to attach to families as such, and that unity of religion is the first condition of their well-being. The want of it does not indeed annul existing domestic obligations, as we know from the highest authority:* and those who reproach the advocates of State-religion with holding a doctrine that leads to persecution, might at least as consistently have inferred, from the general directions to married persons with which the Epistles abound, that the Christian wife and husband would have been commanded to abandon their unbelieving partners respectively; whereas the very contrary is enjoined. Yet these domestic obligations entail religious duties: of instruction in Divine truth from the parents to the children, of common worship in a common faith. Nor do the reasons of these duties cease to be applicable, until by local dissolution the existing single family parts into the seeds of many.

50. The practice even of the heathen world supports the principle of family religion: sustains it, that is to say, in the same manner as it sustains the principle of personal religion, by supplying us with indications, however rude and perverted, of its acknowledgment. The household had its deities, as well as the temple; and Æneas, a type be it remembered of the Roman character and manners as they were estimated by Virgil, bore his aged father from Troy with his household, and with the emblems of his household worship:

Cum famulis natoque, penatibus et magnis Dîs.+

* 1 Cor. vi. 12-16.

† Æn. iii. 12.

51. Notwithstanding all this, however, a man may be, and frequently is, a very kind father without religion. He may educate his children with care, treat them with unvarying kindness, and provide with the utmost sedulity and effect for their temporal welfare, without any regard to God, and merely under the influence of the unacknowledged benefit of those parental instincts which God has given him. Further, it will sometimes happen that a family is orderly and peaceful, without any common religion, where each walks in his own way, and there is either no joint belief and action, or, if any, yet such as is of the most vague and shadowy description. On the other hand, it may happen that a parent, who is in the main conscientious towards God, may nevertheless exhibit some harshness of temper, something of the spirit of wrath yet unsubdued, in the conduct of his parental relations; or may fail in the judicious culture of the understandings of his children, or in the regulation of their ordinary occupations, or in his plans for their temporal welfare. Or again, great pain and disunion may follow from his attempts to instruct his children in the faith which he has received, and which it is his duty to deliver to them. Yet all these causes, whatever might be their right explanation or their proper remedy, or even if they had none, would in no way destroy the general principle, that religion belongs to families in their collective capacity, and not merely to their members as individuals, that family relations entail religious duties, and that unity of religion is,

when we speak of things in their ordinary courses, the first condition of their well-being. So much then for religion in the family, and the reasons of it.

52. The other form of universal association, which I would couple with the family in respect of its extensive range of influences upon the characters and destinies of men, and of its high moral characteristics, is that of the nation or the state.

53. The nation, in its fullest sense, is an aggregation of men having substantial unity in physical origin, in language, in character and customs, in local habitation, and in political life. This unity admits of degree. Of origin and language there may be much diversity, as in the United Kingdom. The conformity of customs and character may be indefinitely various in amount. Even local juxtaposition is not essential to nationality, as we see in the case of the Jews, though it is nearly so. Unity of political or public life to some extent is absolutely essential. We perceive it in that singular people, under its own peculiar form, partly as blended with the theocratic element, and partly as compounded of retrospect and anticipation. Even this, however, is susceptible of gradations, as we may see its slighter forms in the Grecian, the Argive, the Ionic and the other confederations of Asia Minor, among the ancients;* and in the Germanic empire, the Swiss confederation, the

* Mitford on the Council of Amphictyons, i. iii. 3; and on the Argive or Calaurean Confederation, iv. 2. Herodotus on the Ionic Confederacy, i. 143, 147, 148; the Doric, 144; the Æolic, 149, 150.

provinces of the Low Countries, the United States of America, and the union of several European countries with their colonial dependencies, in modern times.

54. If we take in succession the terms a multitude, a people, a nation, a state, we rise by progression from a mere juxtaposition of units to a complete moral organisation. When we speak of a multitude, we indicate mere number; when we speak of a people, we separate the governed from the governors; when we speak of a nation, we contemplate them together, but we merge the governors in the governed; when we speak of the state, we contemplate the same personal subjects, but wholly and singly in respect of their partnership in the national life and order, not as individuals, but only as constituents of the active power of that life. We contemplate those who administer affairs, those who compose the legislative body, those who bear office, those who possess franchises, those who pay tax; in short, all who in any way contribute to make up the organic body; that is to say, all absolutely, but each simply in respect of his entering, according to his measure, into its mechanism; and the term regards them with degrees of more or less, according as their capacity therein is more or less comprehensive and efficient. And together with that fluent body of individuals, which is permanent only by succession, the term state includes those fixed laws and traditionary institutions to which they give effect, through which the national character is sustained and propagated, and which, comparatively secure from the

storms of passion and the devouring rust and moth of selfishness, become for the most part the depository and the safeguard of the best, purest, and truest portions of the common life. As, then, the nation is the realised "unity of the people," so in the state is that unity made vital and active. The state is the selfgoverning energy of the nation made objective. Where monarchy prevails it is centralised and represented in the person of the sovereign, himself an integral portion of this realised unity. Through his will the mind of the state is made effective, and becomes action; and the executive power which he impels throughout is the functional life, or organ, of the state, as the state is of the nation. Even thus, in its correlative the church, is understood, along with an organised body of individuals, the laws and forms of institution according to which they are organised.

55. Into the composition of this organ there should enter different elements in different proportions, according to their intrinsic fitness either positively to determine its actions for good, or reciprocally to correct the faults of each other, the interests or forces (in the German phrase momente) of nobility, of talent, of property, of numbers; all these, on account of their presumption of merit, or at least of a negative competency, as weights balancing one another; and with and beyond all these, the virtue which is from above, whose title to govern is alone indefeasible, but which on earth, from the imperfection of the forms of Coleridge, Table Talk, vol. i. p. 226.

*