, passion, fancy or fear ; that 
 it be practical means that it be unaided by any 
 art or systematic train of argumentation but be 
 the result of experience alone. "Native sense 
 must have been invigorated or practiced by prac- 
 tical life to become common sense." ^ It is com- 
 mon sense that differentiates the Anglo-Ameri- 
 can peoples from the other peoples of Christen- 
 dom, and this thing is the product of their self- 
 help and self-reliance, working upon their free 
 minds in a belief in God and in the brotherhood 
 of man. Never before in the history of the 
 world has there been manifested in a people so 
 much of a common feeling as there has been in 
 the United States during the past thirty or forty 
 » (Lieber, Pol. Ethics, Book I., Sec. xliv., p. 93.) 
 
236 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 years, and this has been the result of the com- 
 mon sense of the people. Free from prejudice 
 and class feeling, they have learned that man- 
 kind is one, and that all men have for the most 
 part the same motives and the same ideas. The 
 difference between class and class has broken 
 down and disappeared ; there are some rich and 
 many poor, but the rich man does not feel him- 
 self to be made of different clay from his poor 
 brother. He knows that there is a solidarity 
 that cannot be destroyed, that for weal or woe 
 he and his neighbor are bound together in indis- 
 soluble ties in society, as well as in politics. 
 One reason — a practical one — why the rich man 
 does not consider himself to be made of different 
 clay from his poor neighbor is because he sees 
 that the poor man of to-day may be the rich man 
 of to-morrow; but the fundamental reason lies 
 in the expansion of the teachings of Christ to 
 the realities of life. " It would be difficult, per- 
 haps impossible, to exaggerate the difference in 
 the estimate put upon the value of a human life 
 in our own day and in the times that are now in 
 the custody of written history. If it be true 
 that the ' individual withers and the race is more 
 and more ' it may turn out that the value set 
 upon the race is solely to emphasize the value of 
 the individual." ^ 
 
 ' (Donald, The Expansion of Religion, p. 49.) 
 
THE PEOPLE, 237 
 
 f The purpose of the state and government to- 
 day is recognized by all to be for the protection 
 and welfare of all men, be the individual man 
 high or low, rich or poor ; and this great thing 
 has been brought about by the teachings of Christ 
 as the same have been expanded and carried into 
 the practical life of the people. ; There was a 
 time, not many years ago, when the question 
 that Jesus Christ asked, " How much then is a 
 man of more value than a sheep?" would have 
 been put by the privileged few, "How much 
 then is a deer of more value than a man ? " But 
 such ideas were never part of the mental furni- 
 ture of the men who have dwelt within the con- 
 fines of the American republic. The welfare of 
 all free men has ever been the end of the Ameri- 
 can state and government, and the value of a 
 man's life has never been measured by the 
 abundance of the things he possessed. In his 
 recent book, " Democracy and Liberty," Mr. 
 Lecky bemoans the rise of the democratic spirit 
 in the world, and especially in England, in a way 
 that seems curious to us here in the United States 
 who have learned to look upon man as of pri- 
 mary, and property as of secondary importance 
 in life. It is manhood suffrage, the right of every 
 freeman to vote in all elections, that distresses 
 him. It Avas "the indissoluble connection be- 
 tween taxation and representation which was," 
 
238 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 he says, " the very mainspring of English con- 
 ceptions of freedom." "It was also a funda- 
 mental principle of the old system of representa- 
 tion that the chief political power should be with 
 the owners of the land,"^ but democracy, he 
 avers, " pushed to its full consequences, places 
 the whole property of the country in the hands 
 of the poorest classes, giving them unlimited 
 power of helping themselves."^ And yet how 
 humane has democracy been when we compare 
 the moderation of the many poor toward the few 
 rich since manhood suffrage has prevailed, to 
 the inhumanity of the few rich toward the many 
 poor when political power was in the hands of 
 the few ! It is not necessary more than to allude 
 to the condition of the rural laborers and factory 
 hands and miners, before the rise of the people, 
 in England. Think of it. It was in the year 
 1834 that Harriet Martineau could write of the 
 condition of the children of the rural laborers in 
 England that they " struggled with the pigs for 
 food during the day, — doing nothing useful, 
 learning nothing which would raise them above 
 the beasts of the field ; and at night huddled on 
 damp straw, under a roof of rotten thatch; or 
 went out to carry poached game, or to fire the 
 farmers' stacks."^ And of the factory children 
 
 ' (Vol. I., Chap, i., p. 2.) '^ {Id., p. 33.) 
 
 3 (History of England, Vol. III., Book IV., Chap, vii., p. 334.) 
 
THE PEOPLE. 239 
 
 she speaks : " Here were children — little creatures 
 whose lives should have been spent in growing 
 in body and mind, — employed all day, and far 
 into the night, in the monotonous and stupefying 
 work of spinning in the mills." ^ But the state 
 of the women and children who worked in the 
 mines was most forlorn. " In 1842," says Miss 
 Martineau, " Lord Ashley had brought forward 
 a bill on behalf of a set of people who really ap- 
 peared to have been neglected by all mankind " 
 — the miners. "A committee of inquiry, ob- 
 tained by this philanthropist, laid open a scene 
 which shocked the whole community. Women 
 were employed as beasts of burden; children 
 were stunted and diseased, beaten, overworked, 
 oppressed in every way ; both women and chil- 
 dren were made to crawl on all fours in the pas- 
 sages of the pits, dragging carts by a chain pass- 
 ing from the waist between the legs; and all 
 lived in an atmosphere of filth and profligacy 
 which could hardly leave a thought or feeling 
 untainted by vice." ^ J^or were the English mill 
 and mine owners the only sinners against women 
 and children, as the address of Seth Luther, on 
 '' The Condition of the Producing Classes in Eu- 
 rope and America in 1832 " will show. Cer- 
 tainly it is not property that has been the cause 
 of the miseries of mankind, for democracy desires 
 
 '{Id.) « {Id. , Vol. IV. , Book VI. , Chap. vii. , p. 355. ) 
 
240 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH, 
 
 wealth as strenuously as aristocracy ; but there 
 is no gainsaying it, the making of property the 
 thing of chief importance, and the welfare of 
 men a matter of little concern, has been the cause 
 of untold miseries, whether we look at ancient, 
 at mediaeval, or at modern society. 
 
 That democracy has many faults and many 
 evil tendencies all who have any experience 
 know, and those who have none can read Mr. 
 Lecky's book, for in that he singles out and 
 makes prominent everything that can be said 
 against the rule of the people. But Mr. Lecky, 
 it must be observed, writes with a prejudice, " he 
 is a gentleman in the old sense of the term, who 
 feels that his weight as such is in some sort 
 menaced."^ But one thing, among many, that 
 Mr. Lecky and writers of his school deplore I am 
 not convinced is altogether an evil, and that is 
 the decline of parliamentary government. Par- 
 liamentary, or as we may say, representative 
 government, has done great service in developing 
 the interests and protecting the liberties of man- 
 kind, but it is not too much to say that it has 
 had its day and that its usefulness is passing 
 away. If it were not so, the parliament of Great 
 Britain, the congress of the United States and 
 the legislatures of the various states of the union 
 would not exhibit so many signs of weakness 
 
 * (Godkin, Problems of Modern Democracy, p. 279. ) 
 
TEE PEOPLE. 241 
 
 and degeneration. The people, the masses of 
 the people, it is evident, are far better educated 
 and infinitely better behaved than they were one 
 hundred or even fifty years ago. There will 
 never come a time, so far as we can see, when 
 some central legislating power or powers will 
 not be required, but the tendency to-day is for 
 the people to take ever more and more care of 
 themselves. We see this in the so-called local 
 option laws, which now have existence in Great 
 Britain and her colonies, as well as in the United 
 States, in the referendiLm of the Swiss republic, 
 and in the submission of constitutions and of 
 various proposals and amendments to the people 
 of the respective American states. Mr. Bryce 
 has a chapter on direct legislation by the people 
 in his well-known book, on " The American 
 Commonwealth," ^ which is very suggestive. It 
 is evident that he is not in sympathy with the 
 thing he describes ; but this lack of sympathy is 
 to be expected from so accomplished a parlia- 
 mentarian. 
 
 But the people of the United States show that 
 they are aware of their sovereignty, not only in 
 the way of making laws directly for their own 
 governance, but by carrying on their affairs with- 
 out enactments or with only the indirect aid of 
 them. If, as Mr. Lecky says, the " characteristic 
 » (Part II., Chap, xxxix., p. 463.) 
 
242 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 function of government is business," ^ it is in the 
 management of so much business with so little 
 aid of government that democracy show^s its 
 right to rule. It is amazing how much of the 
 business of the people of the American republic 
 is carried on without political guidance. Govern- 
 ment has created from time immemorial the fic- 
 titious person, a corporation, but it is only within 
 the past fifty years that this creation has been 
 augmented and developed for the conduct of 
 every kind of business. By means of corpora- 
 tions vast interests which would otherwise have 
 demanded the intervention of the government 
 have been cared for in ways that no governmen- 
 tal regulations could foresee, and for which they 
 could therefore have made no provision. These 
 aids of progress have increased everywhere 
 throughout Christendom, but it is chiefly in the 
 United States that they have become so numer- 
 ous, l^ov are these corporations simpl}^ confined 
 to the transaction of business ; thousands of them 
 are for charitable and social and fraternal pur- 
 poses, and these are interwoven with the life of 
 the people, and carry out their wishes and pro- 
 vide for their welfare and happiness in innumer- 
 able different ways. That there are many abuses 
 that grow out of the great growth of corpora- 
 tions we all know, but we may look to see the 
 
 ' (Democracy and Liberty, Vol. I., Chap, i., p. 45.) 
 
THE FEOFLE. 243 
 
 people rectifying them in due time. But we 
 must not forget that it is the corporations \Yhich 
 have enabled the people of the United States to 
 subdue this continent, and to cover it with the 
 good things that go to make up the comfort and 
 pleasures of life, which embody as it were, our 
 western civilization. Again, I would observe 
 that so accustomed are the people of the United 
 States to consult and agree together to carry on 
 their affairs, that not even corporations are al- 
 ways requisite, in spite of their manifest advan- 
 tages of unity and limited liability. We see this 
 in the establishment of clearing-houses, chambers 
 of commerce, and the like, though these eventu- 
 ally secure some kind of corporate existence. 
 
 But is business the characteristic function of 
 government ? Are there not interests that are 
 higher ? In the outbreak of our war with Spain 
 the people of the United States said that there 
 were, and these they pronounced to be the ends 
 of justice and humanity. And these they have 
 since declared to be the rightful ends of the gov- 
 ernment of the American people, in the pulpit, 
 in the press, on the platform, yes, in Congress it- 
 self; though the covetousness of the political 
 business men has striven to make the people be- 
 lieve that gain, or, as Mr. Lecky calls it, " busi- 
 ness," is the characteristic function of the democ- 
 racy of the new, as well as of the aristocracies of 
 
244 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 the old Avorld. It is because Christian democracy 
 has always had regard for the high interests of 
 life that we love and trust it. The whole doc- 
 trine of the fatherhood of God and the brother- 
 hood of man is involved in the Lord's Prayer, 
 but until the rise and growth of democracy they 
 were never understood nor acted upon. It is too 
 much to say that they are fully comprehended 
 and put into practice to-day, but the people, the 
 great masses of the people, not only of our own 
 country but of all countries throughout the civi- 
 lized world, are beginning to feel their force and 
 to follow their meaning. It is not only the sol- 
 diers and the sailors of Great Britain and the 
 United States who believe that they are children 
 of one Father, but those of the kingdom of Spain 
 and of the republic of France — those of every 
 nation under the sun. 
 
 I can see only two questions that confront the 
 people of the United States that carry with them 
 no suggestions of immediate solution, and they 
 are the question of the alliance of politics with 
 business and the question of the too great atnass- 
 ing of wealth in the hands of a few individual 
 citizens. The first question is the one that faces 
 us in the present, the second the one which will 
 face us in the future. A time was in the history 
 of the United States when men entered the 
 arena of politics as the supporters and expound- 
 
THE PEOPLE. 245 
 
 ers of some great social or economic principle, 
 which was as a rule alleged to be found, or not 
 to be found, in the constitution of the United 
 States ; but all the great constitutional questions 
 have been settled, and the chief thought of the 
 people for the past generation has been how they 
 could best develop the resources of the country. 
 It was undoubtedly first because of this impulse 
 that men sought for political places, or resorted 
 to others who had political places, for business 
 purposes. And if the businesses in view had 
 been always legitimate and had been carried on 
 in legitimate ways, we would have no cause for 
 complaint and fear. But many of the businesses 
 that men have sought to promote politically have 
 not been legitimate, and much of the legitimate 
 businesses so promoted have been advanced by 
 dishonorable and dishonest means. 
 
 But this is not the worst side of the nefarious 
 alliance between business and politics. The 
 worst has been the fact that as outside politi- 
 cians have seen how business men have endeav- 
 oredi to further their personal interests politi- 
 cally, they have sought and obtained the posi- 
 tions by and from which favors can be had by 
 paying for them. ISTor is this all. After these 
 men had attained positions of political power, 
 they learned not only to make the dishonest pro- 
 moters of businesses, legimate and illegitimate, 
 
246 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 pay for the favors they required, but also to levy 
 tax upon and to take toll from many legitimate 
 businesses conducted by honorable business men. 
 And so, as these political positions have become 
 very valuable from a money making point of 
 view, it has come to pass that the politicians 
 have not hesitated to perpetrate frauds of all 
 kinds in order to elect themselves and their crea- 
 tures to the places of pelf and power. It is the 
 question of the hour. In the great cities of the 
 land and in some of the smaller ones, too, the 
 whole municipal machinery is in the hands of so- 
 called " bosses " who batten off the business en- 
 terprises of our citizens. The honest as w^ell as 
 the dishonest business men are compelled to sub- 
 sidize and feed these harpies; the honest that 
 they may not be suppressed, the dishonest that 
 they may be maintained. 
 
 How long this state of affairs will continue, 
 we cannot tell. Yet I believe an end will even- 
 tually be made to it, and for this reason. Party 
 rancor has greatly declined in the United States, 
 and there is but little place for political preju- 
 dice. It is by rancor and prejudice chiefly that 
 the political parties have been held together in 
 the past, by means of which fact the " bosses " 
 have been able to obtain their evil ascendency. 
 As party lines become more and more obliterated 
 they will become so first in municipal elections ; 
 
THE PEOPLE. 247 
 
 indeed, there is evidence that they are less 
 strongly drawn here from year to year. When 
 they shall become wholly effaced and there shall 
 be no more municipal politics, the regime of the 
 " bosses " must go ; for there are more honest 
 than dishonest men in our country, and the hon- 
 est will at last combine and put to rout their 
 shameless adversaries. 
 
 There is a political measure, also, which if it 
 could be carried into effect would, it seems to 
 me, help to divorce business from politics, and 
 that is, the election of United States senators di- 
 rectly by the people. The senate of the United 
 States is made up now greatly of business men, 
 and when we ask ourselves why this is so, we 
 must answer that when political business men 
 have obtained the control of their respective 
 state legislatures for their individual purposes, 
 they have sought the office of senator as a way 
 to social rehabilitation and preeminence ; and 
 perhaps also as a means of further benefiting 
 their respective business enterprises. Or, if this 
 has not been exactly the history of the election 
 of business men to the senate, we must say that 
 they have been chosen because they are rich 
 men, and have been able to contribute, and have 
 contributed, to the " campaign funds " of the dif- 
 ferent state legislators and senators, and then 
 claimed that these last should return favor for 
 
248 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH, 
 
 favor and promote them to the high dignity of 
 the American senate, a place designed for pa- 
 triots and statesmen, that is, for men of the no- 
 blest character and of the highest aspirations for 
 truth and righteousness in the life of the nation. 
 ]S"o one would complain — rather would every one 
 rejoice — if the business men of our country 
 should be elected to the senate of the United 
 States because of their endeavors to promote the 
 welfare of their respective communities, and this 
 should be the test of their fitness. At the polls 
 the people would be the best judges of their hon- 
 est efforts so to do. 
 
 The question of the too great amassing of 
 wealth in the hands of a few individual citizens 
 is more difficult of solution. That there will be 
 inequalities in the distribution of wealth all men 
 will agree who perceive that there are inequali- 
 ties in the mental and physical endowments of 
 mankind ; and this perception is well-nigh uni- 
 versal ; but there need not be, there ought not to 
 be, the extremes of inequality between the multi- 
 millionaires and the proletarians which now 
 amaze and perplex us and cause us to fear.^ It is 
 not at all likely that socialism in any of its forms 
 will prevail in the great republic except it may 
 be in the form of state socialism, that is, the tak- 
 
 * ( Vide Spahr, The Present Distribution of Wealth in the 
 United States, p. 158, et seq. ) 
 
THE PEOPLE, 249 
 
 ing over to itself by the state of certain proper- 
 ties and interests that have become monopolies 
 or that tend to become such, for the benefit of 
 all ; such as railroads, and telegraphs, and other 
 means of transportation and of communication, 
 and the articles of trade that have come, or will 
 come eventually, into the control of some central 
 combination or trust ; yet, I hope that state so- 
 cialism will never develop in the United States, 
 because, in my opinion, state socialism, and in- 
 deed all forms of socialism, mean the decline of 
 democracy. Democracy postulates that govern- 
 ment from above shall be reduced to a minimum. 
 State socialism means the increase of the office- 
 holding class to a very great extent, and the giv- 
 ing into their hands of powers that cannot be 
 described as anything other than imperial and 
 aristocratic. 
 
 What are the remedies for the too great in- 
 equalities of fortune, which every man who re- 
 flects perceives to be wrong and deleterious to 
 the best interests of the country ? There are no 
 legal remedies, if we are to remain a free people, 
 except those which come from a just and equi- 
 table system of taxation, and from enactments 
 which compel men to be honest and which pre- 
 vent certain causes of injustice ; for example, the 
 watering of stocks, and the giving of special 
 rates of transportation to favored individuals. 
 
250 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 The real remedy lies outside of the domain of 
 law, and finds its root in morality, or better, in 
 religion. It is connected with the simple thing 
 that has made the rule of the people possible, 
 education ; but by education I do not mean so 
 much the thing that has gone by its name up to 
 the present time, the training of the mental 
 powers and faculties merely. I mean also the 
 teaching of men the principles and ideas that fol- 
 low necessarily from the conviction that there is 
 a God in heaven who is Father of us all, whose 
 great attributes are justice and mercy, and truth 
 and love, and who can be trusted to be all these 
 things toward His children, both here and here- 
 after, as they are so toward their fellow-men. In 
 other words, it is only as men have a religious 
 sanction for their conduct that the}^ will cease to 
 be selfish and learn to be liberal. It is not Avith 
 wealth that is acquired by honest toil and fair 
 dealing that the people quarrel, but w^ith that 
 which is gained by meanness and fraud. 
 
 There is another thing, which, as it seems to 
 me, the people in a democracy must learn, and 
 that is that not the individual but the family is 
 the basis and unit of society, and that the church 
 and the state must exhibit in every way the 
 family ideal. That men live in an universal 
 famil}^ in the sight of God is shown by the fact 
 that Christ taught us to address God as " our 
 
THE PEOPLE. 251 
 
 Father." This truth, of course, carried to its 
 logical conclusion, must necessarily mean an uni- 
 versal state, which would be conterminous with 
 a catholic church, but we cannot carry it to its 
 logical conclusion in the world to-day, it is self- 
 evident ; but we can carry it to its logical con- 
 clusion in a nation. And this is the true value of 
 the national state and its essential significance, 
 that the men of a nation feel themselves to be 
 brothers. The fact of brotherhood has outgrown 
 all caste and class, and has expanded to the ex- 
 tent of nationality at least. In God's good time 
 it will grow wider and wider, until it embraces 
 the world. In the recent rapprochement between 
 the peoples of Great Britain and of the United 
 States it has taken a great step in advance. ITow 
 the family is a commonwealth even as is the na- 
 tion ; the family in the United States is not the 
 commonwealth it once was, but this unity we 
 must restore, and this we can do in part by re- 
 stricting divorces and by making man and wife 
 more truly partners in their present worldly pos- 
 sessions. It is a matter of observation in history 
 that the separation of the pecuniary interests of 
 man and wife runs with looseness in divorce. No 
 one would care to have the inequalities of " haron 
 et feme " restored, but all right-minded citizens 
 ought to endeavor to make possible a greater 
 community of possessions. History shows that 
 
252 TEE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 the family is the basis of society, and historical 
 research has proven that not individual owner- 
 ship, but joint ownership, was the original way 
 in which property was held and possessed. There 
 ought to be a joint ownership of family posses- 
 sions by man and wife, and thus the idea of joint 
 ownership would soon pass to the people at large. 
 Xot that the joint ownership of all the wealth of 
 a people by all the families is possible or desir- 
 able, otherwise could no family have its own 
 proper possessions, but the ideas that flow from 
 joint ownership ought to and would, if the posses- 
 sions of a family Avere held jointly, pass to the 
 body politic, so that no man would ever say, I 
 can do what I will with my own. And this I 
 believe would be the solution of the great ques- 
 tion of social inequality. Then the wealth, or 
 capital, that ought to be put into any enterprise, 
 whatsoever it might be, would not be regarded 
 by the contributor as his own absolutely, but he 
 would feel that all who embarked in the enter- 
 prise with him had some rights in and to the 
 same. What those rights would be exactly no 
 man could say ; no one can say precisely what 
 the rights of brothers are as against one another 
 in a human family. And so the great ideal of 
 the family in the nation would be strengthened 
 by the brotherly treatment of the poor by the 
 rich, and the poor would never look upon them- 
 
THE PEOPLE. 253 
 
 selves as outside of the life of society and out- 
 side the life of the church. 
 
 Each community, too, would become stronger 
 as the parts of it became more friendly ; more 
 works for general improvement would be under- 
 taken ; more individual gifts would be made for the 
 benefit of all. It is a thing much to be deplored 
 in our modern cities that there is no agora, no 
 forum, no piazza, no cathedral, for the common 
 meeting of the citizens of a community ; nor are 
 there any games or pageants which are under- 
 taken by the public for the account and pleasure 
 of all. We have parades of various fraternities, 
 and occasionally a band plays in some park or 
 public square, but this is all that is done to bring 
 the people together. There ought to be in every 
 city a general place of meeting, a great square or 
 hall, and there ought to be a central place of 
 worship, a vast cathedral, and these ought to be 
 adorned and beautified by sculpture and painting. 
 And this leads to the conviction that there must 
 be more time set apart for the recreation of the 
 people, and that the Saturday half-holiday must 
 be made a permanent institution. Machinery 
 has so multiplied the processes of production that 
 it is no longer necessary that men and women 
 should labor twelve nor yet ten hours a day, nor 
 indeed every day of the six of labor. It has been 
 estimated by statisticians that two or three hours 
 
254 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 a day of hard work performed by all the able- 
 bodied are sufficient for the support of all ; but 
 admitting that this conclusion has in it a certain 
 amount of exaggeration, we know that it is not 
 necessary or well for the working classes to labor 
 as many hours a day as they used to do, and that 
 eight hours is becoming the maximum day of 
 labor throughout the civilized world. We who 
 are our brothers' keepers ought to see to it then, 
 that when the hours of labor are over and the 
 people have a holiday, or a half -holiday, they 
 have some ways of obtaining that recreation that 
 all men agree is necessary to keep a sound mind 
 in a sound body. Mr. Lecky ^ summing up all the 
 hard things that have been said by various 
 writers against the intellectual and esthetic side 
 of American civilization, avers that, although de 
 Tocqueville, Carlyle and Kenan used exaggerated 
 language when condemning the United States in 
 this regard, " modern democracy is not favorable 
 to the higher forms of intellectual life." And to 
 this conclusion we must also come when we con- 
 sider the immense extent of territory and the 
 diversity of the people of the United States, and 
 compare them with the small number "of great 
 works of beauty or of thought, of long medita- 
 tion, of sober taste, or serious, uninterrupted 
 study," 2 that have been produced. The strength 
 
 ' (Democracy and Liberty, Vol. I., Chap, i., p. 131.) « (^Id.) 
 
THE PEOPLE. 255 
 
 and virility of the nation have gone into the ma- 
 terial development of the country and the many 
 mechanical devices and inventions made neces- 
 sary by the same. But that the American peo- 
 ple do possess imagination and that of the high- 
 est kind, is shown b}^ their wonderful railways 
 and bridges, as well as by the verses of some of 
 the purest minds the world has ever known. 
 What we want is the creation of a greater de- 
 mand for the products of the imagination in the 
 arts as well as in the sciences, and this can be 
 effected only as the people gain more leisure, and 
 are better and more fully educated, and feel a 
 oneness with those who possess these divine gifts. 
 It was not only the few wealthy dilettanti and 
 collectors who appreciated the work of a Phidias 
 or a Michael Angelo, but the whole mass of the 
 people of Athens and Florence. The greatest 
 creations, too, of Zeuxis and Eaphael were 
 painted to be seen by all. Surely it is because we 
 are so deficient in the productions of the noble 
 arts of man that life in so much of the territory 
 of the United States is colorless and dreary, and 
 so many emigrate annually to the lands of the 
 old world. Kuskin's reason, as alleged, for hav- 
 ing had no desire to visit America, because it had 
 no feudal castles, fallen into picturesque decay 
 and covered with soft green moss, is absurd; but 
 surely we ought not to be content with the prod- 
 
256 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 ucts of commerce alone. The basis of the state 
 of Venice was its trade, and yet that city be- 
 came one of the greatest marts of the world in 
 the things of beauty. 
 
 And so we see it is that " man shall not live 
 by bread alone, but by every word that proceed- 
 eth out of the mouth of God," and out of God's 
 mouth has proceeded not only the things that are 
 useful but the things that are beautiful, that 
 make life worth the living. The lily is not a 
 useful plant, but how highly did our Lord 
 commend it. So also must the works of men's 
 hands be commended that have in them this 
 great quality of beauty. But here we must 
 pause ; the things that are truly beautiful, when 
 wrought by men's hands, are those that are so in 
 God's sight, and in God's sight only those things 
 can be pleasing that have in them moral ends 
 and ideals. And such is the beauty of the new 
 Jerusalem, the Holy City, as described by Saint 
 John in the Book of his Kevelation. 
 
 And this brings us to the thought of the king- 
 dom of God. When John Baptist began to preach 
 and to foretell the coming of Christ, he announced 
 that the kingdom of God was at hand, and when 
 Christ first preached to men this was also the 
 burden of His message. What did the prophet 
 and what did the Messiah mean ? [N'othing else, 
 as it seems to me, than this, that the time had 
 
THE PEOPLE. 257 
 
 come when the people should recognize that God 
 is the great ruler in the affairs of men, and that 
 all things must be referred to Him, and that 
 only such as are good in His sight should remain. 
 ISTot that the state and government should be 
 overthrown. Christ's attitude toward them was 
 never inimical, but they were to change as the 
 social order changed, and the social order was to 
 change as men became more like unto God : be- 
 cause in the kingdom men become the sons of 
 God, as He becomes their Father. The rule of 
 God, then, in His kingdom, was not to be that 
 of a king but of a Father, and men were to re- 
 gard themselves as brothers. It is in democ- 
 racy, I believe, and in democracy alone, that the 
 kingdom of God can be realized, for democracy 
 alone of all the governments in the world has 
 acknowledged brotherhood to be the underlying 
 basis of the society which God founded in man 
 when He endo^ved him with social attributes 
 and feelings; it alone expresses the fact of a 
 universal brotherhood in relation to a universal 
 Father. It does not matter so much what may 
 be the outward form of the state, the govern- 
 ment must be one of brothers, by brothers, for 
 brothers, for all are the children of one Father. 
 
 And men cannot get rid of the fact of brother- 
 hood. It has become ever more and more the 
 dominant factor of their lives. Neither liberty 
 
258 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 nor equality are exactly possible, for one man's 
 liberty may impinge upon another's, and to one 
 is given five talents and to another one, but 
 brotherhood is possible because it is one of the 
 basal facts of life, and out of it will come all the 
 liberty and all the equality that is possible and 
 wise for the good of mankind and for the gov- 
 ernment of the world. Yet men may not act 
 toward one another as brothers ; yes, herein lies 
 the fault of democracy, indeed, of all forms of 
 government. Men may, like Cain, deny that 
 they are their brothers' keepers. This is the 
 element of transgression that is always to be 
 taken into account, and the transgression of the 
 law of God is alienation from Him, is what is 
 called sin ; it leads to expulsion from His King- 
 dom. 
 
 And it is just herein that Christ comes as the 
 great support and aid of the state and govern- 
 ment. He displaces sin in men's hearts and puts 
 in its place and stead the principles of righteous- 
 ness, and He does this in two ways, by precept 
 and by example. If men would follow the doc- 
 trines of the Sermon on the Mount they would 
 never do what is wrong; if they would follow 
 the steps of the son of Man they would ever do 
 what is right, and there would be little use for 
 government and but little use for the state. But 
 men do not carrv out the precepts of the Sermon 
 
THE PEOPLE. 259 
 
 on the Mount, they fail to follow the steps of the 
 son of Man : true, but they try to carry out the 
 precepts, they follow in some way the steps. 
 And herein it is that the church becomes the 
 second bulwark (I had almost said first) of so- 
 ciety, and takes its place alongside of the state. 
 It is the church that teaches men the Sermon on 
 the Mount and the other great sayings of Jesus 
 Christ, it is the church that holds up before the 
 eyes of men the stirring example of His perfect 
 life. (^Without the church the state would break 
 up into fragments, for the state is built upon 
 only one-half of the nature of man. The church 
 is built upon the other half and both are neces- 
 sary for his w^elfare and security. Destroy one 
 and the other falls to the ground. Without reli- 
 gion man becomes a brute ; without order he 
 cannot live as man. The church stands for reli- 
 gion, the state for order, and these two express 
 all that is best in the life of the people, and just 
 in proportion as the life of the people is high and 
 noble, so are they.^ 
 
 But more, as I believe, the church stands for 
 democracy and is the great upholder of it. The 
 ministry is taken from the people, the Word is 
 preached to them, by the sacrament of Baptism 
 all are welcomed into its fold upon an equal foot- 
 ing, in the sacrament of the Lord's Supper all 
 are recognized and treated as brothers. The 
 
260 THE STATE AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 sacraments of Christ are the bases of Christian 
 brotherhood, they are its symbol and sign, as 
 well as the symbol and sign of the Incarnation 
 of the Son of God. 
 
 
 
 
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