Church and State as Seen in the Formation of Christendom. Allies Thomas William

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ