adhere to the use of certain significant institutions termed sacraments, which, setting aside for the time all consideration of their higher uses, are witnesses in attestation of the sacred Scriptures, by which they also are themselves attested.

41. Again, he would prefer to these communions, which reject all summaries of doctrine formed from the Scriptures, a system like that of the Church-establishment of Scotland, which, by adopting a stated Confession of faith, limits the interpretation of the sacred volume, and tends to fix a belief more definite than that which follows all the fluctuations of mere individual or traditionary judgment.

42. And lastly, and upon the same human considerations as before, he would again prefer to this the polity of the English church, which, as it is extrinsically viewed, and independently of its highest or "transcendental" character, superadds to the evidence and guarantees of the Word, of sacraments, of creeds, and of primitive practices, a perpetual succession of clergy by whom these have been received, as they were delivered, in regular order from hand to hand; and which thus supplies us with a living voice of perpetual witnesses, in addition to those which are not active without a human agency to set them in motion. Indeed, schemes of ecclesiastical polity, in proportion as they found themselves wholly or partially upon private or local opinion, have no choice except between these two alternatives: either to be

* Chalmers' Lectures, lect. vi. p. 178.

subject to perpetual and unlimited fluctuations, if their definitions in theology be few and their scheme liberal; or, on the other hand, to push dogmatic instruction into extreme rigour and detail, and, by the severe method of preliminary subscription to an immense multitude of propositions, to restrain, as by bit and curb, the free action of inquiry. Our Churchhistory will supply abundant examples of this proposition it might not be difficult to illustrate it by the decrees of the Council of Trent, as well as by the Westminster Confession of Faith,* and by many incidents of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. may judge, on the other hand, how dangerous liberality of temperament itself becomes under a scheme not founded on Catholic principles, when we find so excellent a person as Dr. Doddridge protesting against requiring an unity of belief from teachers of religion. with respect to the Trinity. Therefore the State, in allying itself with the Church, adopts the course not only of utility, but of a greater indulgence to tender and uninstructed consciences.

We

43. Another prudential reason which would induce the statesman to prefer a form of religion provided with fixed guarantees of permanence in itself to one without them, is this-that the religious system of a country cannot be administered directly by the State itself. The practice of mankind, unless with the

pecu

* Vide inf. ch. viii. § 52. Cardwell's History of Conferences, pp. 132, 178, 185, confirmed by Neal's History of the Puritans.

+ Doddridge's Correspondence, iii. 293.

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.