THIS is an exceedingly complicated and difficult subject. There are three aspects under which it may be viewed.
I. The actual relation which at different times and in different countries has subsisted between the two institutions. II. The theory devised to justify or determine the limits of such existing relation. III. The normal relation, such as should exist according to the revealed will of God, and the nature of the state and of the Church. Before the conversion of Constantine, the Church was of course so far independent of the state, that she determined her own faith, regulated her worship, chose her officers, and exercised her discipline without any interference of the civil authorities. Her members were regarded as citizens of the state, whose religious opinions and practices were, except in times of persecution, regarded as matters of indifference. It is probable that much the same liberty was accorded to the early Christians as was granted by the Romans to the Jews, who were not only allowed, in ordinary cases, to conduct their synagogue services as they pleased, but to decide matters of dispute among themselves, according to their own laws. It is also stated that Churches were allowed to hold real estate before the profession of Christianity by the Emperor.
When Constantine declared himself a Christian, he expressed the relation which was henceforth to subsist between the Church and state, by saying to certain bishops, “God has made you the bishops of the internal affairs of the Church, and me the bishop of its external affairs.” This saying has ever since been, throughout a large portion of Christendom, the standing formula for expressing the relation of the civil magistrate to the kingdom of Christ.
According to this statement, it belongs to the Church, through her own organs, to choose her officers, to regulate all matters relating to doctrine, to administer the word and sacraments, to order public worship, and to exercise discipline. And to the state to provide for the support of the clergy, to determine the sources and amount of their incomes, to fix the limits of parishes and dioceses, to provide places of public worship, to call together the clergy, to preside in their meetings, to give the force of laws to their decisions, and to see that external obedience at least was rendered to the decrees and acts of discipline.
And this, in general terms, was the actual relation between the two institutions under the Roman emperors, and in many of the states which rose after the dissolution of the Roman empire. But it is easy to see that the distinction between the internal affairs which belonged to the bishops, and the external which belonged to the civil ruler, is too indefinite to keep two mighty bodies from coming into collision. If the magistrate provided the support of the bishops and sustained them in their places of influence, he felt entitled to have a voice in saying who should receive his funds, and use that influence. If he was to enforce the decisions of councils as to matters of faith and discipline, he must have some agency in determining what those decisions should be. If he was to banish from his kingdom those whom the clergy excluded from the Church, he must judge whether such exclusion was in itself just. And on the other hand, if the Church was recognized as a divine institution, with divinely constituted government and powers, she would constantly struggle to preserve her prerogatives from the encroachments of the state, and to draw to herself all the power requisite to enforce her decisions in the sphere of the state into which she was adopted, which she of right possessed in her own sphere as a spiritual, and, in one sense voluntary, society.
Simple and plausible, therefore, as the relation between the Church and state, as determined by Constantine, may at first sight appear, the whole history of the Church shows that it cannot be maintained. Either the Church will encroach on the peculiar province of the state, or the state upon that of the Church. It would require an outline of ecclesiastical history, from Constantine to the present day, to exhibit the conflicts and vacillations of these two principles. The struggle though protracted and varied in its prospects, was decided in favor of the Church, which under the papacy gained a complete ascendency over the state.
The papal world constituted one body, of which the Pope, as vicar of Christ, was the head. This spiritual body claimed a divine right to make its own laws, appoint its own officers, and have its own tribunals, to which alone its officers were amenable, and before whom all persons in the state, from the highest to the lowest, could be cited to appear. All ecclesiastical persons were thus withdrawn from the jurisdiction of the state; while all civil persons were subject to the jurisdiction of the Church. The Church being the infallible judge of all questions relating to faith and practice, and it being the obvious duty of all men to receive the decisions and obey the injunctions of an infallible authority, the state was bound to receive all those decisions and enforce all those commands. The civil magistrate had no judgment or discretion in the case; he was but the secular arm of the Church, with whose judgments, no matter how injurious he might regard them to his own prerogative, or to the interests of his people, he had no right to interfere. The Church, however, claimed the right to interfere in all the decisions of the civil power; because she only could judge whether those decisions were or were not inimical to the true faith, or consistent with the rule of duty. Hence arose what is called the indirect power of the Church in the temporal affairs of the state. Even without going to the extreme of claiming for the Pope, by divine right, a direct sovereignty over the Christian world, moderate Romanists of the Italian school claimed for the Pope, this indirect power in the civil affairs of kingdoms; that is, power of deciding whether any law or measure was or was not hurtful to the Church, and either to sanction or to annul it. And in case any sovereign should persist in a course pronounced by an infallible authority hurtful to the Church, the obligation of obedience on the part of his subjects was declared to be at an end, and the sovereign deposed.