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tional necessities it superinduces, and what moral guarantees it requires: in what degrees these securities are demanded by, and applicable to, the several descriptions of human combination: whether, among these, what we term the nation, and what we term the State, eminently demand the guarantee of religion, in respect both of capacity and of necessity: by what law or criterion the nation or State must supply itself with this requisite to its well-being: by what form of religion this guarantee is most legitimately and most effectually provided. By these steps we shall find ourselves led up to the conclusion, never more succinctly, popularly, or forcibly embodied, than in the peculiarly English watchword "Church and State; the union of a Christian government with the Catholic organ of Christianity.

13. The universe everywhere bears testimony to oneness of life and action, to absolute and invariable dependence on a centre, as the characteristic and the law of its nature, and therefore also the condition of its well-being. The Grecian tongue spoke with an unbiassed simplicity in giving it the name of κόσμος, or essential order: arrangement everywhere referred to a single and pervading law. Plato has delivered, in the noblest manner, the conception of that fellowship which sustains the universe and controls the tendencies to disorder. Φασὶ δ ̓ οἱ σόφοι, ὦ Καλλικλεῖς, καὶ οὔρανον, καὶ γῆν, καὶ Θεοὺς, καὶ ἀνθρώπους, τὴν κοινωνίαν ξυνέχειν, καὶ φιλίαν, καὶ κοσμότητα, καὶ σωφροσύνην, καὶ δικαιότητα· καὶ τὸ ὅλον τοῦτο διὰ ταῦτα

κόσμον καλοῦσιν. * The Latins retained in their language, and have conveyed into ours, the fundamental notion of rò av, of a fixed point and a revolving system, the universum.† The idea is that expressed in the fine lines of Virgil:

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Cœlum ac terras, camposque liquentes

Lucentemque globum Lunæ, Titaniaque astra,
Spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus
Mens agitat molem, et magno se corpore miscet.

The physical confirmation of our solar system attests the veracity of this designation. And the moral structure, as dimly traced in tradition, or conjectured by philosophy, or as fully revealed by the Holy Scriptures, agrees with these independent witnesses. It was because this idea of oneness of life and of a paramount sovereignty in the world had a ground in our human consciousness, that some have evaded the truth by that perversion, which absorbs the whole system into the centre, and deifies every particle of matter. It was, perhaps, on the same account, that the schemes of polytheism, however inconsistent and defaced, have ever retained the notion of some kind of supremacy or superiority in some one of their idols. From this cardinal idea of unity, as the fundamental law of beauty and of well-being to creation, let us commence.

14. It needs not to travel back into the region of deeper mystery; the history of our own race affords matter sufficient for our instruction. The origin of

* Plat. Gorg. i. 137 (p. 507, Steph.).

Cic. de Nat. Deor. i. 43.

He usually employs the term universitas. ‡ Æn. vi. 724.

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evil in this world of ours was the infraction of the established rule of reference to a supreme and single will. Our first parents were not content to derive from a source that lay out of themselves the ultimate ground and reason, and the definitive criterion of their they would seek for themselves another image of good they would entertain it in the mind under a different conception: they would be the judges of its nature, and would not have God to be the judge for them. One act disorganised the earth and all its moral destinies. It constituted as many new centres, as many rebellious and divided systems of action, as there should be human beings; atomic centres of limited and petty influence, but without subordination to Him from whom they had derived even the power to rise in revolt against Him. Nay, even more. So long as man was obedient to God, the whole being of man was obedient to his controlling faculties; but when he ceased to be the servant of his Lord, he ceased also to be the master of himself.* Nor has he ever regained, nor can he recover, that self-mastery, that inward consent and harmony of all his faculties in purpose and in action, which is essential to his peace, until he has once again received and enthroned over his whole heart, to reign there without reserve, the Divine will so madly repudiated.

15. The actual law of human conduct, then, before the fall, was out of man himself, and was in God. The actual law of human conduct after the fall was in

*S. Aug. de Civ. Dei, xiii. 13.

man himself, and was out of God. He had a sense of right and wrong; but he did not ground it on the Divine command. He had a faculty of love; but he would not take account of the continual beneficence of the Almighty, and he spent that faculty upon such inferior objects as he chose. He was susceptible of the sentiments of gratitude and admiration; but he would neither admire the most worthy, nor return thanks to the most bountiful. And all this because he regulated these principles by a reference to himself as supreme arbiter, instead of a reference to a rule out of himself. He had been ordained to walk as an infant by the hand of a nurse; and refusing that aid he could only fall. That which we are specially to observe is, it was not that he thought "I will repudiate the good and worship the evil;" it was not even that he thought, "I will abandon the good to follow the pleasurable;" it was the form and criterion, not the matter of conduct, that he appeared to himself to change; the language of his action was, "I will do that which seemeth good to myself, instead of that which seemeth good to God;" or, "I will require of God that that which He enjoins upon my practice should submit and approve itself to my understanding."

16. Thus, therefore, in the midst of God's fair creation, was there planted, wherever there stood a man, a perpetually prolific principle of derangement; of separate, self-centred action, spent ineffectually upon objects that did not enter into the design of the universe, nor contribute, unless by opposition and revulsion, to

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the fulfilment of its appointed work. The consequences of this rebellion, had they been uncontrouled, must have been, as it would seem, the continual growth of that self-worship which was established at the fall, until at length every vestige of truth and love had been destroyed, and earth had fully reached to the riper wickedness of hell.

17. While, however, it pleased the mercy of God to design a provision for the redemption of mankind by His Son, to be accomplished when the fulness of time should have come; so He likewise ordained certain conditions of the human existence, which, as intermediate expedients, and instruments of a secondary discipline, should both check the progress of selfishness, so far, at least, as to prevent the disease from arriving at its crisis, by establishing a counteracting principle, and should likewise prepare men to recognise the higher truths taught in Divine revelation, and supply them with real though partial approximations to the true law of their being.

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18. These were various in shape, but their pervading character was the same; it was that of a xowvwvía, a common life a common life in the family, in the tribe, in the nation, and in each of the relations which each of these contain, was, apart from direct manifestations of the Divine will, the grand counteractor of the disorganising agency of the law of self-worship, and prevented it (as it seems) from realising all those extremes to which it naturally tended. Even to the brute creation was extended a softening influence by

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