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

of the present discussion; for if it have moral action, it must be capable of moral choice; and if it be capable of moral choice, that choice must rest upon truth as one must rest, at least, upon the nearest approximation to it, and cannot at all consist with jointly embracing systems that are fundamentally or substantially at variance. Whenever, therefore, the State is not in a condition to give itself to the clear intelligible profession of unity in faith and in communion, we may predicate that the national life must, in the same proportion, be curtailed of its moral fulness; for a discordant action is established in the leading faculty of its being.

112. It is moreover clear, that when a State deviates from its actual constitution to commence the practice of indiscriminate support to competing forms of religion, it raises for the consideration of its deliberative ministers and agents a difficult and delicate question. That question is, "How shall I lend my personal agency to carry into effect a principle of which it must thus be said that it both springs from and tends to evil? Can I, in such a matter, go beyond the command of the law, which as such discharges my responsibility? In serving the State, I ought to be engaged with my freest energies to give the utmost possible effects to its acts: can I contribute their use to facilitate a scheme which is faulty, and faulty too in moral subject-matter? Or again, how far Or again, how far may I exercise voluntary functions in a State, a part of whose action is thus disfigured?" These are issues for the court of

conscience, which I am unable to answer by any general terms having the rigour of a formula, that would not rather cause confusion than convey knowledge. There are many similar problems in private life; and our ambition must not be dissatisfied with the want of an absolute and universal solution, far less must a man be forward to condemn his brother where he can hardly feel his own way. But thus much I will say happy is that man who gives, in his own heart, free but not exclusive scope to the fear of sin; who holds that, for a public man, the first condition of capacity to serve his country is an unsullied conscience; and who, when he sees national advantage seemingly contingent upon his own moral contamination, trusts that God will raise up instruments to secure for his country all necessary goods of earth, and refuses to sell wisdom though it be for rubies.

If it be so, then the practice of manifold or indiscriminate establishment tends to throw public office more and more into the hands of the unscrupulous, and thus aggravates the disorder from which it took its rise.

For the sake of the continuity of the argument respecting exclusive duty to the Church, I have here entered by anticipation on a part of the general inquiry, to which we may now regularly proceed.—

113. There is another aspect of the argument for national religion, secondary when compared with the more abstract consideration of the nature of a State, yet not in itself unimportant. The governing body is com

posed of individuals, each of whom are morally bound to refer all their acts to God, to select, and with all their strength to perform, such acts as most tend to His glory, and to employ whatever influence accrues to them with the same view. The man who is aware of his duty in these respects cannot, with safe conscience, bind himself to forego such reference; to omit acts which are for the glory of God, and are within his power; and to forbear applying, in aid of religion, influences which government possesses and confers, and which are naturally conducive to its advancement. Such a man will further feel, that when he becomes a member of the governing body, a portion of the national energies are impersonated in him, and take effect in his decisions. The responsibility belonging to them is not satisfied by his private acknowledgment of God, and it wholly transcends his private capacity. His acts become arduous and difficult in the extreme, and pregnant with the most remote and most extensive consequences; and even in this view he feels the need of new religious associations to sustain him in his function, and to teach him how to appreciate it. But further: his acts too are public; the powers and instruments with which he works are public; operating by and under the authority of the law, he sets in motion at his word ten thousand subject arms; and because there is here an agency quite beyond the range of his mere individual function, it must be sanctified not only by the private personal prayers and piety of the men filling public situations,