164

INCREASED FREEDOM OF THE STATE MUST

LECT. IV.

Charlemagne, a Saint Louis, or even an Elizabeth, and when wielded by a body of rulers many of whom are not by profession Churchmen, and they will see that, if things are not to come to a dead lock, forbearance is necessary in the use of their undeniably great power. On the part of the Church as well as of the State, there must be the greatest moderation in pushing claims, a spirit of conciliation rather than a reckless rushing to extremities.

No one can imagine that civil liberty ought to cease to be as jealously guarded as ever, but common sense is daily shewing that much of the jealousy of ecclesiastical agency on this score is a mere bugbear, too often dishonestly flaunted by designing men. If we may venture to look a little into the future we may prophesy that the management of Church affairs will very soon be left more and more to Churchmen, and instead of enfeebling, from a vague fear of some latent injury to the State, every effort on their part to attain a condition of healthy action, that the love of freedom and openness and discussion, which has led to such great results in English politics, will, as time goes on, extend itself to the feelings of Englishmen generally in reference to the Church; while in the Church's own free, independent action, and free debate, will be found the true antidote to those poisonous errors over which men have mourned in past history and which they dread in the future. In short, the increased freedom of the State must necessarily bring with it increased freedom to the Church; and within that body itself the difficulties which beset the reconciliation of authority and liberty will be overcome through the organized co-operation of the different ranks of the clergy and Church-laity, through

LECT. IV. BRING INCREASED FREEDOM OF THE CHURCH.

165

the increased efficiency of Church institutions too long disused.

For the Church herself no one need fear when she is once aroused. As Parliament and people did not make her, so, as Archbishop Trench in his Primary Charge has nobly said, Parliament and people cannot mar her.* The danger of the day, the danger which every educated man should set himself to combat, is for the State. If it does not solve the problem of its time, a problem no more difficult than those of many another time, it may cut itself off from what at present forms its chief strength, its main title to respect. It is not easy to see how the connection of Church and State, if it is once broken, can ever be repaired.

* And yet, true as this is, the danger of so-called Erastianism is not a dream. It was said by perhaps the acutest of the champions of the faith at a dark period of our history, that "the Erastian principle has had two visible effects in England; it has turned the gentry Deists, and the common people Dissenters; for the Dissenters, one and all, from Presbyterians down to Muggletonians, pretend to Divine Commission independent of all the powers upon the earth; therefore the people run to them and look upon the Church of England as a Parliamentary religion and establishment of the State; and the Deists, when they find themselves in committees of religion, can never think that there is anything Divine in that which they see stand or fall by their vote."-Leslie's 'Case of the Regale,' p. 611.

For an unanswerable defence of the liberties of the Church see the speeches of Bishops Blomfield and Wilberforce, and the Earl of Derby, then Lord Stanley, in the debate in the House of Lords in 1850. (This has been lately made more accessible by being quoted almost in extenso in Fuller's 'Court of Final Appeal.')

166

THE PROGRESS OF CIVILIZED MAN DUE

LECT. V.

LECTURE V.

THE CONFLICT BETWEEN THE IMPERIAL AND NATIONAL PRINCIPLES, OR, THE TEMPORAL POWER OF THE PAPACY. NOVEMBER 10, 1866.

ITALIAN Nationality! The loss of the Pope's Temporal Power! How strange, how dream-like would these words have sounded a very few years ago! Yet how familiar are we already beginning to be with the ideas they convey! How, in a How, in a University where Mediæval History has become a study, can such ideas fail to connect themselves with the long past? Putting aside the ordinary controversial points of view, without for a moment denying their importance, let us glance at the history which these words call up. If we are witnesses to the climax of many centuries, if this is the first time for a thousand years that the conjunction of these two phenomena has been-we will not say accomplished, but imminent-we may well ask ourselves what has hindered the conjunction up to this time; and the consideration of this question may afford us some dim light as to the future. If we can trace the gradual unfolding of a scheme, one marked epoch of which is even now drawing on itself the attention of the world, it must naturally occur to us that this scheme is likely to have a still further development.

That the history of the world has been the history of an education no one will deny; and what does that mean but an education for an end? The universal

LECT. V. TO THE CONFLICT BETWEEN TWO PRINCIPLES. 167

voice of mankind puts in a claim for Progress. It may be intellectual, religious, material, political; but in one form or other we all admit a Progress. Even when we trace recurrences and parallels in history we cannot help perceiving that they are like the periodical return of the spoke of a wheel to the ground. There is a certain uniformity in the details of the movement, but it is still forward. Further, the line of this progress is evolved along the course of man's experimental training; he is permitted to work out the problem for himself. The solution of it is a process of growth and development, not indeed in the sphere of the Christian Faith, which was given once for all, but in all those relations of social and political life with which that Faith is mixed up, and this process seems to be connected with a perpetual conflict of principles, an everpresent clashing of two opposite ideas. We may

observe the conflict in Philosophy, in Politics, in the religious training of mankind. It is part of a great law of our Nature, meeting us at every turn. These principles are represented in a variety of forms by what in philosophical analysis is known as the One and the Many. The history of Politics, the history of the Church, is nothing else but a history of this eternal struggle. How to reconcile Law and Liberty, System and the claims of the Individual, Centralization and Local Government, Dependence and Independence, the Imperial and the Regal, the Ecumenical and the National, is the problem of every age, as old as the infancy of the human race, as young as the society of to-day, confined to no clime, to be comprised in no formula equally available at different times. Men may not perceive how they are working it out; they may mistake the relative

168

NEGATIVE PROOF FROM AFRICA.

LECT. V.

the

position of their age; but as time unrolls the whole, progress made in solving the problem becomes visible.

It is visible, however, as yet only in the heirs of the civilization which travelled from the original Asiatic centre, in the heirs of the Christianity for which all previous Dispensations had existed. Not all men at once were to receive this education. Some seem to be waiting till the great lesson has been learnt by the favoured branches of the one family. Take Africa as the contrast, and at the same time the illustration, of this view. There no settled government from generation to generation trains the character of her children from father to son, from son to grandson. No Revelation has prepared the way for a further and a further light. And thus no ideas are perpetuated and improved; no political traditions carry conviction with the training of infancy; no great natural gifts-and it is false to deny their existence in Africa-germinate and reproduce themselves, but on the contrary they die out with their possessor; no gradual enlargement of the faculties till they obtain a full and complete development takes place, but Africans remain for ever children. And men of our day, forgetful of their own progenitors, ignoring the vast history of their own branch of the great family, shutting their eyes to the commonest effects of education, are tempted to deny that "God hath made of one blood all the nations upon Earth."

And are we not witnesses of the very process of transfer from the more favoured to the less? Is it not a fact, that just as all Europe to her remotest corners has received this inheritance, just when law, order, and to some extent self-government, have prevailed over European barbarism, just when the Celtic, the Teutonic, and the