Chapter XI: Christianity and Politics

W. J. H. CAMPION.

The aim of this essay is to investigate some of the relations of Christianity to human society, and to point out some of the main lines of influence which the Christian Church brings to bear on the organized centres of social life.

We are met at the outset by two widely-differing conceptions of the mode and direction in which Christianity acts as a regenerating influence on the life of mankind. On the one side, Christianity is identified with civilization, and the function of the Church is regarded as simply the gathering up, from age to age, of the higher aspirations of mankind: her call is to enter into, to sympathize with, and to perpetuate whatever is pure, noble, and of good report, in laws and institutions, in art, music, and poetry, in industry and commerce, as well as in the moral and religious usages and beliefs, of mankind. Christianity is thus not a higher order, standing over against and correcting a lower, but is itself the product or rather the natural outgrowth of the progressive moral consciousness of mankind. The value of this mode of thought is in emphasizing the sacredness of secular interests and duties, and in its protest against dividing the field of conscience, and assigning to the one part a greater sanctity than to the other. 'As our salvation depends as certainly upon our behaviour in things relating to civil life, as in things relating to the service of God, it follows that they are both equally matters of conscience and salvation[407].' Its weakness lies in its not sufficiently recognising one decisive fact of human nature, the fact of sin. No one, as it seems to us, looking at human nature, in himself or others, with clear, open, unprejudiced eyes, can doubt the existence of sin, its corrupting influence on the whole nature, and yet its fundamental unnaturalness. But if states and societies are as the individuals who compose them, then any theory of society must rest on a theory of man; and the theory of man is imperfect unless it recognises the fact of sin.

On the other hand, the recoil from secularism, or the overwhelming sense of the power and destructiveness of sin in the lives of men and of societies, leads others to draw sharp the distinction between things sacred and things secular. The order of things, it is said, of which the Incarnation is the starting-point, is admittedly higher than that secular order which existed before it, and which even now surrounds it as darkness encompasses light. Let us put on one side political life, local and national interests, all that sphere of mixed social relations, which is so imperfect, so full of fierce passions, of strife, envy, and ambition, so productive of distractions and entanglements. Let us concentrate our own thoughts on sin, and devote our own lives to its remedy. Let us at least keep our own hands clean, and use for our own discipline that narrower sphere which is sufficient. No doubt individuals will find their vocation in some such attitude as this: and for some it may be wise to abstain from political and social interests, in order thus to strengthen their influence in other directions. But we are not now considering the call of individual Christians, but the attitude of the Christian Church as a whole: and it would be easy to accumulate references to shew that the leading minds of Christendom have declined to recognise, except in cases of special vocation, as the duty of Christians, the abdication of responsibility for the problems, the entanglements, the more or less secular issues of the ordinary social life of mankind. Christianity, in the words of a modern writer, has both to deliver humanity from its limitations, and to bring it to a true knowledge of itself[408].

These two conceptions of the relation of the Christian society to the issues and interests of the life amid which it moves, correspond to two aspects of the Incarnation, which the deepest Christian thought holds in solution. On the one side, the human life of the Word of God may be regarded as a fulfilment, the restoration of an order, marred, indeed, and broken, but never completely lost, the binding together of all truth, all goodness, all beauty, into one perfect life; on the other, it is a reversal, the beginning of a new order, the undoing of a great wrong which has eaten deep into human nature, the lifting up of mankind out of the helpless slavery of sin into the freedom of righteousness. These two aspects of the Incarnation are not contradictory but complementary. However difficult it may be for us to find their unity in thought, they had their unity in a life.

In the same way, the problem with which Christianity has to deal in its relations to human society has two sides. It cannot hold itself aloof from the great currents and movements of that ever-flowing and ebbing human life, in which it shares, which it has to redeem, to purify, and to quicken. 'In the great sea of human society, part of it, yet distinguishable from it, is the stream of the existence of the Church[409].' And yet it has to maintain, as a debt it owes to future generations as well as the present, the purity of its own moral standard, the independence of its own deepest life.

To spiritualize life without ceasing to be spiritual, to maintain a high morality while at the same time inter-penetrating a non-Christian or very imperfectly Christianized society with its own moral habits and manners, is a task which presupposes great cohesion and tenacity on the part of the Christian Church. And it is for that reason that in speaking of the Church we shall have mainly in view that solid, highly articulated, permanent core of Christendom[410], which, however broken into fragments, and weakened by its own divisions, maintains a clearly-marked type, on the side of doctrine in its creeds and sacred writings, on the side of worship in its sacraments and traditional liturgies, on the side of organization in its ministry, as well as holding the life of Christ its standard of perfect living. Those Christian bodies which float, more or less closely knit together, around the central core of the Church, have often rendered great services in advancing on special points the standard of social and personal morality, and they are more flexible, and able rapidly to throw themselves into new crusades; but it may well be doubted if their work could have been done at all without the more rigid and stable body behind them, with its slow movements, but greater Catholicity of aim and sympathy; and certainly it would in the long run have been better done, if, like the great monastic bodies, they had remained as distinct organizations within the Church.

What, then, is the attitude of the Church towards human society, and especially towards human society as gathered up and concentrated in States? What duties does it recognise towards nations, towards human society as a whole?

I. There is a certain order of debated questions, on which it cannot be said that the Christian Church is pledged to one side or the other--she leaves them open. Individual Christians take one side or the other. The Christian society recognises that the differences are due to diversities of temperament and national character, and to the varying conditions under which human societies live, and therefore that they may be best left to human experience to solve.

In this class of questions would come the problem debated since the time of Herodotus, but to which no general answer is really possible, What is the best form of government? On this problem the Church is, so to speak, frankly opportunist. Here we may quote the view of S. Augustine, as stated in the _De Civitate Dei_[411]: 'The Heavenly City, in its wanderings on earth, summons its citizens from among all nations ... being itself indifferent to whatever differences there may be in the customs, laws, and institutions by which earthly peace is sought after or preserved, not rescinding or destroying any of them, but rather keeping and following after them as different means adopted by different races for obtaining the one common end of earthly peace, provided only they are no obstacle to the religion by which men are taught the worship of the one supreme and true God.' In the same spirit, in his dialogue _De libero Arbitrio_[412], he dwells on the mutable character of human law. That law is temporal, which, 'though just, may yet be justly changed from time to time,' i.e. as the conditions change. Thus, a Democracy is best adapted to a grave and temperate people, public-spirited and willing to make sacrifices for the common good; while it is better for a more corrupt, more easily flattered people, greedy of private gain, to be under an Aristocracy or a Monarchy. Or if we wish for a more modern statement of the traditional view of the Christian Church, we shall find it in an encyclical letter[413] of Leo XIII: 'The right of sovereignty in itself is not necessarily united with any particular form of government: it can rightly assume, now one form, now another, provided only that each of these forms does in very deed secure useful results and the common good.' It will be noticed that two qualifications are introduced, the one by S. Augustine, the other by Pope Leo, limiting their acceptance of all forms of government. It is possible for Christian citizens to take an active part in every _de facto_ government which (1) does not hinder the free and peaceable practice of the Christian religion, and (2) whose real aim is the common good, and which does, in fact, work for the advantage of its subjects. Not all governments, even in the nineteenth century, satisfy these tests.

In the same way, there have been the widest differences between Christian thinkers on the most important questions, in which autocratic and democratic leanings shew themselves, such, for instance, as that of the origin of sovereignty, i.e. of that rule of man over man, which is the foundation of civil society. The view indicated, though not worked out by S. Augustine[414], that the rule of man over man had its origin in the Fall, and was therefore part of the secondary, not the primary condition of mankind, is used by Gregory VII as a weapon of assault on the temporal power, by Bossuet as a safe ground on which to rest the duty of obedience to an absolute Monarchy. The other side is taken by S. Thomas Aquinas. He finds the origin of temporal rule in the social nature of man, accepting and making his own the Aristotelian account of man as by nature a being fitted for a common life. Thus, in a state of innocence, there would have been no slavery indeed, but government, with its recognition of the differences in ability and knowledge among men, and of the consequent duty incumbent on the wise and experienced of using their faculties for the common good. Political rule would thus be, not a consequence of sin, but a result of man's inherently social nature.

Differences such as these among those who equally start from fundamentally Christian presuppositions can only be taken to shew that we are wrong in supposing that the Christian Church is bound up with either of the two great political leanings which have appeared in civil communities in all ages of the world, and which have their ground in human nature itself. 'In every country of civilized man, acknowledging the rights of property, and by means of determined boundaries and common laws, united into one people or nation, the two antagonist powers or opposite interests of the State ... are those of permanence and of progression[415].' The Church recognises these diverse powers or interests as natural, and therefore accepts the fact of their existence, without identifying herself with either of them.

II. But it would surely be a mistake to suppose that because the Church is neutral on certain questions of Politics, that therefore she has no direct teaching to give on the vital questions which arise with regard to the organized common life of mankind. In the rebound from the minimizing views of the function of the State, which were associated in England with the Ricardian School of Economics and the philosophic Radicalism of J. S. Mill, men are ready to go all lengths in exalting the position of the State as the moral guide of social life. The tendency is to assign the whole sphere of public morals to the State, and 'private' morals to the individual, acting, if he pleases, under the guidance of one or other of the Christian bodies. However much we may welcome the freer recognition of corporate responsibility, and the nobler conception of the State as having a moral end; yet we cannot help perceiving that certain limitations are, as by a self-acting law, imposed on its moral influence.

(1) The State has been called the 'armed conscience of the community[416].' Looked at on the moral side, as a guide of the conscience of individuals, its arms are its defect. But that defect is not remediable: it is inevitable. For the State has to deal with various grades of character, responding to a vast complexity of motives, which may be roughly classified under three heads, those of duty, self-interest, fear of punishment. To some 'you ought' is a sufficient appeal, to others 'you had better,' while to a third class the only effective appeal is 'you must.' Now the State in order to perform its most elementary business, that of securing the conditions of an ordered and civilized life, has to deal first of all with those who are only susceptible of the lowest motive, the dread of punishment. And in dealing with them, it must of necessity use coercive force[417]. But the force-associations which thus grow up around all State-action weaken and enervate its appeal to the higher motives, those of duty and rational self-interest. The very suspicion of compulsion taints the act done from duty.

Again, there can be little doubt of the vast influence exercised on morals by human law and institutions. It is well known to those who are at all acquainted with the life of the poor in large towns, that in many cases conscience is mainly informed by positive law. But all that human law can do is to secure a minimum of morality[418]. No doubt it is true that indirectly positive law can do something more than this, because good citizens will abstain from all actions which, in however remote a degree, are likely to bring them into collision with the law. But in the main it is true to say that what law can secure is the observance on pain of punishment of a minimum moral standard, which itself shifts with the public opinion of society, rising as it rises, falling as it falls.

Certainly the State is sacred: it is 'of God': it is no necessary evil: but a noble organ of good living. But yet there are these natural limitations to the effective exercise of its functions, as a moral guide. Firstly, it has to use force, and, therefore, its appeal to the higher motive is weakened. Secondly, it can only secure a minimum of morality, shifting with the general morality of the community.

Now it is exactly at these points that the Church steps in to supplement the moral action of the State, not as one part supplements another part of a single whole, but rather as a higher supplements a lower order.

It is in its appeal to the higher motives that the State is weak: it is in its appeal to the higher motives that the Church is strong. If there have been times when the Church has allowed herself to claim or to assume temporal power, or without assuming it, to be so closely implicated with the secular authority that Church and State appeared to men as one body interested in and maintaining the existing order, if she has used the weapons of persecution, or handed men over to the secular arm, then has she so far weakened and loosened her own hold on the higher motives which move men to action. She may have become apparently more powerful, but it has always been at the cost, perhaps unperceived at the time, of some sacrifice of her own spirituality, and of the loftiness of that moral appeal in which her true strength lies. 'There is something in the very spirit of the Christian Church which revolts from the application of coercive force[419].'

And so, alongside of the moral minima of the secular law, the Christian Church maintains moral maxima, moral ideals, or rather a moral ideal, 'Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect[420].' 'Till we all come unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ[421].' It is not that the law is undervalued, or condemned, but that Christians are urged to bring their conduct under principles which will carry them far beyond the mere obedience to law. It is sufficient to quote from the Sermon on the Mount, 'Blessed are the meek.... Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.... I say unto you, that ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also[422].'

The law and institutions of a people rest upon and give expression to a group of moral principles and ideals: they are not the only realization of those principles and ideals, but one; art and literature would be others; further, they realize them mainly on the negative side, in the mode of prohibition. As that group of principles and ideals changes, they change, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. At first sight it seems as if there was no essential difference in this respect between the laws and institutions of a nation, and the manners and institutions of the Christian Church, except that the one gives a more positive and constructive expression to the moral standard of the time than the other. But there is this difference, that the Christian Church has its moral standard in the past, in the life of the Son of Man; it too recognises change, as age succeeds age, but the new duties are regarded not as new, but as newly brought forth out of an already existing treasure, as the completer manifestation under new conditions of the meaning of the life of Christ. On the threshold of Christian morality there lies that by which all its subsequent stages may be tested, and which is the measure of advance or retrogression. It is this permanent element, preceding the element of change and of development, in Christian morality, which gives it its authority as against the moral product of one nation or one age.

It is exactly this authority which has enabled the Church to appeal with such force to duty as precedent to right, and to love as higher than justice. We can best illustrate this steady appeal to higher motives by tracing the steps by which Christian teachers have brought out, one by one, the different aspects of the relations of governors and governed looked at in the light of Christian anthropology and Christian sociology. The first principles governing the attitude of individual Christians towards the various organizations of human society are laid down in the words of Christ, 'Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's[423].' The command, taken in connection with its context, involves two principles, first, the recognition of the claims of civil society, and, secondly, their limitation by a higher order of claims, where they come into conflict with the first. The passage in the Epistle to the Romans[424], in which S. Paul deals with the duties of Christians towards 'the powers that be,' is a commentary on his Master's teaching. It shews the connection of the first of these principles with the second, by tracing it back to its ground in the will of God. It brings it into relation to love, the central motive of the Christian character. Briefly summarized, the stages of S. Paul's argument are as follows: (1) he shews that all power is of Divine origin: 'there is no power but of God.' Thus those who wield secular power are ministers of God. (2) The administration of earthly rewards and punishments by the secular power makes for good, and for this reason God uses it in His governance of the world. Therefore temporal authority is to be obeyed 'not only for wrath, but also for conscience sake,' i.e. not merely to avoid earthly punishment, but as a duty. (3) This duty may be regarded as one application of the general maxim of justice, 'Render to all their dues.' But (4) all these scattered dues are to a Christian summed up under one vast debt, always in process of payment, but never completely paid. 'Owe no man anything, but to love one another.' 'Love is the fulfilling of the law.' These passages of the New Testament put in the clearest light the duty of obedience to civil authority. They lay down its theological ground in the derivation of all power from God; and its moral ground by shewing that such obedience is one form of justice, and justice itself one aspect of love. They thus give to the commands of those wielding authority in human society the firmest sanctions. If on the one side Christianity seems to set up conscience, as the guardian of the things of God, against positive law, it gives on the other a Divine sanction and consecration to the whole order of things connected with the State by shewing its ministerial relation to, its defined place and function in, God's ordering of the world.

This was the side of our Lord's saying which needed enforcing on the Christians of S. Paul's time. The civil authority was the Roman Empire with its overwhelming force and its almost entire externality to Christianity. The danger, then, was the spirit of passionate revolt against the secular power. Men who were filled with the new wine of the Spirit, who were turning the world upside down, found it hard to submit to the decrees of an alien power, wielded by heathen: they pleaded their Christian liberty; they could not understand that such a power was 'ordained of God.' The early Christian Fathers found it sufficient, even when the Roman Empire was gradually becoming Christian, to bring home to consciences the teaching of S. Paul. There was no need then to emphasize in words the other side of our Lord's saying. There was little danger of undue subservience to the civil power being regarded with anything but disapproval: the danger was of men not giving it the obedience which was its due. 'We honour the Emperor,' says Tertullian[425], 'so far as we may, and so far as honour is due to him, as the first after God ... as one who has only God for his superior.' 'If the Emperor demands tribute,' says Ambrose[426], 'we do not refuse it: the lands of the Church pay tribute; if the Emperor wishes for our lands, he has the power to take them--none of us will resist him ... we render to Caesar what is Caesar's.' S. Augustine, with his Stoical leaning and his Roman sense of order, was little inclined to encourage men to resist, in any case, established powers. 'What matters it under whose rule a man lives who is to die, provided only his rulers do not force him to do impious and unjust things[427]?' Only in one passage of S. Chrysostom[428], among the writers of the first four centuries, is a gloss given to S. Paul's words, 'There is no power but of God,' which distinguishes the delegation of power in general from God, and the delegation of power by God to any particular ruler, and so suggests the possibility of a _de facto_ ruler to whom obedience was not due.

But this attitude of the early Christian teachers was a very different thing from that attitude of the English Caroline divines, which gave so fatal a bent to the teaching of the English Church of the seventeenth century in the sphere which lies on the borderland of Theology and Politics. What the early Fathers taught their Christian followers was that it was their duty to obey in secular matters the powers lawfully set over them. What the English divines taught was the Divine right of princes and the subjects' duty of non-resistance. In the great battle which was being fought out in England between arbitrary power and freedom, they threw the whole weight of the English Church on the side of the former. It was a fatal error as a matter of policy, for it was the losing side. But, what is hardly sufficiently realized, it was most untrue to the tradition of the Church, and of the Church in England.

It was contrary to the tradition of the Church. For after the rise of Christianity to the high places of the world, followed by the break-up of the Roman Empire, and the formation of the mediaeval States, weakly knit together by personal ties, and with uncertain claims on the allegiance of their subjects, two new aspects of the relations of governors and governed had been brought out in Christian teaching. First, stress was laid on the duty of those holding power. Emperors and kings, magistrates and officers, who were Christians, had a claim for guidance and instruction in the exercise of their various functions. The claim was met by shewing them that, whatever the earthly source of authority may be, all just power is of God, and therefore must be regarded, not as a privilege, nor as a personal right, but as a _trust_ to be undertaken for the good of others, and as a ministry for God and man. Thus a government which has for its aim anything else than the common good is, properly speaking, not a government at all. Whether its form is monarchical or not, it is simply a tyranny[429]. Secondly, the Middle Age theologians supplemented S. Paul's teaching by shewing the possible right of resistance to an unlawful government, or to one that failed to perform its duties. Such right of resistance might arise in two cases: (1) that of unjust acquisition of power, (2) that of its unjust use. Unjust acquisition might take place in two ways: (_a_) when an unworthy person acquired power, but by legitimate means: in this case it was the duty of subjects to submit, because the form of power came from God; (_b_) when power was acquired by force or fraud: in this case, subjects had the right to depose the ruler, if they had the power, supposing, however, that the illegitimate assumption of power had not been legitimated by subsequent consent. Unjust use might also take place in two ways: (_a_) when the ruler commanded something contrary to virtue, in which case it was a duty to disobey; or (_b_) when he went outside his rights, in which case subjects were not bound to obey, but it was not necessarily their duty to disobey. And so cases might arise in which it was lawful to enfranchise oneself, even from a legitimate power. 'Some who have received power from God, yet if they abuse it, deserve to have it taken from them. Both the one and the other come of God[430].'

Nor was the political teaching of the Caroline divines in agreement with the tradition of the Church in England. It is not necessary to go back to the great Archbishops who led, in earlier days, the struggle for English freedom. It is sufficient to recur to the teaching of the greatest of English post-Reformation theologians, at once soaked through and through with the spirit of Catholic antiquity, and in complete agreement with the English Reformation settlement. Richard Hooker had no sympathy with that doctrine of Divine right which his mediaeval masters looked upon as a quasi-heretical doctrine[431]. He found the first origin of government in the consent of the governed, and he anticipates Hobbes and Locke in his account of the 'first original conveyance, when power was derived from the whole into one[432].' Further, he points out that the king's power is strictly limited (except in the case of conquest or of special appointment by God), not only by the original compact, but also by after-agreement made with the king's consent or silent allowance[433]. And men are not bound in conscience to obey such usurpers 'as in the exercise of their power do more than they have been authorized to do[434].' But on the other hand, he maintains strongly, as against those who thought that human laws could in no sort touch the conscience, the duty of civil obedience in agreement with the law of God, and the sacredness, the 'Divine institution,' of duly-constituted authority, whether 'God Himself doth deliver, or men by light of nature find out the kind thereof.'

Thus, the main points which have been brought out by Christian teaching as to the relation of Christian citizens to the civil authority are: (1) first and foremost, the duty of obedience for conscience' sake, a duty which stands on the same level, and is invested with the same sanctions as the most sacred claims; (2) the duty, in case of the civil authority issuing commands contrary to virtue or religion, of disobedience on the same grounds as those which lead to obedience in the former case; (3) the duty of those wielding authority to use it for the common good, and so as not to hinder, if they cannot promote, the Christian religion; (4) the right, which may be said in certain extreme cases to rise almost to a duty, of resistance to the arbitrary or unconstitutional extension of authority to cases outside its province.

The same emphasis on higher motives is characteristic of Christian treatment of the questions connected with property. Christianity is certainly not pledged to uphold any particular form of property as such. Whether property had better be held by individuals, or by small groups, as in the case of the primitive Teutonic villages, or of the modern Russian or Indian village communities, or again by the State, as is the proposal of Socialists, is a matter for experience and common sense to decide. But where Christian ethics steps in is, firstly, to shew that property is secondary not primary, a means and not an end. Thus, in so far as Socialism looks to the moral regeneration of society by a merely mechanical alteration of the distribution of the products of industry or of the mode of holding property, it has to be reminded that a change of heart and will is the only true starting-point of moral improvement. On the other hand, it cannot be too often asserted that the accumulation of riches is not in itself a good at all. Neither riches nor poverty make men better in themselves. Their effect on character depends on the use made of them, though no doubt the responsibility of those who have property is greater, because they have one instrument the more for the purposes of life. And so, secondly, Christianity urges that _if_ there is private property, its true character as a trust shall be recognised, its rights respected and its attendant duties performed. These truths it keeps steadily before men's eyes by the perpetual object-lesson of the life of the early Church of Jerusalem, in which those who had property sold it, and brought the proceeds and laid them at the Apostles' feet, and distribution was made unto every man according to his needs[435], an object-lesson enforced and renewed by the example of the monastic communities, with their vow of voluntary poverty, and their common purse. So strongly did the early Fathers insist on the duty, almost the debt, of the rich to the poor, that isolated passages may be quoted which read like a condemnation of all private property[436], but this was not their real drift. The obligation which they urged was the obligation of charity.

(2) So far we have considered the way in which Christianity has strengthened and defined on the side of duty, which itself is one form of charity or love, the motives which make men good citizens, good property-holders, and so has supplemented the moral forces of the State, by raising the common standard of opinion and conviction on which ultimately all possibility of State-action rests. But the word charity is used not only in the wider, but also in a narrower sense, of one special form of love, the love of the strong who stoops to help the weak.

It is admitted on all hands that charity in this sense has been a mark of the Christian type of character, but the uniqueness of Christian charity has probably been exaggerated. The better Stoics recognised the active service of mankind, and especially of the poor and miserable, as part of the ideal of a perfect life. Their severity was crossed by pity. As Seneca puts it in one pregnant phrase, they held that 'wherever a man is, there is room for doing good[437].' And so Stoicism had, its alimentationes, or homes for orphan children, its distributions of grain, its provisions for the sick and for strangers[438]. Christianity and Stoicism, it may seem, were walking along the same road; but the difference was this, 'what pagan charity was doing tardily, and as it were with the painful calculation of old age, the Church was doing, almost without thinking about it, in the plenary masterfulness of youth, because it was her very being thus to do[439].' She did it with all the ease and grace of perfect naturalness, not as valuing charity without love, for 'if I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and if I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profiteth me nothing[440],' but because love forthwith blossomed forth into charity. 'And the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch. And in these days came prophets from Jerusalem unto Antioch. And there stood up one of them named Agabus, and signified by the spirit that there should be great dearth throughout all the world.... Then the disciples, every man according to his ability, determined to send relief unto the brethren which dwelt in Judæa[441].'

And so it became the recognised and traditional duty of the Church to maintain the cause of the weak against the strong, of the poor against the rich, of the oppressed against the oppressors. The Bishops of the fourth and fifth centuries exercised 'a kind of religious tribunate[442].' In the Middle Ages, the Church urged on those in public and private stations the duties of charity, pity, humanity. The author of the latter part of the _De Regimine Principum_[443] ascribed to S. Thomas Aquinas lays down as one of the chief duties of a king, the care of the weak and the succour of the miserable. Nor did the Church in England in pre-Reformation times fail in her duty in this respect. She pleaded for the manumission or at least the humane usage of the serfs. She undertook through her monasteries the relief of the poor. Her prohibition of usury, however mistaken it may seem to us, was a real protection to debtors against one of the worst forms of tyranny, that of the unscrupulous creditor. Since the Reformation her record has not been so clean. The shock of the Reformation left her weak. The traditional sanctions of her authority were shaken. In the long struggle of the seventeenth century her close association with the Stuart cause left her powerless to touch the stronger half of the nation. She was not independent enough to act as arbiter, and in committing herself without reserve to opposition to the national claim for freedom she was untrue to her earlier and better traditions. At the same time allowance must be made for the licence, the disorder, and the recklessness with which the claims of liberty were associated, and for the identification of the popular party with views of religion, which, whatever else may be said for them, are not those of the Church. The leading churchmen believed that its triumph meant the disappearance of that historical Church, which they rightly regarded as the only effective safeguard of English Christianity. After the Restoration the Church was stronger, and the increase of strength shews itself on the one side in greater independence of the Crown, and on the other in the outburst of numerous religious and charitable societies and foundations. Queen Anne's Bounty is an instance of the charity, if it be not rather the justice, of one distinguished daughter of the Church. The 'Religious Societies' which in a quiet and unassuming way were a great influence in social life, had among their objects the visiting and relief of the poor, the apprenticing of the young, the maintenance of poor scholars at the University. Charity schools were established throughout the country: hospitals and parochial libraries founded, while societies like the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge date back to the last years of the seventeenth and the first of the eighteenth centuries[444]. Then as the Georgian period begins, all this vigorous life seems for a long period to die down, or only to find vent in the great Wesleyan movement which, beginning within the Church, passes out beyond it, and ultimately becomes stereotyped in more or less pronounced separation from her communion. It was the policy of the ruling Whig oligarchy to keep down the Church, and they succeeded--to the grave loss of English morality. If in some degree the Church in England at the present time is speaking with firmer accent on questions of personal and class morality, and giving more effective witness against the luxury and neglect of their work-people, which are the besetting sins of the great English manufacturing classes, it is due partly to the revival in England of the true idea of the Church as a great spiritual society, and partly to the fact that English statesmen, from sheer inability owing to the conditions of political life to do otherwise, have left her more free to manage her own business and to develop her mission to the English people in accordance with the laws and aspirations of her own inner life.

It is especially necessary in a great industrial society such as that of modern England that the Christian law of self-sacrifice, which crosses and modifies the purely competitive tendency leading each individual to seek his own interest and that of his family, should be strongly and effectively presented. No doubt it is true that the increased knowledge of the structure and laws of social life which we possess, have made charity more difficult than in the Middle Ages: they have not made it less necessary, or a less essential feature of the Christian character. And so, in a democratic age, the protection of the weak and the oppressed will take a different colour. Whether supreme control is in the hands of one or many, it may be used tyrannically. And the most effective exercise of the tribunate of the Church will lie in guarding the rights of conscience and the great national interest of religion against hasty and unfair pressure. And this brings us to our next point.

(3) The drift of the argument has been to shew the incompleteness and inevitable limitations of the State, considered as a moral guide of the social life of mankind. But that incompleteness rises to its maximum, those limitations press most closely when we pass from morality to religion. If it is the highest duty of the State to maintain true and vital religion[445], it is a duty which of itself it is altogether incompetent to perform. If the experience of the Middle Ages shewed conclusively that the subordination of the State to the Church did not tend either to good government, or to the maintenance, pure and undefiled, of the Christian religion, the experience of English post-Reformation history has as conclusively shewn that the subordination of the Church to the State leads on the one hand to the secularization of the Church, and on the other to a grave danger to national life, through the loss of a spiritual authority strong enough, as well as vigilant and independent enough, to reprove social sins and to call to account large and influential classes. The conditions under which the Tudor idea of a Christian commonwealth was possible have passed away, and there seem to remain two possible conclusions from the premises.

The first is that it is expedient in the interests of both that Church and State should be separate from one another, as e.g. in America, and left free to develop, each on its own lines, their respective missions in the national service--'a free Church in a free State.' The current of opinion in England in favour of disestablishment, undoubtedly a strong, though probably not at the present time an increasing one, is fed from many smaller streams. There are Agnostics who believe that religion is the enemy of progress, and that Christianity especially shackles free thought, and hinders the advance of social reformation, and to whom therefore it seems a clear duty to undermine by every means open to them the hold of Christianity on the centres of social and intellectual life, on schools and universities, families and states. They favour disestablishment as one means to this end. Two principal causes seem to move those who are primarily statesmen in the direction of disestablishment. One is the conception of the State as the great controlling and guiding organization of human life[446], supreme over all partial societies and voluntary associations formed to guard parts or sides of life, and the attempt to mould national life by this guiding idea and its logical consequences. This attempt is encouraged by the extreme simplicity of the English Constitution in its actual working, and by the legally unlimited power of Parliament[447]. The other is their practical experience that in view of the divided condition of English Christianity, the most stubborn and intractable difficulties in legislation arise from, or are aggravated by, religious differences. They suppose that these would be lessened if the State took the position of impartial arbiter between rival denominations. Among Nonconformists there are no doubt some who, looking at the Church as the natural rival of their own society, think to weaken her by disestablishment, but there are also many who believe that disestablishment would be a gain to English religion, and that the life of the Church would be more real, more pure, more governed by the highest motives, if she were freed from all direct connection with the State. Lastly, there is no doubt that the idea of the return to the looser relations between Church and State which prevailed in the earliest Christian centuries, has a great attraction for a considerable body of churchmen. They would perhaps have been willing enough to accept the royal supremacy under a religious sovereign in thorough harmony with the beliefs and modes of working of the Church, but the revolution by which the House of Commons has risen to supreme power in England, has given it, not in the theory, but in the actual working of the constitution, the ultimate control over matters ecclesiastical as well as civil, and they hold that by stifling the free utterance of the voice of the Church the House of Commons is doing an injury to religion compared to which disestablishment would be a lesser evil.

On the other hand, if we look beyond our own country, we have the opinion of the venerable Dr. Döllinger, reported by Dr. Liddon, that the disestablishment of the Church in England would be an injury to the cause of religion throughout Europe. And so weighty an opinion may well make us carefully scrutinize those difficulties and tendencies which make for disestablishment. It is no doubt true that from one point of view the _idea_ of the Church as a great spiritual society seems to require her entire freedom to control her own development, and therefore the absence of all formal connection with the State. But there is nothing more deeply illogical and irrational, in any sense of logic in which it is near to life and therefore true, than the attempt to solve a great problem, spiritual, moral, political, social, by neglecting all its factors but one, even if it be the most important one. Nor does it follow that, because we recognise that in a certain condition of things, more harm than good will be done by a particular application of a truth which we accept, therefore we have ceased to hold that truth. It only shews that our ideal is complex.

And so from another point of view the most perfect ordering of things would seem to be one in which Church and State were two parts of one whole, recognising one another's functions and limits, and mutually supporting one another. Thus religion would be put in its true place as at once the foundation and the coping stone of national life. And the State with all its administration would be given a distinctly Christian character. The difficulty in England is to maintain this point of view in connection with the increasingly non-religious (not necessarily anti-religious) colouring of the State, and of the fierce struggles of party government which destroy the reverence which might otherwise attach to the State and its organs. As the State has become increasingly lay, its moral weight has sunk, its hold on consciences become less. But the truth remains that religion is an element in the highest national life. 'A national Church alone can consecrate the whole life of a people[448].' And a national Church can only mean an established Church, and a Church which either has great inherited wealth of its own, or is supported in part by national funds. 'Of all parts of this subject,' says Mr. Gladstone[449], 'probably none have been so thoroughly wrought out as the insufficiency of the voluntary principle.' It is insufficient (i.e. for maintaining national religion), first, because after a certain level of moral deterioration has been reached by individuals or masses of people, the demand for religion is least where the want is greatest; and secondly, because in consequence of the structure of social life there are always large classes of the community who, while just provided with the bare necessaries of life, have not sufficient means to enable them to sustain the expense of the organs of the higher life in any form. We recognise this in the case of education; we can hardly refuse to recognise it in the case of religion.

For these reasons we are thrown back on the second possible conclusion from the data, viz. that it is desirable that there should be some definite and permanent connection between Church and State, but not such connection as will either subordinate the State to the Church or the Church to the State. And such a result would seem to be best attainable by some such system of relations as that between the Established Church and the State in Scotland, or the Roman Catholic Church and the State in France. Thus in Scotland, on the critical point of jurisdiction, the position is this. The Church Courts are final: there is no appeal to a Civil Court except on the ground of excess of jurisdiction. And the judgment of the Church Courts, so far as it involves civil consequences, may be enforced by application to the Civil Courts[450]. In France we have to distinguish the relations of Church and State as constitutionally defined from those relations in their actual working. No constitutional relations, however admirable, can work when the State constantly encroaches, and where its whole attitude is one of hostility to the Church. In theory, however, the position in France is, except on one point, much the same as in Scotland. There is a complete system of ecclesiastical jurisdiction in the Roman Catholic Church based on the Canon Law and administered by the bishops acting as judges. From their decisions there is no appeal to the Civil Courts except on the ground of abuse (appel d'abus). On the other hand, the Ecclesiastical Courts have no coercive jurisdiction, nor are their sentences carried out by the Civil Courts[451]. They bind, therefore, only _in foro conscientiae_ and this is found sufficient. There is one point worthy of special notice in the French system, that while the relations of the State to the Roman Catholic (once the Gallican) Church are regulated by a special Concordat, two leading Protestant bodies, the French Reformed Church, and the Church of the Augsburg Confession, as well as the Jewish body, are also endowed. Alongside of a system by which the Church is established there is a concurrent endowment of other Christian and even non-Christian denominations.

In Scotland the relations of Church and State rest on the Act of Union, in France on the Concordat made by Napoleon with the Pope in 1801. In England there is no definite formulated agreement; and any such agreement would be entirely contrary to the English genius. But in a deeper sense, there is a contract, which is the product of 1200 years of history, of which the terms vary from generation to generation, and which is commended by each age to the forbearance and the statesmanship of its successors. The terms of that contract are in the main fixed by the State. In any case, whether the Church remains established or not, the State has ultimate power over her temporal possessions, as over all temporal possessions held within its territory. But, if the Church is to remain connected with the State, perpetual difficulties must arise, unless means are found to leave the Church free, in matters as well of doctrine as of ritual, both to legislate through her own organs, and to exercise an independent spiritual jurisdiction. It is for the interest of the State that the Church should be allowed to make her service for the English nation as fruitful, as powerful, and as little a hindrance to her own spirituality as possible.

III. Lastly we may consider the way in which the Church, quite irrespective of any direct connection with the State, as a natural consequence of its position as a spiritual society and of its teaching as to fundamental moral and spiritual truths, acts as a purifying and elevating agent on the general social life of mankind, on all its manifestations and organs.

If man is 'metaphysical _nolens volens_,' it is equally true that he is metapolitical, to use Martensen's happy word, _nolens volens_. And metapolitic means 'that which precedes the political as its presupposition, that which lies outside and beyond it as its aim and object, and by which the political element is to be pervaded as by its soul, its intellectually vivifying principle[452].' Every statesman, every real leader of men, has consciously or unconsciously, such a metapolitic; he holds, that is, certain views as to man's place in the world, as to the meaning and possibility of progress, as to the aims as distinct from the machinery of government, as to the relations of nations to one another and to humanity, which determine his general attitude towards all kinds of questions with which he has to deal. It is clear, for instance, that the groups of ideas which govern the fatalist, the pessimist, and the humanitarian, are widely different.

Now the Church is the home and dwelling-place of certain great regulative ideas as to man's destiny and function, and his relation to God and other men, the treasure-house to which they were committed, or the soil in which they germinated. These ideas, if accepted and acted on, or so far as accepted and acted on, must transform and remodel, not only the inward life, but also the whole outward life in all its spheres. Thus S. Paul deduces from the Christian conception of man, the duties of husbands, wives, fathers, children, masters, servants, subjects, rich persons, old men, old women, young men, young women. And so, now rapidly, now slowly, according to the vigour and purity at successive periods of the Christian society, now thrown inwards by periods of persecution or by the rising tide of evil, now borne outwards in periods of rapid expansion and missionary enterprise, now brought to bear on new conditions of life and new social groupings, now traced back to their source, and tested by the life and words of the Word of God, the Christian ideas of man, and of his relation to God radiate through the life of mankind, at once sustaining and correcting its aspirations, and its ideals of righteousness.

The root ideas of this Christian anthropology rest on the Christian conception of God as one yet threefold. Thus on the one side, Christianity attaches to the individual personality a supreme and infinite value as the inmost nature of one made in the image of God, redeemed by the self-sacrifice of Christ, and indwelt by the Spirit of God. And thus it develops the sense of separate personal responsibility. It is on this basis that what is true in humanitarianism rests. Behind all class and social differences lies the human personality in virtue of which all men are equal[453]. But on the other side it frankly recognises man's inherently social nature. It is not good for man to be alone. And family, State, and the Church on earth are training places for a perfected common life in the City of God.

The effect of this conception of man and his destiny is to place the State and its associations in their true position as not ultimate but secondary, as means and not ends. Alongside of the earthly kingdom, with its wealth, its honours, its ambitions, its wide and far-reaching influence, it sets another kingdom, the City of God, with its own standards, its own principles, its own glory, its own blessedness, as the end of mankind, the goal of history. 'The nations shall walk amidst the light thereof, and the kings of the earth do bring their glory into it[454].' And, in so doing, it judges and corrects the splendour of earthly States.

In thus contrasting the earthly State with the City of God, Christianity is no doubt exposed to the old accusation, that it makes men bad citizens. And the old answer is still true, 'let those who think that the doctrine of Jesus Christ cannot contribute to the happiness of the State, give us soldiers and officers such as it bids them to be, subjects and citizens as faithful as Jesus Christ commands, husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, children, masters, servants, kings, judges, living according to the laws of religion, men as punctual in their payment of taxes, as pure in their handling of public funds as are the true Christians: they will be soon forced to admit that the maxims of the Gospel when practised cannot but give a State great happiness and great prosperity[455].' It is not too much but too little Christianity which destroys States; for passion and wilfulness are the great disintegrating forces of the world, and everything which strengthens individuals to resist them, so far strengthens the bonds of social union. But the service which Christianity renders to States goes far beyond this negative result. If the true meaning of progress be moral, and not material, there can be no greater contribution to the well-being of society than that of maintaining the Christian type of character with its humility, its purity, its sincerity, and again its strong and beneficent activity.

In the present discussion the State has been put first and the Church second. In order of time the State is first. And what has been attempted has been to shew how starting with the State and its institutions, the higher order which was initiated by the historical Incarnation (though not without preparatory and imperfect anticipations in earlier and especially in Jewish history), comes in to mould, to purify, and to supplement. But these words only express partial aspects of the whole process by which a higher order acts on a lower. It interpenetrates far more deeply than can be expressed in any classification of the modes of its operation. The Christian religion has been acting on the group of States which we call Christendom from the first days when stable organizations formed themselves after the entrance of the new life of the Germanic races into the remains of the dying Roman Empire. It has been the strongest of all the influences that have moulded them throughout their history. It has pierced and penetrated the life of individuals, the life of families, the life of guilds, as well as the laws and institutions, the writings and works of art in which they have embodied their thoughts and hopes. They are in a sense its children. It is impossible to regard them as S. Augustine regarded pagan Rome. But deep and penetrating as has been her influence and manifold her consequent implications with the existing national and social life of mankind, the Church is essentially Catholic, and only incidentally national. It is their Catholic character so far as it remains, at least their Catholic ideal, which gives to the different fragments of the Church their strength and power. The 'Church of England' is a peculiarly misleading term. The Church of Christ in England is, as Coleridge pointed out, the safer and truer phrase. And this fundamental Catholicism, this correspondence not to one or another nation, but to humanity, rests on the appeal to deeper and more permanent needs than those on which the State rests. It is thus that the true type of the Church is rather in the family than in the State, because the family is the primitive unit of organized social life. Not in the order of time, but in the order of reason, the Church is prior to the State, for man is at once inherently social and inherently religious. And therefore it is only in the Church that he can be all that it is his true nature to be.

[407] Law, _Third letter to the Bishop of Bangor_, second edition, 1762, p. 66.

[408] Martensen, _Christian Ethics_, special part, second division, Eng. Transl. p. 98.

[409] Church, Oxford House Papers, No. xvii, _The Christian Church_, p. 10.

[410] Holland, _Creed and Character_, first edition, 1887, p. 156.

[411] xix. 17.

[412] i. 6.

[413] _Immortale Dei._

[414] Aug. _De Civ. Dei_, xix. 14, 15.

[415] S. T. Coleridge, _Church and State_, edited by H. N. Coleridge, 1839, P. 24.

[416] A. C. Bradley, 'Aristotle's Conception of the State,' in _Hellenica_, 1880, p. 243.

[417] 'Metu coercet,' Aug. _De lib. Arb._ i. 15.

[418] Compare Aug. _De lib. Arb._ i. 5.

[419] Art. on 'Future Retribution,' _Church Quarterly_, July, 1888.

[420] S. Matt. v. 48.

[421] Eph. iv. 13.

[422] S. Matt. v. 5, 11, 39, 40.

[423] S. Matt. xxii. 21.

[424] Rom. xiii. 1-10. Compare S. Peter's teaching in 1 S. Pet. ii. 13-17.

[425] _Ad Scap._ II.

[426] _Oratio in Auxentium de basilicis tradendis._

[427] Aug. _De Civ. Dei_, v. 17, but cp. _De bono Conj._ 16, for a recognition of the possibility of the unjust use of legitimate power.

[428] _Hom._ xxiii. on _Rom._ xiii. 1.

[429] Tyrannicide was defended by some of the more extreme opponents of the temporal power, like John of Salisbury, the secretary of Thomas Becket (_Policraticus_ VIII. 17, 'Tyrannus pravitatis imago; plerumque etiam occidendus'). But it was condemned by the sounder judgment of Aquinas (_De Reg. Princ._ I. 6, 'Hoc apostolicae doctrinae non congruit').

[430] Thomas Aquinas, _Comm. Sent._ XLIV. q. 2 a. 2; q. 1 a. 2. In _Comm. Pol._ v. 1 § 2 he goes so far as to make Insurrection in certain cases a duty.

[431] Janet, _Histoire de la Science politique_, third edition, 1887, vol. i. p. 330.

[432] Hooker, _Eccl. Pol._ VIII. ii. 5, 9. Cp. I. x. 4.

[433] _Eccl. Pol._ VIII. ii. 11.

[434] _Eccl. Pol._ VIII. App. No. I. (ed. Keble.) Cp. I. x. 8.

[435] Acts iv. 34, 35.

[436] Especially in S. Ambrose; the passages are collected in Dubief, _Essai sur les idées politiques de S. Augustin_, 1859, ch. vi. S. Augustine himself opposed the obligatory Communism, advocated by Pelagianism; cp. _Ep._ 157 (Ed. Bened.) to Hilary, quoted by Dubief.

[437] Sen. _De vita beata_, 24.

[438] Uhlhorn, _Christian Charity in the Ancient Church_, Eng. Transl. 1883, Bk. I. ch. i. pp. 18-21, 41, 42.

[439] Pater, _Marius the Epicurean_, Vol. II. ch. xxii. p. 127.

[440] 1 Cor. xiii. 3 (R.V.).

[441] Acts xi. 26-29; cp. also Acts iv. 34, 35, quoted above.

[442] Dubief, p. 11.

[443] II. 15.

[444] Overton, _Life in the English Church_, 1660-1714, Ch. v.

[445] Hooker, _Eccl. Pol._ VIII. i. 4. In all commonwealths, things spiritual ought above temporal to be provided for. And of things spiritual, the chiefest is religion. Cp. V. i. 2.

[446] We have already shewn reasons for thinking that though no doubt the State has _a_ great co-ordinating and regulative function in regard to human life, it is not fitted for the part of _the_ moral guide of mankind.

[447] Dicey, _Law of the Constitution_, second edition, 1886, lecture ii. p. 36, 'The principle of Parliamentary sovereignty means neither more nor less than this, namely, that Parliament thus defined has, under the English Constitution, the right to make or unmake any law whatever; and, further, that no person or body is recognised by the law of England as having a right to override or set aside the legislation of Parliament.'

[448] Westcott, _Social Aspects of Christianity_, ch. v. p. 76.

[449] _The State in its relations with the Church_, p. 41.

[450] _Report of the Ecclesiastical Courts Commission_, Vol. II. p. 601. Answers to questions,--Scotland, Established Church.

'No appeal lies to a Civil Court in matters of discipline or on the ground of excess of punishment. But if under the form of discipline the Church Courts were to inflict Church censures (involving civil consequences) on a minister for _e.g._ obeying the law of the land, a question ... might be brought before the Civil Court on the ground of excess of jurisdiction. It is believed that in no case would the Civil Court entertain an appeal from a judgement of an Ecclesiastical Court on a question of doctrine, or enter on an examination of the soundness of such a judgement before enforcing its civil consequences.

'Any questions which have arisen on points of ritual ... have hitherto been decided exclusively by the Church Courts.' (A qualifying sentence follows as to possible extreme cases justifying, on the failure to obtain redress from the General Assembly, an appeal to the Civil Court.)

[451] _Report of Eccl. Courts Commission_, Vol. II. p. 605. Answers to questions,--France.

'The State remains _lay_, and does not interpose, except when the acts of the clergy are offences at Common Law, or when there is a _cas d'abus_ in which either the public order or individual interests are injured. In which case the Council of State is summoned at the instance of the Government, or on the complaint of the citizens, to repress abuses and annul the _acts of abuse_ (actes d'abus) on the part of the clergy.

'To recapitulate, the minister, as citizen, has to submit to the Common Law; as priest, he belongs entirely to the jurisdiction of the Church, with which the State _does not interfere_, and with which it has not to interfere, for it is solely in the domain of conscience.'

[452] Martensen, _Christian Ethics_, special part, second division, English Translation, p. 100.

[453] Cp. Aug. _De Civ. Dei_, v. 24, of Christian Emperors, 'we think them happy if they remember themselves to be _men_.'

[454] Rev. xxi. 24 (R.V.).

[455] Aug. _Ep. ad Marcellinum_, 138, 15.