There is a fine passage of Mr. Keble’s in the British Critic, in animadversion upon a contemporary reviewer. Mr. Hurrell Froude, speaking of the Church of England, had said that “she was ‘united’ to the State as Israel to Egypt.” This shocked the reviewer in question, who exclaimed in consequence, “The Church is not united to the State as Israel to Egypt; it is united as a believing wife to a husband who threatened to apostatize; and, as a Christian wife so placed would act … clinging to the connexion … so the Church must struggle even now, and save, not herself, but the State, from the crime of a divorce.” On this Mr. Keble says, “We had thought that the Spouse of the Church was a very different Person from any or all States, and her relation to the State through Him very unlike that of hers, whose duties are summed up in ‘love, service, cherishing, and obedience.’ And since the one is exclusively of this world, the other essentially of the eternal world, such an Alliance as the above sentence describes, would have seemed to us, not only fatal but monstrous!” ¹ And he quotes the lines,—

“Mortua quinetiam jungebat corpora vivis,
Componens manibusque manus, atque oribus ora:
Tormenti genus!”

It was this same conviction that the Church had rights which the State could not touch, and was prone to ignore, and which in consequence were the occasion of great troubles between the two, that led Mr. Froude at the beginning of the movement to translate the letters of St. Thomas Becket, and Mr. Bowden to write the Life of Hildebrand. As to myself, I will but refer, as to one out of many passages with the same drift, in the books and tracts which I published at that time, to my Whit-Monday and Whit-Tuesday Sermons.

I believe a large number of members of the Church of England at this time are faithful to the doctrine which was proclaimed within its pale in 1833, and following years; the main difference between them and Catholics being, not as to the existence of certain high prerogatives and spiritual powers in the Christian Church, but that the powers which we give to the Holy See, they lodge in her Bishops and Priests, whether as a body or individually. Of course, this is a very important difference, but it does not interfere with my argument here. It does seem to me preposterous to charge the Catholic Church of today with repudiating ancient history by certain political acts of hers, and thereby losing her identity, when it was her very likeness in political action to the Church of the first centuries, that has in our time attracted even to her communion, and at least to her teaching, not a few educated men, who made those first centuries their special model.

But I have more to say on this subject, perhaps too much, when I go on, as I now do, to contemplate the Christian Church, when persecution was exchanged for establishment, and her enemies became her children. As she resisted and defied her persecutors, so she ruled her convert people. And surely this was but natural, and will startle those only to whom the subject is new. If the Church is independent of the State, so far as she is a messenger from God, therefore, should the State, with its high officials and its subject masses, come into her communion, it is plain that they must at once change hostility into submission. There was no middle term; either they must deny her claim to divinity or humble themselves before it,—that is, as far as the domain of religion extends, and that domain is a wide one. They could not place God and man on one level. We see this principle carried out among ourselves in all sects every day, though with greater or less exactness of application, according to the supernatural power which they ascribe to their ministers or clergy. It is a sentiment of nature, which anticipates the inspired command, “Obey them that have the rule over you, and submit yourselves, for they watch for your souls.”

As regards the Roman Emperors, immediately on their becoming Christians, their exaltation of the hierarchy was in proportion to its abject condition in the heathen period. Grateful converts felt that they could not do too much in its honour and service. Emperors bowed the head before the Bishops, kissed their hands and asked their blessing. When Constantine entered into the presence of the assembled Prelates at Nicæa, his eyes fell, the colour mounted up into his cheek, and his mien was that of a suppliant; he would not sit, till the Bishops bade him, and he kissed the wounds of the Confessors. Thus he set the example for the successors of his power, nor did the Bishops decline such honours. Royal ladies served them at table; victorious generals did penance for sin and asked forgiveness. When they quarrelled with them, and would banish them, their hand trembled when they came to sign the order, and after various attempts they gave up their purpose. Soldiers raised to sovereignty asked their recognition and were refused it. Cities under imperial displeasure sought their intervention, and the master of thirty legions found himself powerless to withstand the feeble voice of some aged travel-stained stranger.

Laws were passed in favour of the Church; Bishops could only be judged by Bishops, and the causes of their clergy were withdrawn from the secular courts. Their sentence was final, as if it were the Emperor’s own, and the governors of provinces were bound to put it in execution. Litigants everywhere were allowed the liberty of referring their causes to the tribunal of the Bishops, who, besides, became arbitrators on a large scale in private quarrels; and the public, even heathens, wished it so. St. Ambrose was sometimes so taken up with business of this sort, that he had time for nothing else. St. Austin and Theodoret both complain of the weight of such secular engagements, as were forced upon them by the importunity of the people. Nor was this all; the Emperors showed their belief in the divinity of the Church and of its creed by acts of what we should now call persecution. Jews were forbidden to proselytize a Christian; Christians were forbidden to become pagans; pagan rights were abolished, the books of heretics and infidels were burned wholesale; their chapels were razed to the ground, and even their private meetings were made illegal.

These characteristics of the convert Empire were the immediate, some of them the logical, consequences of its new faith. Had not the Emperors honoured Christianity in its ministers and in its precepts, they would not properly have deserved the name of converts. Nor was it unreasonable in litigants voluntarily to frequent the episcopal tribunals, if they got justice done to them there better than in the civil courts. As to the prohibition of heretical meetings, I cannot get myself quite to believe that Pagans, Marcionites, and Manichees had much tenderness of conscience in their religious profession, or were wounded seriously by the Imperial rescripts to their disadvantage. Many of these sects were of a most immoral character, whether in doctrine or practice; others were forms of witchcraft; often they were little better than paganism. The Novatians certainly stand on higher ground; but on the whole, it would be most unjust to class such wild, impure, inhuman rites with even the most extravagant and grotesque of American sectaries now. They could entertain no bitter feeling that injustice was done them in their repression. They did not make free thought or private judgment their watch-words. The populations of the Empire did not rise in revolt when its religion was changed. There were two broad conditions which accompanied the grant of all this ecclesiastical power and privilege, and made the exercise of it possible; first, that the people consented to it, secondly, that the law of the Empire enacted and enforced it. Thus high and low opened the door to it. The Church of course would say that such prerogatives were justly hers, as being at least congruous grants made to her, on the part of the State, in return for the benefits which she bestowed upon it. It was her right to demand them, and the State’s duty to concede them. This seems to have been the basis of the new state of society. And in fact these prerogatives were in force and in exercise all through those troublous centuries which followed the break-up of the Imperial sway: and, though the handling of them at length fell into the hands of one see exclusively (on which I shall remark presently), the see of Peter, yet the substance and character of these prerogatives, and the Church’s claim to possess them, remained untouched. The change in the internal allocation of power did not affect the existence and the use of the power itself.

Ranke, speaking of this development of ecclesiastical supremacy upon the conversion of the Empire, remarks as follows:—

“It appears to me that this was the result of an internal necessity. The rise of Christianity involved the liberation of religion from all political elements. From this followed the growth of a distinct ecclesiastical class with a peculiar constitution. In this separation of the Church from the State consists, perhaps the greatest, the most pervading and influential peculiarity of all Christian times. The spiritual and secular powers may come into near contact, may even stand in the closest community; but they can be thoroughly incorporated only at rare conjunctures and for a short period. Their mutual relations, their positions with regard to each other, form, from this time forward, one of the most important considerations in all history.”—The Popes, vol. i. p. 10, transl.

Footnotes

1. Review of Gladstone’s “The State in its Relations with the Church,” October, 1839. ↩