we have counted the cost? It is very clear that these later times have been parents to an opinion, that government ought to exercise no choice in matters of faith, but leave every man without advice, or aid, or influence, from that source, to choose for himself. And many hold this opinion under an idea that the overthrow of national establishments, as such, will be beneficial to pure and undefiled religion. They hold and contend thus, quite undisturbed in their convictions by the ominous and yet undeniable fact, that they share them with all the enemies of law both human and divine. They know not the acuteness of Satanic instinct. May they become alive to it while there is yet time! But we have to calculate, as will presently be seen, upon encountering not merely the political difficulties which these strangely mingling classes of men will create, but likewise the more bitter and more painful reproach that we are injuring the cause of Him, whom, in maintaining the union between Church and State, we profess to serve.

CHAPTER III.

THEORY OF THE CONNECTION BETWEEN THE CHURCH AND THE STATE.

PART II.

THE INDUCEMENTS OF THE STATE IN RESPECT TO RELIGION.

SECTION I.-TO RELIGION IN GENERAL.

1. THUS far upon those reasons for national religion, which, according mainly to the principles of theism, are derivable from a view of the intrinsic nature of political association, as it is impersonated in the State. I now proceed to touch separately upon the argument from consequences, which is the basis of the treatises of Bishop Warburton and Dr. Chalmers, and is also the ground that has been selected for the most part by the opponents of religious establishments.

2. It is one thing, to say that the inherence of any given quality is necessary to any given creature in order to the accomplishment of its purposes whether higher or lower, and another, to say that such a quality attaches to it as one of the proper conditions of its being. It is true that the results of these two forms of argument are precisely coincident one with the other. That which is a condition of the due being of a thing is essential to the attainment of its ends; and that which is necessary to the attainment of its ends is likewise a condition of its legitimate constitution.

But there are practical differences of great weight between these several modes of conducting our investigations. When we treat of such and such a quality, for example, of religion in a State, as advantageous or even essential for the accomplishment of its purposes, we at once depress it into the character of an instrument, and exhibit it as subordinate to the end contemplated; we treat of a duty as though it derived its binding power (under the Divine law) from something posterior to its performance and extrinsic to itself; we separate it, as it were, mentally, from the constitution of the subject; and we introduce more or less the element of contingency, and a dependence on calculations which are in their nature very far removed from certainty, into the question of its adoption. And that adoption stands in the mind as at most the issue of a probable judgment upon difficult subject-matter, instead of ranking among those cardinal principles which the sense and practice of mankind have usually recognised as certainly discernible by the eye of a purer reason, the faculty of intuition, and as alone properly entitled to the name of science. What in the one theory we discover to be fundamental and anterior to human sanctions, in the other we hold as an opinion revocable by the authority that gave it, as in its nature indifferent, and as shining at best by a reflected light.

In this branch of the inquiry, therefore, the State is assumed as calculating and deliberative, but not as properly moral.

3. Having thus expressed a preliminary caution, I now contend, that religion is necessary to the attainment whether of the higher or the lower ends of government. But, first, it may be questioned if this distinction of ends be legitimate. There is, indeed, a doctrine that political society exists only for "material, outward, and mere earthly objects;" that it is a contrivance prompted by necessity for the defence of life and property through the establishment of peace and order; that it is a formula for producing a maximum of individual freedom by an apparent sacrifice, a small payment beforehand, of the same commodity, from each member of the community to the State. Here is the fulfilment of the declaration of Burke, that the age of economists, sophisters, and calculators has arrived.* Here is the twin sister of that degraded system of ethics or individual morality, the injurious legacy of Locke,† which received its full popular development from Paley, and was reduced to forms of greater accuracy by Bentham; which in logical selfconsistency sought to extirpate the very notion of duty from the human heart and even to erase its name from language, and which made pleasure and pain the moral poles of the universe. So long as this theory of moral obligation continues to receive among us any portion of that sanction which was once unhappily bestowed on it in places of authority, it must (as the ultimate standard of all our philosophy is to be

* Thoughts on the French Revolution, p. 148. Essay on the Human Understanding, b. ii. ch. xxi., on Power.

found in the state of the individual conscience,) depress to its own level every other branch of moral science. But now, when the utilitarian morals have been attacked in the very places of their strength,* we may hope that the days of their reign are numbered, and upon the basis of a right conception of man single, we shall naturally found a right conception of man combined and organised.

4. To ascertain the ends of government we must not resort to this or that notion, prevalent in a particular country or generation. It is, indeed, not less sad than instructive, when we extend our view to a larger range of time and of space, to behold the vagaries of human opinion, each revelling within its own domain, be it a little narrower or be it a little wider; each entertained with the most undoubting confidence by partisans, each destined to speedy supersession by the favourites of the coming hour, and either to undergo a final extinction, or to be fixed upon the wheel of some metempsychosis, to appear and reappear, and to merge and merge again. All these in the mean time are condemned out of the mouths of one another by their own irreconcileable contradictions; among which are, notwithstanding, thinly scattered the fragments of true knowledge, slighted, perhaps, yet enduring, bound by their consistency to one another, and by their common hold upon God, the rock of their foundation. These are

* See Professor Whewell's Four Sermons upon the Principles of Ethics, preached before the University of Cambridge.