liar exception of the papacy, has been to separate, almost universally, the functions of civil government from the persons of the priesthood, or those of priesthood from the persons of civil governors, when society has attained any considerable magnitude. The State, therefore, cannot be immediately and permanently cognisant of the doctrines taught, in the sense of exercising over them that supervision from day to day, which belongs to ecclesiastical superiors. Consequently its relations are formed with institutions; and as teaching is always, though in different degrees, liable to vary and degenerate, it is the interest of the State to contract with that which shall offer the fairest probability of retaining all the features which it had when the contract was made, so as to save the necessity of revision and the risk of rupture.

44. Thus much of permanency. But now of truth, which is its foundation. As a statesman believing in God (for we have not yet invested our ideal person for the purpose of the present argument with the responsibilities of a member of the Catholic Church) will prefer revealed to unrevealed religion, the one coming to him as matter of knowledge, the other of conjecture; or, at the least, the one as determinate, the other as undefined; even so, still on the same principle of theism, he will be bound to prefer the entire revelation of God's will to any partial exhibition of it. The two conditions, therefore, for which he will naturally look, are these: all that is attainable of truth in the religion itself, and of fixity in the institutions appointed for its

maintenance and propagation. And these conditions meet in the Church, attested as she is by eighteen hundred years of chequered, indeed, but never interrupted existence.

45. But the State has this further and very great advantage in alliance with the visible and perpetual society which is appropriately termed the Church of Christ. It is most difficult and invidious for governors to select any one form of mere opinion as such, and to endow it, or to prefer any institution simply for the reason that the doctrines taught in it are agreeable to the views entertained personally by themselves. Now the Church professes to be an institution not deduced by human reason from any general declaration of God's will, but actually and (so to speak) bodily given by God, founded through his direct inspiration, and regularly transmitted in a divinely appointed though human line. The State, therefore, does not here propose a conception of its own for the approbation of the people, but something more palpable and objective, an institution, to which it has itself yielded faith and homage, as of Divine authority; and the homage which it has thus paid is done not upon grounds of opinion alone, but with these to the authority which that institution possesses from its historical connection with Christ and his Apostles, corroborated as well as conveyed by the cumulative witness of all the succeeding generations. The difference is twofold: it is that between inheritance and acquisition; it is that between an attested and a conjectural authority from God.

46. The inducements, of which the enumeration has now closed, are all matters intrinsic to the Church; and up to this point I have endeavoured to show, that rational men, entertaining the average belief of men in a Creator, and serious in it, and being called to exercise the functions of government, ought to apply to the acts of government the offices of religion, for the discharge of their own and of the national responsibilities before God; and that in inquiring, not already under Christian prepossessions, what is the best religion for the profession of the State, they will, even without taking into view the scope of particular doctrines, arrive naturally at the adoption of the Christian Church.

*

47. If, however, the claim of the Church be preferable for State purposes, it does not seem at once to follow that it should be exclusive, as against sects of Christianity professing to concur in its fundamental doctrines. Yet some considerations of utility will lead us towards this result, though they may scarcely reach it. Some kind of unity is not only desirable but needful for public decency and order. Now an unity of opinion can never be absolutely insured, and it is properly a question of degree; and it would be impossible for a government permanently to contract with any set of opinions as such, because it could not be competent to detect deviations in their subtle and nascent forms, so that it might only become aware of their existence when they were too strong to be corrected and repressed.

*This question is further pursued in chap. ii. § 103-112; and in chap. v.

And the name of Christianity affords no security whatever for the substantial unity or convergency of the doctrines taught. There must be, for example, a far wider space between Catholic Christianity and Unitarianism (regarded in the abstract), than there need be between Unitarianism and the religion of the works of Plato. We might, then, argue for the Church on principles of reason, as offering, in her oneness and permanency of communion, the only adequate guarantee of that unity which is so important to the State.

CHAPTER IV.

THEORY OF THE CONNECTION BETWEEN THE CHURCH AND THE STATE.

PART III.

THE ABILITY OF THE STATE IN RESPECT TO RELIGION.

SECTION 1.-AS TO ITS EXTENSION.

1. IN the foregoing chapter it has been argued at length that the State, as such, has a true and moral personality, and should therefore profess and practise a religion. That this sphere of duty includes the particular obligations to adapt the laws to the principles of the State religion on all points of definite contact between them, and to hold them generally subordinate to such a regulating power; and to make provision within its limits for the maintenance, and the perpetuation from age to age, of the chosen system of belief and worship; by the instruction of the young as they grow into consciousness and responsibility; by supplying sacred ordinances to the poor, who are so engrossed by physical necessities that they have not the means of providing and supporting them on their own account; and by a pervading machinery for soliciting the unwilling and the spiritually dead through the agency of suasion. It has likewise been shown how the law of interest coincides with the higher yet parallel law of duty. The reasoning,