that we would use a power for the defence of the one which we decline to employ for the propagation of the other; although too often some such vicious inference is drawn by persons reasoning ill or not at all, from such a conduct on the part of the State. But it is because God has seen fit to authorise that employment of force in the one case, and not in the other; and because we, as creatures under conditions of fallibility essentially kindred in rulers and in subjects, have no right to administer pains and penalties, either on social or religious pretexts, to our brethren, upon any circuitous inference or conjectural speculation of our

own.

53. We have now arrived at the second question proposed. If, then, the State may not persecute for matter of religion, may it notwithstanding disqualify? And first, what is political disqualification? It is not exclusion from all social power, for the unenfranchised multitude has power. The bodiless apprehension of violence, the hold of consumers over those who supply them, the ability to derange the whole industrial operations of a country and its physical life by suspending the action of the strong arm of labour, the mere voice of human solicitation-these are all indirect, yet real and weighty, elements of social power. But disqualification is exclusion from social power in those determinate and current forms which the constitution of a country recognises, and to which it gives legal effect. Social power, reduced under such forms, we may denominate political power. May a State,

VOL. I.

Y

then, disqualify for religious opinions not immediately adverse to social order?

54. Now I first observe, that the five first of the arguments which have been deemed available against persecution, are also arguments, in their degree, against disqualification. For civil function and office is in the nature of a benefit as well as a duty; and to this benefit all members of the body politic have, in equity, a presumable inchoate right, according to their several capacities, Something therefore, namely, that presumable or inchoate right, that fair and equal chance of an actual privilege, is taken from them by civil disabilities. Accordingly disqualification is capable of being represented as, relatively to the individual, in the nature of a penalty, not often perhaps considerable, yet equal in amount to the difference betwen the burden and the benefit of civil office, with possibly the addition of whatever may, under particular circumstances, be lost by the incapacity suffered in point of general repute. Disqualification is open therefore, in a less degree, to the more general objections against coercion: on the other hand, it does not derive the full advantage of such arguments as tell in favour of the other. It often galls far more than it curbs. It may induce men to dissemble their faith when it has not stringency enough to make them abandon it; but conscience fares worse, perhaps, at least scarcely better, in the former case than in the latter. Persecution commonly will produce a crisis which may result in the * § 41, 42, 44, 46, 48.

triumph of one of the contending principles, and then the establishment of an equilibrium. But disqualification alienates and embitters by a more tardy process, and, gradually deepening the seat of social discord, engenders contentions, which, if less passionate while they continue, are likewise less powerfully and rapidly borne towards their issue, and consume the heart of society by a slow and wasting fever.

55. And yet, upon the principles of this work, dissent from the national faith is in the nature of a disadvantage for the performance of public functions; for if the State be intrusted with the administration of a Divine authority, its maxims must be determined and its laws moulded according to the revealed will of God: now that revealed will, in the view of the State, is represented by the Church; how, then, should it be a matter of indifference whether those who are to conduct the action of the State, are or are not imbued with the spirit of the Church? And again, yet more specifically, the disqualification of dissidents is in its nature, and so long as it can be maintained with security to the State, in the nature of a bulwark to the direct profession and active support of the national religion; and few will deny that, under some circumstances, it may be lawful for the State to discourage diversities of creed.*

It is better, cæteris paribus, for the pre

"Voici donc le principe fundamental des loix politiques en fait de religion. Quand on est maître de recevoir dans un état une nouvelle religion, ou de ne la pas recevoir, il ne faut pas l'y établir; quand elle y est établie, il faut la tolérer."-Montesquieu, Esprit des Loix, xxv. 10.

servation of that vital spirit, that the influences of the hostile and the lukewarm should be remote, than that they should be proximate. If the personal composition of the governing body be wholly conformable to the Faith of the Church, then the agency of those influences is extrinsic to the State organic, though not to the State diffusive; but if it be checquered, then the agency has become intrinsic and familiar, and is more likely to take effect in the action of the governing body itself, by which, as in the case of persons, its moral habits must be finally determined. Now it is more practicable, I say, to preserve the religious action of the State entire (and therefore to keep it moral), when dissidents are excluded from the governing body, than when they are admitted into it. Shall the State, then, adopt for its immutable canon the resolution to exclude them? If so, the inducement which brought it thus far will assuredly conduct it much farther.

56. For, upon the other hand, the arguments for disqualification are of a kind which are not fully satisfied by it, although to a certain degree it meets their purpose. If it be dangerous, that men not possessed of all the conditions of national life (of which the national religion, as has been shown, is one and the highest) should enter into the composition of the governing body, it is also as truly, though less directly, dangerous, that such men should exist in the body of the community, and should make use of those indeterminate yet substantial engines of social power which the unprivileged masses must, whether consciously or un

consciously, possess. The argument, therefore, would require that, in order to obviate the whole of this danger, expatriation, at the least, should be enforced. And I apprehend that writers, who insist upon "the Test," as the one essential guarantee of national religion, might, by logical antagonists, be forced to admit that their theory was severer than their intentions.

57. For it is evidently more practicable still, to give effect to the principle of national religion when the faith of the nation is uniform, than when dissent is permitted by the law. Shall the State, then, expatriate dissenters? If it does, can it logically stop there? Upon the same principle it might expatriate all profligates, all sinners, that is to say all men; because there is no doubt that not only heresy, not only religious error, but all inward roots of sin whatever, are, in the nature of causes, tending to disable men from realising, so far as their own public agency on behalf of the nation is concerned, the true religious principle and spirit of a national life. Such, then, are the absurd anomalies in which we are finally lost, if, in pursuing a theory, we overlook one of the sets of its conditions. What, then, are the conditions, which are omitted from the above argument?

58. They are those belonging to the truth of political science, and mainly this; that the well-being of a State presupposes and requires its being. Therefore, in order to be capable of realising a spiritual, it must actually have realised an animal life. As all the