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CHURCH AND STATE
AS SEEN IN
THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM.
BY
T. W. ALLIES, M.A.

AUTHOR OF
“PER CRUCEM AD LUCEM, THE RESULT OF A LIFE,”
“A LIFE’S DECISION,” “JOURNAL IN FRANCE AND LETTERS FROM ITALY,”
“THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM,” ETC.
LONDON: BURNS AND OATES.
1882.

PROLOGUE.

THE KINGDOM AS PROPHESIED AND AS FULFILLED.

This volume, though entire in itself, is also the continuation of a former work, the “Formation of Christendom,” already written and published by me in three volumes. It is, in fact, the further unfolding of the subject under a particular aspect. In truth, the relation between Church and State leads perhaps more directly than any other to the heart of Christendom; for Christendom, both in word and idea, means not only one and the same Church subsisting in all civil governments, but also a community of Christian governments, having a common belief and common principles of action, grounded upon the Incarnation of the Son of God, and the Redemption wrought thereby. For this reason, the Formation of Christendom can hardly be described, unless the relation which ought by the institution of God to subsist between the two great Powers, the Spiritual and Civil, appointed to rule human society, is first clearly established.

In this volume, therefore, I treat first of the relation of these two Powers before the coming of Christ. Secondly, of their relation as it was affected by that coming, in order to show what position the Church of Christ originally took up in regard to the Civil Power, and what the behaviour of the Civil Power towards the Church was. And, thirdly, the question of principles being thus laid down, the remainder of the volume is occupied with the historical exhibition of the subject during the first three centuries; that is, from the Day of Pentecost to the Nicene Council. The supreme importance of that period will appear to all who reflect that the Church from the beginning, and in the first centuries of her existence, must be the same in principles with the Church of the nineteenth and every succeeding century. And this volume is, in fact, a prelude to the treatment of the same subject in the last three centuries, down to the Ecumenical Council of the Vatican.

The subject which I am treating is, then, strictly historical, being the action of a King in the establishment of a kingdom; the action of a Lawgiver in the legislation which He gave to that kingdom; the action of a Priest in founding a hierarchy, whereby that kingdom consists; but, moreover, which is something much more—the action of One who is Priest, Lawgiver, and King at once and always, and therefore whose work is at once one and triple, and indivisible in its unity and triplicity, and issuing in the forming of a people which is simply the creation of its King.

1.—The Kingdom as Prophesied.

As an introduction to it, let me refer to the distinct and explicit prediction of such an event at a point of time six centuries before it took effect, as well as now distant from us almost 2500 years, under circumstances upon which it is most instructive to look back. For not only did the secular and the religious histories of mankind then meet together, as they had met before, but they began to stand in a certain relation to each other, which continues from that time to this. The intersection of two societies which work themselves out in the one human history became permanent. At that moment a revelation was given, which is perhaps the most definite detailed and absolute prophecy concerning the whole compass of human society, as viewed in its relation to God, which is to be found in the Old Testament. And the occasion upon which it was given makes it even more significant, for it was like a burst of sunlight suddenly scattering the darkness of a storm and bathing the whole landscape in radiance.

That darkness indeed was terrible, for the ancient people chosen by God to support His name among apostate nations no longer lived apart from those nations in their own land which God had provided for them, with an independence based upon the law especially given to them, but lay prostrate under the feet of a heathen invader, who had placed a vassal upon the diminished throne of Solomon, and the royal line of David seemed on the eve of expiring in a degenerate descendant. For the continued infidelities of four hundred years had worn out even the divine patience. In vain had the ten tribes of schismatic Israel been carried into captivity by Assyria. It needed that the remaining kingdom of Judah should be broken up and its chiefs deported to Babylon, whose monarch was now the heir of Assur’s great empire, the king of kings, the sceptred head of heathendom. Moreover, in a few years he was to punish the vassal, rebellious to himself, but yet more faithless to the God of Israel, whom he had placed on David’s seat, and to burn that glorious Temple which the wisest of kings had erected to the majesty of the one true God. And with that fall of Zedekiah the line of David would cease for ever to sit upon a temporal throne.

A darker moment in the history of the chosen people could not be found, nor a more hopeless prospect, to all seeming, for the carrying out the promises made to Abraham and his seed. What was a divine judgment on the breakers of a special covenant with the one true God appeared to be the triumph of a heathendom which had set up many false gods. Yet it was the moment chosen to send to that very king, who was the executor of the divine chastisements upon a faithless people, a revelation which contained the future lot not only of the people which he had humbled, but of the heathendom of which he was the crown. As he lay upon his bed, Nabuchodonosor had a dream, “and his spirit was terrified, and the dream went out of his mind.” He strove in vain to recover it, either by the efforts of his own memory or by the skill of the wise men and soothsayers of Babylon. But among the captives in the imperial city was a youth of David’s lineage, nourished at the king’s court, and a member of his household. And when Daniel heard the decree of the great king ordering the death of the wise men who failed to interpret a dream which the king could not disclose to them, Daniel turned himself and his three fellow-captives and companions to prayer and supplication, “to the end that they should ask mercy at the face of the God of heaven concerning this secret. Then was the mystery revealed to Daniel by a vision in the night: and Daniel blessed the God of heaven, and speaking he said: Blessed be the name of the Lord from eternity and for evermore: for wisdom and fortitude are His. And He changeth times and ages: taketh away kingdoms and establisheth them, giveth wisdom to the wise, and knowledge to them that have understanding: He revealeth deep and hidden things, and knoweth what is in darkness, and light is with Him. To Thee, O God of our fathers, I give thanks, and I praise Thee; because Thou hast given me wisdom and strength: and now Thou hast shown me what we desired of Thee, for Thou hast made known to us the king’s discourse. After this Daniel went in to Arioch, to whom the king had given orders to destroy the wise men of Babylon, and he spoke thus to him: Destroy not the wise men of Babylon: bring me in before the king, and I will tell the solution to the king. Then Arioch in haste brought in Daniel to the king, and said to him: I have found a man of the children of the captivity of Judah that will resolve the question to the king. The king answered and said to Daniel, whose name was Baltassar: Thinkest thou indeed that thou canst tell me the dream that I saw, and the interpretation thereof? And Daniel made answer before the king and said: The secret that the king desireth to know, none of the wise men, or the philosophers, or the diviners, or the soothsayers can declare to the king. But there is a God in heaven that revealeth mysteries, who hath shown to thee, O king Nabuchodonosor, what is to come to pass in the latter times. Thy dream, and the visions of thy head upon thy bed, are these: Thou, O king, didst begin to think in thy bed what should come to pass hereafter: and He that revealeth mysteries showed thee what shall come to pass. To me also this secret is revealed, not by any wisdom that I have more than all men alive, but that the interpretation might be made manifest to the king, and thou mightest know the thoughts of thy mind. Thou, O king, sawest, and behold there was as it were a great statue: this statue, which was great and high, tall of stature, stood before thee, and the look thereof was terrible. The head of this statue was of fine gold, but the breast and the arms of silver, and the belly and the thighs of brass: and the legs of iron, the feet part of iron and part of clay. Thus thou sawest, until a stone was cut out of a mountain without hands, and it struck the statue upon the feet thereof that were of iron and of clay, and broke them in pieces. Then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold broken to pieces together, and became like the chaff of a summer’s threshing-floor, and they were carried away by the wind, and there was no place found for them: but the stone that struck the statue became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth. This is the dream: we will also tell the interpretation thereof before thee, O king. Thou art a king of kings: and the God of heaven hath given thee a kingdom, and strength, and power, and glory: and all places wherein the children of men and the beasts of the field do dwell: he hath also given the birds of the air into thy hand, and hath put all things under thy power: thou therefore art the head of gold. And after thee shall rise up another kingdom, inferior to thee, of silver: and another third kingdom of brass, which shall rule over all the world. And the fourth kingdom shall be as iron. As iron breaketh into pieces and subdueth all things, so shall that break and destroy all these. And whereas thou sawest the feet and the toes part of potter’s clay, and part of iron: the kingdom shall be divided, but yet it shall take its origin from the iron, according as thou sawest the iron mixed with the miry clay. And as the toes of the feet were part of iron and part of clay, the kingdom shall be partly strong and partly broken. And whereas thou sawest the iron mixed with miry clay, they shall be mingled indeed together with the seed of man, but they shall not stick fast one to another, as iron cannot be mixed with clay. But in the days of those kingdoms the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, and His kingdom shall not be delivered up to another people, and it shall break in pieces and shall consume all these kingdoms, and itself shall stand for ever. According as thou sawest that the stone was cut out of the mountain without hands, and broke in pieces the clay, and the iron, and the brass, and the silver, and the gold, the great God hath shown the king what shall come to pass hereafter, and the dream is true, and the interpretation thereof is faithful.”

No one can study the vision and its interpretation without seeing that the fabric of a great temporal empire, whose ruler is called a king of kings, and whose seat is the city wherein Nimrod, “the great hunter before the Lord,” set up the first kingdom, to stand for ever at the head of human history a kingdom symbolical not of justice but of force, is therein contrasted with the fabric of a kingdom which the God of heaven should set up. And it is specially noted that He should set up this kingdom in the times of the empires denoted by the statue. And of the kingdom so to be set up four things are predicated in, as it were, an ascending scale. First, there is its divine institution: “the God of heaven shall set up a kingdom,” and that in a manner wholly unexampled, which is expressed by “a stone cut out of a mountain without hands.” Secondly, “the kingdom shall never be destroyed.” Thirdly, and further, “it shall not be delivered up to another people;” a process which, according to the interpretation of the vision, was to take place three times in the empires represented by the statue. Fourthly, “that it should break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, while itself should last for ever.”

Moreover, as the earthly kingdom was really a kingdom, so the force of the similitude running through the whole, and heightened by the effect of contrast, declares that the heavenly should be a kingdom. As the seat of the earthly kingdom was this world, so evidently the seat of the heavenly is this same world. As the earthly kingdom should be destroyed, so the heavenly should be exempt from destruction. As the earthly kingdom was to pass from one people to another, so the heavenly kingdom should not pass from one people to another. But then comes a culmination which no one could anticipate. For not only is there an antagonism between the earthly and the heavenly kingdom, but by force of it, and in consequence of it, the heavenly should consume and break in pieces the earthly. Whereby the hearer is given to understand that the earthly kingdom, terrible and grand and all-powerful as it seemed to be, was created for the sake of the heavenly, which in due time should be set up in it, but not of it nor from it.

It is no less implied through the whole tenor of the vision that the authority which constitutes the essence of a kingdom—that is, supreme and independent authority, which is expressed in legislation and administered in government—subsists as much in the heavenly as in the earthly kingdom, with this marked distinction, that it is transitory in the one case and permanent in the other.

And, finally, the power by which all this should be done was something beyond human power, and without parallel, very strange and astonishing, “a stone cut out of a mountain without hands,” which should not only strike the statue upon its feet, but itself grow, “until it became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth.”

Thus the filling of the whole earth with the stone which struck the statue and then became a great mountain terminates the vision. But it is no less its scope and object. The statue exists before that the stone may come after. The statue and the stone, as thus exhibited, indicate the respective value in the divine counsels of the powers which they represent; that is, the subordination of the human kingdom to the divine, both in the order of causality and in duration, is distinctly laid down. And the end of both accords with this. The great statue, when struck by the stone, became like the chaff of a summer’s threshing-floor; but the stone which struck it filled the whole earth. And the vision leaves it in possession.

The vision also reaches from end to end. It begins with the first empire, which is human, and runs back by the place in which it is seated to the commencement of actual things; and it ends with the last, which is divine, and which shall consume all the other kingdoms recorded, and itself last for ever. Thus the vision grasps the whole organism of society in the human race, as it lies unrolled before the providence of God.

2.—The Kingdom as Fulfilled.

Such was the prophecy. Now let us pass over a thousand years, and take the first fulfilment of the vision as it presented itself to an ancient saint at the beginning of the fifth century. We will only note that in the interval Nabuchodonosor and Cyrus and Alexander and Cæsar had set up the four world-empires. They were four indeed, for they passed three times from one people to another—from Chaldean to Persian, from Persian to Grecian, from Grecian to Roman, as the variety of metals in the statue was interpreted to mean. Yet were they also one—a unity which, as that of a single person, the great statue so faithfully represented. For they were one with each other in the character and unbroken tradition of the same civilisation, and in the principle of their authority, which was conquest. They were filled with the same spirit of heathen domination, which was in truth the voice and the power of a false worship, as with the spirit of one man who rose in Babylon to set in Rome.[1] Two Apostles, special friends and constant fellow-workers, had marked this identity by giving the mystical name of Babylon to heathen Rome—St. Peter[2] in the epistle which he dates from Babylon, St. John in his vision of the woman drunk with the blood of saints and martyrs, and seated upon the seven hills, whom he himself interprets to be “the great city which had kingdom over the kings of the earth.” These empires had run their appointed course, and the last and greatest of them, which was likewise the heir and successor of the three preceding in power and thought, as well as in the body of their territories and the soul which ruled therein, was ending in disgrace and dissolution. For at length the tribes of the North had broken through the long-guarded frontiers of Roman power. Alaric with his Goths had taken Rome, and a deep cry of distress arose through all the vast provinces of her empire. Every city in that wide domain trembled with the sense of insecurity for the present and fear for the future which the fall of Rome inspired. Just at this moment the great Western Father, whose voice sounded like the voice of the Church herself, wrote thus to a heathen inquirer:—

“Faith opens the door to intelligence, while unbelief closes it. Where is the man who would not be moved to belief, simply by so vast an order of events proceeding from the beginning; by the mere connection of various ages, which accredits the present by the past, while it confirms antiquity by what is recent? Out of the Chaldean nation a single man is chosen, remarkable for a most constant piety. Divine promises are disclosed to this man, which are to find their completion after a vast series of ages in the last times, and it is predicted that all nations are to receive a benediction in his seed. This man being a worshipper of the one true God, the Creator of the universe, begets in his old age a son, of a wife whom barrenness and age had long deprived of all hope of offspring. From him is propagated a most numerous people, which multiplies in Egypt, whither a divine disposition of things, redoubling its promises and effects, had carried that family from eastern parts. From their servitude in Egypt a strong people is led forth by terrible signs and miracles; impious nations are driven out before it; it is brought into the promised land, settled therein, and exalted into a kingdom. Then it falls more and more into sin; it perpetually offends the true God, who had conferred upon it so many favours, by violating His worship; it is scourged with various misfortunes; it is visited with consolations, and so carried on to the incarnation and manifestation of Christ. All the promises made to this nation, all its prophecies, its priesthoods, its sacrifices, its temple, in a word, all its sacred rites, had for their special object this Christ, the Word of God, the Son of God—God that was to come in the flesh, that was to die, to rise again, to ascend to heaven, that by the exceeding power of His name was to obtain in all nations a population dedicated to Himself; and in Him remission of sins and eternal salvation unto such as believed.

“Christ came. In His birth, His life, His words, His deeds, His sufferings, His death, His resurrection, His ascension,—all the predictions of the prophets are fulfilled. He sends forth the Holy Spirit; He fills the faithful who are assembled in one house, and who by their prayers and desires are expecting this very promise. They are filled with the Holy Spirit; they speak suddenly with the tongues of all nations; they confidently refute errors; they proclaim a most salutary truth; they exhort to penitence for the faults of past life; they promise pardon from the divine grace. Their proclamation of piety and true religion is followed by suitable signs and miracles. A savage unbelief is stirred up against them. They endure what had been foretold; hope in what had been promised; teach what had been commanded them. Few in number, they are scattered through the world. They convert populations with marvellous facility. In the midst of enemies they grow. They are multiplied by persecutions. In the straits of affliction they are spread abroad over vast regions. At first they are uninstructed, of very low condition, very few in number. Their ignorance passes into the brightest intelligence; their low ranks produce the most cultivated eloquence; their fewness becomes a multitude; they subjugate to Christ minds the most acute, learned, and accomplished, and convert them into preachers of piety and salvation. In the alternating intervals of adversity and prosperity, they exercise a watchful patience and temperance. As the world verges in a perpetual decline, and by exhaustion expresses the coming of its last age, since this also is what prophecy led them to expect, they with greater confidence await the eternal happiness of the heavenly city. And amid all this the unbelief of impious nations rages against the Church of Christ, which works out victory by patience, and by preserving unshaken faith against the cruelty of opponents. When the sacrifice unveiled by the truth, which had so long been covered under mystical promises, had at length succeeded, those sacrifices which prefigured this one were removed by the destruction of the Temple itself. This very Jewish people, rejected for its unbelief, was cast out of its own seat, and scattered everywhere throughout the world, to carry with it the sacred writings; so that the testimony of prophecy, by which Christ and the Church were foretold, may not be thought a fiction of ours for the occasion, but be produced by our very adversaries—a testimony in which it is also foretold that they should not believe. The temples and images of demons, and the sacrilegious rites of that worship, are gradually overthrown, as prophecy foretold. Heresies against the name of Christ, which yet veil themselves under that name, swarm, as was foretold, in order to call out the force of teaching in our holy religion. In all these things, as we read their prediction, so we discern their fulfilment, and from so vast a portion which is fulfilled we rest assured of what is still to come. Is there a single mind which yearns after eternity and feels the shortness of the present life, that can resist the light and the force of this divine authority?”[3]

St. Augustine wrote thus to his friend Volusian, the uncle of St. Melania, a Roman nobleman of high reputation, who was then, as he continued for many years to be, a heathen. But we must also take note that he wrote at a point of time scarcely less remarkable than that of the vision interpreted by Daniel. The old world with its sequence of world-empires was passing away. And so soon as it passed another travail of extraordinary severity was preparing for the Church, such a travail as even the eagle eye of the Bishop of Hippo could not discern as he stood before the beginning of its accomplishment. When he wrote there was a Catholic Church, the fulfilment of a long train of prophecies in that “connection of ages” which he has so wonderfully drawn out, but there was not yet a Christendom. Nor could he the least foresee what was to take place before that Christendom could be formed. Only, as he spoke, the iron of Roman discipline—the inflexible Romulean mind—which had held together the miry clay of so many various and divergent nationalities, European, Asiatic, African, so that “the kingdom took its origin from the iron,” was losing its tenacity. That vast structure of Roman power, the breaking up of which had been feared in the wars and insurrections arising upon the death of Nero, and extinction of the family of Augustus, was in truth dissolving.[4] The western and eastern limbs of the statue were parting away from each other, and the toes were crumbling. But though Augustine heard the sound of the advancing tide, he saw not yet the full flood of the deluge from the north; and still less could he foresee the counter desolation from the south; Teuton flood and Arab desolation which in their joint effect would blast utterly the Roman Peace, and break the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold in pieces together, until they became like the chaff of the summer’s threshing-floor.

As little could he anticipate another sight, the further fulfilment of the vision, when the provinces, those crumbling toes of the statue, which lay before him in an impending dissolution, were to be formed into great independent kingdoms, having for the common foundation of their power “the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.” Then in that “connection of ages” which should be drawn out after the time of Augustine in even greater distinctness than before him, and with greater claim upon the believing mind, which “yearns after eternity,” a grander fulfilment of the vision would be disclosed. The royalties set up by barbarian chiefs of tribes among incoherent populations of victors and vanquished were to educate mature nations with individual character in the one Christian faith, and shine as distinct stars set in the crown of the Successor to Peter’s pastorship. For as the Word made flesh created Christian monarchies and Christian nations in their several being, so the charge of the Word to a disciple by the lake of Gennesareth, “Feed My Sheep,” created the great unity of Christendom which bound them together. In Constantine one empire had acknowledged the reign of Christ, and bent the neck of heathen domination to raise the cross upon a heathen crown. But then a group of nations should base the fabric of their laws, and the whole civilisation which redeemed them from barbarism, upon the truth that God assumed flesh for man’s sake, and should acknowledge in Peter’s Successor the Vicar of that God, who by and in that pastoral rule of Peter made them members of one Body, and in so making them “took the Gentiles for His inheritance, and the utmost parts of the earth for His possession.”

This was a second and further fulfilment of the vision, which as yet Augustine saw not, nor even anticipated; but after thus writing he set himself in the last years of his life to a great task, even that of comparing together from their origin to their end the course of the two societies, not national, but world-wide, which run out through human history, intermingled together, and claiming possession of the same man. First, the natural society of the human race played upon by all the passions and infirmities which are the effect of man’s original Fall; and secondly, that other society chosen by God from the beginning in view of His Son’s Incarnation, for the purpose of repairing and counterworking that Fall. It was the capture of Rome by Alaric, and the deep despondency which thence arose in the minds of many, both Christian and heathen, that moved him originally to this design, of which the first tracing is seen in the letter to Volusian just quoted. He sought to meet conclusions unfavourable to the Christian faith, which were drawn by weak, or narrow, or unbelieving minds from the fall of the imperial city. His plan accordingly led him to take a complete view of all human history; and the result has been that one of the last representatives of the old world, and certainly the greatest of all as thinker, philosopher, and theologian, the most universal genius of the patristic ages, whether among Greeks or Latins, has left us a Philosophy of History, the first in time, and as yet unequalled in ability; for it supplies a key to the acts of man and the providence of God in that masterly comparison between the City of God and the City of the devil in their origin, their course, and their end.

The leading thought of this great work gives me a final text bearing on the subject of this volume.

“Thus, then, two Cities have been created by two loves: the earthly, by that love of self which reaches even to the contempt of God; the heavenly, by the love of God which reaches even to the contempt of self. The first has its boast in self; the second in its Lord. For the first seeks its glory from men; whereas to the second, God, the witness of conscience, is the greatest glory. The first in that glory which it has made for itself exalts its own head; the second says to its God, ‘Thou art my glory and the lifter up of my head.’ In the first the lust of domination sways both its rulers and the nations which it subjugates. In the second a mutual service of charity is exercised by rulers who consult the good of subjects, and by subjects who practise obedience to rulers. The first loves in its own potentates its own excellence; the second says to the God of its choice, ‘I will love Thee, O Lord, my strength.’ And thus in the first its own wise men, living after human fashion, pursue the goods of their body or their mind, or both at once, or they who might have known God, have not ‘glorified him as God nor given thanks, but became vain in their thoughts, and their foolish heart was darkened; professing themselves to be wise,’ that is, extolling themselves in their own wisdom through the pride that mastered them, ‘they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness of the image of a corruptible man, and of birds, and of four-footed beasts, and of creeping things;’ for they either led their peoples or followed them in the adoration of such-like images; and ‘worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever.’ But in the second there is no wisdom of man save piety, by which the true God is rightly worshipped, awaiting its reward in the society of saints, not men only, but angels, that God may be all in all.”[5]

I put together these three facts of human history, the vision of the King of Babylon interpreted by Daniel six hundred years before Christ, the summary of its fulfilment down to his own age written by St Augustine four hundred years after the coming of Christ, and his delineation, a few years later, of the Two Cities, as set forth by him in a work on which the Christian mind has now been nurtured for fourteen hundred and fifty years. The simple juxtaposition of these shows how Babylon stretches to Rome, and Rome is heir of Babylon; and the heathen man thus formed illustrates “the Man who is born in Sion, the city of the great King.”[6] It is true that the two great Powers of Civil and Spiritual government, the relation between which forms the subject of this volume, are not exactly represented as concerns that relation in the vision of Daniel; but only the heathen growth of the Civil Power, and the miraculous rise, permanent rule, and progressive growth of the Spiritual Power in the midst of it; yet the mighty promise is recorded that in presence of the Civil Power the Spiritual shall never pass away; rather that it shall last unchanged, while the other is shifting and transitory; and also the cognate truth, that the great and terrible Power represented by the Statue is, in the counsels of God, subordinate in its scope to the Power represented by the Stone.

It is true, again, that the vivid contrast of the Two Cities as drawn by St. Augustine does not represent the legitimate relation of the Two Powers to each other, but only the perversion of the one Power from its true end and object, and the perfect antagonism of the other to that perversion.

But the kingdom set up by the God of heaven in the vision interpreted by Daniel, and the connection of ages dwelt upon by St. Augustine, which leads up to the Person of Christ, and then starts afresh from Him, and the Divine City delineated by St. Augustine, fit exactly into each other, and so they seem to me to form together an appropriate introduction to that most remarkable period of history with which the present volume is occupied, when the Stone cut out without hands struck the Statue, and became a great mountain, in preparation for that further growth when it would fill the whole earth.

The Statue presented in vision to the heathen king has indeed been swept away, but in every country a reduced likeness of it, “the look whereof is terrible,” stands over against “the Man born in Sion.” And the Two Cities everywhere run on in their predestined course until the end contemplated by Augustine takes effect. But as he did not discern the second fulfilment of the divine kingdom which followed upon the wandering of the nations, so neither can we discern the third and yet grander fulfilment when the divine kingdom shall become to the whole world what once it was in the Roman Empire. For, to repeat St. Augustine’s words, “In all these things as we read their prediction, so we discern their fulfilment, and from so vast a portion which is fulfilled we rest assured of what is still to come.” And “the stone that struck the statue became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth.”

February 12, 1882.

CHURCH AND STATE
AS SEEN IN
THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM.

CHAPTER I.

RELATION BETWEEN THE CIVIL AND SPIRITUAL POWERS FROM ADAM TO CHRIST.

1.—The Divine and Human Society founded in Adam, refounded in Noah.

In one of the most ancient books of the world, which, in addition to its antiquity, all Christians venerate as containing the original tradition of man’s creation, guaranteed in purity and accuracy by divine assistance given to the writer, we read the following words:—“God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds, and cattle, and everything that creepeth on the earth after its kind. And God saw that it was good. And he said: Let us make man to our image and likeness: and let him have dominion over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and the beasts, and the whole earth, and every creeping creature that moveth upon the earth. And God created man to his own image: to the image of God he created him: male and female he created them.” And further: “The Lord God formed man of the slime of the earth; and breathed into his face the breath of life, and man became a living soul.... And the Lord God took man and put him into the paradise of pleasure, to dress it and to keep it. And he commanded him, saying, Of every tree of paradise thou shalt eat; but of the tree of knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat. For in what day soever thou shalt eat of it, thou shalt die the death. And the Lord God said, It is not good for man to be alone; let us make him a help like unto himself. And the Lord God having formed out of the ground all the beasts of the earth, and all the fowls of the air, brought them to Adam to see what he would call them: for whatsoever Adam called any living creature, the same is its name. And Adam called all the beasts by their names, and all the fowls of the air, and all the cattle of the field; but for Adam there was not found a helper like himself. Then the Lord God cast a deep sleep upon Adam: and when he was fast asleep he took one of his ribs and filled up flesh for it. And the Lord God built the rib which he took from Adam into a woman: and brought her to Adam. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of man. Wherefore a man shall leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they shall be two in one flesh. And they were both naked, Adam and his wife, and were not ashamed.”

Such is the account of the origin of man, of woman, of marriage, as the root of human society, and of that society itself, beginning in the absolute unity of one who was father and head of his race, created in full possession of reason and language, and exercising both by an intuitive knowledge of the qualities of living creatures as they are brought before him by his Maker. This account stands at the head of human history, and has been venerated as truth by more than a hundred generations of men since it was written down by Moses, not to speak of those many generations among whom it had been a living tradition before he had written it down. Human language scarcely possesses elsewhere such an assemblage of important truths in so few words. Perhaps the only parallel to it is contained in the fourteen verses which stand at the opening of St. John’s Gospel, wherein are recorded the Godhead and Incarnation of the Divine Word. The first creation has its counterpart only in the second; and the restoration of man by the personal action of God alone surpasses, or, perhaps, more truly may be said to complete, the Idea of his original formation by the same personal action of the same Divine Word, who, great as He is in creating, is yet greater in redeeming, but is one in both, and in both carries out one Idea.

For the creation of man as one individual, who is likewise the head and bearer of a race, is the key to all the divine government of the world. The fact rules its destinies through all their evolution. The world, as it concerns the actions, the lot, and the reciprocal effect of men upon each other, would have been quite a different world if it had not sprung out of this unity. If, for instance, mankind had been a collection of human beings in all things like to what they now are, except in one point, that they were independent of each other and unconnected in their origin. This unity further makes the race capable of that divine restoration which from the beginning was intended, and with a view to which man was made a race: which in restoring man likewise unspeakably exalts him, for He who made Adam the father and head of the race, made him also “the figure of One that was to come.”

Let us briefly enumerate the parts of the divine plan as disclosed to us in the narration just given.

In the council held by the Blessed Trinity it is said, “Let us make man to our image and likeness;” not, Let us make men, but man: the singular number used of the whole work indicates that the creation to be made was not only an individual but a family. From the beginning the family is an essential part of the plan. This is no less indicated in the single creation of Adam first, not the simultaneous creation of the male and female, as in the case of all other creatures, but the creation by himself of the head alone, from whom first woman by herself, and then from the conjunction of the two his family is drawn. In Adam first, while as yet he is alone, the high gifts of reason, speech, and knowledge indicated in the twofold and also congenital possession of reason and language, are exhibited as residing as in a fountain-head, when all creatures of the earth and the air are brought before him by his Maker, and he with intuitive understanding of their several qualities and uses imposes on them the corresponding name. Thus Adam is created complete, a full-grown man, in whom the divine gift of thought finds expression in the equally divine gift of language, both exerted with unerring truth, for it is intimated that the names which he assigns to the creatures thus passed in review render accurately their several natures. It is not said that the Lord God intimated to Adam the names which he should give; but the knowledge by which he gave the names was part of his original endowment, like the gift of thought and language, which answer to each other and imply each other, and in a being composed of soul and body complete by their union and joint exercise the intellectual nature. “The Lord God brought all beasts and all fowls before Adam to see what he would call them; for whatsoever Adam called any living creature, the same is its name.”

This presentation of the creatures before Adam, and their naming by him, is the token of the dominion promised to him “over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and the beasts, and the whole earth,” as the result of his being made to “the image and likeness” of the Triune God. Only when he has thus taken possession of his royalty is the creation of the family completed out of himself. For when “for Adam there was not found a helper like himself,” the Lord God took not again of the slime of the earth to mould a woman and bring her to man, but “He cast a deep sleep upon Adam, and built the rib which He took from Adam into a woman, and brought her to Adam.” And then He uttered the blessing which should fill the earth with the progeny of the woman who had been drawn from the man her head, saying, “Increase and multiply and fill the earth, and subdue it, and rule over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and all living creatures that move upon the earth.”

What, then, is the image and likeness of the Triune God? The image consists in the soul, with its two powers of the understanding and the will, proceeding out of it, indivisible from it, yet distinct. May we not infer that the likeness is the obedience of the soul, with its powers, to the eternal law? This law, viewed in the Triune God, the prototype of man’s being, is the sanctity of the Divine Nature; but in man, thus created, the obedience to it was the gift of original justice superadded to his proper nature: the gift by which the soul, in the free exercise of the understanding and the will, was obedient to the law of God, its Creator.

This was an image and likeness which belonged to Adam in a double capacity, firstly, as an individual, secondly, as head of a family; for it was to descend to each individual of the family in virtue of natural procreation from Adam. The man created after the image and likeness of the Triune God was, according to the divine intention, to be repeated in every one of the race.

But what of the family or race which was to be evolved out of Adam alone? Not the individual only but the race also is in the divine plan. Is there a further image of the Triune God in the mode of the race’s formation?

To give an answer to this question, we must first consider what is the prototype of that singular unity according to which the first parents of the race are not formed together out of the earth, male and female, like the inferior creatures. For in most marked distinction from all these man is formed by himself, and alone; receives the command to eat of all trees in the garden except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, under penalty of death if he take of it; and then is shown exercising the grandeur of his knowledge and the fulness of his royalty in the naming of the subject creatures. But inasmuch as none of them could supply him with a companion, and as “it was not good for him to be alone,” a council of the Triune God is held again, and a help like to himself is taken out of himself. Is there not here, with that infinite distance which separates the created from the Increate, a yet striking image of the Divine Filiation?

Again, from the conjunction of the two, from Adam the head, and from Eve when she has been drawn out of him, proceeds, in virtue of the blessing of God, the human family. Is there not here, again, at that distance which separates divine from human things, an image of the procession of the Third Divine Person, the Lord, and the Giver of life, from whom all life proceeds?

May we not then say with reverence, that from the council of the Triune God, “Let us make man to our image and likeness,” proceeds forth the individual man, an earthly counterpart in his memory, understanding, and will to the divine Creator, and likewise man, the family, a created image of the primal mystery, the ineffable joy of the Godhead, the ever blessed Trinity in Unity? And since the origin of creation itself is the free act of God, it ought not to surprise us that the chief work of His hands in the visible universe should reflect in the proportion of a creature the secret life of the Divine Nature, the Unity and Trinity of the Godhead.

But next to this primal mystery, which is the source of all creation, stands that unspeakable condescension, that act of sovereign goodness, by which God has chosen to assume a created nature into personal unity with Himself, and to crown the creation which He has made. As to this the first Adam, in all his headship, with the privileges included in it, the transmission to his family of original justice, and of that wonderful gift of adoption superadded to it, is “the figure of Him who was to come.” But more also, St. Paul tells us, is indicated in the formation of Eve out of Adam during the sleep divinely cast upon him. This was the “great sacrament of Christ and of His Church” (Eph. v. 32), to which he pointed in reminding his hearers of the high institution of Christian marriage. And thus we learn that God, in the act of forming the natural race, supernaturally endowed, was pleased to foreshadow by the building of Eve, “the mother of all living,” out of the first Adam, the building of another Eve, the second and truer mother of a divine race, out of the wounded heart of the Redeemer of the world asleep upon the cross. As then in Adam’s headship we have the figure of the Headship of Christ, so in the issuing of Eve from him in his sleep we have the Passion of Christ and the issuing forth of His Bride from it, when His work of redemption was completed and His royalty proclaimed.

Thus the mysteries of the blessed Trinity, that is, of God the Creator, and of the Incarnation and Passion of Christ, that is, of God the Redeemer, lie folded up, as it were, in the Mosaic narrative of the mode in which Adam was created, and in the headship of the race conferred upon him.

Before we approach the sin of Adam and its consequences to human society, let us cast one glance back upon the beauty and splendour of the divine plan in the original creation as it is disclosed to us in the narrative of Moses. As the crown of the visible creation is placed a being who is at once an individual and the head of a family, representing in his personal nature the divine Unity and Trinity, and in the race of which he is to stand at the head the same divine Unity and Trinity in their aspect towards creation; representing the royalty of God in his dominion over the creatures, a dominion the condition of which is the obedience of his own compound nature to the law given to it by the Creator; representing again in the vast number to which his race shall extend the prolific energy of the Lord of Hosts; representing also in that secret and altogether wonderful mystery, out of which the multiplication of his race springs, the yet untold secret of the divine mercy, in virtue of which his fathership is the prelude to a higher fathership, the first man is the pattern of the Second, and the royalty of his creation but a rehearsal at the beginning of the world of the reparation which is to crown its end.

The whole work of creation as above described, depends in its result upon the exercise of man’s free-will. His value, before God, lies simply in the way in which he exerts this great prerogative of his reasonable nature. Without it he would be reduced from one who chooses his course, and in that choice becomes good or evil, to the condition of a machine devoid of any moral being. To test this free-will man was given a commandment. We know that he failed under the trial; that he broke the commandment. His disobedience to his Creator was punished by the disobedience of his own compound nature to himself. That divine grace, which we term the state of original justice, and in virtue of which his soul, with its understanding and will, illuminated and fortified, was subject to God, and the body with all its appetites was subject to the soul, was withdrawn. He became subject to death, the certain death of the body, with all that train of diseases and pains which precede it; and the final separation of the soul from its Creator, unless by the way which God indicated to him he should be restored. Becoming a sinner, his refuge was penitence; henceforth his life was to be the life of a penitent; he had lost the grace which was bestowed royally on the innocent; he was left the grace which was to support and lead on the penitent. From the garden of pleasure he is expelled, to go forth into a world which produces thorns and thistles, unless he water it with the sweat of his brow. To all this I only allude, since my proper subject is to trace the first formation of human society as it came forth from the fall. But the primal state of man could not be passed over, because the state in which he grew up, and the state in which he now stands, cannot be understood nor estimated rightly without a due conception of that original condition.

With the loss of original justice Adam does not lose the headship of his race. All men that are to be born remain his children, and continue to be not a species of similar individuals, but a family, a race. All the dealings of God with them continue to be dealings with them as a race. Adam’s fathership, had he not fallen, would have been to them the source of an inestimable good, would have secured to them the transmission of original justice, crowned as it further was by a wholly gratuitous gift, the gift of adoption to a divine sonship. But that fathership, in consequence of his sin, actually transmitted to them a nature penally deprived both of the original endowment and of the superadded adoption; and, as a fact, all the difficulties which occur to the mind in the divine government of the world spring out of this treatment by God of man as a family, a race. But likewise through this continuing fathership of Adam, the Fathership of Christ appears as the completion of an original plan, devised before the foundation of the world, and actually carried out at the appointed time. He was to be son of David and son of Abraham in order that He might be Son of man. This original plan of God is not frustrated but executed by the fall of Adam. The yet undisclosed secrets of human lot have their origin in Adam and their solution in Christ. We are allowed to see that they belong to one plan. No doubt the hidden things of God in this dispensation baffle our scrutiny: they remain for the trial of faith until faith passes into sight, but we are allowed to see the fact of a vast compensation; and over against the fathership which brought death and corruption and the interminable ills of human life, we see all the supernatural blessings of the new covenant, consisting in the triple dowry of adoption, betrothal, and consecration, come to man as a spiritual race descending from the Second Adam.

Thus, not only the primary but the actual state of man in society springs out of an absolute unity. We have here to note two great truths. Adam, as he was expelled from paradise to till the earth and subdue it, was the head of his race in two particulars: first, as to natural society, whence springs civil government; and secondly, as to the worship of God, and the promises included in that worship, whence springs priesthood and all the fabric of religion. The two unities, the social and the religious, had in him their common root; and man thus comes before us in history as a family in which the first father stands at the head of the civil and religious order in most intimate intercourse with God. The only description which we possess of that first period of human society from the Fall to the Deluge, suggests to us a state which seems absolutely walled round by God with securities, both as concerns human life in the intercourse between man and man, and as concerns the purity of their worship of God. As to the first, have we not said all which can be said when we say that they were a family? The king of the human race was the father of every one in it. Certainly if any king could ever command the love and respect of his subjects it must have been Adam in that royalty.

But let us very briefly consider the bearing of man’s condition before the fall, as set forth to us in the sacred records which have been so far followed, upon his knowledge of divine and human things, and his moral state in his first society after the fall.

We have seen Adam in possession of a great dignity, created in the maturity of reason, exercising the full power of thought and speech as directed to truth by an inward gift, which conveys to him the knowledge of the creatures surrounding him; moreover, taught by God as to his present duties and future hopes. We have seen a wife bestowed upon him, who is, as it were, created for him and drawn from him, and a vast family promised to him. He is thus made father and head of his family and his race, and his Creator is his immediate Teacher. After his fall these privileges do not become to him as if they had never been. The memory of them all is complete in him, but a very large portion of their substance remains. Let us take three points, which are enough for our purpose. He receives, at the fall itself, firstly, a great promise of God; secondly, he becomes the Teacher and, thirdly, the Priest of his race. As to the promise, God declares to him that, as the result of the serpent seducing the woman to sin, He will create enmity between the serpent and the woman, the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman; the seed of the woman should crush the serpent’s head; the serpent should lie in wait for his heel. All human history is gathered up in that division of the race, between the seed of the woman, from which springs the City of God, and the seed of the serpent, from which springs the City of the Devil. That is a communication of fresh knowledge to Adam, knowledge of good and evil, a mixture of consolation and sorrow. That is a disclosure of the issue of things stretching to the very end of the world, which comes to sustain Adam in his penitence, to complete the knowledge which he previously had of God and of himself.

In this first great prophecy, which embraces all the religion, the hope, and the destiny of man, the consequences of which are not yet worked out, man is treated as a race. The punishment falls on him as a Father; the Woman through whom it comes, the Mother of his children, points to another Woman and Mother, through whom it is to be reversed, and the Deliverer is to come to him as a Descendant.

Adam, then, was cast out of paradise, but not without hope, still less without knowledge, for he carried with him the knowledge which God had given to him, and the lesson of a great experience. Thus he became the great Teacher of his family. Through him from whom they received natural being and nurture, they received the knowledge of God, of their own end, of all which it behoved them to know for the purpose of their actual life. The great Father was likewise the great Penitent; and the first preacher of God’s justice to men told them likewise of His mercy: a preacher powerful and unequalled in both his themes.

But, by the fall, Adam became likewise the Priest in his family. We learn from the narrative of Cain and Abel that the worship of God by sacrifice had been instituted, and it is not obscurely intimated that it was instituted even before he was cast out of paradise, since God Himself clothed Adam and Eve with skins of beasts, which, doubtless, were slain in sacrifice, since they were not used for food.[7]

The rite of bloody sacrifice, utterly unintelligible without the notion of sin, and inconceivable without a positive divine institution, so precise in its formularies about the statement of sin, and the need of expiation, is an everliving prophecy of the great sacrifice which God had intended “before the foundation of the world,” and a token of the knowledge which He had communicated to Adam before he became a father. Unfallen man needed to make no sacrifice, but only the triple offering of adoration, thanksgiving, and prayer. These Adam would have given before he fell; after his fall he became a priest, and the bloody sacrifice to God of His own creatures, a mode of propitiating God which man could never have invented or imagined of himself, is a token of the ritual enjoined upon him, and of the faith which it symbolised and perpetuated.

Such, then, was the condition of the children of Adam, the first human society, in those “many days” which passed before Cain rose up against Abel: the state of a family living in full knowledge of their own creation, being, and end, in vast security, for who was there to hurt them? worshipping God the Creator by a rite which He had ordained in token of a great promise, at their head the Father, the Teacher, and the Priest, with the triple dignity which emanates from the divine sovereignty, and makes a perfect government.

The two powers which were to rule the world rested as yet undivided upon Adam after his fall.

It is evident that nothing could be further from a state of savagery or barbarism, from a state of defective knowledge of God and man, and his end, than such a condition as this, which suggests itself necessarily to any one who considers attentively the sacred narrative.

But as Adam in paradise was left to the exercise of his free-will, and fell out of the most guarded state of innocence by its misuse, so the first-born of Adam broke out of this secure condition of patriarchal life through the same misuse, and begun by fratricide the City of the Devil. We are told that God remonstrated with him when he fell under the influence of envy and jealousy, but in vain. He rose against his brother and slew him; he received in consequence the curse of God; “went out from his face, and dwelt a fugitive on the earth at the east side of Eden.” There it is said that he built the first city, on which St. Augustine comments: “It is written of Cain that he built a city; but Abel, as a stranger and pilgrim, built none.”

The fratricide of Cain leads to a split in the human family. The line of Cain seems to depart from Adam and live in independence of him. It becomes remarkable for its progress in mechanical arts, and for the first example of bigamy. The end of it is all we need here note. In process of time, “as men multiplied on the earth,” two societies seem to divide the race of Adam—one entitled that of “the sons of God,” the other that of “the daughters of men.” But the ruin of the whole race is brought about by the blending of the better with the worse: the bad prevail, the two Cities become mixed together in inextricable confusion. God left to man throughout his free-will, but when the result of this was that “the wickedness of men was great upon the earth, and that all the thoughts of their heart was bent upon evil at all times,” that is, when the City of the Devil had prevailed over the City of God in that patriarchal race which He had so wonderfully taught and guarded, He interfered to destroy those whose rebellion was hopeless of amendment, and to make out of one who had remained faithful to Him a new beginning of the race.

The race had been cut down to the root because in the midst of knowledge and grace it had deserted God; and Noah, as he stepped forth from the ark, began with a solemn act of reparation. He “built an altar to the Lord and offered holocausts upon it of all cattle and fowls that were clean.” God accepted the sacrifice, inasmuch as it was in and through this act that He bestowed the earth upon Noah and his sons, and gave him everything that lived and moved on it for food. He consecrated afresh the life of man by ordaining that whoever took human life away, that is, by an act of violence, not of justice, should himself be punished with the loss of his own life; and He grounded this great ordinance upon the fact that man was made after the image of God. At the same time God repeated to Noah and his sons the primal blessing which had multiplied the race, and was to fill the earth with it, and made a covenant with him and with his seed for ever, a covenant to be afterwards developed, but never to be abrogated. It is to be noted that the sacred narrative dwells rather upon the sacrifice made by Noah immediately upon issuing from the ark than upon the original sacrifice offered by Adam. Of the first institution of sacrifice it makes only incidental mention, referring with great significance to those skins of beasts, of which God provided a covering for the nakedness of Adam and Eve. It is as if the rite of sacrifice, instituted as a prophecy of the future expiation of sin, might fitly supply from the skins of its victims a covering for that nakedness which sin alone had revealed and made shameful. The mention of this fact ensues immediately upon the record of the fall, before Adam is cast out of paradise. And again, by the mention of the sacrifice of Abel, and of its acceptance, it is shown that the rite already existed in the children of the first man. But now the sacrifice of Noah, and the covenant made in it, as being of so vast an import to every succeeding generation, is described at length as the starting-point of the whole renewed, that is, the actual race of man. In this sacrifice it is emphatically declared that “the Lord smelled a sweet savour,” since it stood at the beginning of man’s new life, coming after the waters of the deluge as the image and precursor of the Sacrifice on Calvary, which was to purify the earth, and which those waters typified.

As, then, we considered lately the position of man as to his knowledge of God and of himself in the “many days” which ensued after the fall before the death of Abel, so let us glance at his condition in these same respects at the starting-point of this new life of man. First of all, out of the wreck of the old world Noah had carried the two institutions, one of which makes the human family in its natural increase, while the other constitutes its spiritual life—marriage and sacrifice. In marriage we have the root of society; in sacrifice the root of religion. These had not perished, neither had they changed in character. They were the never-displaced foundation of the race, an heirloom of paradise never lost; marriage, as established in the primeval sanctity before man fell, sacrifice as superadded to man’s original worship of adoration, thanksgiving, and prayer immediately upon his fall, in token of his future recovery. God, in selecting Noah to repair the race, made him, in so far like to Adam, the head of the two orders, King and Priest, and from that double headship the actual government of the world through all the lines of his posterity descends.

Thirdly, we find in Noah’s family the divine authority of government expressly established; for in the protection thrown over human life the power to take it away in case of grievous crime is also given. Authority to take life away belongs of right to the giver of life alone. He here bestows the vicarious exercise of it upon that family which was likewise the first State, and the fountain-head of actual human society. “At the hand of every man, and of his brother, will I require the life of man: whosoever shall shed man’s blood, his blood shall be shed, for man was made to the image of God. But increase you, and multiply, and go upon the earth, and fill it.” We have then the charter here of human society;[8] the delegation to it of supreme power by the Head of all power, to be vicariously exercised henceforward over the whole race as it went out, conquered, and replenished the earth; the sacredness of man’s life declared, in virtue of that divine image according to which he alone of all creatures upon the earth was made, yet power over that life for the punishment of crime committed to man himself in the government established by God. An absolute dominion over all beasts was given at the same time to man; first for himself, in virtue of his distinction from the beast, in virtue of the divine image resting upon him, a delegation of divine power was set up in the midst of him, the supreme exercise of which is the power of life and death. Civil government therefore was no less created by God than marriage, and sacrifice, with the religious offices belonging to it. Like them it was ratified afresh in the race at this its second starting-point.

But, fourthly, it was as Father and Head of the race that the first act of Noah leaving the ark was to offer sacrifice; he offered it for himself and for all his children. With him, as offering in a public act the homage of his race, the great covenant of which we have been speaking was made. Besides the divine things bound together in the institution of sacrifice—the accord of four acts, adoration, thanksgiving, prayer, and expiation, which express man’s knowledge of his condition of God’s sovereignty, and of his own last end, as well as the dedication of his will to God—great temporal promises, such as the dominion over all other creatures, and the filling the earth with his race, promises which belong to man as one family and one race, were made to Noah in this solemn covenant ratified in sacrifice. The common hopes of the whole community for the present life and the future also were jointly represented in it. It is, in fact, the alliance of the civil government with religion, of which we see here the solemn ratification. Noah the Father, the King, and the Priest, sacrifices for all, where all have a common hope, a common belief, a common knowledge, a life not only as individual men, but as a family, as a race, as a society.

Thus in marriage, in sacrifice, in the vicarial exercise of divine power by civil government, and in the alliance of that government with the worship of God, we have the four central pillars on which the glorious dome of a sacred civilisation in the human family, when it should be conterminous with the whole earth, was intended to rest. These four things date from the beginning of the race; they precede heathenism, and they last through it. Greatly as man in the exercise of his free-will may rage against them, grievously as he may impair their harmony, and even distort by his sin the vast good which that harmony ensures and guards into partial evil, yet he will not avail to destroy the fabric of human society resting upon them before the Restorer comes.

Noah having lived 600 years before the flood, and having been the preacher of justice for 120 years to a world which would not listen to him, has his life prolonged for 350 years after the flood. During this time he is to be viewed as the great Teacher of his family, like Adam when he came out of Paradise. What the Fall was in the mouth of Adam the Deluge was in the mouth of Noah, a great example of punishment inflicted on man for the disregard of God as his end. It is hard to see how God could have more completely guarded those two beginnings of human society from the corruption of error and the taint of unfaithfulness than by the mode in which He caused them to arise, in that He formed them both through the teaching of a family by the mouth of a Parent, and the government of a race by the headship of its Author. For the larger society sprung actually out of brethren as the brethren themselves out of one parent. “They have,” to use Bossuet’s striking recapitulation, “one God, one object, one end, a common origin, the same blood, a common interest, a mutual need of each other, as well for the business of life as for its enjoyments.” And one common language, it may be added, serves as the outward expression, the witness, and the bond of a society so admirably compacted, based, as it would seem, on so immovable a foundation.

Let us sum up in three words the history so far as it has yet been recorded. The foundation of all is man coming forth by creation out of the hand of God. He comes forth as one family in Adam. Falling from his high estate by his Father’s sin, he receives a religion guarded and expressed by a specific rite of worship, which records his fall, and prophesies his restoration. After this the family springs from parents united in a holy bond, which, as it carries on the natural race, is likewise the image of a future exaltation. As he increases and multiplies the divine authority is vicariously exercised in the government of the race as a society. That government is strictly allied with his religion. It is most remarkable that the last end of man dominates the whole history; that is, all the temporal goods of man from the beginning depend on his fidelity to God. Disregard of this works the Fall; the same disregard works the Deluge. It remains to show how that compact and complete society instituted under Noah depended, as to the maintenance in unimpaired co-operation of the great goods we have just enumerated, upon the free-will of man to preserve his fidelity to God; that is, to show how in the constant order of human things there is an inherent subordination of the temporal to the spiritual good, as for the individual so for the race.

2.—The Divine and Human Society in the Dispersion.

The divine narrative of the beginning of human society ends with an event of which the consequences remain to the present day, and from which all the actual nations of the earth take their rise. The blessing and command given to Noah and his family were, “Increase and multiply and fill the earth.” It would seem that the family of man continued in that highly privileged and guarded state which has just been described during five generations, comprehending perhaps the life of Noah and Shem. Of all this time it is said, “The earth was of one tongue and the same speech.” The division of the earth among the families of a race by virtue of a natural growth, which was itself the effect of the divine blessing and command, did not carry with it as a condition of that growth the withdrawal of so great a privilege as the unity of language. God had formed the human family out of one; had built it up by marriage; cemented it by a religious rite of highest meaning; crowned it with His own delegated authority of government, and sanctified that government by its alliance with religion. Unity of language is as it were the expression of all these blessings. The possession of language by the first man, the outer vocalised word, corresponding to the inner spiritual word of reason, was a token of the complete intellectual nature inhabiting a corporeal frame—a fact expressed by the doctrine that the soul is the form of the body—which constituted his first endowment. And in a proportionate manner the possession of one language as the exponent of mind and heart by his race, was the most effective outward bond of inward unity which could tie the race together, whatever its numerical and local extension might be. It is to be noted that though the cause of the deluge was that “the earth was corrupted before God, and was filled with iniquity” (Gen. vii. 11), yet God had not withdrawn from man the unity of language, perhaps because the revolt of man had not hitherto reached to a corruption of his thought of the Divine Nature itself. But now ensued an act of human pride and rebellion which led God Himself to undo the bond of society, consisting in unity of language, in order to prevent a greater evil. The sin is darkly recorded, as if some peculiar abomination lay hid underneath the words; the punishment, on the contrary, is made conspicuous. “And the earth was of one tongue and the same speech. And when they removed from the east, they found a plain in the land of Sennaar and dwelt in it. And each one said to his neighbour, Come, let us make brick and bake them with fire. And they had brick instead of stones, and slime instead of mortar. And they said, Come and let us make a city and a tower, the top whereof may reach to heaven: and let us make our name famous before we be scattered abroad into all lands. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the children of Adam were building. And He said, Behold it is one people, and all have one tongue; and they have begun to do this, neither will they leave off from their designs till they accomplish them indeed. Come ye, therefore, let us go down and there confound their tongue, that they may not understand one another’s speech. And so the Lord scattered them from that place into all lands, and they ceased to build the city. And therefore the name thereof was called Babel, confusion, because there the language of the whole earth was confounded; and from thence the Lord scattered them abroad upon the face of all countries.”

It may be inferred that the city and the tower thus begun point at a society the bond of which was not to be the worship of the one true God. As a matter of fact, thenceforth and to all time the name of Babel has passed into the languages of men as signifying the City of Confusion, the seat of false worship, the headship of the line of men who are the seed of the serpent, and of that antagonism which the primal prophecy announced as the issue of the fall.

But the severity of the punishment and its nature seem further to indicate that we are here in presence of the beginning of the third great sin of the human race, in which, as in the former, the free-will of man, his inalienable prerogative and the instrument of his trial, runs athwart the purpose of God. The first was the sin of Adam’s disobedience resulting in the Fall; the second the universal iniquity of the race punished by the Deluge; the third is the corruption of the idea of God by setting up many gods instead of one, a desertion of God as the source of man’s inward unity, which is punished by the loss of unity of language in man, the voice of the inward unity, as it is also the chief stay and bond of his outward unity. The multiplication of the race and its propagation in all lands was part of the original divine intention. When the bond of living together in one place and under one government was withdrawn, there remained unity of worship and unity of language to continue and to support the unity of the race. Man was breaking his fealty to God not only by practical impiety, as in the time before the flood, but by denial of the Divine Nature itself as the One Infinite Creator and Father; God replied by withdrawing from rebellious vassals that unity of language which was the mark and bond of their living together as children of one Parent. With the record of this event Moses closes his history of the human race as one family, which he had up to this point maintained. He had hitherto strongly marked its unity in its creation, in its fall through Adam, in its first growth after the fall, and in the common punishment which descended upon it in the flood, and again in its second growth and expansion from Noah. Language is the instrument of man’s thought, and the possession of one common language the most striking token of his unity; and here, after recording the withdrawal of that token by a miraculous act of God in punishment of a great sin, Moses parts from all mention of the race as one. He proceeds at once to give the genealogy of Shem’s family as the ancestor of Abraham, and then passes to the call of Abraham as the foundation of the promised people. He never reverts to the nations as a whole, whom he has conducted to the point of their dispersion and there leaves.

Through this great sin the division of the earth by the human family started not in blessing, but in punishment. “The Lord scattered them abroad upon the face of all countries.” He who had made the unity of Noah’s family, Himself untied it, and we may conceive that He did so because of that greatest of all crimes, the division of the Divine Nature by man in his conception of it, his setting up many gods instead of one.

Let us see how this sin impaired, and more and more broke down, that privileged civilisation brought by Noah from before the flood, and set up by him in his family.

If God be conceived as more than one, He ceases by that very conception to be self-existing from eternity, immense, infinite, and incomprehensible, he ceases also to have power, wisdom, and goodness in an infinite plenitude; and, further, He ceases to be the one Creator, Ruler, and Rewarder of men.

Thus the conception of more gods than one carries with it an infinite degradation of the Godhead itself, as received in the mind and heart of man.

But it likewise unties the society of men with each other, and lays waste the main goods of human life. Thus it was in the case of Noah’s family. As it was planted by God after the deluge, it possessed a distinct knowledge and worship of Him, as the one end and object of human life. This knowledge and worship were contained, as we have seen, in the rite of sacrifice and its accompaniments. Proceeding from this, it possessed the love of God, obliging men to mutual love, a precept the more easy because it was given to those who, as members of one family, were brethren. From these it followed that no man was stranger to another man; that every one was charged with the care of his brother; and that a unity of interest itself bound men to each other.[9]

But all these goods are dependent on the first. For if men do not worship one and the same God, as the Creator, the Ruler, and the Rewarder of all, their life ceases at once to have one end and object; their love to each other is deprived of its root, for they suppose themselves to be the creatures of different makers, or not to be made at all, to spring out of the earth, or to come into the world no one knows how, whence, or wherefore. Again, the natural brotherhood of man depends on his origin from one family, which must be the creature of one maker. And if the root of this natural affection and brotherhood be withered, men become strange to each other, rivals in their competition for the visible goods of life; they cease to care for others, and cease to be united in one interest.

When the family which had formed a patriarchal state became by natural growth too large to live together, the natural process for it was that it should swarm, and each successive swarm become a patriarchal state. Here was in each the germ of a nation, as they occupied various countries. Naturally, they would have parted in friendship, and if the bond of belief and of language had continued unbroken, they would have become a family of nations; they would each have carried out and propagated the original society from which they sprang without alloy or deterioration.

What actually took place was this. The division of the race into separate stems, and the corruption of the conception of God into separate divinities, pursued a parallel course, until the deities became as national as the communities over which they presided. As there ceased to be in their thought one God of the whole earth, they ceased to believe in one race of man, nor does any good seem to have more utterly perished from the peoples who sprung out of this dispersion than the belief in the universal brotherhood of man; and the conduct which should spring out of that belief, the treatment of each other as brethren.

That their having lost the consciousness of such brotherhood is no proof that it never existed, has been established for us by the new science of comparative grammar in our own day in a very remarkable instance. The careful study of a single family of languages in the great race of Japhet has proved beyond question that those who came after their dispersion to speak the Sanscrit, the Persian, the Greek, the Latin, the Celtic, Slavic, and Teutonic tongues, all once dwelt as brethren beside a common hearth, in the possession of the same language. Yet, in ancient times, it never crossed the mind of the Greek that he was of the same family with the Persian, by whose multitudinous inroad he was threatened; to him the barbarian, that is the man who did not speak his tongue, was his enemy, not a brother. As little did the Saxon, when he displaced the Celt, and gave him, too, the name of barbarian,[10] as not understanding his tongue, conceive that he was of the same family. It was with no little wonder that the first French and English students of Sanscrit found in it uneffaced the proofs of its parentage with Greek and Latin.

The study of the comparative grammar of various languages, when carried out as fully in other directions, may have in reserve other surprises as great as this; but the proof of unity in this case, where yet the divergence has proceeded so far, of unity in a family from which the greatest nations of the earth have sprung, and whose descendants stretch over the world, tends to make the unity of the original language of man credible on principles of science, independently either of historical tradition or of revelation, while it shows into what complete and universal oblivion a real relationship may fall.

With the belief in one God, then, fell the belief in one human brotherhood as well as the existence of one human society. Each separated stem became detached from the trunk, and lived for itself. It is true that each state, as it began, was patriarchal; but identity of interests was restricted to the single state; beyond its range there was war, and within it, in process of time, war led to conquest, and after conquest the conquering leader became head of the conquered. Thus the patriarchal state, in which the head of the family was its priest, passed into kingdoms compacted by war and its results, in an ever-varying succession of victories and defeats.

But it is our special task to see what portion of the goods, which belonged to the race when undivided, passed on to its several stems in the dispersion with which Moses closes his account of the one human family.

The universal society stops at Babel, and national existence begins; that is, a number of inferior local unities succeed to the one universal. It would be well if we had a Moses for guide through the long period which follows, but he restricts his narrative to Abraham and his family, and to such incidental notice of the nations with whom they come in contact as their history requires. When we reach the beginnings of history in the several peoples who took their rise at the dispersion, a long time has intervened. The bond of one society in a race seems to consist in unity of place, of language, of religion, and of government. Now for man in general the unity of place was taken away by the dispersion itself. As to language, the lapse of a thousand years was more than sufficient to make the inhabitants of various countries strange to each other and barbarians. Men of different lands had long utterly ceased to acknowledge each other as brethren. As to religion, the worship of the one true God had passed into the worship of many false gods in almost every country each one of which had its own gods, generally both male and female, whom it considered as much belonging to itself as its kings or its cities. This diversity of deities in each nation, and the appropriation of them by each to itself, was become a most fertile principle of division and enmity among men. But if man had lost the unity of religion he had created for himself in every land an institution which might be said to be universal: the division of men into bond and free, the institution of slavery. That condition of life whereby man ceased to be a member of a family invested with reciprocal obligations and rights, came in fine to be regarded, not as a person, but as the thing of another man, that is the institution which man had made for himself in the interval between the dispersion of Babel and the commencement of authentic history in each nation. Man, who had divided the unity of the Godhead, had not only ceased to recognise the one ineffaceable dignity of reason as the mark of brotherhood in all his race demanding equality of treatment, and the respect due to a creature who possesses moral freedom, but had come to deprive a vast portion of his kindred of the fruit of their labour, and to confiscate their toil for his own advantage.

There remains the fourth bond of unity, government, whether national, tribal, or municipal, without which social existence is not possible; and this, as the nations emerge into the light of history, appears everywhere among them standing and in great vigour. In the vast majority of cases that government clothes itself in the form of royalty; the king is undoubtedly the most natural descendant of the patriarchal chief, the father passing by insensible gradation into the sovereign. But whether monarchy or republic, whether the rule of the many or of the few, government, by which I mean the supreme dominion in each portion of the race over itself, of life and death over subjects, is everywhere found. Nowhere is man found as a flock of sheep without a shepherd.

Over these unrecorded years of human life, which want their prophet and their bard, sounds yet the echo of perpetual strife. If mighty forms loom among their obscurity, and come out at length with fixed character and a strong and high civilisation, such as the Assyrian and Egyptian, the Indian and Chinese monarchies, and so many others of more or less extent and renown, we know that states have suffered change after change in a series of wars. The patriarchal ruler has given way to the conquering chief; conquest has humiliated some and exalted others. What remains intact in each country, and after all changes, is government itself. This carried on the human race.

But if we examine more closely this race which is thus scattered through all countries, which speaks innumerable tongues, has lost the sense of its own brotherhood, worships a multitude of local gods, is divided, cut up, formed again, and torn again with innumerable wars, and has degraded a large part of itself into servitude, so as to lose as it would seem all semblance of its original unity, we yet find running through it, existing from the beginning as constituent principles which the hand of the Creator has set in it, four great goods.

1. For what hand but that of the Creator could have impressed ineffaceably upon a race, misusing as we have seen to such a degree the faculty of free-will, such an institution as marriage, in which the family, and all which descends from the family, is contained? The dedication of one man and one woman to each other for the term of their lives, for the nurture and education of the family which is to spring from them, is indeed the basis of human society, but a basis which none but its Maker could lay. It exists in perpetual contradiction to human passion and selfishness, for purposes which wisdom or the pure reason of man entirely approves, but which human frailty is at any time ready to break through and elude. If we could so entirely abstract ourselves from habit as to imagine a company of men and women thrown together, without connection with each other, without any knowledge, any conception beforehand of such an institution, and left to form their society for themselves, we should not, I think, imagine them one and all choosing to engage themselves in such a union, resigning, respectively, their liberty, and binding themselves to continue, whatever might happen to either party, however strength and vigour might decline on one side, or grace and attractiveness on the other, in this bondage for life. Yet this institution of marriage is found established, not, as was just imagined, in a single company of human beings thrown together, but in a thousand societies of men separated by place, by language, by religion, and by government. The most highly policied among them are the strictest in maintaining its purity; and the higher you are enabled by existing records to ascend in their history, the stronger and clearer appears the conception of the duties of the married state. It is surrounded with all the veneration which laws can give it, and the blessing of religion consecrates it. Take marriage among the Romans as an instance. Their commonwealth seems to be built upon the sanctity of marriage and the power of the father. The like is the case with China, the most ancient of existing politics. There is not one nation which has gained renown or advanced in civilisation but shows, as far back as you can trace its history, this institution honoured and supported. I leave to mathematicians the task of calculating what are the chances of such an institution springing up in so great a multitude of nations according to an identical rule, guarded in all of them with whatever protection religion and law could afford, except by the fiat of a Creator in the manner described by Moses. The signet of God impressed on Adam at his origin could alone create such a mark on his race; the Maker alone lay such a foundation for it.

We find this institution in the course of time and in various countries debased by polygamy, and corrupted by concubinage. These aberrations testify to the force of human passion, and the wantonness of power and wealth ever warring against it, but they only enhance thereby the force of the institution’s universal existence from the point of view from which I have regarded it.

2. Take, secondly, the rite of bloody sacrifice. It would be hard to find anything more contrary to reason and feeling than the thought that taking away the life of innocent creatures by pouring out their blood could be not only acceptable to the Maker of those creatures, but could be accepted by Him in expiation of sin committed by man. Yet this is the conception of bloody sacrifice; this was expressed in the rites which accompanied it; and besides this particular notion of expiation, which is the correlative of sin, the most solemn duties of man, that is, Adoration, Thanksgiving, and Petition, the whole expression of his obedience to God, and dependence on God, were bound up with this rite, and formed part of it. And we find this rite of sacrifice existing from the earliest times in these various nations; continued through the whole of their history, solemnised at first by their kings and chief men, and then by an order of men created for that special purpose, and in every nation themselves holding a high rank in virtue of their performing this function. What, again, are the chances of a rite so peculiar being chosen spontaneously by so many various nations, and chosen precisely to express their homage for their own creation and continuance in being, to make their prayers acceptable, and above all, to cover their sin, to serve as an expiation, and to turn away punishment. This is the testimony which Assyria and Egypt, which Greece and Rome, which India and China bear to their original unity. If God instituted this rite, at the fall itself, as a record and token of the promise then made, its existence through the many changes of the race becomes intelligible; on any other supposition it remains a contradiction both to reason and feeling, which is like nothing else in human history.

The institution of sacrifice comprehends with its accompaniments the whole of religion. It suffered the most grievous corruption in that it was offered to false gods, to deified men, to powers of nature, to those who were not gods but demons. Again, its meaning was obscured, and the priests who offered it were not pure in their lives. But whatever abominations were at any time or in any place connected with it, its peculiarity, its testimony to the unity of the race, to the power which established it, remain without diminution.

3. Thirdly, let us take the great good of civil government. The human race is scattered over all countries, in divisions which range as to amount of population from the smallest independent tribe to the largest empire. God suffered them to pursue their own course, to engage in numberless wars, and to pass through a succession of the most opposite circumstances, but He implanted in them from the beginning, and preserved in them throughout, the instinct of society, which develops in government. And He established that government in possession by the patriarchal constitution of life, which each portion of the race at its first start in independence took with it. By this He maintained order and peace, as a rule, in the bosom of each community; the smallest and the greatest alike possessed the commonwealth in the midst of them, which was thus, independent of walls and forts, a citadel of safety. Not even the most savage tribe in the most desolate northern wilderness, barren shore, or inland lake, was left in its self-wrought degradation without this support. In cultured nations, such as the Egyptians, Assyrians, Persians, Indians, Chinese, the State attained a high degree of perfection; while from the practice of the Hellenic cities Plato and Aristotle could draw principles of government which are of value for all time; and Rome, the queen-mother of cities, has been the teacher of state-wisdom to mankind. But what I wish to note here is that civil government was everywhere throughout the dispersion of the nations a dam, constructed by Divine Providence, sufficiently strong to resist the inundation of evils brought about by man’s abuse of his moral freedom. It was the moon in heaven which shone as a stable ordinance of God amid the storms and darkness of human life in the fall of heathendom. It belonged to man as man and never departed from him; because as conscience was given to the individual, the witness and mark of God, sovereignty was given to the community, a delegation of the divine kingship. “It is entirely by the providence of God that the kingdoms of men are set up,” says a great father.[11] “He gave to every one of them, said the Son of Sirach, commandment concerning his neighbour. Their ways are always before him, they are not hidden from his eyes. Over every nation he set a ruler, and Israel was made the manifest portion of God” (Ecclus. xvii. 12-15).

The human race, from its beginning and through all its dispersion, was never in any of its parts without civil government. The headship of Adam, repeated in Noah, itself a vicarious exercise of divine authority, rested, amid its dispersion and partial degradation, upon each portion of the race, so that it might never be kingless and lawless: never a herd, always a society.

This great good had also its corruption, into which it very frequently fell; the corruption of tyranny. Against this the Book of Wisdom (vi. 2-5) warned: “Hear therefore ye kings and understand: learn ye that are judges of the ends of the earth. Give ear, you that rule the people, and that please yourselves in multitudes of nations. For power is given you by the Lord, and strength by the most High, who will examine your works, and search out your thoughts: because being ministers of his kingdom, you have not judged rightly, nor kept the law of justice, nor walked according to the will of God.” But this corruption of tyranny no more destroys the good of government or its testimony as the mark of the Creator, than the corruption of marriage by concubinage, or the offering of sacrifice to false gods, impairs the testimony of those institutions.

4. The fourth good which I shall note as running through all the nations of the dispersion, is the alliance between government and religion. Distance of place, diversity of language, division of the idea of God into separate divinities, which become the guardians of their several peoples, these causes all co-operate to sever from each other the various peoples and to make them enemies. But observe, at the same time, with this hardening and estrangement of the peoples from each other, the enlacement of all human life, public and private, by the rites and ties of religion in each society. At the head of the new race we have seen Noah offering sacrifice for his family, and a covenant with the whole earth struck in that sacrifice between God and man. That aspect of the public society towards religion was not altered during the whole course of heathendom, and in all its parts. It is a relation of the strictest alliance. No nation, no tribe of man, up to the coming of Christ, conceived any condition of society in which the Two Powers should not co-operate with each other. “If it be asked,” says Bossuet,[12] “what should be said of a State in which public authority should be established without any religion, it is plain at once that there is no need to answer chimerical questions. There never were such States. Peoples, where there is no religion, are at the same time without policy, without real subordination, and entirely savage.” It is a fact which we see stretching through all the times and all the nations of the dispersion, that however tyrannical the government, and however corrupt the belief, still the separation of government from religion was never for a moment contemplated. A Greek or a Roman, and no less an Egyptian or an Assyrian, an Indian or a Chinese, must have renounced every habit of his life, every principle in which he had been nurtured, to accept such a divorce. For all of them alike, “ancestral laws” and “ancestral gods,” went together. He who was traitor to the city’s worship was considered to overthrow its foundation. In this point of view heathendom in all its parts continued to be profoundly religious. It risked the life of a favourite of the people when the statues of a god at Athens were mutilated, as it was supposed, with the connivance of Alcibiades; and Marcus Aurelius, stoic philosopher as he was, offered countless sacrifices for the Roman people, as Noah offered sacrifice for his family; and the Chinese Son of Heaven is to this day the father of his family who unites religious and civil power in his sacred person, and calls upon his people for the obedience of children.

The corruption of this relation between civil government and religion, which was an original good of the race, was the forcible maintenance of the polytheistic idolatry with all the moral abominations which it had introduced. But the corruption does not belong to the relation itself; it issues, as in the preceding cases, from the abuse of his free-will by man.

Here then are four goods, marriage, religion, as summed up in sacrifice, civil government, and alliance between civil government and religion, which we find embedded in the whole human society from the beginning, going with it through all its fractions, untouched by its wars, dissensions, and varieties of belief, suffering indeed each one of them by man’s corruption, but lasting on. The force of any one of them as testimony to the unity of God who alone could have established it in the race, and so through Him to the unity of the race in which it is found established, and so, further, to the whole account of Moses, would be very great and not easily resisted by a candid mind seeking nothing but the truth. But how great is the cumulative evidence of the four together to the exactness of the account of the race’s origin, establishment, and education, which we receive through Moses.

How strangely also are these goods of the race contrasted each one of them and all together with a great evil, universal like them, but man’s own invention, the result of his wars and of the destruction of the feeling of brotherhood, in the various portions into which the race divided. The hideous plague-spot of slavery, which yet is one institution running through the race, attests also its unity, attests by its contrast with the four goods, by its practical denial of their beneficent action so far as the slave is concerned, the degradation of the race from that condition of a family having one end in the worship of one God, one brotherhood, a common care and charge of its members, a common interest in which it started.

The sum then of the whole period which begins from the dispersion of mankind at Babel and runs on to the coming of Christ is the progressive moral degradation of a race founded in the unity of a family. That unity itself rested upon the fidelity of the race to the belief and worship of the God who created it. The race voluntarily parted from this belief and worship; its own division followed; mutual enmity supplanted brotherhood, and the end is to create two classes of men, dividing society in each nation into the bond and the free. The nations themselves have lost all remembrance that they were once actually brothers by one hearth. Yet they still contain in themselves indisputable proof of that original unity. There is not only the common nature which language, the token of reason, raises to a dignity utterly incommensurable with the condition of any other animal; but great divine institutions planted at the beginning endure amid the corruption which has dimmed their original beauty, and testify to the providence which has preserved them amid the surging flood of heathenism for future restoration of the race.

3.—Further Testimony of Law, Government, and Priesthood in the Dispersion.

The account of the human race in its origin and its dispersion thus presented allows for the existence of tribes in every part of the world, who, through their isolation, the effect of nomad life, war, and severities of climate, but most of all by that tendency to degrade itself—to fall from known truth to error—which is the characteristic of the race, and through the impairing of social life which thus ensues, have left records of their uncultivated or even savage condition, which an eager search is continually discovering. These records have been taken as aids to a theory which, rejecting the scriptural and traditional account of man’s origin, would wish him to start from men of different races, or from universal savagery, or even from the ape as an ancestor. But, while on the one hand the existence of such tribes is no difficulty in the scriptural record of the dispersion, where they may be fully accounted for by the causes above-mentioned, the universal existence of the four great goods in the most ancient nations, where they appear also purest at the most remote time, is quite incompatible with either of the three invented origins of the human race. Neither different races of men, originally distinct and separated, nor universal savagery, and far less fathership of the ape, will develop into simultaneous existence four uniform institutions found through the widest range of divided nations, such as marriage, a religion based on sacrifice, civil government, and the alliance between government and religion. An original language accounts for the proofs of unity embedded in the primary structure of the Aryan tongues, and science professes its full belief in such unity. It is but a parallel to this to say that a creative hand impressing itself on the plastic origin of the race accounts for the existence of these goods in the most-widely severed branches of it. But that scattered savages should emerge from savagery into cultivation of the same ideal, or different races in their dispersion pitch upon the same very marked peculiarities of social life, or the ape teach his offspring the highest requirements of human society, such imaginations are contrary to the collective testimony of reason, experience, and history. Perhaps one must go altogether beyond the bounds of true science to account for their arising, and attribute them to that passionate dislike of a creating God, which is the recoil from the condition of a creature subject to responsibility for his actions.

On the contrary, pure historical inquiry, going back in the dry light of science to the archaic society of nations as they first appear to us at the beginning of written records, shows this remarkable chain of facts. A condition of things is found existing, of which the only explanation is that family was the nidus out of which sprung forth the House, then the Tribe, then the Commonwealth with its patriarchal government. When property is traced to its origin it seems to be first found in the family as joint-ownership; and further, its succession is blended inexplicably with the existence and state of the family. Again, the close union of government with religion finds its root in the family. No testimony can be more unsuspicious than that of the learned author of “Ancient Law,” who observes (p. 4), that “the earliest notions connected with the conception of a law or rule of life are those contained in the Homeric words θεμις and Themistes.” “The divine agent, suggesting judicial awards to kings or to gods, the greatest of kings, was Themis.” She is the assessor of Zeus, the human king on earth, not a law-maker, but a judge. The Themistes are the judgments, in fact, of a patriarchal sovereign, “whose judgment, when he decided a dispute by a sentence, was assumed to be the result of direct inspiration.” And Themis and Themistes were (p. 6) “linked with that persuasion which clung so long and so tenaciously to the human mind of a divine influence underlying and supporting every relation of life, every social institution. In early law, and amid the rudiments of political thought, symptoms of this belief met us on all sides. A supernatural presidency is supposed to consecrate and keep together all the cardinal institutions of those times, the State, the Race, and the Family. Men, grouped together in the different relations which these institutions imply, are bound to celebrate periodically common rites and to offer common sacrifices; and every now and then the same duty is even more significantly recognised in the purifications and expiations which they perform, and which appear intended to deprecate punishment for involuntary or neglectful disrespect. Everybody acquainted with ordinary classical literature will remember the Sacra Gentilicia which exercised so important an influence on the early Roman law of adoption and of wills. And to this hour the Hindoo Customary Law, in which some of the most curious features of primitive society are stereotyped, makes almost all the rights of persons and all the rules of succession hinge on the due solemnisation of fixed ceremonies at the dead man’s funeral, that is, at every point where a breach occurs in the continuity of the family.”

Thus every king, as history begins, appears in a position which recalls the memory of Adam or of Noah, as the divinely appointed judge, whose office springs out of his fathership. The original consecration, which rested on the government of the race when it begun, is seen not yet to have parted from its scattered members in their tribal or national insulation.[13]

It is observed of Homeric Greece that “the people in its orderly arrangement of family or clans, or tribal relationships coming down from the patriarchal form of life, derives its unity from its king, whose power as little springs from the people as that of the father from his children.” Thus he possesses this power not in virtue of compact or choice, but simply from Zeus.

Οὐ μέν πως πάντες βασιλεύσομεν ἐνθάδ’ Ἀχαιοί.
οὐκ ἀγαθὸν πολυκοιρανίν· εἷς κοίρανος ἔστω,
εἷς βασιλεὺς, ᾧ δῶκε Κρόνου παῖς ἀγκυλομήτεω
σκῆπτροντ’ ἠδὲ θέμιστας, ἵνα σφίσιν ἐμβασιλέυῃ.

—Iliad, 2. 203.

This conception shows itself not merely on occasion in the poet, as perhaps in the well-known epithets, Jove-born, Jove-nurtured, friend of Jove, or in the genealogies which connect with the gods the princely races by ties of blood, but he has a distinct theory on the subject variously expressed.

ἐπεὶ οὔποθ’ ὁμοίης ἔμμορε πμῆς
σκηπτοῦχος βασιλὲυς, ᾧ τε Ζεὺς κῦδος ἔδωκε.

Agamemnon’s sceptre, the symbol of his rule over the Peloponnesus, is referred to the immediate gift of Jupiter.

The effect of this evidence, says the author just before cited, derived from comparative jurisprudence, is to establish that view of the primeval condition of the human race which is known as the “Patriarchal Theory.” This is, “that the eldest male parent—the eldest ascendant—is absolutely supreme in his household. His dominion extends to life and death, and is as unqualified over his children and their houses as over his slaves; indeed, the relations of sonship and serfdom appear to differ in little beyond the higher capacity which the child in blood possesses of becoming one day the head of a family himself. The flocks and herds of the children are the flocks and herds of the father; and the possessions of the parent, which he holds in a representative rather than a proprietary character, are equally divided at his death among his descendants in the first degree, the eldest son sometimes receiving a double share under the name of birthright, but more generally endowed with no hereditary advantage beyond an honorary precedence.” “The sum of the hints given us by legal antiquities” is that “men are first seen distributed in perfectly insulated groups, held together by obedience to the parent. Law is the parent’s word. When we go forward to the state of society in which those early legal conceptions show themselves as formed, we find that they still partake of the mystery and spontaneity which must have seemed to characterise a despotic father’s commands, but that at the same time, as they proceed from a sovereign, they presuppose a union of family groups in some wider organisation. The next question is, what is the nature of this union and the degree of intimacy which it involves? It is just here that archaic law renders us one of the greatest of its services, and fills up a gap which otherwise could only have been bridged by conjecture. It is full in all its provinces of the clearest indications that society, in primitive times, was not what it is assumed to be at present, a collection of individuals. In fact, and in the view of the men who composed it, it was an aggregation of families. The contrast may be most forcibly expressed by saying that the unit of an ancient society was the Family, of a modern society, the Individual.”

“In most of the Greek states, and in Rome, there long remained the vestiges of an ascending series of groups, out of which the State was at first constituted. The Family, House, and Tribe of the Romans may be taken as the type of them; and they are so described to us that we can scarcely help conceiving them as a system of concentric circles which have gradually expanded from the same point. The elementary group is the family, connected by common subjection to the highest male ascendant. The aggregation of Families forms the Gens or House. The aggregation of Houses makes the Tribe. The aggregation of Tribes constitutes the Commonwealth. Are we at liberty to follow these indications, and to lay down that the commonwealth is a collection of persons united by common descent from the progenitor of an original family? Of this we may at least be certain, that all ancient societies regarded themselves as having proceeded from one original stock, and even laboured under an incapacity for comprehending any reason except this for their holding together in political union. The history of political ideas begins, in fact, with the assumption that kinship in blood is the sole possible ground of community in political functions; nor is there any of those subversions of feelings, which we term emphatically revolutions, so startling and so complete as the change which is accomplished when some other principle—such as that, for instance, of local contiguity—establishes itself for the first time as the basis of common political action. It may be affirmed, then, of early commonwealths that their citizens considered all the groups in which they claimed membership to be founded on common lineage.”

“The conclusion, then, which is suggested by the evidence is, not that all early societies were formed by descent from the same ancestor, but that all of them, which had any permanence or solidity, either were so descended, or assumed that they were. An indefinite number of causes may have shattered the primitive groups; but wherever their ingredients recombined, it was on the model or principle of an association of kindred. Whatever was the fact, all thought, language, and law adjusted themselves to the assumption” (p. 131).

“On a few systems of law the family organisation of the earliest society has left a plain and broad mark in the life-long authority of the Father, or other ancestor, over the person and property of his descendants, an authority which we may conveniently call by its later Roman name of Patria Potestas. No feature of the rudimentary associations of mankind is deposed to by a greater amount of evidence than this, and yet none seems to have disappeared so generally and so rapidly from the usages of advancing communities” (p. 135).

“It may be shown, I think, that the Family, as held together by the Patria Potestas, is the nidus out of which the entire Law of Persons has germinated” (p. 152).

“When we speak of the slave as anciently included in the Family, we intend to assert nothing as to the motives of those who brought him into it or kept him there; we merely imply that the tie which bound him to his master was regarded as one of the same general character with that which united every other member of the group to its chieftain. This consequence is, in fact, carried in the general assertion already made, that the primitive ideas of mankind were unequal to comprehending any basis of the connection inter se of individuals apart from the relations of Family” (p. 164).

“The point which before all others has to be apprehended in the constitution of primitive societies, is that the individual creates for himself few or no rights and few or no duties. The rules which he obeys are derived first from the station into which he is born, and next from the imperative commands addressed to him by the chief of the household of which he forms part” (p. 311).

Then as to the union of government with religion:—“A stage occurs in the history of all the families of mankind, the stage at which a rule of law is not yet discriminated from a rule of religion. The members of such a society consider that the transgression of a religious ordinance should be punished by civil penalties, and that the violation of a civil duty exposes the delinquent to divine correction” (p. 23). At the time of the Code of the Twelve Tables, “Roman society had barely emerged from that intellectual condition in which civil obligation and religious duty are inevitably confounded” (p. 18).

For, in fact, originally, “Law is the parent’s word” (p. 125), and “the civil Laws of States first make their appearance as the Themistes of a patriarchal sovereign” (p. 166); that is, “as separate, isolated judgments, which, consistently with the belief in their emanation from above, cannot be supposed to be connected by any thread of principle” (p. 5). Moreover, as to the origin of Property:—“It is more than likely that joint-ownership, and not separate ownership, is the really archaic institution, and that the forms of property which will afford us instruction will be those which are associated with the rights of families and the groups of kindred” (p. 259), as shown in the Indian village-community, the Russian and Slavonic village. And “we have the strongest reasons for thinking that property once belonged not to individuals, nor even to isolated families, but to larger societies composed on the patriarchal model” (p. 268). Thus the author conjectures “that private property, in the shape in which we know it, was chiefly formed by the gradual disentanglement of the separate rights of individuals from the blended rights of a community” (p. 269).

He remarks “a peculiarity invariably distinguishing the infancy of society. Men are regarded and treated not as individuals, but always as members of a particular group. Everybody is first a citizen, and then, as a citizen, he is a member of his order—of an aristocracy or a democracy, of an order of patricians or plebeians; or in those societies which an unhappy fate has afflicted with a special perversion in their course of development, of a caste; next he is member of a gens, house, or clan; and lastly he is member of his family. This last was the narrowest and most personal relation in which he stood; nor, paradoxical as it may seem, was he ever regarded as himself, as a distinct individual. His individuality was swallowed up in his family. I repeat the definition of a primitive society given before. It has for its units not individuals, but groups of men united by the reality or the fiction of blood-relationship” (p. 183). “The history of jurisprudence must be followed in its whole course, if we are to understand how gradually and tardily society dissolved itself into the component atoms of which it is now constituted; by what insensible gradations the relation of man to man substituted itself for the relation of the individual to his family, and of families to each other” (p. 185).

Such is the strong—may we not say irrefragable?—testimony which the condition of human society, as it emerges into the light of history, bears to the family as the cradle of man’s life. It is in the original soil of the family that the four goods we have noted, marriage, religion, government, and the alliance between religion and government, spring up together. Further, also, they are seen to be not separate, one here and another there, but bound together in the strictest coherence. For if this human race be thrown up and down throughout the world, divided and insulated in its several parts by vast distances and by thousands of years, even the scattered limbs are shaped in the mould stamped upon it at its birth, and in them government, law, property in its origin and its succession, and religion bear witness to the family character. This archaic society, from the Pacific to the Atlantic Oceans, from Scythia in the north to India in the south, is never a crowd of individuals but an organic structure: Adam and Eve prolonged and living in their race. We see that in the beginning the fathership of God created a human plant which should reveal Himself in its development, bearing in its structure and fruit an undying witness to His nature; and serving, in spite of corruption and decline, for the future exhibition of His fathership in a yet higher degree, even to the communication of the divine nature.

Whatever may be the interval of time which runs out between the dispersion of the family at Babel, and the appearance of each separate member on the platform of history—and the longer this time, the greater the marvel we note—the family remains in each as a sort of universal θεσμός upon which the commonwealth, the government, property viewed in itself and in its descent, law, and religion itself rest. The “natural state” and the “social compact” when inquired into become unsubstantial fictions; “theories plausible and comprehensive,” as the author of ancient law observes, “but absolutely unverified” (p. 3). Man is seen to be the child of Adam; and all the relations of men to each other to have been originally determined by that origin, and persistently maintained in its mould.

Now let us return to the relation between the Spiritual and the Civil Power, which forms part of this original constitution of the race.

At the head of the human race we have seen, first in Adam and then in Noah, the junction of the two orders, sovereignty and priesthood. There never was a time when the race was without government; there never was a time when the race was without sacrifice. The delegated authority of God rested ever upon the former for the prosperity of man’s life upon earth; the worship of the one God, man’s Creator and End, was summed up in the latter. All human life consists of the tissue formed by the two; and as in his first abode man’s condition was subject to his obedience to the divine command, so throughout his course his worship of God ruled his temporal condition. The lot of the antediluvian world bore witness to that truth. With Noah the experience began afresh. Then once again the covenant with Noah and his seed after him was made in sacrifice, in which the unity of God and the religion of man stand recorded, and man’s earthly lot is made dependent on the purity of his worship. Thus the two orders are seen in their origin to be both of divine institution; just as the life of man upon earth was from the beginning subordinate to his ultimate end, so government, which was created for the former, was subordinate to worship, which was created for the latter.

Let us follow rapidly the relation between man’s social state and his religion, arising out of such origin, that we may note how the degradation of worship entailed the degradation of society.

In Noah and his sons, so long as the earth continued of one tongue and speech, the priesthood belonged to the head of the family. That was its natural descent. We may suppose that the dispersion began with the same rule, but we are not able to say how long that rule continued in force. There was intended to be one priesthood offering one sacrifice over all the earth to the one God. How prodigious became the degradation when the divine unity was lost! A variety of gods was introduced; a similar variety of priesthoods followed: and the sacrifice, which was the rendering of supreme homage to the one Creator and Lord of life, in which was contained the everliving prophecy of man’s future restoration, was prostituted to a number of deities, the offspring of man’s sensual imagination, or of perverted tradition, or of worship of natural powers, or of demoniacal trickery.

As soon as the patriarchal State was changed by war into the State founded by conquest, the natural appurtenance of the priesthood to the head of the family must at least have been modified. It was probably often attached to the actual head of the State. But it does not need to trace step by step the debasement of worship and the multiplication of deities which took place in the Gentile world. It is enough to see how the whole mass of nations had by the time of Christ become divided from each other in their civil societies and their religious belief. But we may note that as with the loss of belief in one God the nations originally lost the belief in their own brotherhood, so their national gods became the stronghold of national prejudices and hatreds. Thus a debased religion was turned into a source of cruelty to man, who had no bitterer enemy to his life and welfare than a foreign god; and instead of human life being sacred to man, it was sometimes even an act of worship to immolate him to an idol.

It is not too much to say that the profound enmity of the Gentile nations to each other was grounded in the variety of their gods; and in this instance religion, which in its purity is the bond of human society, had become a main cause of alienation between the members of the race.

The alliance of the State in each nation with its religion was, as we have seen, an original good of the race; and it continued through all the debasement of worship. Had that worship maintained its original purity, the alliance would have been an unmixed good. But as the belief became corrupt, it ended in the public force being ever at the command of error. The final issue of this alliance seems to have been when the State had laid hold of religion to deify, as it were, itself. The Roman emperors were the most complete, but by no means the sole, bearers of this corruption. They were considered to embody in their single persons the united majesty of the gods. Whoever refused obedience to their worship was guilty of the double crime of sacrilege and treason.

If this be a correct summary of the relation between the Two Powers as it issued in the final condition of Gentilism, it is clear that the State had far less declined from the high purpose for which it was instituted, that is, the preservation of human society, than the priesthood from the corresponding purpose which belonged to it, that is, the worship of God and the sanctification of human life. The civil power was still in every respect a lawful power. And obedience was due to it for conscience’ sake, as expressly declared by our Lord and His Apostles. But the priesthood had been so utterly debased by its worship of false gods, which tore from it the crown of unity, and by the abominations which its rites in too many instances carried with them, that it had ceased to be a lawful power. It had moreover fallen, at least in the Roman empire, and from the time of the Cæsars, under the dominion of the State.

Yet down to the very coming of our Lord the veneration which had belonged to the original character and institution of the priesthood is made manifest by the clear acknowledgment that the authority of the priest was not derived from the king. The Gentiles in the lowest depths of their moral degradation referred the excellency of the priesthood to its divine origin. The honour due to God, and the thought of the future world, were so imbedded in the original constitution of human society everywhere, that even in a pantheon of false gods, and in a service paid to numberless male and female deities, the priest’s office itself was held to be divine.[14]

In the case of the Romans, it is true that when the free state was suppressed by the empire, the priesthood and the imperial power were improperly conjoined in the same person. But this conjunction was at once a novelty and an usurpation. Thus the office of Pontifex Maximus, first seized by Lepidus after the death of Julius Cæsar, and after Lepidus assumed by Augustus, and then kept in succession by the following Cæsars, whether through the adulation of the people or their own pride, seemed to pass as a proper title of their principate, and was numbered among the honours, even of the Christian emperors, down to Gratian, who refused and prohibited it. Nevertheless the functions of these two powers were reckoned as distinct; but in the time of the Kings and the free Commonwealth this distinction was much more marked.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus thus describes the Roman Pontifical College:—“They have authority over the most weighty affairs; they are judges of all sacred causes, whether among private persons, or magistrates, or ministers of the gods; they legislate for all sacred things which are not written or prescribed by custom, enacting laws and customs as seems to them good; they examine into all magistracies to which sacrifice and worship of the gods belong, and scrutinise all priests; they keep watch over the ministers which these use in their sacred office, so that the sacred laws be not transgressed; they instruct and interpret for lay persons who do not understand what concerns the worship of gods or genii. If they observe any disobedient to their commands, they punish them according to the due of each. They are themselves exempt from all trial and punishment. They render account neither to senate nor to people. It would be no error to call them priests, or sacred legislators, or custodians, or, as we should prefer, rulers of sacred things. On the death of any one another is elected to his place, not by the people, but by themselves, whoever of the citizens they judge the most meet.”[15] From this account of the historian, says Bianchi, we may deduce the following conclusions:—Firstly, how great was the power of the Roman Sacerdotes in judging matters of religion, in which the magistrates were subject to them. Secondly, their authority to punish those who transgressed their laws, independently of kings and magistrates. Thirdly, their immunity from the civil power, even of the Commonwealth itself, to which they were not bound to render an account of what they did. Fourthly, the distinction which existed between the power of the priests and that of the civil magistrates, which results not merely from the points recited, but also from the reflection that the Pontiffs were perpetual, while the magistrates under the free Commonwealth were temporary. The latter were created by the suffrages of the people; in the former vacancies were filled by the College of Pontiffs itself. This custom lasted from Numa’s time to the year of Rome 601, when Cneius Domitius, tribune of the people, transferred the right of filling vacancies from the College to the people; this was abolished by Sylla in his dictatorship; but again restored by the Tribune Titus Labienus during Cicero’s consulship. But finally the right of electing its members was given back to the College of Pontiffs by Augustus.

The Pontifex Maximus, though created by the suffrage of the people, was always taken from the College of Pontiffs, and his office was perpetual. Augustus would not take it from Lepidus during his life, though he took it after his death. Thus the power of the Supreme Pontiff was by no means confused with that of the magistrate or the prince; and the assumption of this priesthood by the Cæsars makes it evident that they recognised it not to be part of the prince’s power to intrude into matters of religion; and that they needed a sacerdotal power in order to superintend sacred things. It was for the sake of this superintendence, Dio observes, that the emperor always assumed the office of Pontifex Maximus, in virtue of which he became master of all religious and sacred things.

The example of Cicero pleading before the College of Pontifices for the restoration of his house, which had been dedicated by Clodius to Concord, a plea involving their power to revoke a tribunicial law passed by Clodius, is a remarkable testimony to the pontifical authority: “If ever,” he said, “a great cause rested on the judgment and power of the Priests of the Roman people, it is this; in which all the dignity of the commonwealth, the safety, the life, the liberty, the public and private worship, the household gods, the goods, the fortunes, and the homes of all seem intrusted to your wisdom and integrity.”[16]

The fair conclusions from these facts, says Bianchi again, are that the Romans knew religion to be directed to a higher end than temporal felicity, though they did esteem it also necessary for the preservation of the State; that the power of the priesthood was distinct from the civil power of the magistrate; that it had the right to judge in all cases of religion without interference from the magistrate; that immunity and exemption from the civil power belonged to it.

It is needless to go through the various nations of antiquity in order to show the veneration which everywhere belonged to the office of the priest. That is shown likewise in the frequent connection of the royal power with the priesthood; but though thus connected, they were not confused; kings were priests, not in virtue of their kingship, but by a distinct appointment. Plato asserts that in some nations the priesthood was reputed so excellent that it was not considered to be properly placed save in the person of the king; and that among the Egyptians it was not lawful for any king to command the people without being first consecrated to the priesthood. By this fact is seen how the sacerdotal dignity was esteemed by antiquity, even in the darkness of idolatry; and, at the same time, how the power of the priest was considered to be distinct from the power of the sovereign. Plato gives his own judgment when he says that the creation of priests should be left to the care of God; and that they should be elected by lot, in order that the person destined to so high an office may be divinely chosen.[17]

All that it is requisite here to point out seems to be that, however great was the degradation of worship produced by the character of the gods worshipped, as well as by the divisions of the godhead which the multiplying of divine beings brought with itself, yet two things survived in the minds of men: one the intrinsic excellence of worship in itself, as the homage paid by man to a power above himself; and the other, the sense that this worship was a thing of divine institution, coming down from heaven upon earth, quite distinct in character from civil rule, and if exercised by kings, exercised not because they were kings, but in virtue of a separate consecration. Thus, if the patriarchal origin of property, law, and government is borne witness to by the most ancient institutions, customs, and feelings of men, which witness likewise extends to the unity of the race, so likewise the original independence of the priestly order as to all its sacred functions and the sense of its divine origin, which runs through so many nations, bear joint witness to the unity of the race and to the truth of the Mosaic record. They convey a manifest contradiction to the theory that man sprung originally from a number of different races, and likewise to the theory that he grew up originally in a state of savagery.

The force of the testimony consists in this: first, a priesthood appears everywhere; secondly, it is connected with the rite of sacrifice; thirdly, it usually comprises an order of men devoted to the purpose of divine worship, or at least having special functions which by no means belong to the civil ruler as such, so that if he performs them, it is as priest and not as king; fourthly, this order has a special authority from the Divine Being or Beings whom it represents, not subject to the civil rule; fifthly, injury to the priest’s person or contravention to his order in divine things is esteemed as an injury done to the God whom he represents.

The peculiarity of a priesthood must therefore be added to the peculiarity of the rite of sacrifice upon which his office rests, and both together form an order of ideas so marked and distinctive as to establish the unity of the race in the several portions of which they appear; and at the same time it establishes, as the common inheritance of that race, an overwhelming sense of human life being founded, preserved, and exalted by a communion between heaven and earth: it is, in short, a sense of man lying in the hand of God.

We have hitherto followed the dispersion of Babel in its Gentile development down to that ultimate issue in which a long and unbroken civilisation is combined with an extreme moral corruption; now let us revert to the divine plan which was followed to repair this evil.

At a certain point of time, when forgetfulness of the divine unity was becoming general, God chose one man out of whom to form a nation, whose function should be the preservation of a belief in this unity. Abraham, the friend of God and the forefather of Christ, was called out of his own country that he might preserve the religion of Noah, and that “in him all the kindreds of the earth might be blessed” (Gen. xii. 3). In the second generation his family was carried down into Egypt, and became, in the security of that kingdom, a people, but it likewise fell into bondage. From this it was redeemed in a series of wonderful events under the guidance of Moses, was led by him into the desert, and there formed into a nation by the discipline of a religious, which was also a civil code. In the law given on Mount Sinai we see once more the constitution of the society established in Noah. The whole moral order of the world contained in the ten commandments is made to rest upon the sovereignty of God: “I am the Lord; thou shalt have no strange gods.” From this precept, which fills the first table, proceed the precepts which, in the second, maintain the order of society: “Honour thy father and thy mother; thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not steal,” and the rest. Such, says Bossuet, is the general order of all legislation. The ten words of God form the core of a complete religious and civil code, in which the two Powers exist in an ideal no less than a practical union. The individual and the national worship is the same, and the society springs out of it, the root being, “I am the Lord;” but the persuasiveness of redemption is added to the power of creation: “I am the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.” Abraham, the father of the people, had exercised the patriarchal priesthood and the patriarchal sacrifice in his family; but just as God had not chosen Abraham because he was the first-born, so Moses, taking the patriarchal priesthood, with a special sanction, set it not in the first-born of the tribes, but in another tribe, and in a family of this tribe. He took, further, the rite of sacrifice, which had existed from the beginning, only developing its meaning in a series of ordinances, which, as St. Paul tells us, all pointed to Christ: “Almost all things according to the law are cleansed with blood, and without shedding of blood is no remission” (Heb. ix. 22). But while there is here a complete union in faith, in practice, and in worship, for every true Israelite and for the whole people, while there is one source of authority to the three, the bearers of the dignities which represent this triple life of man are separated. Moses instituted, in the person of Aaron, a high priesthood which from that time stands through the whole history of his people at the head of their worship, superior in all that concerns it to the civil authority, which is bound to consult it and obey it, not only in the things of God, but in the chief civil acts which regard the nation. The outcome of this work is the creation of a people whose function is to bear on the worship of the one true God and faith in the Redeemer to come, a royal, prophetic, and priestly nation, the special domain of the promised Messias.

I have no need here to follow this people through the trials, revolts, chastisements, and humiliations of 1500 years. It is sufficient to observe the result at the coming of Christ. The nation at length, as the fruit it would seem of captivity and suffering, has accepted with one mind and heart the doctrine and worship of one God; the Jewish priesthood, uncorrupted in its essence by any of the abominations of polytheism, offers the daily morning and evening sacrifice, which typified the Lamb of God, in the spirit of Adam, Noah, Abraham, and Moses. The power of the State had indeed just passed to a Roman lord, but it left the rites and practices and doctrines of the Jewish faith untouched in the hands of the High Priest and the Great Council, which sat in this respect in the chair of Moses,—a great and manifest distinction, perhaps, from the condition in this respect of the whole Gentile world. In Rome, at least, the worship “of the Immortal Gods,” though blended with the whole growth of the State, and seated triumphantly in the Capitol, was simply subservient to the Civil Power: in Judea, a small and despised province of Rome, the religion was the life of the people, which had been made a people that it might be God’s domain, and, with all its divisions, was filled from the highest to the lowest with an universal expectation of the promised Christ, who was to be Prophet, Priest, and King.

In the relation between the two Powers, Gentilism required a total reconstruction, in order that the priesthood, existing in it from the beginning, might be completely purified, derived afresh from God, and receive from Him an independence which it had lost from the moment that it lost its fidelity to the One Creator,—and such a gift would be a token of divine power. Judaism, on the contrary, made, after the programme of God, an image in the nation of what the Christian people was to be in the world, required only to acknowledge in the Christ the purpose for which it was appointed, that the law might go forth from Sion and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.

CHAPTER II.

RELATION BETWEEN THE CIVIL AND THE SPIRITUAL POWERS AFTER CHRIST.

1.—The Spiritual Power in its Source and Nature.

Taking as our basis the historical outline of the relation between the Civil and Spiritual Powers which has preceded, let us attempt to have present to our minds the state of this relation at the death of Christ.

The great world-empire had then been ruled in most peaceful security for half a generation by Tiberius. Under him lay a vast variety of nations, professing as strange a variety of gods and of worship paid to them, but all, with one exception, accepting a religious supremacy in him as Pontifex Maximus of the Roman religion. The Princeps of the civil power, the Imperator of the civil force, was also Chief Priest of religion, and by that union held in his hands those two Powers, an attack upon either of which constituted, as Tertullian testifies, the double guilt of majesty violated and sacrilege incurred. Within these limits, and with this condition, it was free to the several nations to practise their ancestral rites as well as to believe in their ancestral gods, at least within their ancient territorial bounds. There can be no doubt that these nations generally clung to their several rites and beliefs, not only from the force of nurture and habit, but also as remnants of their former independence as nations. As little can we doubt that the great Roman power was employed to maintain and protect them as part of the constituted order of things and in prevention of sedition. This, so far as the Roman dominion extended, was the outcome of that long succession of wars, and changes of rule ensuing on wars, which forms the history of mankind so soon as it leaves the nest of pristine unity at the epoch of the dispersion. It is clear that through the whole of this Gentile world, while amity had not been broken between the Civil and the Spiritual Powers, the priesthood, which represented the latter, had everywhere become the subject of the former. It is no less clear that this subjection was repaid with support. This condition of things was most clearly expressed as well as most powerfully established in the position of the Roman Emperor, who, as he received the tribunitial power, which in union with the consular was distinctive of the imperial dignity, from the Senate, so received also the supreme authority in matters of religion which belonged to the Pontifex Maximus. This authority had indeed been in its origin and its descent from age to age in the Roman city distinct from secular power, but henceforth became practically united with the civil principate. That undivided supremacy betokened the ultimate constitution of the heathen State, antecedent to the coming of Christ, in what concerns the relation between the two Powers. According to this, the Civil Power prevailed over the Spiritual, and casting off the subjection to religion in which itself had been nurtured, directed all its actions to a temporal end.

Far otherwise was it with that people which Moses, under the divine command, had created according to the pattern which he saw in the Mount. Chosen by God to conduct the race of Abraham out of captivity into the promised land, he alone in the history of the Israelitic race united in himself the three powers bestowed by unction of Priest, of Prophet, and of King. These powers he left to the people he was forming, but did not deposit them all in the same hands. His creation of the priesthood in the tribe of Levi, and of the high priesthood in the person of his brother Aaron and his lineal descendants, stands without a parallel in all the history of the world before the coming of Christ as an act of transcendent authority. For instead of the original priesthood of the first-born, which he found existing as it had been transmitted from the earliest time, he selected a particular tribe, which was not that of the first-born, to bear from that time forth the priesthood among the children of Israel; and further, he selected a particular person in that tribe, his brother Aaron, to erect in him the high priesthood, the most characteristic institution of the Jewish people. In like manner he took the ancient institution of sacrifice, dating, as we have seen, from Paradise itself, and formed it into an elaborate system to be carried out day by day through the whole succeeding history of his people, by priests springing from the person of the first High Priest. At the door of the Tabernacle, in the presence of all the assembled tribes, Moses invested Aaron with the priestly garments, especially the ephod, bearing attached to it the Rational, which contained the twelve stones indicating the twelve tribes of the holy nation, by which the High Priest, consulting God, issued the oracle of doctrine and truth. Moses further set the mitre on his head, bearing on its golden plate the inscription, “Holiness to the Lord;” and pouring on his head the oil of unction, he anointed and consecrated him. Thus the whole Jewish priesthood descended from above, being gathered up in one person, from whom all succeeding priests were drawn, and the sous of the first High Priest were to continue the line for ever according to primogeniture.

The High Priest’s office had in it four points peculiar to him beyond the office of the ordinary priest. First, once in the year, on the great day of the atonement, he alone entered into the most holy place, “not without blood, which he offered for his own sins and the sins of the people” (Heb. ix. 7), inasmuch as he sent into the wilderness one he-goat, charged with the sins of all the people, and sacrificed the other, whose blood he carried into the sanctuary, sprinkling it seven times over against the oracle, to expiate the sanctuary from the uncleanness of the children of Israel (Lev. xvi. 15, 16). He thus once every year represented in his person the whole sacred nation in that most remarkable act of confessing its guilt before God, and offering an expiation of it, which pointed even more to a future Redeemer. Secondly, he consecrated the whole body of the priests and Levites for their several work. The oil of unction poured upon his head was the palpable sign of priestly power transmitted from him to the priest, in which, again, he was an image of the future High Priest. Thirdly, whenever the civil rulers of the nation required advice in matters concerning the good of the whole people, it was the office of the High Priest to inquire for them by means of the breastplate of light and truth, which he carried upon the ephod. The relation of the Civil to the Spiritual Power was symbolised in the first bearer of the former after Moses, to whom Moses was commanded by God to communicate “part of his glory.” God said to Moses, “Take Joshua the son of Nun, a man in whom is the spirit, and put thy hand upon him, and he shall stand before Eleazar the priest (who had then succeeded his father Aaron in the high priesthood), and all the multitude, and thou shalt give him precepts in the sight of all, and part of thy glory, that all the congregation of the children of Israel may hear him. If anything be to be done, Eleazar the priest shall consult the Lord for him, he, and all the children of Israel with him, and the rest of the multitude, shall go out and go in at his word” (Num. xxvii. 18). Thus David afterwards consulted God by Abiathar, the High Priest in his day. Fourthly, on all questions concerning the decalogue, or commands in the moral law, or the ceremonial law, which embraced the whole field of the divine worship, or the judicial law, which concerned reciprocal rights and duties between man and man, the High Priest possessed a supreme and decisive jurisdiction, from which there was no appeal.

It is necessary to distinguish between the third of those privileges, the judgment by the breastplate of light and truth, which was an extraordinary gift of God, bestowed at particular times, and analogous in this to inspiration, and the fourth, the supreme jurisdiction and judgment of the High Priest, which belonged to him as an ordinary part of his office, and may be likened to a perpetual divine assistance inherent in it.[18]

2. Such was the high priesthood in its institution, and its operation through the whole of Jewish history down to the final destruction of the Temple corresponds to its institution.

The children of Israel were made a nation for a specific purpose, that is, in order that the race of Abraham, by Isaac his chosen son, should maintain upon earth, in the midst of an ever-growing defection, the worship of the one True God, and should likewise embody and represent no less that which was bound up in this worship, the promise of redemption given at the beginning of the world. The reason of its existence, therefore, was to be the bearer of the Messianic idea. To this all its ordinances and sacrifices pointed, and in the execution of all this purpose the High Priest was the chief organ. The Pontificate was the stem of the nation, of which the civil unity was made from the beginning dependent on the spiritual. On Aaron, by God’s command, Moses devolved one “part of his glory;” and when Eleazar had succeeded his father in the office of High Priest, and Moses was about to die, he devolved, by the same divine command, another part of his glory upon Joshua, appointing him to lead the children of Israel into their promised inheritance. To invest him with this solemn charge, the civil leadership of the nation, he brought him before Eleazar the priest, that, according to his instruction, Joshua and the whole congregation “should go out and go in.” This relative position of Eleazar and Joshua is continued in the respective religious and civil rulers during several hundred years down to the kingship of Saul. When the Israelites chose themselves a king after the pattern of the nations round them, the word of God to Samuel respecting their act is, “They have not rejected thee, but me, that I should not reign over them” (1 Kings viii. 7). Nevertheless God sanctions the erection of a kingdom, leaving unaltered the position of the High Priest. During the time of the kings the high priesthood continues the centre of Jewish worship; and when the civil unity is broken by the revolt of the ten tribes, they revolt likewise against the worship which had its seat in Jerusalem and was gathered up in the High Priest. The long-persistent iniquity of the people is punished by the captivity, and when a portion of the nation comes back to take root afresh in its own land, it is in the high priesthood more than ever that its unity is restored and maintained. Thus, through the three periods of Israelitic history, under the judges, under the kings, and after the return from captivity, the High Priest remains the permanent centre of Jewish life, the organ of spiritual, and therein of civil unity. Our Lord recognises this spiritual ruler as at the head of the Great Council, “sitting in the chair of Moses.” At His birth Herod inquires of this authority where Christ should be born, and receives the undoubting answer, “In Bethlehem of Juda.” Of Him Caiaphas, being then High Priest, uttered the famous prophecy denoting the great act of His mediatorial sacrifice; and the same Caiaphas, sitting as supreme judge of the nation, adjures Him by the living God to declare if He be the Christ; and our Lord answers the adjuration by the explicit declaration of His divine Sonship, and His authority to be Judge of the living and the dead.

The judges pass, the kings pass, the nation goes into captivity; it comes back chastened, and faithful at length to its belief in the divine unity and the promises attached to it; and through all this, up to the time of accomplishment, the High Priest sits in the chair of Moses, and offers expiation on the day of atonement, and the priests emanate from his person, and prophecy speaks from his mouth. He is the ordinary judge of the whole people, the guardian and interpreter of the divine law, whose decision is final and supreme.

3. That people lost its civil independence, which was merged in the great Roman empire, but its spiritual independence, centred in its High Priest, was preserved to it. At no period of its history was this independence more remarkably maintained. Philo, himself a Jew settled in Egypt, says, “Innumerable pilgrims from innumerable cities flock together by sea and land, from East and West, from North and South, on every festival to this Temple (of Jerusalem) as to a common harbour and refuge, seeking peace there in the midst of a life of business or trouble.”[19] “The Holy City,” he says in another place, “is my country, a metropolis not of the single country of Judea, but of many others, on account of the colonies from time to time thence sent forth.” But not only was this city such a metropolis to all Jews in every part of the world, and the High Priest the centre of the worship which drew them from all parts of the world, but his spiritual authority extended over them in the several cities which they inhabited as well as when they came up to Jerusalem. This was the power borne witness to by St. Paul, when “yet breathing out threatening and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, he went to the High Priest and asked of him letters to Damascus to the synagogues, that if he found any men and women of this way, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem.” This was the power which counterworked and persecuted St. Paul himself wherever he went, through which “five times he received of the Jews forty stripes save one, and was thrice beaten with rods” (2 Cor. xi. 24). This was the power which, wherever the Apostles went, preaching the Gospel under the cover of a religion which enjoyed legal sanction, and so disobeyed no Roman law, encountered them, and, after endless particular persecutions, succeeded at last with Nero in getting them put beyond the pale of the protection which their character of Jews might afford them, and placed under the ban of the empire as preachers of a new and unsanctioned religion. They were but summing up a long course of previous persecution in this act, which was the master-stroke of Jewish antagonism, by which they fulfilled to the uttermost the divine prediction: “Therefore, behold I send to you prophets, and wise men, and scribes; and some of them you will put to death and crucify, and some of them you will scourge in your synagogues, and persecute them from city to city” (Matt. xxiii. 40). And it was followed at once by the destruction of the city, the Temple, and the priesthood, as the prophecy ran, “Behold your house shall be left to you desolate.” The position of the High Priest in this last period of Israelitic history, the forty years which elapsed from the day of Pentecost to the destruction of the city and Temple, represents him most vividly as the guardian, judge, and mouthpiece of a religion which, though national, had colonies in all parts of the world, and in which not only the central seat of the worship and the country of Judea, but the colonies also, in whatever part of the world they might be situated, acknowledged his spiritual jurisdiction. This privilege was given by Julius Cæsar, as to the Roman empire, and continued by Augustus. It is of much moment to understand the history of the first forty years of the Christian Church.

4. So completely had the high priesthood created by Moses, and the whole system of worship, sacrifices, rites, and ceremonies which it presided over and guarded, fulfilled the purpose for which it was created. It presented in all its parts a type and a prophecy of Christ and His kingdom—a type and a prophecy which through fifteen hundred years of action and suffering had wrought itself out in the heart of a people who, now deprived of their civil, but enjoying a spiritual, independence, lay scattered through the whole world, ready to receive the spiritual kingdom. Through all Gentiledom the sacerdotal authority had become, by its corruption of the high truths of religion, the serf or minion of the Civil Power, but to the Jews the worship of their God was in its own nature supreme, and did not admit of interference even from that power which they acknowledged to rule absolutely in temporal dominion. The same scribes and pharisees and people who cried out before the Roman governor, “We have no king but Cæsar,” were ready a few years afterwards to sacrifice their lives rather than admit into Jerusalem a statue of the Emperor Caligula, which seemed to them an impugnment of their religious law. And the Jewish people during the years of our Lord’s teaching and ministry were looking for their Messias, and when they should acknowledge Him, were ready to acknowledge Him not only as Priest and Prophet but as King also. So deeply had the words of Moses sunk in their hearts: “That God would raise up to them a prophet of their nation and of their brethren like unto him, whom they were to hear” (Deut. xviii. 18); that is, a Prophet bearing, as Moses alone had done, the triple unction, and who was to be supreme in teaching, in priesthood, and in rule. The civil subjection of the people brought out more strikingly by its contrast their spiritual independence, and the banishment, which scattered a number of them into all lands, provided everywhere a seed-plot in which the Gospel might be planted—a little gathering not only of Jews, but of Gentile proselytes, “who feared God” in every place, and so could more readily receive the doctrine of God incarnate and crucified upon their belief of God the Creator. Had the Jews remained in their own land, they would not have had the perception of a spiritual jurisdiction founded upon a divine hierarchy alone, and stretching over the whole earth, disregarding all national divisions and restrictions, and binding Parthians and Medes, Elamites and Mesopotamians, Egyptians and Libyans, Cretes and Arabians, Greeks and Romans into one. The mould into which the Gospel was to be cast had been wrought out even through the obstinacy, the sins, and the punishments of the chosen people, and was now complete to receive and bear the tree for the healing of the nations. The high priesthood had come forth from Moses by express inspiration, and bearing its people through centuries of most various fortune, had imaged out exactly the Christian high priesthood and rule to which it was to yield.[20] A prophecy embodied in a fact which unites a people into an indissoluble organisation, and works through centuries moulding generation after generation, and gathering into one prodigious monument of priesthood, sacrifices, ceremonies, and temple, and the hopes and devotion of a race, this is the ground which our Lord selected for the basis of the spiritual kingdom which He would set up. He had provided Moses as a servant to construct the model of the house which hereafter He would build Himself; He had inspired Moses to create Aaron and draw out of him the levitical priesthood, because Himself would commission Peter, the perpetual fountain of the Christian priesthood, and would make Peter for all nations that which Aaron had been for one.

But, as in all the preceding history, God left to man the exercise of his free-will. It was not open to the Jews indeed to frustrate the divine purpose, but it was open to them to receive or not receive the Christ when He came. They were ready to receive a glorious but not a suffering Christ. And the High Priest, sitting at the head of the Great Council of the nation, in the chair of Moses and in the dignity of Aaron, instead of accepting, rejected and slew Him with the Roman death of crucifixion, by the hand of the Roman governor, the bearer to the nation of the Roman imperial power. The High Priest slew Him further on the affected charge that He was plotting against the emperor’s power; in reality because He acknowledged Himself to be the Christ, the Son of God.

Let us take, then, what I am about to say as facts which have been hitherto undisputed. There have been, and there are, unbelievers in plenty of the Christian truth and Church, but no one has, I believe, hitherto been found to deny that Christ was put to death by Pontius Pilate at the instigation of the Chief Priest and the Sanhedrim. Let us take this as a fact, and put ourselves in thought at the great Sabbath during which His Body rested in the tomb. It is the Body of one executed with the greatest ignominy, between two thieves, by a most cruel death, under the authority of the Roman governor, upon the charge that He claimed a kingship which interfered with that of the emperor, at the instigation of those who rejected His claim to be their Messias, the Son of God. His Body, even when dead, ceases not to be under the jurisdiction of the Roman governor, who commits its custody to His chief enemies, those whose instigation has brought about His death. Their seal is set upon His tomb, and their guards watch it. Taking these bare facts, as acknowledged by friend and foe, can any situation of more complete impotence be conceived by human imagination than this? He has come, and taught, and worked miracles, and been rejected by His own. He has been put to death in the name and by the power of the world’s lord, who bears the crown of majesty and wields the authority of worship. The guards of His enemies sit beside His tomb.

Such was the fact on the great Sabbath, the high day of the Jewish Pasch.

What can be conceived more improbable at that moment, and under these circumstances, than the fact which we have now to record as following in its evolution during so many ages? The sovereign in whose name and by whose power that Body had been put to death held undisputed in his hands the supremacy of Spiritual as well as Civil Power through the great world of Gentilism, represented by the Roman empire. From that Body was to spring, beginning with the morrow, the distinction and independence of the Spiritual over against the Civil Power, which was to dissolve this twofold supremacy throughout the whole range of that empire. And this was to be accomplished by a series of actions arising out of the sole proclamation of envoys taken from the people which had rejected Him—a proclamation derived from the commission which He should give in the Body raised again to life. The distinction, indeed, of the two Powers, so far from being new, has been coeval with the human race itself, as we have seen; but it has been broken down by human sin in all nations but one, and that one, created for its maintenance, made, through all its history, prophetical for its fulfilment when the time of that fulfilment came, has rejected its Bearer; and yet out of its bosom, on the morrow, is to go forth that word of power which in the end shall change the condition of human society, and create it after another order.

It will be well thoroughly to grasp the truth that all which followed depended upon a fact, the supernatural character of which cannot be exaggerated. We are considering the Spiritual Power which arose and diffused itself in the world from the Person of Christ. It took its origin from the Body in which He appeared to His Apostles after His resurrection. Without their belief in that resurrection, as evidenced to all their senses, there was no ground for their conduct. Without the reality of that resurrection there was no source for the Power. It would seem that, whatever else the Christian order of things may be, it must be supernatural and miraculous, since, to exist at all, it presupposes a fact which is a lordship over nature and a miracle in the highest degree. Without this primary miracle all Christian faith is vain, and in the power which worked it all subsequent miracles are included. That the fact took place, let the results which followed testify, at the beginning of which our exposition stands. The Jews expected a Messias, who, according to the prophecies long enshrined in their nation about Him, was to be Priest, Prophet, and King. They put to death one who claimed to come before them in this triple character. From one dead, so long as he continues dead, no life can spring. But life and multifold life sprung up here; therefore He who was dead had arisen, and all of which we have to speak is the result of His life. The fundamental truth on which we have to dwell is the going forth of a supernatural power from the Person of Christ.

We have seen Adam in Paradise created in the full maturity of intellect and will, and placed at the head of a double order of things, of civil and of spiritual authority. We have now to consider that greater One whom Adam prefigured, and who, coming forth from the tomb, assumed forthwith that double headship. When the great act of His pontificate had been accomplished in giving up His Body to death for the sins of the world, and its efficacy acknowledged by His resurrection, He declared to His Apostles “that all power had been given to Him in heaven and upon earth.” This all-power in heaven and on earth, given to the God-man as the fruit of His incarnation and the reward of His sacrifice, divides itself into two—temporal and spiritual. The first is that by which He disposes of all persons and all events. This power He has not delegated to any one in chief, but keeps it in His own hands. Yet it is a part of this power of which it is said, “By me kings reign, and princes decree justice.” The whole civil sovereignty is founded on an apportionment to it of the divine sovereignty for the maintenance of human society. A part of the second or Spiritual Power He delegated to St. Peter in chief, and to the Apostles, with St. Peter at their head. Out of this all-power He set up and sent forth in them a royal priesthood to proclaim and maintain the truth which He had come to declare to the world; that is to say, He took His own priesthood and put it upon them, investing it with a reproductive ordering and maintaining power in His spiritual kingdom. To it He attached the gift of truth, that is, of communicating, unfolding, guarding, the whole body of doctrine which He came upon earth to declare; and in it He placed the jurisdiction which is necessary to the priesthood in order to exert itself in offering the sacrifice and in dispensing the sacraments which He instituted, and in guarding the truth with which they are bound up.

That power, then, which He designated in the keys given to Peter, in the Rock which He set in his person, in the pastoral charge which He laid upon him over His sheep, and in which He sent forth His Apostles to make disciples all nations, to baptize them in the sacred Name, to teach them to observe all which He had commanded, and in the exercise of which He promised to remain with them to the end of the world, is one and indivisible in itself, and triple in its range and direction—a priesthood proclaiming the truth and ruling in the sphere which belongs to its priesthood and its teachings. As Adam is created one and complete, and his race springs from him, so this kingdom of Christ springs complete from Him in its regimen, which is not the result of history, but formed in His Person before its history begins, as He is at once Priest, Teacher, and King. Thus this Power comes from above, not from below; proceeds from emanation; is not gathered gradually by accretion; is an effect of positive institution, derived from the Head; not the effect of a need or the working out of a natural capacity in the body.

The root of that Power is the act for the accomplishment of which our Lord Himself took our flesh upon Him—the act of His high priesthood, by which, having taken our flesh, He took also the sins of the world upon Himself, and offered Himself for them on the cross. It is as Redeemer that He is Priest, the sacrifice of His body being the offering which He made. It is in the perpetual service and offering of that body that the priesthood which He created for others exists and provides the perpetual bread of life, which is the food of sanctification, for His people. In the priesthood, therefore, we have to deal with the whole range of subject which embraces grace on the part of God and worship on the part of man. It is most fitting that all spiritual power should grow upon this stock. All priesthoods in the world from the beginning had been connected, as we have seen, with the sense and acknowledgment of guilt; and with the rite of sacrifice. In the Aaronic priesthood this has been specially noted. Thus it bore a perpetual prophetical witness to the act which Christ accomplished. All future priesthood dated from the accomplishment of that act, and took its force from it. Thus it was truly the central act of human history. Had not the Son of God assumed our nature, He could not have been a Priest. His priesthood, therefore, carried in it the two great divine acts—His incarnation and His satisfaction, which make up the economy of human salvation. The first direction, then, of the power which He delegated is that of the Priest.

The second is that of the Teacher. A principal part of His ministry while on earth certainly was to teach. He was the Prophet that was to come into the world, and all that He taught bore reference to the two acts just dwelt upon, that He came forth from God and was going to God. Not a sentence of His teaching but presupposes His Incarnation and His Passion. That whole body of truth, therefore, which He did not write down Himself, but committed to the living ministry of His Apostles, proceeds, as it were, out of His Pontificate, and rests upon it. It is the truth of the Word made flesh, and of God sacrificed for His creatures. The gift of teaching, as the illuminating power in His Church, corresponds to the virtue of faith in the taught, and implies the possession of truth in the teacher. As the priesthood has a perpetual sacrifice stored up within it, and a perpetual gift of grace accompanying it, so the teaching has a perpetual gift of truth. The fountain of truth, therefore, in this Power, can be no more discoloured and polluted than the fountain of grace in the priesthood can be turned into sin. By virtue of it Christ remains for ever the one Teacher and Master whom all His people have to follow. Theology is an outcome of this Power. The issuing of doctrinal decrees is grounded upon it, and the censure of writings and of all false opinions on whatever subject which may impair Christian doctrine.

The third direction of the one Power is that of ruling and ordering, not to be separated from the former two, since it consists, in fact, in the free, legitimate, and ordered use of them, and has, therefore, been termed Jurisdiction, inasmuch as it is government in the whole domain of grace and truth. In every government there is a power which administers, a power which legislates, a power which judges, and all these in the sovereign degree; that is, in a degree not liable to revision and reversal in the respective subject-matter. If we apply these three acts to the full domain of grace and truth, which is the domain of the Incarnate Son (John i. 14), set up in the world, we express that royalty which is the third attribute of the priesthood. It comprehends supreme pastorship in all its range; legislation in the kingdom of truth; and judgment, whether external or internal, in the spiritual tribunal.

This was the Power, one and indivisible in itself, triple in its direction, which Christ took from His own Person as part of the all-power given to Him, and delegated to the Ruler of His Church, that in the exercise of it He might fulfil all prophecy concerning Himself, and be at once Priest, Prophet, and King: and out of this He made and makes His people.

In the transmission of that Power to the persons to whom He gave it He observed two principles: that of unity, and that of hierarchical subordination. To maintain the first, He made the Primacy; to maintain the second, the College of Apostles. For the whole of this triple power, the keys of the kingdom of heaven in the priesthood, the guardianship of faith in the office of teacher, and the supreme pastorship of rule He promised to one and bestowed on one, Peter. Thus He made Peter the Primate, and by the centering this triple authority in his sole person set him as the Rock on which the Church is built. At the same time He associated with Peter the eleven, to exercise this same authority in conjunction with Him. Thus at the very founding of the Church we find the two forces which are to continue throughout, and from the union of which the whole hierarchy with its graduated subordination springs. From the Apostolic College descends the Episcopate, the everliving source of which is in Peter the head, by union with whom it is “one Episcopate, of which a part is held by each without division of the whole.” Only on this condition is the Episcopate one, without which, in all places and in all time, it would be a principle of rivalry and division, using the triple power of priesthood, teaching, and rule against itself. With this condition we have exactly realised the image of the Rock on which the Church is founded, and against which the gates of hell shall not prevail, in the establishment of the Episcopate, as one indivisible power, having its fountain and fulness in one person, a part of whose solicitude is shared by a body of bishops spread through the whole world, speaking with one voice the faith of Peter, because they are united with the person of Peter.

All that we have hitherto said as to the emanation of power from the Person of Christ is comprehended by St. Peter when he calls our Lord, “the Shepherd and Bishop of our souls,” and by St. Paul when he calls Him “a High Priest over the house of God,” “the Apostle and High Priest of our confession,” “called of God High Priest after the order of Melchisedek.” And by Himself when He bade His disciples to have no other Master, that is, Teacher, “for one is your Master, Christ;” and when, treating on the eve of His passion this very subject, He said to His Apostles, “I dispose to you, as my Father disposed to me, a kingdom;” and after His resurrection, saying to them collectively, “As my Father sent me, even so send I you;” and “Behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world;” and when He said to Peter on the shore of the Lake of Galilee, after He had drawn in the unbroken net full of great fishes, “Lovest thou me more than these? Feed my sheep.”[21] For is He not in priesthood, teaching, and government the prolific Father of the age to come? He remains not solitary in His triple dignity, but is the Adam of His race, and rules in it from His resurrection by those whom He appoints.

It may further be observed that in the supernatural regimen thus established by our Lord, viewed as the one indivisible power which constitutes it, there is an image traced upon His spiritual kingdom of the ever-blessed Trinity, its royalty representing God the Father as the source: its priesthood, wherein lies the whole economy of human redemption, God the Son, who carries it out; its teaching, God the Holy Ghost, the Spirit of Truth, whose ever-abiding presence guides its subjects, as by the hand, into all truth. The regimen is the generative power in His kingdom; and this image, wrought indelibly upon its society in all lands and times, is as distinctly Christ’s work upon the Christian commonwealth as the image traced upon individual man in the soul’s triple constitution of memory, understanding, and will, when it has been sanctified by His grace, is His work upon the individual.

That in the Episcopate there should be a triple power: of priesthood, comprehending the whole divine worship, and the imparting of grace through the sacraments; of teaching, which contains the communication of the whole divine truth; and of ruling, that is, over the whole region of action comprised by the priesthood and the teaching, the prototype of which exists in the eternal relations of the Blessed Trinity, while itself is that one undivided power which represents the divine unity, seems to shadow out the very citadel in which the Divine Wisdom set up His kingdom.

Who could have imagined beforehand such a constitution of government? Who, placing himself at the time of Christ and contemplating as a fact the actual relations of the Two Powers then in existence before him, could ever have devised such a kingdom? Is not this in very deed the kingdom of grace and truth? Have we not here visible to the eye of faith the Priest, the Prophet, and the King, who has set up Altar, Chair, and Throne together in the midst of the nations?

2.—The Spiritual Power a Complete Society.

That man, who was originally made after the image and likeness of God, is sent into this life in order that he may in a future life attain the end of his being, that is, the enjoyment of God, is the primary fundamental truth which is presupposed in that whole work of Christ just described. The supernatural society exists for a supernatural end. The total denial of this end would be the complete and perfect heathenism of which the original heathenism was but a shadow; for that state of man in which the whole of his public and private life was encircled by the ties and consecrated by the rites of religion, even though those rites were prostituted by being offered to false gods, was not a denial of this end. In such a state man acknowledged a power beyond himself—beyond visible nature: his mind, his heart, his imagination were filled with the sense of that power. This is true of the great mass of the heathen before the coming of Christ, and is true in a large degree of those nations remaining still outside the Christian faith in their traditional religion, which descends in however fragmentary, however perverted a form, from the religion of Noah, and the primal and universal covenant for all his family struck with him. It is only the apostasy of a few from the Christian faith itself which has readied that final and absolute impiety—the greatest which the human mind can reach—of entirely denying this end of man.

Now, in considering the relation between the Civil and the Spiritual Power in all its bearings, we assume as a postulate this supernatural end of man. As it is the kernel of our belief, so it is the absolute basis of our argument. It cannot be put in a terser form than that in which our Lord stated it to those about Him when He asked the question, “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” Those only who have come to such a negation of reason as to suppose that they have no souls can disregard it. And as it is of absolute necessity, so it is all that is required for a full consideration of the subject.

“There is then a certain good beyond the natural society of man in this his condition of mortal life, which is that ultimate beatitude which is looked for after death in the enjoyment of God. And so the Christian, who has acquired a right to that beatitude by the blood of Christ, and has received the earnest of the Holy Spirit in order to attain it, requires, beyond the aid which temporal government gives him for the concerns of this life, a spiritual care which is given to the faithful by the ministers of Christ’s Church. Now, as to the ultimate end which they are to seek, the same must be said of the whole mass of men as of one man. If, then, the one man’s end lay in any good existing in himself, the ultimate end of government for the mass of men would be similarly that it should reach such good and secure its possession. But all the goods of this present life offer no such end, whether it be health, or riches, or knowledge, or even virtue. For the virtuous life, whether of the individual or the mass, is subordinate to a further end, which is the future enjoyment of God. If that end could be obtained by a power of human nature, it would belong to the office of temporal government to direct men to it, since that is supreme in things purely human. But since man does not attain the end of enjoying God by any merely human power but by divine power, according to St. Paul’s word, that ‘the grace of God is eternal life,’ it requires not a human but a divine government to lead men to that end. And so it is that such a government belongs to a King who is not only man but also God, that is, to our Lord Jesus Christ, who has introduced men to the glory of heaven by making them sons of God. This, then, is the kingdom which has been delivered to Him, and which shall not be broken up, on account of which He is named in Scripture, not Priest only, but King. Hence a royal priesthood is derived from Him; and, what is more, all the faithful of Christ, so far forth as they are His members, are called kings and priests. Therefore the ministry of this kingdom, in order that spiritual things might be distinguished from temporal, has been entrusted not to the kings of the earth but to priests, and in the highest degree to the priest who is over all, the successor of St. Peter, the Vicar of Christ, the Roman Pontiff, to whom all kings of the Christian people are to be subject as to our Lord Jesus Christ himself; for this is in accordance with the principle that those to whom belongs the care of antecedent ends should be subject to him who has the care of the final end, and be directed by his rule.”[22]

What we have just said amounts to this, that the whole life of man, whether single or in society, while he lives upon earth, is subject to the life which he hopes for in heaven as its supreme purpose and end; and that being so subject, as there is a society to aid him in attaining the goods of his natural life, so much more is there a society to aid him in attaining that supernatural good to which the natural goods are subordinate. We have next to compare the regimens of these two societies with each other in regard to their completeness.

The analogy between the Two Powers is full of instruction; but it is to be remembered that as, since the coming of Christ, the Spiritual Power is one in all countries and in all times, whereas the Temporal Power is one only in each country and at each time, the comparison of the two can only take those points which belong to the Temporal Power alike in all countries and times; and this will be found sufficient for our purpose. We have just seen the conception of spiritual jurisdiction as wielding the priesthood and the teaching: it corresponds in this respect to secular sovereignty, under which is ranged on the one hand authority in every degree, as held by all officials in administration, by all councillors in legislating, by all judges in their several tribunals, by all officers in the public force. Whoever in the public service holds a portion of the public authority may be ranged under the general head of magistrate, and stands herein to the sovereign power in the same relation as the priest to the bearer of supreme spiritual jurisdiction. On the other hand, whoever is engaged in the whole circle of human arts and sciences, which comprehends the vast domain of human knowledge as acquired by learning, answers to the spiritual teacher. This triple division runs through every state, at every time, whatever may be its relative advancement in the scale of government. And the comparison as to both Powers is exhaustive with regard to their range, since in both, man, individual or collective, is a being who acts because he first knows and then wills. Sovereignty, presiding in the various kinds of magistracy over all who command, and over all in the various arts and sciences who teach, because they have first learned, covers that triple domain in the one case, and in the other spiritual royalty, which acts through the priest and the teacher. But the society is knit together in a much stricter bond, by a far more perfect interaction of forces, in the spiritual than in the temporal order; and this arises from the fact that all spiritual power in its triple range actually descends from the spiritual head through every degree, which is far from being the fact in temporal sovereignty. That is the pre-eminence of Christ in His spiritual kingdom; and it is the perfection of the Divine Legislator that He exercises His royalty by the indivisible action of His Jurisdiction, Priesthood, and Teaching, communicated to the whole structure at the head of which He stands.

The completeness of the spiritual society in its regimen is likewise shown by the philosophical basis on which it rests. Our knowledge of our dependence upon the Being, the Truth, and the Goodness of God is the foundation of religion in us, and produces in us the idea of three chief duties binding us to God—Faith, Adoration, and Charity.[23] These answer to man’s triple nature, which acts upon the basis of knowing and willing; and they correspond likewise to the office of the Teacher, the Priest, and the Spiritual Ruler. Faith is evidently the virtue in man elicited by the Teacher, and its office is to accept the truth which he communicates. It leads on to Adoration, which ensues when the mind and heart dwell upon the divine attributes and their relation to man, and which includes Hope as a part of itself; and this answers to the special work of the Priest, which is to communicate the whole treasure of grace to the human redeemed family. And, lastly, Charity, which is the ruling principle of all action to the Christian, so far as he acts christianly, is the special virtue of the Ruler, according to the condition imposed by our Lord when He instituted the pastoral rule in its highest degree, saying to Peter, “Lovest thou me more than these?” that is, his brother Apostles and the Apostle of Love himself, and then adding, “Feed my sheep.” And these virtues, Faith, Adoration, and Charity, it may be added, have as intimate a connection with each other as the several bearers of power in the regimen to which they belong are linked together. To exercise Faith, Adoration, and Charity make the Christian man, as the Teaching, the Priesthood, and the Rule make the Christian order.

Worship, belief, and conduct embrace the whole man in his relations godward; but much more than this is true in the order of the Christian kingdom, for there these three things are inseparably joined with the Person of Christ. As we have said above, the whole power grows upon the root of His Priesthood, the particular act of which is the offering of His Body, the Body of the Incarnate Son, for the sin of the world. His communicated Priesthood consists in the perpetual presentation of that Sacrifice to God by His ministers in the name and in the presence of the Christian people; and the Sacrifice thus offered becomes further to them the food of eternal life. In this great sacrament, carrying with it the perpetual presence of Christ in and with His Church, all the other sacraments are potentially contained. It is the well-spring of the whole sacramental life, which He caused to open when His own Passion was beginning. Of indescribable grandeur is that order, beginning with the eve of His Passion, and stretching unbroken through all times and climes to the consummation of the world. In that great act, carried on by the High Priest through the voice and hands of countless successors, which daily in every generation gathers into one the prayers of His people, the manifold life is concentered which provides for every need.

But this Priesthood it is which carries on the Faith. That Faith is not a belief in God “as the Architect of the universe,” but in the love of God the Father, the Creator of man, who sends His Son to be their Redeemer, and in the love of God the Son, who is so sent; so that the Faith grows on the root of the Priesthood. And out of this Faith is developed that vast fabric of doctrine which in the course of eighteen centuries and a half has made Christian theology, and reared for itself a harmonious system of Christian law. The Eternal Priest carries in His hands eternal truth, which He alone can preserve amid the never-ending conflicts of human opinion, the surging strife of the bottomless sea of human imaginations. The gift of maintaining all the truth which concerns human redemption in every one of its remotest issues cannot be parted from the Priesthood by which that redemption was wrought. Thus it coheres with the sacramental life, and is not a fruit of man’s intellect by itself, but is bestowed on that intellect in union with grace. It is as it were an atmosphere of thought which the Christian people breathe.

And, once more, Christian conduct is the action of those who have this worship and this faith. It springs from an intention united at least implicitly to the Author and Finisher of the Faith. It is this intention which gives to the action the quality of merit. For an action done with it differs incalculably from an action done without it, though the external appearance and effect of the two actions may be the same. It is to Christ as King that we are answerable for our actions, and worship and belief culminate in action. The inward life of His subjects therefore answers to the triple outward order established by the Priest, the Prophet, and the King. It is in virtue of this answering in His people that He has fulfilled the prophecies concerning Him as to His triple character. Had He left no government for His kingdom, how would He be a King? Had He left no priesthood to be perpetuated in His Church, how would He be Priest after the order of Melchisedek? Had He left no truth inaccessible to error, how would He be the Prophet that was to come into the world?

It is then in their worship, their belief, and their conduct that the Christian people one and all are derived from Christ, as much as the triple regimen of His kingdom. Every individual man, so far as he is a Christian, is a copy of Christ, while the whole people “is Jesus Christ diffused and communicated, Jesus Christ complete, Jesus Christ perfect man, Jesus Christ in His fulness.”[24]

Nothing can show the universality of this Christian society more than this derivation alike of the individual and of the mass from Christ. When the children of Noah wore scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth at the dispersion, the great family was broken up and nations arose; but in the baptism of Christ nations disappear and the great family is restored. There it is the member of the human race, the child of Adam alone, who is assumed to be the brother of Christ. All the conditions of human life which have arisen in the society of the nation, which St. Paul has summed up in the words Greek and Jew, barbarian, Scythian, bond or free, disappear also; there arises from that fontal birth only the man “created anew to knowledge after the image of the Creator” (Col. iii. 10, 11). Yet there is no interference with the natural society, with its rights on the one side and its obligations on the other. It is the human being, with body and soul, making one manhood, of which the soul is the form, which is thus taken; but he is taken in his relations to that last end with the mention of which we begin. As to the other relations of his natural stale, they continue as they were, subject only to a superior end, which is superior because it is the last.

Our Lord, when traduced before the Roman tribunal as infringing on the sovereignty of the emperor, was solemnly asked if He was the King of the Jews. He replied with a threefold assertion: that He was a King; that His kingdom was not of this world, and yet that it was in this world. How far does the kingdom which we have so far attempted to delineate correspond to these three truths?

1. It is a kingdom because, according to the delineation of it which we have just made, it is a royal priesthood, ruling inasmuch as it deals with the belief, the worship, and the conduct of its people—all the relations of man with God. In all this it does for the divine life in man everything which the temporal kingdom does for his secular life. The analogy between the two is precise and complete.

2. It is not a kingdom of this world, inasmuch as it governs with a view to an end which is outside and beyond this life. This end determines everything within it, as also we have seen above.

3. Again, it is not of this world because the source of its regimen lies in the Incarnation and Passion of the Son of God, acts the virtue of which consists in God’s supreme government of the world, in His absolute lordship over it as Creator and Redeemer. All authority in it descends from Christ, “as the Apostle and High Priest” by this divine appointment, from whose Person the apostolate and priesthood are transmitted to those whom He sends, in like manner as He Himself was sent by His Father.

4. Again, it is not of this world because its subjects are produced as so many copies of this divine original; it is the only kingdom in which the people proceeds out of the King as much as the regimen by which it is ruled. He is strictly the Father whom His children imitate so far as they are His children; in Him Fathership and Kingship are identical.

5. Again, it is not of this world because its sacraments bestow grace, a gift of God coming down upon the world, in it, but not of it; the fountain-head of the gift being that God has taken the flesh of Adam and borne the sin of Adam, and therefore, through seven sacramental streams, dispenses the grace which heals the sin, as it affects the whole life of man as the offspring of Adam.

6. Again, it is not of this world in the perpetual witness which it bears to the truth, in which witness specially our Lord declares that His sovereignty lies. If this witness had closed with His death, that would have been the triumph of falsehood. And those who allege that truth has been corrupted in His kingdom do, in fact, declare with the same breath, though they often do not perceive the consequence, that His witness has ceased and failed. But truth, as the token and inheritance of His kingdom, depends, like grace, upon a divine gift attached to His Person, and transmitted through the order of His kingdom’s regimen.[25]

7. Furthermore, it is a kingdom because of the complete analogy with that civil government which makes a temporal kingdom. It has jurisdiction for jurisdiction, and a graduated hierarchy of officers descending more directly from the head than exists in any temporal monarchy. And what the multifold arts and sciences which embellish natural life are to any of these kingdoms, that the divine inheritance of teaching Christian truth, in its bearings upon the acts and thoughts and philosophy of mankind, is with a much higher degree of perfection in the Christian kingdom.

8. And if man has naturally need to live in society, if to do so is a fulfilment of God’s purpose in creating him a race, much more has he this need of the supernatural society; and in so living he fulfils the purpose of God in so much higher a degree as Christ exceeds Adam. All the sacraments fulfil this purpose according to the needs of human life, by incorporating him with a divine order; most of all the divinest of them, in which the King appears for ever in the act of His Priesthood, dispensing bread to His people. And here again this spiritual nourishment, whereby His people live in society, testifies that the kingdom is not of this world.

9. Nor is it to be forgotten that the kingdom thus far described generated for itself a law, not confined, like the law of any earthly kingdom, to a particular time or place, but universal as itself, defining and arranging the various relations by which it subsists, that is, the whole order of the internal Christian life and the external Christian society. The power of the Legislator who is seated in this empire nowhere is shown more manifestly than in the great and uniform fabric of Christian law which He has caused to proceed out of it, and which, made for the rule of a Christian people gathered out of all the tribes of the earth, contains in it, drawn out and applied, all the principles needed to provide a mirror of justice and equity for the nations of the earth in their intercourse with each other.

10. Most striking is this witness to the truth that it is not of this world in the essential and inherent independence of the civil government which the kingdom possesses as to its end, as to its regimen, as to the production of its people, as to its sacraments, as to its maintenance of the truth committed to it, and as to its Canon Law. With regard to all these it is in the midst of these governments, but it is not of them. No one of these things can their mechanism produce, while the divine kingdom consists in the exercise of them all within the limits of these various kingdoms, with or without their concurrence, but never with any originating power in temporal rule as to any of them.

11. And this leads to two of the most striking differences between the Temporal and the Spiritual Power. Every temporal kingdom is limited in space. The proudest and most imperial which has yet existed, that great Roman empire of which Christ was a subject, and in the bosom of which His greater kingdom arose, how small a portion of the earth’s surface did it cover! Not so the Kingdom of Truth. It is in place, but not local; it runs through all the kingdoms of the world, grasping them, not grasped by them. By the token of ubiquity it is in them, but not of them; and if it be retorted that this attribute has but imperfectly been fulfilled in fact, I reply that it has been sufficiently fulfilled to mark to all eyes that it is a token of the one kingdom, fulfilled more and more, and advancing to greater fulfilment; besides that I am here considering the divine kingdom in its conception, in its idea.

12. And still more than in place is the Temporal Power limited in time. Immortal in the institution itself, so far as the human race is immortal, it is subject to decline and death in numberless individual applications. If man is likened to a flower in duration, many a kingdom lasts not so long as a tree. All change in the character of their government, passing from the one to the few, from the few to the many, or again reabsorbed from the many to one. The succession of human governments is likened to the sea in its changes, whose turbulent waves image forth the fluctuations of empires. Where is the government that has remained one and the same but that concerning which Christ said, “Feed my sheep;” “I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven;” “Confirm thy brethren;” “Thou art the Rock on which I will build my Church”? By its domination over time and space the kingdom of the truth shows that it is in but not of the world.

13. There is yet one more quality, as distinctive and as peculiar as any which we have yet passed in review. It is the kingdom not only of the truth, but of Charity. Not that within it there have not been innumerable scandals; not that within it sin has not ever been fighting with grace; but that the whole kingdom is compacted and held together by a divine charity, and has in it as a common possession the treasure of the merits of Jesus Christ. “The king is one with the kingdom, because He bears its sins; the kingdom is one with the King, because it bears His cross.”[26] This is an interchange of charity which goes on for ever. It is an effect of this bond that no virtue and no suffering in it is lost. The whole kingdom, from the beginning to the end, makes up “that which is wanting of the sufferings of Christ.” There is no such bond of unity, no such fruit of communion, in any temporal kingdom comparable to this. I suppose that patriotism in the natural society corresponds to the charity engendered in the supernatural kingdom; and patriotism is limited to the temporal objects of the particular society; charity extends to the eternal interests of the kingdom without end.

3.—Relation of the Two Powers to each other.

In the treatment hitherto pursued we have divided the consideration of the two Powers into the period before Christ and the period which ensues upon His coming.

In the period before Christ we have found that both Powers were originally of divine institution in the beginning of man, and that both belonged to him as a race. Civil government began with the family; worship, and with it priesthood, began also with the family; both were united in the head of the race; both were instituted for the good of man as he lived in society. Their subject was the same—man—the secular Power treating him in his relation to his natural end, its object being to provide all things which concerned the temporal prosperity of his life; the Spiritual Power treating him in relation to his supernatural or last end, its object being to provide whatever concerned his eternal state after this life. And their relative importance was determined by their end, with regard to which the temporal life was subject to the future life. No fact was more strikingly illustrated by the whole history than this; for three times the condition of the whole race upon the earth was affected by its conduct in regard to the last end, which belongs to the Spiritual Power. Once, and at a stroke, the whole race fell in its first sire from its state of original justice, and from the happiness which depended on the preservation of that state, by disregard of the end for which it was created. A second time the whole race, with the exception of one family, because disobedience to God became universal, fell in like manner, and was destroyed. A third time the lapse proceeded to the corruption of the idea of God Himself; the unity and brotherhood of the race was broken up in consequence; it divided into nations at enmity with each other, and man, from being a family of brethren, became the bitterest foe of his fellow-man, inventing war, and slavery as its result, and inflicting on himself worse evils than those which came to him from any external cause. By the same lapse the Spiritual Power was specially affected. The unity of the priesthood was destroyed with belief in the unity of the Godhead; the truth which it was intended to attest and carry on, that is, the sense of man’s guilt and the promise of his restoration, was overclouded; the sacrifice which it was intended to offer to the one God was offered to a multitude of false gods; the rites which accompanied the sacrifice and the prayers which explained its meaning lost their force. The corruption of religion entailed with it a terrible descent in the moral character of its ministers. In this state it may be said that the Spiritual Power was so far fallen from its original purpose, that it had almost ceased to have relation to the supernatural end of man. In every country it continued to be, it is true, in amity with the civil government, but at the price of absolute subjection at last. The truth which should have guarded it was all but lost, and the honour which belonged to it was seized by the civil ruler as a decoration of his crown.

In the period which ensued upon the coming of Christ we have found a new basis given to the Spiritual Power. As it lay through all Gentilism with its truth corrupted, its power appended to the State, its offices stripped of all moral meaning, it needed to be renewed from its very source. A foul pantheon of male and female deities, differing as to names and functions with every country, could generate no priesthood. Such generation was the work of the Most High God, and for it He sent His Son. The nation which He had built up to form the Altar, the Chair, the Throne of His Son refused, through the worldliness of its rulers, to discharge its office. Yet in its despite He sent forth the law from Sion, where the act of His Son’s high priesthood was effected by the very sin of His people; and henceforth we find the Spiritual Power a derivation from the Person of Christ as the Incarnate God in His work of redemption. We have seen it one and indivisible in its essence, triple in its direction or modality; in its Priesthood representing the Son; in its Teaching of the truth, the Holy Spirit; in the Spiritual Royalty, from which Priesthood and Teaching both proceed, and which both exercise, the Father, the source of the Godhead; thus rendering an image, perfect so far as the weakness of created things allows, of the Divine Trinity in Unity, according to the prayer offered for it by our Lord in His Passion: “They are not of the world, as I am not of the world: as Thou hast sent me into the world, I also have sent them into the world; that they all may be one, as Thou, Father, art in me, and I in them, that they also may be one in us.”

It is, then, out of the union of the divine and human natures in Christ, in virtue of His Passion, and from His Person when He rose from the dead, that the Spiritual Power is drawn. The Spiritual Power itself makes its subjects; and thus the Father of the future age creates His people from Himself, as of old time and in figure of Himself He made the race out of Adam. Thus, as regards Gentilism, He formed anew the priesthood to replace that original priesthood which had so fallen from its duties, so corrupted its witness, so lost its honour. The act in view to which that original priesthood was set up being accomplished, He resumed its power, for the symbolical sacrifice became useless so soon as the real sacrifice was offered. As regards Judaism, he fulfilled the purpose for which it had been created, offering Himself as the Paschal Lamb in the midst of it; and by His resurrection He caused the prophet-nation to subserve for the generation of an universal kingdom of truth, whose power lay henceforth in Himself.

This is the condition of things established by Christ, and all that we have further to say as to the relation between the Two Powers is a deduction from it.

1. And, first, it is clear that all Christians are subject to the Spiritual Power. This subjection rests upon the same ground as subjection to Christ Himself, for the power represents Him. As regards any individual Christian this will hardly be contested. But it is equally true of all corporate bodies, whether small or great. This obligation touches us strictly the mightiest kingdom, if it be Christian, as the humblest private person. There is nothing in the quality of numbers or of temporal sovereignty which exempts from obedience to the law of Christ those who acknowledge Him for their King; and the King’s government is as the King Himself. Of course it is only so far as the spiritual domain extends—that is, over the things which belong to the Priesthood, the Teaching, and that Spiritual Jurisdiction which makes their Royalty—that the obligation of obedience extends.

2. Secondly, all Christians are subject likewise, as all men in general, to the Temporal Power, in the respective country in which they live, so far as the domain of that Temporal Power extends, which even more than the Spiritual has its limits. The Spiritual Power has itself laid down in absolute terms the obligation of this obedience and the ground on which it rests. “Let every soul be subject to higher powers, for there is no power but from God, and the powers which are have been ordained by God. So that he who resists the power, resists the ordinance of God, and they that resist purchase to themselves condemnation, for the power is God’s minister to thee for good.” And again, “Be subject to every human creature for God’s sake, whether it be to the king as excelling, or to governors as sent by him for the punishment of evil-doers, and for the praise of the good; for so is the will of God.” This may be termed the comment of the two chief apostles, Peter and Paul, upon the words of their Lord, “Render to Cæsar the things which are Cæsar’s,” which is followed by the limitation, “and to God the things which are God’s.” Temporal government is herein declared to be the vicegerent of God; to have been such from the beginning of the world; to continue to be such to the end of it. The statement that authority, as such, is the minister of God to man for good applies, of course, not to any particular form of temporal government, as emperor, king, or republic, in which the government is administered in the persons of many or few, and in various degrees of delegation, but to temporal government in itself, in the principle of its authority. And being spoken by the highest Christian authority in regard of what was actually a heathen government, it manifestly belongs not only to Christians under Christian governments but to the subjects of civil power in all times and conditions of things. And, further, it is remarkable that our Lord and His apostles, who so strongly recognise civil government as the ordinance of God, “as the minister of God for good,” themselves suffered the loss of their lives in obedience to it, by an unrighteous judgment.

We have, then, the two Powers set forth as two Vicegerences of God, in the government of His human world: the temporal Vicegerency belonging to each sovereignty for the country which it rules, so far as the sphere of that sovereignty extends; the Spiritual Vicegerency belonging to His one spiritual kingdom in all times and places in the sphere of its sovereignty.

3. Here we are in presence of two societies, the authority in each of which is a divine Vicegerency, whose subject is the same man, whether individual or collective. The one is the minister of God for good to man in all his natural relations in every country; the other is the very authority of the Incarnate God Himself, unlimited as to time and place, over the same man in all his supernatural relations. Not only do both represent God, but both govern the same man. These two conditions fix what is the divinely intended relation between them. It cannot but be one of amity. As these powers existed in the beginning they were united even as to the person bearing them. The great sin of unfaithfulness to God in the race caused them to be placed in different bearers. Amid all the corruption which ensued, as to worship on the one hand, as to civil government on the other, the two Powers never ceased to be in amity with each other. For the basis of this amity is, in truth, a condition of human nature which never varies, being, in fact, the subjection of man’s natural life to his supernatural end. As long as man is sent into this world for the purpose of trial, to live in another world an endless life, the quality of which shall be determined by his conduct as a free moral agent in this life, so long the power which rules him in reference to the concerns of this life is bound to live in amity with the power which rules him as to the concerns of that future life. This, on the one hand, being the reason for amity in man himself; on the other hand, both Powers proceeding from the same God. must be intended by Him to work in harmony. He has no more made them rivals in the government of His moral world, than He has made the sun and moon rivals in the physical enlightenment of the earth, and the government of its motions.

To illustrate further the necessity of amity between the two Powers for the good of man’s life, let us consider three other relations which have been conceived as possible to exist.

4. A separate action of the two Powers in their respective spheres, that is, a complete division between Church and State, has been imagined by some as feasible and desirable. But with regard to this it must be observed that the two Powers rule over one human commonwealth, whether that be viewed as existing within the limit of any particular state, or as spread over the whole world. Again, that they rule conjointly over both soul and body. For, if we use accurate language, it is not as if the Church ruled over the soul, and the State over the body. It is, indeed, true that, in order to bring home the relative importance of the two ends pursued by the two Powers, this illustration has been constantly used, by the Fathers first, and by other writers afterwards; but it is only an illustration, not an accurate statement of a real relation. They rule, in fact, over both soul and body, but in different relations; the State over soul and body as to their natural end, the Church over soul and body as to their supernatural end. The State’s rule is over all those things which are ordered for the tranquillity and stability of human society; the Church’s rule is over all those things which concern the salvation of souls, all those things which fall under the domain of her priesthood, her teaching, and her jurisdiction. It is obvious that both these classes of things belong both to soul and body. How, for instance, can rule over the soul be denied to the State if it can demand of its subjects, for the defence of country, the sacrifice of life, in which the condition of the soul as well as that of the body is involved? How can rule over the body be denied to the Church, when the body enters into every act of worship and receives the sacraments?—when the inward belief requires to be testified by word and deed, in order to confess Christ before men?

The Temporal Power, therefore, rules over all temporal matters, that is, those which concern natural right and man’s natural end; the Spiritual Power rules over spiritual things, those which concern man’s supernatural end. Can the former perform rightly the duties which belong to it without considering the rights appertaining to the latter?

To answer this question, let us take the case of the individual man. Is it possible for a man rightly to perform his duties to the State without consideration of his duties to God? As we have before seen, all the duties of man in life are subject to his supernatural end. Every particle of natural right rests upon the authority of God the Creator; and if God has created man for a supernatural end, to discharge the civil duties of life without regard to that end is simple impiety. It is plain that, according to the intention of God, every part of man’s natural life has been ordered with a view to the end of his supernatural life.

But in this the case of the individual in no respect differs from the case of the collective mass. The State has been created with a view to the ultimate end of man as much as the individual. In fact, the cause of its creation was to establish an order in human things which should help man continually to attain that end. It was not created for itself. The society of man in this life is not the ultimate fact. Once more; the Fall, the Deluge, and the Dispersion have uttered three voices upon that truth which can never be silenced, which have echoed through the whole world and touch all human nature. The State, then, as much as the individual, must perform all which it is intended to perform in the government of man, in obedience to the principle that man’s present life is ordered with a view to his future life.

To apply this more particularly, it means that the State, in its administration of all temporal things, is bound incessantly to have regard to the free exercise by the Spiritual Power of its authority over spiritual things. It must allow that power to administer the whole work of the priesthood, and the whole work of the teaching, with that liberty of internal government which constitutes its jurisdiction, the seat of its royalty. It is not the place here to enumerate in detail how much that involves. It is enough to say that the ordinary action of the State and the ordinary action of the Church run daily into each other, as being concerned with the same man and the same society of men; and accordingly, that the allowing such a liberty to the Church by the State carries with it great consideration and regard for the Church by the State. But such a consideration and regard are quite incompatible with separate action of the two Powers in their respective spheres. An instance in point would be the State compelling a subject, who is a minister of the Church, to become a soldier. It is a purely natural right of the State to require the service of the subject for such a purpose. It is a purely spiritual right of the Church to have the use of her ministers for her own work. The use of the former right without consideration of the latter would constitute a separate action of the State in its sphere. But it would be at the same time an act of the utmost hostility on the part of the State to the Church. And other instances of the same kind present themselves through the whole domain of things which, in themselves, are purely temporal or purely spiritual. Besides these there is the class of mixed things, and, as one of them, let us take education.

Education, so far as it embraces instruction in the several arts and sciences which subserve man’s natural life, belongs to the domain of the State; so far as it embraces the formation of the spiritual character in man, which includes instruction in religion, and that not only as it concerns dogma, but also philosophy and science, belongs to the domain of the Church. If the State exercises its natural right over education with regard to the former, without allowing the supernatural right of the Church over the latter, which in itself would be no more than a separate action in its own sphere, it would constitute, at the same time, a complete infringement of the Church’s rights in her spiritual power of teaching and jurisdiction.

This is enough to show that the separate action of the two Powers in their respective spheres leads to the disjunction of man’s natural life from his supernatural end. This was not the intention of God in creating the two Powers, and placing man’s life under their joint government.

5. Another relation between the two Powers which may be conceived, is that of hostility upon the part of the State to the Church. This cannot be reciprocal. The Church can indeed and must resist, with her own weapons, unlawful aggression against the exercise of her rights in administering the “things of God,” but she cannot war against the State as such, because it is in her sight “the minister of God.” The hostility of the State which invades the Church’s exercise of her Priesthood, Teaching, and Jurisdiction constitutes persecution. There are many degrees of this. A heathen State may aim at the complete destruction of the Christian Church within its borders, as at times the Roman emperors did. A Christian State may also vex and hamper with every form of impediment the exercise of the Church’s powers. A State which has been Christian, becoming heretical or apostate, may assault the Church with a hatred, combined with deceit, which shall surpass the malignity of the Roman State of old or the heathen State at any time. In the course of centuries every degree of persecution has been exercised by the State, heathen, Christian, heretical, or apostate, against the Church, by the permission of the divine Providence; but no one will pretend to say that such a relation as hostility on the part of the State, and of suffering on the part of the Church, is the normal relation intended by God in the establishment of the two Powers. On the contrary, the States which persecute the Church, while they fulfil the divine purpose for its trial and purification, incur punishment in many ways for their crime against God in assaulting His kingdom, and, if they persevere, have been and are to be rooted up and destroyed.

6. In contrast to such relation between the two Powers, let us look for a moment at the divine Idea as it is thrown out in strong projection upon the background of ages. We have human government founded indeed by God at and with the commencement of the race, and continued by the strong sanction of His power ever since, through the dispersion, through the various races of men, one rising and another falling; human government possessed in common by a vast number of sovereignties, great and small, particular in place, with changing constitutions, everything about them, the people who bear them, the boundaries within which they flourish, the laws by which they are administered, shifting and transitory: no one of these sovereignties having a claim to say that it was founded by God, inasmuch as they all spring out of a long series of conquests and changes which succeed after the original patriarchal rule. These are distinctively the kingdoms of men, and in them is fulfilled, with a little longer range, what the poet says of each human generation—

“Like leaves on trees the race of man is found;”

the only thing about them which is not shifting and not transitory is the one thing which is of divine appointment, government itself. And in the midst of these nations, borne upon them, and shaken indeed, but imperturbable amid their fluctuations, behold the one government founded immediately by Christ in St. Peter, as no other sovereignty has been founded; in St. Peter, made by express language His Viceregent. Here is one sovereignty, universal in time and place, with no changing constitution, after the fashion of its human shadows, which are a royalty one day, a democracy another day, an empire a third, but one and the same for ever. Here is the kingdom of Christ.

But that which rules the relation of the one kingdom and the many kingdoms to each other, is the end for which they are constructed: human government, the one abiding because divine element in the many kingdoms, exists for the peace, the order, and the prosperity of man’s life on earth. But this, its highest end, is subject, like all the natural goods of man, to a higher end, the eternal beatitude of man. In the last resort temporal government itself was originally founded and actually exists only for this purpose. But the one kingdom of Christ is directed immediately to this very purpose. Because there is an inseparable relation of all earthly things to that highest end, therefore each of these temporal kingdoms and the one spiritual kingdom have a bond between them which cannot be broken. If it were not for this, their range is so apart from each other, their powers so independent of each other, that they would speedily part company. The strong hand of God has joined them to draw together the chariot of human government by the yoke of the last end.

How entirely independent in themselves are their constituent parts! On the one hand, earthly might, grounded indeed in right but ruling by force, cemented by riches, carrying the sword of life and death in its hands, exulting in all the vast accumulation of human arts and sciences, the work of civilised man through long ages; on the other hand, a royal priesthood, with a divine truth, carried through the ages by an order of men generated spiritually in virtue of the consecration once given by the hands of Christ to Peter and his brethren. The temporal government marked by wealth and force; the spiritual by poverty and weakness. Yet both reign over the soul and body of man individual and collective. These powers are both ordained by God; can they be also ordained with co-ordination?

The following passage of St. Thomas[27] leads, I think, to a full answer to this question:—

“As the life by which men live well here on earth is as means to the end of that blessed life which we hope for in heaven, so whatever particular goods are obtained by man’s agency, as, for instance, riches, profits of trade, health, eloquence, or learning, have for their end the good of the mass. If then, as we have before shown, the person charged with the care of the last end ought to be the superior of those who are charged with means to an end, and to direct them by his authority, it is evident from what we have said that, just as the king ought to be subject to that domain and regimen which is administered by the office of the priesthood, so he ought to preside over all human offices and regulate them by his supreme authority. Now whoever has the duty of doing anything which stands to another thing as means to an end, is bound to see that his work is suitable to that end; so the armourer furbishes his sword for fighting, and the builder arranges his house to be lived in. Since, then, the beatitude of heaven is the end of that life by which we live at present virtuously, the king’s office requires him to promote such a life in his people as is suitable for the attainment of blessedness in heaven, by ordaining what tends thither, and by forbidding, so far as is possible, the contrary.”

The king will here stand for whoever has sovereign authority. That sovereign authority therefore is itself subject to the law of God through all its exercise. The bearer of that law of God is the Spiritual Power which stands over against all sovereigns, in all countries, with the commission placed expressly in its hands by Christ. So far, therefore, as the law of God is concerned, which is precisely the same for the individual and the multitude, the sovereign is in every country subject to it, and the more stringently because, in the words of St. Thomas, he presides over all human offices. These by their nature are subject to the superhuman office.

This is the indirect Power over temporal things possessed by the Royal Priesthood which has been instituted by Christ. The indirect Power rests simply on the supernatural end of man, and cannot be denied without the denial of that supernatural end. And on account of this end the relation between the two Powers cannot be one of co-ordination, and must be one of subordination.

Nothing can be further removed from the confusion of the two Powers, or from the absorption of the one by the other, than this Idea of their relation. For it is a purely spiritual power which belongs to the priesthood: any power which it exerts over temporal things is indirect, based simply upon the subjection of those temporal things to the bearer of the divine law; and therefore this indirect Power extends over all temporal things without exception, but over all only so far as they concern the last end of human life.

The sum is this. God is the one Creator, Designer, and Ruler of the order of Nature and the order of Grace, and in both has one end in view, the glorification of Himself by His creatures; which glorification in beings possessed of reason can only consist in the knowledge and love of His infinite perfections.

There is no power on earth of man over man but that which is derived from God, either mediately or immediately; and therefore every power is, strictly speaking, vicarious, a portion of His lordship over the human race, committed to man, and subject to the end of His glorification by His creature: in which is comprehended the ultimate happiness of that creature; since that happiness is itself the exercise of his mind and his will in knowing and loving his Creator, so that God’s honour is the creature’s bliss.

But, further, the order of nature was in its origin united with the order of grace, and subordinated to it. The intervention of the Fall did not dissolve this subordination. The long ages of the Revolt only led up to the Restoration, which was prophesied at the moment of the Revolt, and intended even before it. Thus the Power divinely instituted to carry on the human race—the Power of civil government—the power which represents God in the order of nature, is yet subordinated by Him to the power which He Himself has instituted in the order of Grace.

This second Power at the time of the Restoration springs directly from the Person of the Son; who as He was sent by the Father, so sent His apostles; but He conveyed that power especially to Peter and his heirs in the fulness of a royal priesthood which teaches His faith for ever; so that no power on earth exists so directly instituted by God, and so manifestly vicarious of God’s own power, as that of Peter, viewed in himself and in his heirs; and given with the express promise that all the power of the enemy shall not prevail against it.

In all this God, who cannot be at variance with Himself, made the two Powers to help each other, conferring upon each distinct offices, which concern respectively the natural and the supernatural life of man, but likewise subordinating the natural to the supernatural end in the person and race of the Second Adam, as He had subordinated it in the person of the First Adam.

One of the greatest saints and rulers, who shines in the firmament of the Church with almost unparalleled lustre, has expressed this union under the image of a human body, seeing the natural light by two eyes, but directed by one mind, the mind of Christ. He is the one Head of the two Powers, ruling in temporal sovereignty by the hand of kings, in spiritual by the Priesthood which He has inaugurated. If we imagine the one mind of the God-man thus ruling the Christendom which He has made out of Himself by the two eyes of the kingdom and the priesthood, we reach the divine ideal of the relation between the two Powers. Thus St. Gregory VII. observes in his letter to Rodolph, Duke of Suabia, A.D. 1073:[28] “The sovereign reigns most gloriously, and the Church’s vigour is strengthened, when priesthood and empire are joined in the unity of concord. There should be no fiction, no dross, in that concord. Let us then confer together, for as the human body is directed in the natural light by two eyes, so when these two dignities are united in the harmony of pure religion, the body of the Church is shown to be ruled and enlightened with spiritual light. Let us give our best attention to these matters, so that when you have well entered into what is our wish, if you approve of our reasons as just, you may agree with us. But if you would add or subtract anything from the line of conduct which we have marked out, we shall be ready, if God permit, to consent to your counsels.” The words “if God permit” indicate very gently that subordination, grounded upon the pre-eminence of the divine law, and the divine Ruler who upbears it, which, in case of difference, the natural must yield to the supernatural authority. There is the fullest recognition that to temporal sovereignty all things belong which concern natural right. In these few words I think that St. Gregory VII. has summed up the settled view, policy, and practice of all his predecessors and of all his successors upon the relation between the two Powers, and the importance of their agreement for the good of human society. Never has any one of them denied to human sovereignty the exercise of all those rights which belong to natural law. Never has any one of them failed to maintain that all things which belong to natural law are subordinate to those things which touch the salvation of man, and accordingly that when the two orders of things come into conflict, the natural must yield to the supernatural. It is obvious to add how many mixed things there must be, which enter into both domains, and the treatment of which will affect the harmony between the two Powers.

From all the above it results that the denial of the supernatural end in man, individual or collective, constitutes that which is the complete heathenism. In proportion as the bearers of the Temporal Power have more or less approached this heathenism has their opposition to the Spiritual Power been more or less intense; in proportion as they have acknowledged and acted with a due regard to the supernatural end, they have also acknowledged the Spiritual Power and acted in harmony with it.

The perfect ideal relation between the two Powers has been expressed by the term of marriage, in which Christ, the celestial Bridegroom in the Spiritual Power, espouses the temporal order. This image is in remarkable accordance with the origin of the race, and with the prefiguration of Christ in Adam. It is as if the divine order at the Fall fell into the background, and in its slumber the human was taken out of it. But when the human race awoke in the new Adam, the divine order greeted the human as bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh, and wooed it to rule the world with it in the stable union of wedlock. This image at least may serve to indicate the various relations which have hitherto existed between the two Powers. It is itself the ideal relation intended by God. Then, as a matter of fact, during the first three centuries the Church, with her divine claims, turns to the Temporal Power inviting it to an alliance. This is the Church’s relation to the heathen State, as it were the time of wooing. Next the Temporal Power accepted this invitation and united itself with the Church, so that each preserving its own domain, they ruled the world together. That was the relation of the Church to the truly Catholic State, a marriage disturbed by no division and separation, when unity of faith preserved the marriage vow unbroken. Each then, indeed, might have misunderstandings, because the bearers of the two Powers, like husband and wife, are human beings; but since there was the stable will in both to preserve the marriage vow undefiled in Christ, such misunderstandings were easily overcome. Perhaps this expresses the whole medieval condition of things in this respect as accurately as can be done. Thirdly, the Temporal Power divorced itself from the Church’s faith, and from obedience to her in divine things; that is the state of broken wedlock. It has various decrees. First, the housewife divorces her husband and breaks the marital band: that in itself constitutes the apostate State. Secondly, she dissolves the marriage by entering into connection with another, to whom she gives power over the household, and with his aid oppresses the lawful husband: that is the position of the heretical State. Thirdly, the housewife will no longer tolerate the single rule of him who has alienated her from her husband; she is willing to have more than one temporary connection, and amongst the many perhaps the husband, if he will accept such terms: that is the position of the indifferent State. Thus we get from this image of marriage[29] an adequate measure of all the relations which have hitherto subsisted between Church and State.

But the purpose of the foregoing chapter has been to set forth the ideal relation between the two Powers intended by God in the Incarnation and the Passion of His Son, and springing out of the junction of these two mysteries of His love.

CHAPTER III.

THE ACTUAL RELATION BETWEEN CHURCH AND STATE FROM THE DAY OF PENTECOST TO CONSTANTINE.

Transmission of Spiritual Authority from the Person of Our Lord to Peter and the Apostles, as set forth in the New Testament.

The Spiritual Power rests for its origin, so far as all Christians are concerned, upon the transmission of spiritual authority from the Person of our Lord to Peter and the Apostles.

That transmission runs up as a fact by a living unbroken line of men to our Lord Himself. It subsists as a kingdom subsists. As the governments of England, or France, or Russia, or China, occupy a portion of the earth, and by that fact are recognised quite independently of any records which attest their rise and growth, so the far greater and more widely spread government of the Church exists, and is in full daily action, independently of any records which attest its origin. Day by day in the sacrament of Baptism it admits children into the Christian covenant; day by day upon myriads of altars, from the rising to the setting sun, it offers the unbloody sacrifice of the Body and Blood of Christ; day by day in unnumbered confessionals it exercises in binding and loosing the sacrament of Penance; day by day its priests teach, support, console, uphold, in ways which it would exhaust the power of language to describe, a multitude of its people. This is its vital force as a kingdom, which it has gone on exerting for eighteen hundred and fifty years without a moment’s suspension. This vital force does not proceed from any record which attests it: it is not stored up in any book, but in a divine presence resting on a living succession of men, which perpetuates itself—which, as a fact, goes on increasing in volume and in the effects which it produces from age to age.

Nevertheless, it is desirable to draw out as accurately as we can the account of the first transmission of that spiritual authority by which this kingdom exists, as we have it recorded for us in the writings of the New Testament. For this purpose I shall quote the terms which express it as given in each of the four Gospels and in the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles of St. Paul and in the Apocalypse.

First of all is the institution of that Priesthood which supports the whole spiritual superstructure, and from which, as the stem, all its branches spring. And this is seen to take place at a moment when our Lord’s Passion may be said to have begun—to be, as it were, the first act of it. The fullest record we have is that given by St. Paul in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, which runs thus: (1 Cor. xi. 23) “For I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you: the Lord Jesus, the same night in which He was betrayed, took bread, and giving thanks, broke, and said, Take ye, and eat: this is My Body which shall be delivered for you: this do for the commemoration of Me. In like manner also the chalice, after He had supped, saying, This chalice is the new testament in My Blood: this do ye, as often as ye shall drink, for the commemoration of Me.” The Apostle adds in His own words that this was an everlasting memorial of the Lord’s death, to continue until His second coming, and that it so contained the Lord’s Body and Blood that he who ate or drank unworthily was guilty of the Body and Blood of the Lord. “For as often as you shall eat this bread, and drink this chalice, you shall show the death of the Lord until He come. Therefore, whosoever shall eat this bread or drink the chalice of the Lord unworthily, shall be guilty of the Body and Blood of the Lord.”

St. Luke in the Gospel mentions the institution in terms similar to those of St. Paul, especially in that he uses in respect of the Body the sacrificial words, “Do or offer this in commemoration of Me,” which St. Paul uses of the chalice also, while St. Luke omits them. St. Matthew and St. Mark record it more briefly still, not giving the sacrificial words in either case; and St. John passes over the institution itself of the Blessed Sacrament, while he adds very largely to the record of what was said by our Lord on the eve of his Passion, and gives three whole chapters which might almost be considered as a comment upon that act of divine love. Indeed, the opening words, “I am the true Vine,” seem to point to the rite as having just been accomplished, and to give a divine interpretation of the graces stored up in it. On the whole, it must be said of these four accounts, even including that of St. Paul, that they are rather an allusion to a thing otherwise well known to those for whom it was written than a description of it. When St. Paul wrote, the Priesthood and the Sacrifice had been in daily operation for twenty-five or thirty years, and every Christian knew by the evidence of his senses the full detail, both as to Priesthood and to Sacrament, of that to which reference was made. This is a consideration which it is requisite to bear in mind. Nothing could be further removed from the truth than to suppose that we were intended to obtain our knowledge of what the Priesthood, the Divine Sacrifice, and the Blessed Sacrament were, merely or mainly from the record of them in the Gospel narrative. When this was first published in writing, they were institutions upon which the Church had been already founded; every detail of them was imprinted upon the heart of every Christian, associated with his daily life, and enshrined in his practice. To a heathen reading the Gospel, the words, “Do this in commemoration of Me,” might be an enigma; while to a Christian they carried the power of which his whole spiritual being was the growth.

The institution of the Blessed Sacrament and of the Priesthood which is to offer the Sacrifice is enacted by our Lord on the eve of His Passion before the Apostles collected together, as He is about to make the offering in commemorating which forever, until His final coming, the Priesthood consists. Thus the moment of the institution is so chosen as to connect it most intimately not only with His Person, but with that act of our Lord wherein He is our High Priest, and in reference to which His own words of institution carry so deep a significance. That which was given by our Lord to His Apostles, that which they were to receive themselves and give to others to the end of the world, was precisely that which was to be offered on the same day for the sin of the world, which is very exactly intimated in the tense used in the original; not a future but a present tense: “Take, eat: this is My Body which is being broken for you;” as if the action of His immolation had begun.

As the whole divine mission of our Lord is collected up in his Priesthood, and no less the whole power which He left to His Church, every circumstance of time, place, and occasion which belongs to its institution has to be noted, and this in particular, that it is bestowed before His death, and that it is the only power which is recorded to have been actually bestowed before it. Perhaps it would be more correct to say that His death is the crowning act of the eucharistic institution, and accompanies the institution, understanding in this sense the words of St. John, “Jesus knowing that His hour was come that He should pass out of this world to the Father, He loved them unto the end,” words by which he introduces the account of that last evening of our Lord’s life.

The basis of the whole structure being thus laid in the act which began our Lord’s Passion and commemorates it for ever, we proceed to the testimony of the several Gospels as to the investiture of the Church’s rulers which followed the Passion.

1. The words in which St. Matthew records the transmission of spiritual power from the Person of our Lord after His resurrection are the following:—“The eleven disciples went into Galilee, unto the mountain where Jesus had appointed them.... And Jesus came and spoke to them, saying, All power is given to Me in heaven and in earth. Go forth, therefore, and make disciples all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world.”

The power thus given, as recorded by St. Matthew, comes direct from Christ, as an outflowing of His all-power in heaven and on earth: it is an universal power, co-extensive with all the purposes for which the Church has been created, and enduring so long as the Church endures, through the accompanying presence of the Lord; and it is given to the Apostles collectively as to one body.

But St. Matthew, in a former part of his Gospel, had recorded a most remarkable and singular promise made to Peter, or rather a group of four promises forming one mass: the first, that he should be the Rock on which Christ would build His Church; the second, that against this the gates of hell should not prevail; the third, that Christ would give to him the keys of the kingdom of heaven; the fourth, that whatsoever he should bind on earth should be bound in heaven, and whatsoever he should loose on earth should be loosed in heaven. Matthew (xviii. 17, 18) had also recorded, a little later, a promise made to the Apostles collectively, in which our Lord, after referring to the Church as an authoritative tribunal for all His people, had added, “Amen, I say to you, whatsoever you shall bind upon earth shall be bound also in heaven, and whatsoever you shall loose upon earth shall be loosed also in heaven.” This promise then contained a part of the fourfold promise already made to Peter, with the limitation, however, not only that it was made to the Apostles conjointly, whereas it had been made to Peter singly, but also that it was detached from the other part of the promise so given to Peter. With respect to the first point, a power vested in a Body, with the condition that it be exercised by common consent, differs greatly from the same power vested in the Head of that Body, to be exercised by him singly. It differs, as far as the conception of aristocracy differs from the conception of monarchy. And the second point above noted, that the promise thus given to the Apostles is detached from the other parts of the promise which had been given to Peter, corroborates this distinction. The powers which indicate monarchy lie in those parts of the promise which were not given to the Apostles conjointly.

The whole testimony of Matthew, therefore, consists in the promise of powers which he records to have been made before the Resurrection, and in the giving of powers which he records to have been made after it.

2. The testimony of Mark is contained in the last six verses of his Gospel: “And He said to them (the eleven), Go ye into the whole world and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, but he that believeth not shall be condemned. And these signs shall follow them that believe: in My name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they shall drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay their hands upon the sick, and they shall recover. And the Lord Jesus, after He had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God. But they went forth and preached everywhere, the Lord working withal, and confirming the word with signs that followed.”

Here also the power comes direct from Christ; it is universal in its range and permanent in duration; it is given to the Apostolic Body, and St. Mark attaches to it the perpetual accompaniment of miraculous effects, which he connects with the session of our Lord at the right hand of God, as witnessing to the truth of the Apostolic mission; and not only so, but as further implying that so long as the session at the right hand of God continues, the divine effects which proceed from it shall continue also.

It is remarkable that St. Mark’s Gospel, which is the Gospel of Peter, set forth by his disciple at his instance, is the only one of the four which does not record either the promise or the conveyance of the special power bestowed upon Peter.

3. St. Luke’s record is this: Our Lord coming to the Apostles on the evening of His Resurrection bestows upon them His peace; convinces them that He has risen again; eats with them; illuminates their mind to understand the Scriptures and the need of His Passion. “And He said to them, Thus it is written, and thus it behoved Christ to suffer, and to rise again from the dead the third day; and that penance and remission of sins should be preached in His name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. And you are witnesses of these things. And behold I send the promise of my Father upon you; but stay you in the city until you be indued with power from on high. And He led them out as far as Bethania, and lifting up His hands, He blessed them. And it came to pass while He blessed them He departed from them and was carried up into heaven.”

Luke completes his account in the Acts, where he says our Lord “showed Himself alive, after His Passion, to the Apostles whom He had chosen by many proofs, for forty days appearing to them and speaking of the kingdom of God. And eating together with them He commanded them that they should not depart from Jerusalem, but should wait for the promise of the Father, which you have heard, saith He, by My mouth. For John indeed baptized with water, but you shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost not many days hence. They, therefore, who were come together asked Him, saying, Lord, wilt Thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel? But He said to them, It is not for you to know the times or moments which the Father hath put in His own power; but you shall receive the power of the Holy Ghost coming upon you, and you shall be witnesses unto Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and Samaria, and even to the uttermost part of the earth. And when He had said these things, while they looked on, He was raised up, and a cloud received Him out of their sight.”

The power thus promised as about to be bestowed in terms so concise and yet so simple, as “the promise of the Father sent down by the Son,” “the power from on high,” “the power of the Holy Ghost coming upon you,” is afterwards described in the events which took place on the Day of Pentecost, which therefore supplement or give their full meaning to St. Luke’s account of the transmission of spiritual authority. It is a power coming down on the Apostles in a Body direct from Christ—the power, in fact, which makes the Church to be what she is; it is a visible descent of that perpetual presence of the Holy Ghost within her which is her life, by which she is the kingdom of God on earth—a power universal and permanent.

It is given to the Apostolic College collectively, and there is no mention here of a special power given to Peter. But St. Luke in his account of the Last Supper introduces in a manner peculiar to himself a special prerogative promised by our Lord to Peter. To gather its whole force, it is necessary carefully to study the context in which it is found.

Immediately after his reference to the institution of the Lord’s Supper and the announcement that there was one among them who should betray his Lord, St. Luke writes: “And there was also a strife among them which of them should seem to be greater. And He said to them, The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and they that have power over them are called beneficent. But you not so; but he that is the greater among you, let him become as the younger, and he that is the leader, as he that serveth. For which is greater, he that sitteth at table or he that serveth? Is not he that sitteth at table? but I am in the midst of you as he that serveth. And you are they who have continued with Me in My temptations; and I dispose to you, as My Father has disposed to Me, a kingdom; that you may eat and drink at My table in My kingdom, and may sit upon thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel. And the Lord said, Simon, Simon, behold Satan has desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat. But I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not; and thou being once converted, confirm thy brethren. Who said to Him, Lord, I am ready to go with Thee both into prison and to death. And He said, I say to thee, Peter, the cock shall not crow this day till thou thrice deniest that thou knowest Me. And He said to them, When I sent you without purse and scrip and shoes, did you want anything? But they said, Nothing. Then said He unto them, But now, he that hath a purse let him take it, and likewise a scrip, and he that hath not, let him sell his coat and buy a sword. For I say unto you that this which is written must yet be fulfilled in Me, ‘And with the wicked was He reckoned.’ For the things concerning Me have an end. But they said, Lord, behold here are two swords. And He said to them, It is enough.”

We may judge of the importance of this conversation by the fact that the space given to it by St. Luke makes much more than half of his whole record, so far as the events are concerned which took place in the upper chamber, while it exceeds the whole record of those events given either by St. Matthew or St. Mark. In fact, it constitutes the main addition which St. Luke has made to the record of the first two Evangelists, and, viewed as that addition, it specially draws our notice to his reason for inserting it. The incident thus dwelt upon by St. Luke with so much detail is omitted not only by St. Matthew and St. Mark, but by St. John also. If we view the narrative of the Passion as a whole, given by the four Evangelists, it is as special a contribution to it by St. Luke as the conversation given by St. John.

And here, first, it may be again remarked, that our knowledge of the institution either of the Priesthood or of the Blessed Sacrament did not depend upon its record in the Gospels, because both were institutions of the divine kingdom carried into effect before the Gospels were published, and exhibited in the daily action of the Church. But our knowledge of a contest having arisen among the Apostles at the very time our Lord was speaking of one out of the Apostolic College itself who was to betray Him—a contest the subject of which regarded the person who should be the greater in that College—does depend upon the written record of it; and the selection of it to occupy so large a part in so short a narrative, as well as to form almost the whole addition which St. Luke was to contribute to the previous record of St. Matthew and St. Mark, shows that something was contained in it which was to be kept in perpetual remembrance among Christians.

First, then, our Lord does not put aside this contest, but proceeds to determine it. He draws the strongest contrast between heathen domination, such as it both was then and had been in past time, and Christian government, which as yet was not, but was to be. “The kings of the earth lord it over them, and they that have power over them are called beneficent. But you not so; but he that is the greater among you, let him become as the younger, and he that is the leader as he that serveth.” Thus “a greater” and “a leader” in the Apostolic College is pointed out as to be. But it is also pointed out that the type and example of this superior is our Lord Himself. It is the character of one who represents Him. “For which is greater, he that sitteth at table or he that serveth? Is not he that sitteth at table? But I am in the midst of you as he that serveth.” If the character of our Lord’s example is here pointed at on the one hand, on the other the greatness of the rule to be exercised is indicated. In both, in the character of the rule as being a service to those who are ruled, and as representing our Lord Himself, the application makes itself felt. The superior was to exercise not a domination which had become the mark of Gentile kings, but a service for the good of the governed such as Christ in all His ministry had shown. The words recorded by St. Luke bring back those recorded by St. John, which our Lord had uttered just before: “Know you what I have done to you? You call me Master and Lord, and you say well, for so I am. If then I, being your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that as I have done to you, so you do also.” If this had been all which St. Luke had recorded, the existence of a Superior in the Church after the pattern of Christ Himself might have been inferred as to come.

But our Lord then proceeds to speak positively of a kingdom which He was setting up, and of the place in it which the Apostles should hold: “And you are they who have continued with me in my temptations; and I dispose to you, as my Father hath disposed to me, a kingdom; that you may eat and drink at my table, in my kingdom, and may sit upon thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.” From these words we gather that in the kingdom thus announced there should be not only one Superior after the pattern of Christ—“the greater and the leader”—but the College of the twelve, sitting on thrones, and judging the whole people of God. The kingdom and its rulers are correlative and co-enduring. And is not the whole of the order of the Episcopate symbolised in these words, as well as the distinctive rank of the twelve Apostles? For do not they in their heirs carry on through the whole duration of the kingdom on earth the mysteries of that wonderful priesthood instituted at this moment, eating and drinking at His table in His kingdom, and judging His people in the tribunal which has reference to it?

This interpretation seems intimated in the words which follow, in which an attack is spoken of as to be made upon all the rulers of this kingdom; and not, as it would seem, a passing, but a continuing attack. “And the Lord said, Simon, Simon, behold Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat. But I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not; and thou, being once converted, confirm thy brethren.” He singles out one Apostle, and speaking of the whole Body in the plural as the object of the attack, declares that He has prayed for that one, that he may be able, at a future time, when he has been converted, to confirm his brethren. Peter, supposing that our Lord spoke of the actual moment, said to Him, “Lord, I am ready to go with Thee both into prison and to death. And He said, I say to thee, Peter, the cock shall not crow this day, till thou thrice deniest that thou knowest Me.”

Thus pointedly did our Lord exclude the time then present from that at which Peter should confirm his brethren; and the event showed that, so far from confirming them during the night of the Passion and the subsequent Crucifixion, his faith and his conduct conspicuously failed: while all deserted Him and fled, he denied Him.

But of what time, then, did our Lord speak? of what attack? of what confirmation to be rendered by Peter?

The words which follow seem to give an answer to these questions. “And He said to them, When I sent you without purse, and scrip, and shoes, did you want anything? But they said, Nothing. Then said He unto them, But now he that hath a purse, let him take it, and likewise a scrip, and he that hath not, let him sell his coat, and buy a sword. For I say to you, that this that is written must yet be fulfilled in Me, ‘And with the wicked was He reckoned.’ For the things concerning Me have an end. And they said, Lord, behold here are two swords. And He said to them, It is enough.”

What is this but that our Lord contrasts all the time of His ministry, when He was with them, their visible Master, Lord, and Comforter, when He sent them forth with instructions, after fulfilling which they were to return to Him, with another period—that in which the things concerning Him had an end: when He was to be taken from them: when they were to go forth in His power, but without the resource of His visible Headship and the comfort of His visible presence. That period is the whole time during which the apostolic ministry—the eating and drinking at His table, and the sitting on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel—continues. During all this time the attack of which our Lord spoke is going on: there is one who desires to have them that he may sift them as wheat: there is one also whose faith, in virtue of our Lord’s prayer, fails not, and who is appointed to “confirm his brethren.” Peter and the eleven, as individual men, passed away and went to their reward; but the kingdom of which our Lord was speaking, and which He disposed to them, did not pass, nor by consequence its rulers, neither those who were to be sifted as wheat, nor he who was to confirm his brethren. Thus during all that time which was to begin after His passion, death, and resurrection, when the kingdom was disposed to the Apostles, when the apostolic ministry was being carried on, and when the undying enmity of the great enemy was to be shown in the persistence of his attack, the chaff is burnt, the wheat is sifted, and the Confirmer, after having been converted, is in the midst of his brethren and performs his work.

Thus completely does our Lord answer the question of the strife which had arisen among the Apostles, and so great is the pertinence of the narrative thus introduced by St. Luke, so important its bearing upon all future history. If, then, these fifteen verses be considered in their whole context, not forgetting that they constitute the insertion of a totally new incident, in which consists mainly the addition made by St. Luke to the two points which are common to his own record and that of the first and second Evangelist, that is, the declaration of our Lord as to the disciple who should betray Him, and the institution of the Blessed Eucharist, it will appear that St. Luke distinguishes Peter from the other Apostles, and the power promised to him of confirming his brethren from the powers given to hint in common with them, no less markedly than St. Matthew and St. John, though in quite other language. And it must be added that, as his narrative in the Acts of what took place on the Day of Pentecost completes his statement in his Gospel concerning that “promise of the Father,” and “power of the Holy Ghost” coming down, with which the Apostles were to be endued; so his narrative, from the Day of Pentecost through eleven chapters of the Acts, to the end of the time during which he speaks of the whole College of the Apostles, their preaching and miracles, illustrates what is meant in his Gospel by the special office here promised to Peter of “confirming his brethren.” For Peter throughout appears at the head of the Apostles: his Primacy is exhibited in action from the first mention on the Day of Pentecost itself, as in the words, “Peter, standing up with the eleven, lifted up his voice and spoke to them;” while his supervision of the whole work, which comprises the first period of the Church’s history, while the Apostles acted in one country together and until they separated, is stated in the words, “Peter, as he went through, visiting all,” which indeed may be said to be a compendium of the whole narrative. And of him alone is it recorded that, when he was in prison, “prayer was made without ceasing by the Church unto God for him.”

This, then, is the testimony of St. Luke considered as a whole, contained partly in the Gospel, partly in the Acts, as to the transmission of spiritual power, and such is the very remarkable addition which he contributes to the narrative given by his predecessors, St. Matthew and St. Mark.

4. The testimony of St. John as to the transmission of spiritual power may be divided, as in the cases of St. Matthew and St. Luke, into the promises which he records as made before our Lord’s Passion and the fulfilment which he records as made after His resurrection.

The promises are contained in that same wondrous discourse of our Lord to His Apostles, of which St. Luke has preserved for us another portion in the passage just transcribed. They are given to the apostolic Body collectively, and, so far as they refer to this particular point, the transmission of spiritual power, are contained in the following verses:—

“Whatsoever you shall ask the Father in My name, that will I do: that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you shall ask Me anything in My name, that will I do.—And I will ask the Father, and He shall give you another Paraclete, that He may abide with you for ever: the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth Him not, nor knoweth Him: but you shall know Him, because He shall abide with you, and shall be in you. I will not leave you orphans: I will come to you.—These things have I spoken to you, abiding with you. But the Paraclete, the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring all things to your mind, whatsoever I shall have said to you. Peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, do I give unto you.—If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, you shall ask whatsoever you will, and it shall be done unto you.—You have not chosen Me: but I have chosen you; and have appointed you, that you should go, and should bring forth fruit: and your fruit should remain: that whatsoever you shall ask of the Father in My name, He may give it you.—I tell you the truth: it is expedient to you that I go: for if I go not, the Paraclete will not come to you: but if I go, I will send Him to you.—But when He, the Spirit of truth, is come, He will teach you all truth. For He shall not speak of Himself: but what things soever He shall hear, He shall speak, and the things that are to come He shall show you. He shall glorify Me: because He shall receive of Mine, and show it to you.—And in that day you shall not ask Me anything. Amen, amen, I say to you: if you ask the Father anything in My name, He will give it you.—Sanctify them in truth. Thy word is truth. As thou hast sent Me into the world, I also have sent them into the world.”

In these words our Lord foretells and promises the coming of the Paraclete to His Apostles, whom He would send to them from His Father, and the perpetual possession of truth which the Paraclete, by His presence, would confer upon them, and our Lord also says how He would bestow on them His own mission, received from the Father. There was the promise of a vast and manifold spiritual power involved in these things, which we do not attempt to draw out; but we pass to the record of St. John as to the bestowal of spiritual power made by our Lord on the eve of His resurrection to the assembled Apostles. A clear and striking connection and correspondence between the bestowal and the promise are here to be seen. An interval of three days only in time had taken place, but in it the passion and resurrection of our Lord had been accomplished.

“Now when it was late that same day, the first day of the week, and the doors were shut, where the disciples were gathered together for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in the midst, and said to them: Peace be to you. And when He had said this, He shewed them His hands and His side. The disciples therefore were glad when they saw the Lord. He said therefore to them again: Peace be to you. As the Father hath sent Me, I also send you. When He had said this, He breathed on them; and He said to them: Receive ye the Holy Ghost. Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them: and whose sins you shall retain, they are retained.”

In these few words, addressed to the Apostles together, our Lord would seem to have conveyed a power as universal and as direct from Himself as that contained in the corresponding passages of the three preceding Evangelists. Nothing could be wanting to that mission of which it is said, “As the Father hath sent Me, I also send you;” nothing to the fulness of the grace communicated by the Lord breathing on them, and saying, “Receive ye the Holy Ghost;” while the concluding words coincide exactly with the promise made to the Apostles in St. Matthew, that they should receive the power to forgive or to retain sins. In this interview with His Apostles on the evening of the day of His resurrection. He conveys to them the full apostolate in terms the simplicity of which is only equalled by their majesty.

Had the testimony of St. John stopped here, it would have seemed to give to the Apostles every attribute of power needed for their work. And it is to be noted that St. Peter was present with his brethren, St. Thomas alone being absent, and so, notwithstanding his recent fall, was included in that grant to the Apostolic College.

But St. John, in the last chapter of his Gospel, has added to it a record of that famous scene wherein our Lord bestowed on Peter singly a power as universal as that contained in the fourfold promise recorded by St. Matthew, a power also completely including the power given collectively to the Apostles in the four Evangelists. Indeed, we seem to hear the same voice sounding which said, “The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them, and they that have power over them are called beneficent. But you not so; but he that is the greater among you, let him become as the younger, and he that is the leader as he that serveth:” when the Lord said to Peter, “Simon, son of John, lovest thou Me more than these? Feed My lambs: be shepherd over My sheep; feed My sheep.” How else was it possible for Eternal Love to give so stupendous a charge and power in language so tender?

But considering that our Lord had already bestowed a mission on the Apostles collectively, which He likened to the mission received by Himself from the Father, what could these words mean save the universal pastorship of the flock of Christ? What more could Peter receive than the others, in answer to his greater love for his Master, except this?

The passages which we have now cited contain the whole account which we possess, as written in the Gospels, of the spiritual authority first promised, and then communicated by Christ to the Apostles and to Peter.

They comprehend two classes of passages, those which regard the Apostolic College collectively, and those which regard Peter singly. And this division is made the more remarkable by the fact that no power is either promised or conveyed to any Apostle distinctly from the rest except to Peter.

In estimating their relative force, on the one hand, the full meaning must be given to each of these classes; on the other, no interpretation can be admitted which puts one class into conflict with the other. That interpretation alone can be sound which binds them in one harmonious whole.

If we take the passages which we have above cited, and which are addressed to the Apostles collectively, that is, Matt. xxviii. 18 20, Mark xvi. 15-20, Luke xxiv. 46-49, with Acts i. 3-9, and the passages from our Lord’s last discourse in St. John together with John xx. 21-23, we find them to contain an universal supernatural power which is conveyed to a Body consisting of the Apostles, and which is co-extensive with the needs of that Body, and which lasts so long as the Body is to last. Moreover, the language used by each Evangelist is sufficient by itself, without reference to the others, to express the conveyance of this power, but at the same time the language of each several Evangelist corresponds to the meaning of the others.

If we take the passages addressed to Peter singly, that is, Matt. xvi. 17-19, Luke xxii. 31, 32, John xxi. 15-17, we find a power of Headship superadded to the former power which had been conveyed to the Apostles as a College. This Headship is conveyed in various expressions, such as the Rock on which the divine House is built, while to it the promise of perpetual stability is attached; the Keys, which indicate the supreme power in the divine Kingdom; the power to bind and to loose everything in heaven and earth, as given not to a collective Body, but to one singly, which distinction in the terms of the grant greatly enlarges the authority of the recipient by removing all restraint arising from common action; the Confirming the brethren in the divine Family; the Pastorship of the divine Flock. Each of these five things indicates sovereignty; together they express it with cumulative evidence: but each of these five things also indicates not collective sovereignty given to a college of men, but the sovereignty proper to a single person.

These passages in three several Evangelists addressed to Peter singly correspond to each other even more closely than the former class of passages corresponds to each other, and the power conveyed in them is a power more definitely marked than the power conveyed in the other.