claims a lasting dominion over the soul under pretence of being infallible and divine. It may be natural and even necessary for current beliefs to mould themselves into certain visible forms of creed or association; but we pervert the course of nature when, misled by ambiguities of language, we insist on giving perpetuity to arrangements really requiring incessant supervision and renewal.1 Two meanings mingle in the term church, which it is very common to confound, but which it is very important to distinguish. The local community alluded to in the gospel (Matt. xviii. 17) is one thing; the spiritual edifice said to be built upon a rock is another. But the ambiguity passes unheeded, and the notion of a spiritual or ideal kingdom furnishes an unfailing excuse for the abuses of worldly establishments. Churches in the common meaning of the term are necessarily political. However honourable the motives of the individuals composing them, their corporate aim is not truth, but conformity and expediency. They are coalitions formed to defend a given faith, to discipline irregular fanaticism, to promote the creeds of government or of party. For these objects they stoop to the broadest level of popular unanimity, adjusting themselves to the low standard of the many, and discouraging, as far as possible, the scruples of individual intelligence. A church becomes practically an instrument for superseding individual thought on the highest problems of human concernment, and supplying a ready made solution at the cheapest rate of obedience and unreflecting assent. The mechanical observance, the technical belief which it was at one time thought expedient to accept as congenial to the tastes and capacities of a majority, it makes indispensible and im

1 Free thought never forms a church; yet churches, whose very essence is a carefully adjusted equilibrium of conservatism and compromise, tend, under favourable circumstances, more and more in the direction of freedom. In a free and civilized community more and more compromise and comprehension is continually called for; and then either the conservative principle gives way, or the establishment perishes. Arnold's Life, vol. ii., p. 59.

perative for ever and for all. Finding mankind in a state requiring guidance, it treats them, not as improveable, but as essentially unreasoning creatures, characteristically comparing the laity to fish, sheep, and stones; i.e., animal and material things which are used for a purpose, and become valuable only by aggregation. Whenever, interposing on behalf of the humbler classes, it lends a helping hand towards the establishment of political liberty, it is not from a genuine love of freedom, but only in order to substitute a mental absolutism of its own, a yoke far more noxious and insidious than any it contributes to remove.2 Hierarchies have often promoted material improvement, and performed a useful part in the infancy of societies. The priest is the appropriate elementary civilizer of a barbarous age, subduing savage minds by superstitious terrors to observe the rudimentary decencies of social life, as prescribed, for instance, in the discipline of Orpheus,3 or the statutes of Leviticus and Menu. A church fashions the rude feeling of religion into form, represses its excess, and provides a safe channel for its

1 The simile of sheep is too common to need illustration. For the comparison of lay members of the church to stones, see 1 Peter ii. 5; Hermas, Vis., ii. 3, 4; Ignatius to the Ephesians, ch. ix. The fish-symbol of Christianity occurs frequently on gems, and on the monuments in the Lateran and Vatican museums. Its origin may be found in the designation of the Apostles as "fishers of men" (Matt. iv. 19), and in other passages (as Matt. xiii. 47; Luke v. 6-10); the narrative (John xxi. 11) is supposed by Jerome to be symbolical, the net being the church of Peter (see Köstlin, in the Tübingen Jahrbücher, vol. x., p. 195). An ancient hymn, cited by Clemens Alexandrinus, thus addresses Christ:

-

αλιευ μερόπων των σωζόμενων πελάγους κακιας ιχθυς ἁγνους;

and Tertullian, de Baptismo. ch. i., says: “ Nos pisciculi secundum ΙΧΘΥΝ nostrum Jesum Christum in aquâ nascimur." See Munter's "Sinnbilder der alten Christen," p. 48.

2 Cardinal Wiseman, in a sermon preached some years ago in St. George's Cathedral, emphatically announced that if we would only resign our minds and consciences to Rome, he would leave us in undisputed possession of all our liberties.

3 "Silvestres homines cædibus et fœdo victu deterruit Orpheus." 6 Menu v. 31, etc.

Leviticus ch. xvii. 21.

legitimate expression. But its uses soon cease, and are always dearly purchased. Its initial postulate of infallibility opposes an invincible non possumus to projected change, and thus becomes an almost insurmountable barrier to improvement, perpetuating the superstitious imbecility which alone justified its interference, and made its discipline appropriate. The impossibility of recognising and embracing a higher truth leaves insincerity or ignorance the only alternative. The compression of religion into routine; the indolent surrender of conscience; the perversion of reverence to an idolatry of traditions, vestments, or books; the arrest of education,-since education in clerical hands must always be controlled by the primary ecclesiastical conception of the nature of truth,-such are, generally speaking, the results of that momentous sacrifice to shortsighted expediency, that artificial confinement of an essentially progressive faculty within conventional limits, which is implied in a church.

And it should be noticed that church influences are especially unsuited to free states depending for their safety and prosperity on individual effort and intelligence. A religion professionally prescribed, and unthinkingly taken as a manufactured article from the shop, supposes the reverse of the mental energy which is the soul of political independence. Freedom may temporarily subsist as a habit or patrimony indolently inherited from former ages; but it cannot for ever maintain its balance on a pole without adjusting and sustaining forces; nor can men, led passively by superstition, be relied on to assert under trying circumstances the principles of self-government. It has been said that churches, if not an unmixed good, are yet a necessary evil. Yet it is hard to see, apart from custom and association, what useful end they serve which may not be better gained by other and less exceptionable means. Is it the maintenance of order in religious societies? But this may be had in all such societies alike as

lay institutions under the control of civil government. Is
it education? Churchmen are, as a class, the least fitted
to undertake this most important work in any sense save
that of Jesuitical indoctrination, and a propagandism of
the obsolete dogmas inherited from semi-barbarous ages.
Is it governmental influence obtained by bribing the self-
interested zeal of ecclesiastics? But the unprincipled
theory of a church advocated by Hume,1 ¿.e., as an instru-
ment in the hands of government for hoodwinking an
ignorant population, were too candid a confession of a
dishonourable truth to be openly tolerated now. To say
that, after so many centuries of "religious education," a
Christian people is so helplessly ignorant as to be “posi-
tively dangerous to civil order without priestly guidance,'
is not so much to accuse education, as to proclaim the
utter incapacity of those who have mismanaged it, and
that Protestantism and Christianity have both been
failures. Protestantism, in so many respects irresolute
and reactionary, was in nothing more fatally inconsistent
and untrue to itself than in its attempted perpetuation of
church principles. Its real spirit is the reverse of ecclesi-
astical; it has no more to do with churches than with
transubstantiation. When, after the ecclesiastical univer-
salism of the middle age, individual religion and national
government revived, the use of a church, of that ominous
city of God" which had risen over the ruin of temporal
government, was properly at an end. It was ended by the
substitution of Erastian principles for theocratic; and yet
so long as a name for ages linked to theocratic theory con-
tinued to be used, the thing too continued in menacing
abeyance, ever ready, in conjunction with other inherited
prejudices, to bring back medieval stagnation, and to
thwart the better efforts of individuals or governments to
promote that mental improvement which is the real meaning

66

1 History, ch. xxix.

2 Remarked in a leading article of the "Times," October 15, 1862.

of Protestantism. In the theory of the "invisible" church through which alone its secession from Rome could be justified, Protestantism possessed the prolific idea of education as the proper business of the visible; but the idea was dimmed if not effaced by the kind of education proposed, and the necessity felt by Lutheranism of establishing a position in the eyes of the world, by insisting, against the anarchical Donatism of the Anabaptists, on the reality of the church in a too literal and Roman spirit. In the first disruption of national government from the ecclesiastical one which had so long been thought entitled to an exclusive monopoly of the higher influences of teaching and administration, it seemed as if a blank had been created, and that a national ecclesiasticism was wanted to fill it. It now appears that every beneficial change connected with education has to be won against the interested opposition or still more injurious co-operation of religious parties, and that the chief difficulty of modern states is the open or concealed rivalry of hierarchies.

There are many who are sanguine enough to think the church to be susceptible of regeneration, and of becoming a fit instrument for directing the true educational development of the national mind. This must be the opinion of the many eminent men who remain members of it, although painfully made aware of its defects, and naturally the first to undergo the ostracism of its tyranny. Assuredly it can be no easy matter to reconcile ideal and practical interests,-to make an institution essentially defensive and conservative into a trustworthy instrument of progress. It would be indeed a happy consummation if the immense influence and resources of churches could be diverted into a new channel, and made for the maturity, as in the infancy, of nations, an effectual means of civilization. But history and experience discountenance the hope. Cir

1 This is hinted in more than one confession when speaking of the necessary imperfection of the visible church. See Calvin's Inst., iv., 8, 12, seq.