delivered to us as a portion of the living covenant; and this of course precludes us, not indeed from discharging obligations incumbent on us as of good faith under any existing laws, but from entering into schemes even for the promotion of God's word in any manner contravening that which He has sanctioned and ordained; and from dropping any portion of His command while the means of fulfilling the whole are graciously vouchsafed to us. While the doctrine of "one body" is authoritatively declared by Scripture, to recognise the Christian religion in separate bodies might be to countenance the sin, which lies somewhere, though it may be hidden, or may be divided among many offending parties, in every such putting asunder of what God has united.

107. But there is also an injurious mental habit, and a hazard of ulterior evils, connected with that sort of eclecticism, which a system of indiscriminate aid to different religious communions presupposes. It seems to imply, and at least it prepares us to believe, that the power of revealed Truth is in the abstract forms of its propositions, just as, when we have accurately stated a formula of mathematics, we know that we virtually possess all its results; and as, when we reduce it to a narrower expression, we are still aware what classes of results we exclude, and how much we retain. It is most perilous to handle Christianity upon such a principle, most presumptuous thus to dispense with a part of God's benefaction to mankind. The Church, indeed, commissioned of Him for the function of teach

ing, has embodied in her earliest creeds, probably from the authority of inspiration itself, conveyed by the mouths of the Apostles of Christ, the great elementary truths of the faith: not as presuming to discard any portion of what is revealed, but to put more prominently forward in the series of progressive instruction those truths upon which the residue of Christian knowledge is built. But this summary, which she has so received, is meant to introduce and not to confine her teaching. Of this she is, with respect to order and method, the judge: it is hers to endure or to condemn any of the forms of private opinion, limited by the maxim of adhesion to the Scriptures which she holds, and to their Catholic interpretation. But she has never said, and cannot say, With the written Creed, I will be satisfied and ask no more. Much less then can any authority other than hers thus shut up the way of instruction which the Creed lays open; and less still can any such power be entitled to define a new class or form of tenets as fundamental, to supplant the basis of eighteen hundred years.

108. Suppose therefore that a State composed of Christians and Catholics should say, "We will aid all communities in which the doctrine of the Atonement is taught, and no others." First, it would undertake a function not given to it, and would frame a standard of things essential, for which office it was not appointed. Secondly, the standard so framed would be a new one, and would place in the category of non-essentials all other matters; for instance, the Deity of Christ, and the

Sacraments. Thirdly, it would thus classify doctrines simply according to our human apprehension of their consequences, and thereby adopt a criterion which in all moral subject-matter tends to lower and debilitate the tone of those who employ it. Fourthly, it would overlook the fact that all Christian teaching is wholly dependent on the inward energies of the Holy Ghost, the promise of which is given to the revelation as a whole, and not to any particular parts of it. Partial teaching in religion can only be justified as preparatory teaching, or because our physical and social necessities prevent men from realising at once the treasure of the Christian Revelation. But if we countenance a sectarian creed, which is absolutely founded, which builds its distinctive existence and vindicates its separation, upon the negation of what such a State would hold to be a part of the revealed Truth of God, the teaching which it administers is not elementary but mutilated: it is not a part of the body, but severed from it.

109. I am free to admit that, on any other than specifically Christian principles, the human understanding would probably incline to the theory of a plurality of establishments: not as abstractedly preferable to unity, but so also neither as being essentially objectionable. There might be many reasons inclining a State to grant a demand of the kind if it were made; and accordingly we find, that among the cultivated nations of antiquity, where public religion was observed chiefly with a view to its political effects, and the grand re

quisite was to flatter and soothe and at the same time subjugate the popular mind, the ordinary practice was to enlarge with great facility the catalogue of national deities, subject to the sole reservation, that they should be such as should not tend to displace the old ones. Socrates, indeed, was arraigned for introducing new divinities; but it was because the actual tone of his philosophy tended to discredit the national forms of worship. Rome, the mistress of state-craft, and beyond all other nations in the politic employment of religion, added without stint or scruple to her list of gods and goddesses, and consolidated her military empire by a skilful medley of all the religions of the world.

110. Thus it continued while the worship of the Deity was but a conjecture or a contrivance; but when the rising of the Sun of Righteousness had given reality to the subjective forms of faith, had made actual and solid truth the common inheritance of all men, then the religion of Christ became, unlike other new creeds, an object of jealousy and of cruel persecution, because it would not consent to become a partner in this heterogeneous device, and planted itself upon truth, and not in the quicksand of opinion; and in the same natural order, when Christianity became the religion of the State, it excluded every other system from public patronage. Even so the Mahometan creed is distinguished among the religions of the East for its hostility to indifferentism,* because it

* Esprit des Loix, xxv. 15.

is a definite though false belief in revelation; and should the Christian faith ever become but one among many co-equal pensioners of a government, it will be a proof that subjective religion has again lost its Godgiven hold upon objective reality; or when, under the thin shelter of its name, a multitude of discordant schemes shall have been placed upon a footing of essential parity, and shall together receive the bounty of the legislature, this will prove that we are once more in a transition-state-that we are travelling back again from the region to which the Gospel brought us, towards that in which it found us.

111. We have to consider, secondly, the argument from the personality of the State, which, implying cognisance of truth, seems to show that a unity in its profession and its maintenance is, if not necessary in the strictest sense, yet both to be desired, and certainly requisite to the ideal perfection of a State. If there be between any set of distinct religious communions not merely a nominal but a substantial difference of doctrine, then, independently of specifically Catholic obligations, the idea of union with more than one is fatally at variance with the idea of personality and responsibility in the government as the organ of the national life. It is sad when two persons take discordant views of religious truth; but it is still more sad when one person contentedly acquiesces in each of these discordant views, because, though he might not know which is truth, he must know that truth is one. But the State is as a single human being in the view