RELIGION AND 
 POLITICS 
 
 BY 
 ALGERNON SIDNEY CRAPSEY 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 THOMAS WHITTAKER 
 2 and 3 Bible House
 
 Entered according to Act of Congress in the year nineteen hundred and fire by 
 
 ALGERNON SIDNEY CRAPSEY 
 in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, Washington, D. C.
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 SANTA PAP.T5.\RA 
 
 Contents 
 
 Preface 
 
 I. The State 9 
 
 II. The Attitude of Jesus to the State 31 
 
 III. The Democratic Church in the Imperial 
 
 State 56 
 
 IV. Jesus' Method of Government 78 
 V. The Imperialized Church 100 
 
 VI. The Subjection of the Eastern Church 
 
 to the State 120 
 
 VII. The Supremacy of the Church in the 
 
 West 142 
 
 VIII. The Fall of the Mediaeval Church 170 
 
 IX. The Rise of the National Churches 214 
 X. The Relation of Church and State in 
 
 the United States 235 
 
 XI. The Commercialized Church in the 
 
 Commercialized State 256 
 
 XII. The Present State of the Churches 276 
 
 XIII. The American Church-State 297
 
 Preface. 
 
 The sermon lectures which are submitted to the 
 judgment of the reading public in the following 
 pages, were not written in the first instance with any 
 thought of their ultimate publication. They were 
 prepared by the author and delivered by him in the 
 course of his duty as preacher to the congregation 
 of which he is the pastor. Reports of the lectures 
 were published in the daily press, which reports at- 
 tracted wide attention, and gave rise to much discus- 
 sion and contention. Because of this it seems wise 
 to publish the discourses in full in order that the 
 writer may be judged by the whole body of his 
 thought, rather than by any selected portion of the 
 same. 
 
 It was the intention of the speaker that these utter- 
 ances should serve the double purpose of the lecture 
 
 and the sermon: as lectures it was their main ob- 
 ject to impart historical information, as sermons they 
 were intended to rouse spiritual emotions and to in- 
 spire moral action. The writer is aware that he has 
 not altogether escaped the dangers which follow upon 
 the effort thus to combine the work of the lecturer 
 and the preacher. He has, he fears, unwittingly, 
 brought into the region of heated theological con- 
 troversy, matters that belong rather to the clear, calm, 
 
 CO
 
 2 PREFACE. 
 
 dispassionate department of historical investigation. 
 His only excuse is that religion and history are so 
 closely associated that it is impossible to treat of the 
 one without reference to the other. Especially is 
 this the case when one attempts to consider the rela- 
 tion of the religious to the political life of man. This 
 subject must be considered historically or not at all. 
 
 In view of the discussion which has been occa- 
 sioned by the publication of the I2th lecture in this 
 course on the Present State of the Churches, it seems 
 wise for the writer to devote a few prefatory pages 
 to a simple explanation of the historical method as it 
 is used by modern schpjasjn_th^jnvestigation of 
 historical phenomena in general and of thej)henom- 
 ena of religious history in particular. 
 
 Historic criticism, as a science, has for its purpose 
 the discovery and establishment of historic truth. 
 Any one who is at all acquainted with human affairs 
 is well aware of the fact that one cannot believe all 
 that one hears. Stories are told of what men have 
 said and men have done, stories which, while they 
 may have some basis in truth are yet so turned and 
 twisted, so colored and informed by the hopes and 
 fears, the prejudices and passions, the inaccuracies 
 and exaggerations of the story tellers, that it is only 
 by a rigid process of examination and cross exam- 
 ination that we are able to arrive at anything like a 
 truthful account of what actually occurred. Every 
 one admits that in the ordinary affairs of the world,
 
 PREFACE. 3 
 
 one must exercise the utmost caution if one would 
 not be lead into error. If a man runs after every 
 rumor and listens to every tale, he is sure to come to 
 grief. A prudent man will not act upon any in- 
 formation until he has tested that information by a 
 rigid method of investigation which will give him 
 reasonable assurance that what he has heard is true. 
 Every prudent man is, therefore, an historical critic. 
 He is applying to current history the same method 
 which the student uses in his study of the history of 
 the past. 
 
 The law courts are engaged daily in this process 
 of historical criticism. They seek to arrive at the 
 truth by a rigid system of examination. These 
 courts have by long experience evolved rules of evi- 
 dence which guide them in their administration of 
 justice. To be a perfectly competent witness a man 
 must have knowledge at first hand of the fact to 
 which he testifies. If he has not himself seen or 
 heard he is not competent to tell. Not only must he 
 have this first hand knowledge but he must also be, 
 as far as possible, without prejudice or partiality; 
 the character of a witness, his ability, his fairness, his 
 moral integrity and his intellectual capacity must all 
 be considered in weighing his testimony. Moreover, 
 a witness, in certain circumstances, to be of value, 
 must not only have a knowledge of the particular 
 fact to which he testifies, but also of the relation of 
 that fact to the general order of the world. An
 
 4 PREFACE. 
 
 ordinary person may be competent to testify that a 
 man was wounded in a given part of the body and 
 yet not be competent to say that the wound in ques- 
 tion was necessarily fatal and the cause of the man's 
 death. Before he is competent to give such evidence 
 he must know somewhat of human anatomy and 
 physiology, and of the effect of such wounds upon 
 the life of man. He must not only be an eye witness, 
 he must also be an intellectual expert. 
 
 Not only does historic criticism take into account 
 the character and opportunity of the witness, but it 
 also considers the nature of the alleged event. An 
 assertion which falls in with the ordinary daily ex- 
 perience of mankind can be established by evidence 
 much less cogent than is required to sustain a state- 
 ment which contradicts such experience. We can 
 believe readily the word of almost anyone who tells 
 us that a certain man walked upright upon the land; 
 we would examine much more searchingly the same 
 witness should he assert that a certain man walked 
 upright on the water. In the one case the wit- 
 ness is corroborated by universal experience; in the 
 other case universal experience is against him, and 
 of all witnesses, universal experience is the most 
 convincing. What we call natural law is simply an 
 accurate statement of this universal experience. 
 From the earliest times men have observed that 
 heavy bodies when thrown into the air fall again to 
 the earth. An accurate measurement of the velocity
 
 PREFACE. 5 
 
 of the fail of such bodies gives us the Newtonian law 
 of gravitation. We can test that law at all times 
 and it never fails us. When once this law has be- 
 come a part of our mental endowment, we can readily 
 receive all that is in accord with it, while any viola- 
 tion of it appears to us impossible. All the wonders 
 of astronomical science, beside which all the recorded 
 miracles of the world are but as child's play, seem to 
 us credible because they conform to this universal 
 experience. 
 
 If we are told of a certain being in human form, 
 born of a human mother, expressing consciousness in 
 human speech, living a human life and dying a hu- 
 man death, we naturally predicate of such an one a 
 human fatherhood as well as a human motherhood, 
 for universal experience bears witness to the fact that 
 everyone who is the child of a human mother is also 
 the child of a human father. To overcome this 
 presupposition which is established by universal ex- 
 perience would require testimony of overwhelm- 
 ing force. The burden of proof lies with those 
 who deny, not with those who assert the valid- 
 ity of universal experience to establish a given fact. 
 
 Historic criticism simply applies these principles to 
 the examination of historic documents. It is a well 
 known fact that in the beginning the mind of man 
 was not trained to accurate observation and accurate 
 statement. Nor was he sufficiently acquainted with 
 the course of Nature to be able to interpret rightly
 
 6 PREFACE. 
 
 natural events. His history was not the result of 
 careful research, of painful composition and toil- 
 some correction ; but it was a tale told by the fireside 
 and passed from lip to lip growing and changing 
 with every repetition. Primitive man was moreover 
 unable to distinguish between the creations of his own 
 imagination and the facts of the external universe. 
 His dream by night was as real to him as his sight 
 by day. He projected himself into the universe and 
 made the world in his own image. The sun and the 
 moon and the stars, the winds and the waves, the 
 trees and the running waters, were conceived by him 
 to be living creatures like himself, capable of joy and 
 sorrow, inspired by hopes and fears, indulging loves 
 and hatreds. The earliest literature of the world is 
 the expression of the facts of the universe in general 
 and of human life in particular in the terms of the 
 undisciplined human imagination. This literature 
 is sublime poetry, but it is not accurate history. The 
 historical critic classes stories of this kind under the 
 name of mythology. In the next period of human 
 thinking man recognizes more clearly his distinct 
 place in nature, but he cannot yet measure his own 
 powers, nor be fully conscious of his own limitations. 
 He is ready to ascribe to his fathers, to ancient kings 
 and heroes mastery over nature which later exper- 
 ience will not allow. The stories which make up his 
 history have only a general relation to the facts as 
 they occurred. His fathers and his heroes are the
 
 PREFACE. 7 
 
 personification of race feeling such as race pride, race 
 fear and race hope. Stories of this class, which have 
 some basis in fact, are grouped by the historic critic 
 under the name of legend. After legend comes 
 sober history when trees are trees and men are 
 men and facts are facts. 
 
 It has been the sole work of the historical critic to 
 thus arrange and classify historical statements. The 
 Christian critic has not hesitated to apply this 
 method to all history except the history of his own 
 religion. And is he not in honor bound to use the 
 same measure for himself which he metes out to 
 others ? And this is all that the present writer con- 
 tends for in the I2th lecture of this series. He 
 claims the right to investigate Jthe facts of his own 
 religion by the same method which he has been 
 taught to use in the investigation of the facts of all 
 other religions. He would be ashamed to claim for 
 his own great religion what he is not ready to allow 
 to the poorest religion of the world. If the literature 
 and formularies of his religion contain historical 
 statements, then those statements must be subjected 
 to the process of historical criticism, and if we find 
 there the elements of myth and legend let us not be 
 afraid to confess that our religion like all religions 
 has had its infancy and its youth, as well as its years 
 of sober manhood. And the writer of these lectures 
 further asserts that whether we, the Christian min- 
 isters, like it or not, the historical content of the
 
 8 PREFACE. 
 
 Hebrew and Christian religion has been and will be 
 subjected to the correcting process of historical crit- 
 icism and is it not better that we, ourselves, should do 
 this necessary work rather than be forced to receive 
 its results at the hand of strangers ? 
 
 The true believer has nothing to fear from historic 
 criticism. His faith does not rest in any given in- 
 terpretation of history ; for him God is God, man is 
 man, Jesus is Jesus, the Spirit of Holiness is the 
 Spirit of Holiness in the eternal now, no matter what 
 may have happened in the past. 
 
 NOTE. Before going to press the author desires to qualify 
 a statement made in lecture 12, concerning Theological 
 Seminaries. It is there asserted that these Seminaries are 
 the only institutions of learning which do not employ the 
 scientific method in the investigation and establishment of 
 truth. This is true of Theological Seminaries in general, 
 but there are notable exceptions. The Union Theological 
 Seminary in New York, Harvard Divinity School, Yale 
 Divinity School, the Divinity School of Chicago University, 
 the Episcopal Divinity School of Cambridge, Mass., are all 
 schools of scientific as opposed to scholastic theology and 
 are doing work of a very high order.
 
 The State. 
 
 The Convention of the Protestant Episcopal 
 Church, lately assembled in the city of Boston, had 
 as its guest of honor no less a personage than His 
 Grace, the Archbishop of Canterbury. For the first 
 time in history the primate of all England, the 
 highest dignitary of the established church, has left 
 his own jurisdiction, and has come out to visit the 
 churches in the Dominion of Canada and in the 
 United States of America. This visit is noteworthy, 
 not only because of the gracious personality of him 
 who made it, but more because of the political and 
 religious significance of the event. 
 
 We hear from all who came in contact with His 
 Grace of Canterbury of his simplicity of character, 
 his personal piety, his gentleness and courtesy. He 
 is without doubt a good man and an exemplary 
 clergyman. But it was not as a good man, nor as 
 an exemplary clergyman, that he was carried about 
 in private palace cars, received the worship of the 
 
 bl
 
 io RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 churches and the adulation of the multitude. It was 
 not Mr. Randall Davidson who had the chief seats 
 in the solemn assembly ; who was the guest of honor 
 in the house of the President of the United States 
 and sat at the right hand of the merchant princes 
 of our land. All these honors were accorded, not 
 to the man, but to the official. This man occupies 
 for the time being one of the highest dignities in the 
 world. He is the natural companion of emperors, 
 kings, and presidents ; he is titular chief of the estab- 
 lished church of England ; he has his palace at Can- 
 terbury and his palace in London; his official in- 
 come is greater than that of the President of the 
 United States. This Archbishop of Canterbury is 
 not only an officer in the church of Christ; he is 
 also an official in the Kingdom of Edward VII. He 
 not only presides in the councils of the church, but 
 as a member of the House of Lords; he has his 
 voice and vote in affairs of state. This, his official 
 status, makes his recent presence in our midst a 
 historical object lesson, bringing to our attention 
 in a picturesque way the fact that there are in 
 Christendom two institutions, the church and the 
 state, which from the beginning of Christian history 
 have borne a varying relation to each other. It is
 
 THE STATE. n 
 
 to this constantly varying relation of the church 
 to the state that I now invite your attention, not as 
 a matter for mere academic discussion, but as of vi- 
 tal interest to our social, our political, and our re- 
 ligious life. 
 
 That institution which we call the church came 
 into existence about 1900 years ago, and had its 
 beginning in a province of the Roman Empire. The 
 church took its rise just at that period when the 
 imperial system had firmly established its sway over 
 the Roman world. The Christian church and the 
 Roman Empire are so bound together in their ori- 
 gin and history that it is impossible to understand 
 the one without some knowledge of the other. We 
 must, then, take a hasty glance at the history and 
 constitution of the Empire before we can study with 
 intelligence the history and constitution of the 
 church. 
 
 The Roman Empire as it existed in the first cen- 
 tury of the Christian era had succeeded to the pow- 
 ers and inherited the conquests of the Roman Re- 
 public. The Empire had, indeed, built itself up out 
 of the ruins of the Republic. The rise of the city of 
 Rome from republican simplicity to imperial great- 
 ness is the central fact in the history of Europe, if
 
 12 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 not of the world. On the left bank of the Tiber, in 
 the country called Italy, about 14 miles from the 
 sea, are a number of low-lying hills; two of these 
 hills, separated from one another by a narrow ra- 
 vine, form the site of the original city of Rome. 
 The beginnings of the city are wrapt in myth and 
 legend. Tradition tells us that it was founded by 
 the union of three or more separate tribes under the 
 leadership of Romulus and Remus. These mythical 
 heroes were of divine origin, and acted under di- 
 vine guidance in selecting the site and laying the 
 foundations of their city. From the very first the 
 Roman people were remarkable for their piety, and 
 religion was a function of the state. It is to this 
 fact that Cicero ascribes the rise of Rome to world- 
 wide dominion. "Let us," said this great Roman; 
 "let us be as partial to ourselves as we will, Con- 
 script Fathers, yet we have not surpassed the Span- 
 iards in number, nor the Gauls in strength, nor the 
 Carthaginians in cunning, nor the Greeks in the 
 arts, nor, lastly, the Latins and Italians of this na- 
 tion and land in natural intelligence and home mat- 
 ters; but we have excelled all nations in piety and 
 religion, and in this our wisdom of fully recogniz-
 
 THE STATE. 13 
 
 ing that all things are ordered and governed by 
 the power of the immortal gods."* The domestic 
 and the public life of the Roman had each its pre- 
 siding deity, and he ruled all his actions with a view 
 to pleasing his gods. 
 
 It has been suggested by Goldwin Smith in an 
 able essay on The Greatness of Rome that the city 
 owed its military dominance to the fact, not that 
 it was more warlike, but, on the contrary that it 
 was less warlike, than the surrounding peoples. 
 The conquests of Rome were due, not so much to 
 the brute force of the warrior, as they were to the 
 discipline of the soldier and to the sagacity of the 
 general. It was, says Goldwin Smith, "the first 
 triumph of intellect over muscle."f The fighter 
 under the Roman rule was not a savage rushing at 
 his foe with savage rage, and running away with 
 savage fear. He was the member of a highly trained 
 company advancing and retreating at the word of 
 command. Discipline was the life, and obedience 
 the watchword, of the Roman soldier. To be slack 
 in discipline was a crime; to disobey a command, 
 
 *Cicero, De Har. Resp. 9. Quoted by Bacon in Essay on 
 Atheism, p. 167. Lee and Shepard, Boston, 1868. 
 tThe Greatness of the Romans Essay Goldwin Smith.
 
 14 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 or to act without orders, was to incur the penalty 
 of death. Both in military and in civil life the Ro- 
 man was the first to develop fully the idea of law. 
 The great word which he has contributed to the 
 language of man is the word lex, or law. In the 
 Roman system the will of the city was the rule of 
 life. 
 
 The original government of Rome was monarchi- 
 cal. But even in the days of the Kings the mon- 
 arch was not absolute. He was assisted in the gov- 
 ernment by a Senate or Council of Elders, and by 
 an Assembly of the People. It would seem that 
 the office of King was not hereditary, but was sub- 
 ject to election by the people and confirmation by 
 the Senate. When the Kings dared to violate the 
 laws and outrage the feelings of the people they 
 were expelled from the city, and Rome became a 
 Republic. We have the whole genius of Rome ex- 
 pressed in this word "Republic." It is res publica 
 a public thing. The life of the city and the life of 
 every citizen in the city was a public thing; and it 
 was the merging of the life of the citizen in the life 
 of the city that created that public thing, that res
 
 THE STATE. 15 
 
 publica which became at last the wonder of the 
 world. In Rome the citizen existed for the sake 
 of the city; not the city for the citizen. It was a 
 corporation, a body politic, a real thing that lived 
 and wrought on the hills by the Tiber. We owe to 
 Rome our conception of the state as an entity, our 
 reverence for law as a rule of life, our belief in the 
 people as the source of power. The very word 
 "people" is of Roman origin. After the expulsion 
 of the Kings, the Romans were jealous, above all 
 things, of the executive power. Instead of Kings 
 ruling for life, they had Consuls elected every year. 
 I cannot in this lecture discuss the details of the 
 Roman Constitution. It was the growth of cen- 
 turies, and its history forms one of the great depart- 
 ments of human knowledge. The seat of power was 
 in the Senate and in the Assemblies of the People. 
 During the early period of republican history the 
 city was disturbed by the conflict between the peo- 
 ple at large and the old families, called the patri- 
 cians. The patricians were the privileged class. 
 They owned the land, for the most pari, on which 
 the city was built ; they alone were eligible to mem- 
 bership in the Senate ; they alone could hold the of-
 
 16 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 fice of Consul. Little by little the people pressed 
 forward, gaining for themselves a constantly in- 
 creasing share in the government of the city. In 
 the Tribune they created an officer who could veto 
 the acts of the Senate, and arrest the person c\f the 
 Consul. It was this conflict between the patrician 
 order and the people at large that brought about 
 at last the fall of the Republic. 
 
 While developing her Constitution within her 
 walls, Rome was extending her boundaries without. 
 War, at first a necessity, became a pleasure and a 
 pastime. The soldier at first a citizen, laying aside 
 his sword for the plough when the campaign was 
 over, became at last a professional who spent his 
 whole life in the military service of the Republic; 
 and it was this professional soldier who in time 
 subdued both patrician and plebian to his will, and 
 founded the Empire. 
 
 Absorbing first the kindred tribes of the Sabines 
 and the Latins, the Romans pressed northward be- 
 yond the Arno and the Po, subdued the region of 
 Cis-Alpine Gaul, and extended her borders to the 
 foot hills of the Alps. By the middle of the third
 
 THE STATE. 17 
 
 century before the Christian era all Italy was sub- 
 missive to the authority of the city of Rome. The 
 wars with Carthage, a rival city on the coast of 
 Africa, threatening for a time the very existence 
 of the Roman state, ended at last in giving Rome 
 possession of Spain, Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica, 
 and the lordship of Africa. From this time until 
 the fall of the Republic, the Romans engaged in the 
 business of conquering the world, and were emi- 
 nently successful in their enterprise. They subdued 
 Greece, Syria, and Egypt. In seven years Caesar 
 so Romanized and Latinized the country we now 
 call France that to this day we call France a Latin 
 country, and speak of the French as a Latin peo- 
 ple. The instrument by which Roman success was 
 achieved was the army. The Roman legions were 
 perfectly adapted to the work in which they were 
 engaged. Discipline was their life, the camp was 
 their home. Their general was their god and their 
 father. The Roman legionary had no attachment 
 to the city of Rome, no reverence for her institu- 
 tions. The city he, perhaps, had never seen; of 
 her history and Constitution he was profoundly ig- 
 norant. The gods of the city were not the gods of
 
 i8 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 the camp. It is hard for us in these days to under- 
 stand how completely the gods were localized in the 
 ancient world. Each city had its own gods; each 
 tribe its own deities. But in the Roman camp 
 were men from all the cities and all the tribes of 
 the Roman world, and each had left his gods behind 
 him as he had left his father and his mother. It 
 was this bringing together of the men of all na- 
 tions under the rule of Rome that brought about 
 the downfall of the ancient religions. Men found 
 that the gods of their city were not able to defend 
 them, and so they lost faith in them. The belief 
 that the power of the gods was local was fatal to 
 the belief in those gods when a man was removed 
 from his own country. The god of Syria could do 
 nothing for the Syrian as he wandered forlorn 
 through the sands of Africa. So the Roman legion- 
 ary, who spent his life in the camp, had lost his 
 residence in the city, his attachment to her insti- 
 tutions, and his belief in her gods. But, as religion 
 is a necessity of the heart of man, he soon sub- 
 stituted a new faith for the old. He soon came to 
 have a reverence, a love, and a wholesome fear for 
 the Imperium of Rome. Whoever came to his camp
 
 THE STATE. 19 
 
 bearing the commission of the city to command came 
 with the power of life and death. The legionary 
 saw in his commander the incarnation of the majes- 
 ty of Rome ; and, as I have said, the Roman legion- 
 ary found in that commander his father and his 
 god. To that father and god he yielded perfect 
 obedience; to him he looked for guidance; from 
 him he received food and clothing; from him he 
 begged the donative that gave a little pleasure to 
 his hard camp life, and from his hands he expected 
 the bit of land in Italy or the provinces upon which 
 at last he might live in quiet and die in peace. 
 
 In this way grew up that religion, so strange to 
 our way of thinking, which was the worship of the 
 Imperium of Rome ; which at last came to ascribe to 
 the Roman Emperor, the commander of the Roman 
 armies, as the incarnation of Roman power, divine 
 attributes during his life, and raised him to the rank 
 of an immortal god after his death. This was the 
 religion, and the only real religion, with which 
 Christianity had to compete in the first centuries of 
 its existence. 
 
 While the Roman Republic was strengthening it- 
 self in the outlying regions of the world, it was with
 
 20 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 still greater rapidity losing vitality in the very cen- 
 ter of its life in the city of Rome. The century 
 which saw the provinces of Greece and Asia, Sy- 
 ria, and Egypt come under the Roman dominion 
 was also the century which saw the decay of 
 republican virtue, and the failure of republican gov- 
 ernment, on the hills by the Tiber. Rome in the 
 days of her republican simplicity was as remarkable 
 for her domestic virtues as she was for her piety 
 toward the gods and her devotion to the public 
 good. The stories of Lucretia and Virginia tell of 
 the high esteem in which the Roman held the chas- 
 tity of his women. The histories of Regulus and 
 Cincinnatus speak of the Roman as always ready 
 to subject his life and his fortune to the interests 
 of the city; and we have already heard from the 
 lips of Cicero of his piety toward the gods. Now 
 in the second century before Christ all of these vir- 
 tues began rapidly to decay, and at the beginning 
 of the Christian period had utterly perished. Of 
 Rome it could have been said at that time what 
 Isaiah said of Jerusalem in his day : "The city was 
 full of wounds and bruises and putrifying sores. 
 From the crown of the head to the sole of the foot
 
 THE STATE. 21 
 
 there was no soundness in it."* The chastity of 
 Roman women became like the snakes in Ireland 
 non-existent. Men changed their wives, and women 
 their husbands, as readily as they changed their 
 garments. Adultery was a venial sin, and fornica- 
 tion a very virtue. For two centuries the only Ro- 
 man women who attained to celebrity gained a bad 
 pre-eminence by the excess of their vices. Instead 
 of Lucretia and the mother of the Gracchi, we have 
 Julia Augusta, Messallina, and Agrippina Minor. 
 With the corruption of female virtue came the ex- 
 tinction of the family. Rome would have become 
 depopulated if it had depended on the natural in- 
 crease of its own stock. It was only saved from 
 that fate by the influx of strangers from all parts 
 of the world. 
 
 But the loss of civic virtue was more frightful 
 than the decay of domestic purity. No American 
 politician of the baser sort ever surpassed the 
 Roman in making public office a private graft. The 
 stealings of Tweed himself become petty larceny 
 when we compare them with the robberies of a Lu- 
 cullus, a Crassus, or a Caesar. The Roman Pro- 
 consuls did not do their work in secret. They 
 
 *Isaiah, chap. iv.
 
 22 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 robbed the world in the open day, by force, and not 
 by cunning. The rich cities of the East became 
 their prey, and there was no end to their spoil. In 
 thus appropriating to themselves the riches of the 
 barbarian, they were conscious of no wrong. Their 
 cry was, "Woe to the conquered !" and long before 
 Marcy they had formulated the doctrine that to the 
 victor belong the spoils. Having in their power the 
 wealth of the nations, they might well, like Give as 
 he stood in the treasure house of Delhi and took 
 only so many hundred thousand pounds of that im- 
 mense treasure, marvel at their own moderation. 
 When Caesar went as quaestor to Spain he had to 
 borrow a vast sum from Crassus to pay his debts; 
 at the end of his quaestorship he had repaid this 
 loan, and had at his disposal millions of money, and 
 yet Caesar was probably the most virtuous and 
 moderate of all the great Romans of his day. 
 
 The venality of the Senate was as rapacious as 
 the rapacity of the generals. In the second and first 
 centuries before Christ political power centered in 
 the Roman Senate, and in the Senate everything 
 was for sale. Jugurtha, the usurping King of 
 Numidia, bought 'the Roman Senate as cynically as
 
 THE STATE. 23 
 
 Jay Gould bought the legislature of New York, or 
 the great corporations the legislature of New Jer- 
 sey. The Senate was the fountain of justice, and 
 there justice was poisoned at its wellspring. The 
 crimes of spoliation and murder went scot-free 
 upon a money payment. Rome had, indeed, be- 
 come a harlot whose every virtue had its price. The 
 populace of Rome shared in the general decadence. 
 Free bread and the circus had utterly corrupted 
 the masses. The votes in the comitia were 
 bought more openly than the votes in the Senate. 
 The populace avenged the murder of Caesar, not 
 so much because he was a great Roman, as be- 
 cause he left them each a sum of money in his will. 
 But a still greater disaster than the decay of do- 
 mestic purity, or the corruption of civic virtue fell 
 on the city ; this last overwhelming calamity was the 
 loss of religious faith. The Roman in the first and 
 second centuries before the Christian era had out- 
 grown the simple belief of his fathers. The Augurs 
 smiled at each other as they looked at the entrails 
 of animals, or watched the flight of birds ; the poets 
 turned the history of Jupiter into an obscene drama. 
 A crowd of strange gods and goddesses from the 
 East came crowding into Rome, and thrust aside
 
 24 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 the ancient deities. Osiris and Isis from the Nile, 
 Astarte and Heliogabalus from the Syrian desert, 
 were far more popular than poor old Jove, or rustic 
 Ceres, or plain Minerva. This vast seething mass 
 of religious decay and corruption stifled the con- 
 science of Rome and left her a prey to the violence 
 of her own passions.* Then followed the orgies of 
 the later Republic and early Empire; when human 
 nature, turning upon itself, put out the light of 
 shame, and gave itself over to a sensuality that was 
 neither brutal nor fiendish, but a sensuality of 
 which neither brute nor fiend, but man alone, is ca- 
 pable; when his conscience is cast down, and his 
 passions rule without restraint. The destruction of 
 republican Rome was caused by the vast increase 
 of ill gotten wealth, by the substitution of slave 
 labor for free industry, and by the subordination of 
 the civil to the military power. In the last century 
 of the old era the end came. In that century power 
 was rapidly concentrated in the hands of a very few 
 men. The military chieftans occupied the position 
 in the world then which the captains of industry 
 hold to-day. Pompey, the conqueror of the East, 
 representing the old aristocracy in the Senate, 
 
 *Suetonius, Lives of the Twelve Caesars, passim.
 
 THE STATE. 25 
 
 Caesar, the quaestor of Spain and the leader of 
 the Democratic party, together with Crassus, the 
 richest man in the Roman world, formed the first 
 trust,* and divided that Roman world between 
 them. Crassus was killed in his illfated expedition 
 into Parthia ; and the Senate, fearing the rising for- 
 tunes of Caesar in Gaul, and the triumph, in his 
 person, of the Plebeian or Democratic party, roused 
 against him the jealousy of Pompey, and arrayed 
 these great chieftans against each other, in the 
 hope that each would destroy the other and so 
 leave them, the senators, free to rob the world at 
 their ease. But the genius of Caesar was too much 
 for them. While Pompey was vacillating, Caesar 
 was acting. In violation of the Constitution, he 
 marched with his legions from Gaul to Rome; 
 drove the cowardly Senate before him; pursued 
 Pompey beyond the Adriatic ; and on the field of 
 Pharsalia ended forever the power of the Senate 
 and the duration of Republican institutions in 
 Rome. 
 
 The Roman world, as it lay at the feet of Caesar
 
 26 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 on the night of Pharsalia, was a world without a 
 government, a world without virtue, and a world 
 without religion. And this man, Caius Julius 
 Cassar, in the far-reach and plenitude of his genius, 
 became himself all these to the world. The word of 
 Cassar became the law, obedience to Caesar the gov- 
 ernment, attachment to Caesar the virtue, and wor- 
 ship of Caesar the religion, of the world. Only one 
 other personality can compete with the personality 
 of Caesar for pre-eminence among men, and that 
 personality was not yet born into the world. In his 
 day there was no one, far or near, to compete with 
 Caesar for supremacy. He gathered into his hands 
 all the powers of the Roman republic. He was 
 clothed by the Senate for life with the Imperium. 
 He was the Imperator, Emperor, or Commander 
 of all the armies in all the provinces. Outside of 
 Italy his word was the only law ; within Italy itself 
 the Senate and the people were obedient to his 
 will. As Pontifex Maximus he was clothed with 
 all the majesty and mystery of the national religion. 
 In his day Caesar stood alone like a God, an object 
 of fear, of reverence, of love, and of hatred. He
 
 THE STATE. 27 
 
 was the state, he was the church, and beside him 
 there was no other. He filled the whole horizon of 
 the heavens, and men bowed to him as to a deity. 
 
 And when Caesar died at the foot of Pompey's 
 pillar his great personality did not perish with his 
 mortal frame. That personality brooded for cen- 
 turies; yes, it broods still, over the political life of 
 man. Caesar was the incarnation of the state. In 
 him the old Roman idea of the state as a Thing 
 apart from the people, was personified. It was a 
 Thing mysterious in its nature and awful in its 
 power. It had but to speak the word, and men 
 must forsake their homes, their wives, and their 
 children, and march away to leave their bones in the 
 sands of Africa, in the forests of Germany, and on 
 the mountains of Caucasus. This dreadful Thing 
 could come and wring the last drachma from the 
 hand of the peasant, and leave him and his wife 
 and his babes to perish with hunger. This Thing 
 could come into a land smiling with plenty and 
 leave it a desolate waste. This Thing could enter 
 into the palace of the greatest of the Senators, and 
 he must follow it to the dungeon and to death.
 
 28 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 The state as it was incarnate in Caesar was the in- 
 carnation of death and destruction. But it had this 
 great and necessary virtue, it allowed no one to 
 rob and kill but itself. It brought a certain peace 
 and quiet into the world. 
 
 The state as a Thing was passed on as private 
 property to the grandnephew of Caesar, the young 
 and beautiful Octavianus, called Augustus, who 
 consolidated the power and increased the value of 
 the property which he inherited from his great-uncle. 
 In some respects Augustus is even a more wonder- 
 ful personality than Caesar. He was not, like 
 Caesar, a great military or literary genius ; not, like 
 him, a great statesman. He was a consummate 
 organizer; an astute politician. But, because he 
 was that Thing, the Roman state, he could speak 
 his quiet word in his house on the Palatine and a 
 man would die in the city of Antioch. He could 
 issue his decree and a province would be laid waste 
 by cruel taxation. During the long reign of Au- 
 gustus the Roman Empire became firmly estab- 
 lished in his person, and at his death passed on, as 
 a matter course, to his adopted son Tiberius.
 
 THE STATE. 29 
 
 And here let us pause and marvel at this Thing, 
 the Roman state, which, since the days of 
 Caesar, has been the ideal of the state in the world. 
 The state is a Thing, a corporation, a body politic ; 
 throughout the history of Christendom for the most 
 part a private Thing, the property of its chief office 
 holder, handed on from father to son as any 
 other chattel. This Thing dominated all other 
 things and persons; having interests of its own 
 which are not the interests of the people who belong 
 to it. It can, and it does to-day, send its hundreds 
 of thousands of men from their homes in Russia to 
 perish in the fields of Manchuria. It can, and it 
 does, rob the people to the point of starvation that it 
 may build itself warships, and arm its soldiers with 
 mauser and maxim guns. It can, and it does, take 
 from the poor and give to the rich. It compels the 
 peasant to eat black bread and sleep on straw in or- 
 der that the Emperor may gorge himself with orto- 
 lans, stupefy himself with Falernian wine, build his 
 golden house in Rome, and his marble palace in 
 Baiae. All this the state as incarnate in Caesar, and 
 as it survives in the modern world, did and does. It 
 does, indeed, prevent the peasant from killing and 
 robbing the peasant, but only on condition that it
 
 30 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 may rob and kill at its will. The Roman Empire, 
 and too often the modern state, is simply the lesser 
 of two evils. It substitutes despotism for anarchy. 
 
 Because the Roman Empire was this awful 
 Thing; because it did hold in its machine-like 
 hands the lives of men and the destinies of the peo- 
 ple; because it did sometimes save the peoples from 
 falling upon and destroying one another, therefore 
 it was that the Roman state, in the person of the 
 Emperor, was worshipped as divine. The old re- 
 ligions were dead, the gods of the hills and the gods 
 of the groves were driven each from his shrine by 
 the growing power of the critical reason and the 
 corroding power of the corrupted conscience. What 
 was good and what was bad in man combined to 
 work the destruction of the ancient faith, and for 
 the time being there was no other divine thing for 
 men to fear but the divinity of the Roman Empire ; 
 no other God but Divus Caesar. 
 
 But just then another came to establish a new di- 
 vinity, and to compete with Caesar for the worship 
 of the world.
 
 The Attitude of Jesus to the State. 
 
 Seventy-three years after the death of Julius 
 Caesar, fifteen years after the death of Octavianus 
 Caesar, called Augustus, in the reign of Tiberius 
 Caesar, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph;* a car- 
 penter of upper Galilee, laid aside the tools of His 
 trade and went down to the crossings of the Jordan 
 near Jericho; attracted by the preaching of a new 
 and strange preacher, who was stirring up the peo- 
 ple by his vigorous denunciations of the evils of his 
 day, calling the people to repentance, and proclaim- 
 ing the immediate coming of the Kingdom of God.f 
 
 The departure of Jesus from Nazareth in the fif- 
 teenth year of Tiberius Caesar marks the beginning 
 of a new era in the history of the world. With this 
 departure Jesus began a public career, which, while 
 it lasted only for about thirty-six months, was 
 fraught with eternal consequences to the life of man 
 on the earth. Jesus, as He turned His back on Naz- 
 areth and joined the crowd that was hurrying to 
 hear John the Baptist, carried within Himself forces 
 
 *S. John 1-46. 
 
 tSt. Matthew, chap. in.
 
 32 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 that were to profoundly modify the social, the po- 
 litical, and the religious life of mankind. The acts 
 and words of Jesus, which followed His departure 
 from Nazareth, gave rise to a new and strange peo- 
 ple, who, entering into the Roman Empire, gradu- 
 ally assimilated its better elements, and became 
 in time the Roman Empire itself. Resting on the 
 authority of Jesus, a new race of rulers rose up in 
 the world, who, after centuries of conflict with the 
 power of the Caesars, supplanted that power, 
 seated themselves in the chair of the Caesars in the 
 city of Rome, and from their seat in that city ruled 
 a wider world with a more enduring dominion. 
 
 This effect of the life of Jesus upon the life of 
 the world is the great mystery of history, and its 
 mystery lies in its very simplicity. It is mysterious 
 just as all beginnings of life are mysterious. The 
 Christian world has been engaged for eighteen hun- 
 dred years in trying to fully explain the mystery of 
 Jesus, and is as far to day from any perfectly satis- 
 factory explanation as it was at the beginning of 
 the Christian era. 
 
 But the fact itself, like the birth of a child, is, if 
 not the simplest, yet the commonest, thing in the 
 world. The history of Jesus is the product of his-
 
 THE ATTITUDE OF JESUS TO THE STATE. 33 
 
 toric causes. He was born in due time to meet a 
 great opportunity. When Jesus left Nazareth to 
 enter public life human society was ready for the 
 greatest revolution in its history, and Jesus was the 
 Man created for the purpose of inaugurating the 
 movement that was to change the base of human 
 life, making love instead of fear the motive of 
 human action ; resting all government upon persua- 
 sion and consent, rather than upon force, and so 
 creating a new ideal for human endeavor. Human 
 society was ready for this new civilization because 
 the ancient civilization had done its work and was 
 at the point of death. The reorganization of the 
 Roman world by Julius Caesar had only arrested 
 the progress; it had not cured the evils that were 
 sapping the life of the Roman people. Augustus 
 Caesar struggled in vain against the tendencies of 
 the times. The lord of the world, who commanded 
 all the armies of the Empire; who could waste a 
 province or destroy a city ; at whose word the great- 
 est of the Romans had been put to death, was not 
 able to rule his own household, nor to regulate the 
 passions of his own daughter. The failure of the 
 imperial system and the corruption of Roman life 
 manifested themselves most terribly in the imperial 
 REL. & POL. 3
 
 34 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 family itself. A glance at the history of that family 
 will reveal to us the moral condition of the Roman 
 world better than a more general survey of the 
 social life of the Empire. Julius Caesar was mur- 
 dered by the leaders of the Republican or Oligarchi- 
 cal party in Rome in the fifty-third year of his age. 
 Though three times married, he left no children. 
 His appointed heir was his grandnephew Octavi- 
 anus, who with consummate skill reestablished the 
 Empire of his uncle in his own person, and reigned 
 over the Roman world for more than fifty years. 
 At the beginning of his career, when he was twenty- 
 three years old, Octavianus married for purely polit- 
 ical reasons a woman much older than himself. 
 This woman was Scribonia, who had powerful 
 connections in the Republican or Oligarchical 
 party and who was chosen as his wife by the Caesar 
 for the purpose of attaching that party to his own 
 person, and so healing the divisions in the Roman 
 state. Scribonia had been twice a widow, and had 
 no hold upon the affections of her young husband. 
 Within a year of his marriage Caesar Augustus 
 fell violently in love with Livia, the beautiful young
 
 THE ATTITUDE OF JESUS TO THE STATE. 35 
 
 wife of Claudius Nero. Caesar divorced his own 
 wife, Scribonia, just as she gave birth to his 
 daughter and only child, Julia. At his command, 
 Claudius Nero divorced Livia, and then Augustus 
 and Livia were married. At the time of her mar- 
 riage Livia was the mother of one son, Tiberius 
 Nero, who was afterwards adopted by Augustus, 
 and succeeded to the Empire. This succession of 
 divorces and marriages caused great scandal, even 
 in the dissolute society of Rome.* But after this 
 Augustus gave no further offense; his love for 
 Livia ended only with his life, and she was his 
 faithful wife for more than fifty years. But this 
 marriage, if it brought happiness to Augustus, was 
 the cause of far-reaching misery to his family. 
 Scribonia, as the mother of Julia, could not be 
 ignored. She was the head of a faction in the 
 palace. Her daughter was married first to her 
 cousin Marcellus, and, when he died, was given to 
 the great friend and general of the Emperor, Vip- 
 sanius Agrippa, by whom Julia had three sons, 
 Caius Julius Caesar, Lucius Julius Caesar, and 
 
 *After her marriage to Augustus, Livia gave birth to a 
 son by her former husband. Augustus sent the child to 
 his father, Claudius Nero.
 
 36 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 Agrippa Posthumus, the last so called because he 
 was born after his father's death. Caius Julius 
 Caesar and his brother Lucius were adopted by their 
 grandfather, Augustus, and grew up under his eye. 
 In them the Julian family seemed firmly established 
 and the succession of the Empire secured for gen- 
 erations to come. But alas for the vanity of human 
 hopes ! These young princes died within eighteen 
 months of each other, poisoned according to Roman 
 gossip, by Livia, Caesar's wife, to make room for her 
 own son. These deaths left, as the only descendant of 
 Augustus, Agrippa Posthumus, who was an idiotic 
 maniac, and was afterward murdered, it is sup- 
 posed, at the command of his grandfather, at the 
 time of the Emperor's death. 
 
 The last years of the Emperor Augustus were 
 blighted by a sorrow even more terrible than the 
 death of his grandsons. After the death of her 
 husband, Agrippa, Julia, the daughter of Augustus, 
 then in her twenty-eighth year, was given in mar- 
 riage to the son of Livia. This son, Tiberius Nero, 
 was a man of sullen disposition, whose life had been 
 soured by his treatment by the Julian faction in the 
 palace. As the son of Livia, he was hated by Scri-
 
 THE ATTITUDE OF JESUS TO THE STATE. 37 
 
 bonia, the mother of Julia. During the lifetime of 
 the young princes, Caius and Lucius, the heart of 
 the Emperor was cold toward Tiberius, and the son 
 of Livia passed a number of wretched years in vol- 
 untary exile. After the death of Agrippa he was 
 called back to Rome to marry Julia. Tiberius hated 
 this woman, who had been the cause of his lifelong 
 unhappiness, and he hated her yet the more because 
 of her glaring infidelities. Julia had long been 
 known to everybody, except her father, as the most 
 dissolute woman in Rome. She abandoned herself 
 freely to every passing fancy, and there was hardly 
 a young man of note in Rome who had not at some 
 time been her lover. Her husband, disgusted at her 
 levity, returned into voluntary exile at Rhodes. Her 
 father, still thinking her a paragon of chastity, held 
 her up to laughing Rome as a modern Lucretia. 
 When her iniquities could no longer be concealed, 
 the revelation of her evil life came upon Augustus 
 as a stroke of lightning. He shut himself up in his 
 house, bowed his gray head in agony, and would not 
 speak a word. He did not, however, shield his 
 guilty daughter. She was tried and condemned by 
 the senate, and sent into exile, and spent the rest of 
 her life in prison on a barren island in the sea.
 
 38 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 On the death of Augustus, Tiberius Nero, the 
 son of his wife, Livia, ascended the throne. Tibe- 
 rius at the time of his accession was a sour, disap- 
 pointed man, despising the world over which he was 
 called to rule. He left the government mostly in the 
 hands of favorites, and lived for the greater part of 
 his reign in seclusion, indulging, according to some, 
 in the most shameless debaucheries, and, according 
 to others, mourning austerely over the corruption 
 of Rome. Suspicious of everyone, he caused many 
 of the senators to be put to death, and his last years 
 were the most wretched of his miserable existence. 
 His death was hailed as a happy deliverance, and 
 was hastened, it is said, by the act of his successor. 
 
 Now it was in the fifteenth year of this Tiberius 
 Caesar that Jesus of Nazareth entered upon his 
 mission as the Saviour of the world. He was per- 
 fectly acquainted with the state of the world. No- 
 where was the Roman power more odious than in 
 upper Gallilee. The representative of the imperial 
 government in that region was Herod Antipas, the 
 murderer of John the Baptist. The attitude of 
 Jesus toward the Roman state was that of horror,
 
 THE ATTITUDE OF JESUS TO THE STATE. 39 
 
 of undying hatred and contempt. It is true that the 
 allusions to the Roman Empire are few and obscure 
 in the written lives of Jesus. His conflict was not 
 so much with the Roman state as it was with the 
 Jewish religion of his day. But that Jesus was 
 fully aware of the terrific evils of His time, both in 
 church and state, is evident from the whole trend 
 of His thought and action. 
 
 When Jesus became conscious of the fact that it 
 was His mission to set up the Kingdom of God in 
 the world He had to consider the relation of His 
 Kingdom to the Empire of Rome, which was 
 already in possession of the earth. It is impossible 
 that Jesus should not have taken the Roman Empire 
 into account. It was the one great fact of His day. 
 He met its soldiers, its taxgatherers, its officials, at 
 every turn. He saw crosses on every highway to 
 which the power of Rome had nailed the children 
 of his people. He saw men everywhere living in 
 perpetual fear of that wretched, miserable, lonely 
 man in Italy. Through Nazareth passed one of the 
 highways from Rome to the east, and Jesus must 
 have listened at the khan to many a dark story of 
 lust and murder brought by the traveler from the 
 imperial city. His whole soul rose in revolt against
 
 40 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 this system of government founded upon force, pro- 
 tecting sensuality, rewarding the guilty, and de- 
 stroying the innocent. 
 
 The state as it existed in the time of Jesus was 
 not divine, but satanic. When the temptation came 
 to Him to become another Caesar, and by the same 
 method to take for His own the kingdoms of the 
 world and the glory of them, then He saw in that 
 temptation to rule as Rome ruled by force and fear 
 a rejection of God and the worship of Satan. And 
 when, in the awful struggle in the wilderness, He 
 put that temptation behind Him, He determined 
 the nature of His own Kingdom; He prescribed 
 His own attitude and the attitude of His followers 
 toward the state then existing, and toward the state 
 of all time. In this determination, made in the 
 wilderness, to declare Himself the King of the 
 Kingdom of God, the Master and Saviour of the 
 world, and yet to do all this without shedding a drop 
 of blood or destroying a blade of grass, Jesus 
 entered upon a career which was sure to result, as 
 it did, in His rejection by the Jews and in His cruci- 
 fixion by the Romans. By the Jews the actual 
 Jesus was looked upon as a traitor; by the Romans 
 He was held to be a dangerous fanatic and madman ;
 
 THE ATTITUDE OF JESUS TO THE STATE. 41 
 
 and from the point of view of the contemporary 
 Jew and Roman this estimation of Jesus was cor- 
 rect. The contemporary Jew shared with Jesus His 
 undying hatred to the Roman power, but he did not 
 hate it because it was power, but because it was 
 Roman. What the Jew wanted was to seize that 
 power for himself, to become himself the ruling 
 nation, and to avenge upon the Roman the wrongs 
 of the Jewish people. He wanted to break in pieces 
 the nations like a potter's vessel, and to wash his 
 footsteps in the blood of the ungodly. The Jewish 
 conception of the Kingdom of God was the lordship 
 of the Jew over the world, ruling with a rod of iron, 
 leading the people captive, binding their Kings in 
 chains, and their nobles with links of iron. Now to 
 all this hope and expectation of the Jews Jesus was 
 a traitor. He hated the Roman power, not because 
 it was Roman, but because it was power. The whole 
 system of the state as it existed in His day was, in 
 the eyes of Jesus, evil and satanic. He had as His 
 mission, not the curing of evils within the state, 
 much less the mere transfer of the power of the 
 state from the hand of the Roman to the hand of 
 the Jew. The mission of Jesus, as He conceived it, 
 was far more radical than this ; it was not to allevi-
 
 42 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 ate or to change, it was to destroy the state ; to take 
 man wholly out of its power, and so render it use- 
 less and unnecessary. 
 
 The teaching of Jesus undermined the very foun- 
 dation of the state as it existed in the ancient world. 
 The ancient doctrine taught that the state was 
 divine ; a holy Thing to be worshipped, sacred from 
 the touch of man. Man existed for the state, not 
 the state for man. Now Jesus asserted the sover- 
 eignty of man. He, the Son of Man, was greater 
 than the Roman state or the Jewish synagogue. 
 They could not judge Him, but He could judge 
 them. In the estimation of Jesus, man, not the 
 state, was the thing divine. Institutions are for 
 man, not man for institutions. The state does not 
 make man, but man makes the state. The state, 
 instead of being a holy Thing, a divine creation, is a 
 mere contrivance of man for temporary uses. Man 
 was before the state, and will be after the state has 
 perished. The state can be no better nor 
 wiser than the men who make it and use it. At its 
 best, it reflects human imperfection; at its worst, 
 human depravity. In all ages the state has mani- 
 fested, not the highest, but the lowest, aspects of 
 human life. The student of history stands aghast
 
 THE ATTITUDE OF JESUS TO THE STATE. 43 
 
 at the folly and wickedness of human government. 
 The great criminals of the world have been too 
 often the rulers of the people. The state is not from 
 above, it is from beneath. It had its origin in fear. 
 Men gathered together on the hills of Rome and built 
 walls about them because they were afraid. If man 
 had not been a savage he would have needed no 
 walls. To-day the state has vast military arma- 
 ments and costly war vessels because it is afraid. 
 If man were not a barbarian, he would need no 
 soldiers. Savage is afraid of savage, barbarian of 
 barbarian, and so fear rules the world. But fear is 
 a debasing passion. Fear engenders hate, and hate 
 engenders fear; and these twin monsters, hate and 
 fear, have been seated at the council board of the 
 nations since ever the nations began to be. 
 
 It was the mission of Jesus to cast out the devils 
 of fear and hate from the world. Men fear one 
 another and hate one another, so they make war on 
 one another. Jesus taught men to love one another 
 and hope the best from one another. Man, in his 
 childishness, dreads the unusual, and hates the 
 stranger. In the ancient world every strange man 
 was an enemy. The very words "stranger" and 
 "enemy" were synonymous. The Jew called the
 
 44 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 rest of the world Gentile by way of reproach, the 
 Greek and the Roman feared and despised the out- 
 lying barbarian world ; just as to-day the Chinaman 
 cries foreign devil after every stranger, and the 
 Anglo Saxon despises all other races, especially if 
 their skin is a little darker than his own. Now 
 Jesus saw the folly of all this. He saw that man is 
 not the natural enemy, but the natural friend, of 
 man. He said : Ye have heard of old time, ye shall 
 love your neighbors and hate the stranger. But I 
 say unto you, love the stranger, and pray for them 
 that make war on you that ye may be the sons of 
 your Father which is in heaven. A military estab- 
 lishment was, in the eyes of Jesus, a most damnable 
 expression of atheism. It was a denial of the 
 Father, Whose love is over all His children. For 
 fear Jesus substituted hope ; for hate, love ; for vio- 
 lence, gentleness ; for force, persuasion. He carried 
 the world from the physical to the moral basis. 
 The weapons of his warfare were spiritual, not car- 
 nal, but were mighty to the breaking down of 
 strongholds. The great distinctive doctrine of 
 Jesus was, resist not evil. There is no place for 
 an army or a navy in human life as that life is 
 manifested in the life and the teaching of Jesus of 
 Nazareth.
 
 THE ATTITUDE OF JESUS TO THE STATE. 45 
 
 If Jesus had no use for an army or a navy, he 
 had even less use for courts of law. The adminis- 
 tration of so-called human justice, which is a princi- 
 pal function of the state, was, in the eyes of Jesus, 
 little better than a travesty of divine justice and a 
 woeful waste of time and strength. The only per- 
 sons who really profit by the vast system which goes 
 under the name of law are the lawyers; the men 
 who make law a profession. The lawyers make the 
 laws, and afterward the lawyers dispute as to the 
 meaning of the laws, and then lawyers interpret the 
 laws; and so the vicious circle goes round and 
 round. 
 
 For the courts and the lawyers of His day Jesus 
 had unconcealed hatred and contempt. He said to 
 His followers : "Agree with thine adversary quickly 
 whilst thou art in the way with him, lest haply the 
 adversary deliver thee to the judge and the judge 
 deliver thee to the officer, and thou be cast into 
 prison. Verily I say unto thee thou shalt by no 
 means come out thence till thou have paid the last 
 farthing," *not the last forthing you owe, but the 
 last farthing you have. In olden times, as in mod- 
 ern, the law was an expensive luxury, with which 
 
 *St. Matthew, v., 25, 26.
 
 46 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 it was the part of wisdom for the ordinary man to 
 have nothing to do. Not only did Jesus condemn 
 the Roman system of jurisprudence, but his anger 
 was kindled to the white heat by the whole legal 
 system of the Jews. This system of robbery was 
 the more hateful to Him because it was sancti- 
 monius. "Woe unto you lawyers," he cried, "for ye 
 lade men with burdens grievous to be borne, and ye 
 yourselves will not touch the burdens with one of 
 your fingers. Woe unto you who devour widows' 
 houses, and for pretence make long prayers."* 
 
 The attitude of Jesus toward the law was the 
 natural corollary of His attitude to that other insti- 
 tution created by the law, private property. The 
 state exists in a great degree to protect property 
 rights, and for property rights Jesus had very little 
 respect, because property itself was of little value 
 in His eyes. He looked with pity on that eagerness 
 with which men accumulate things. "A man's life," 
 He said, "does not consist in the abundance of the 
 things which he possesses."! He said of the man 
 whose barns were bursting, and who was planning 
 to build new ones : "Thou fool ! this night shall thy 
 
 *St. Matthew, XXIH. ; St. Luke, XL, 46, etc. 
 tSt. Luke, xii., 15.
 
 THE ATTITUDE OF JESUS TO THE STATE. 47 
 
 soul be required of thee."* Covetousness was, in 
 His estimation, a crime against the soul. The King- 
 dom of heaven was a Kingdom of love, and joy, 
 and peace, not gold and silver and precious stones. 
 To prefer a piece of land or a piece of cloth to peace 
 of mind was, in the opinion of Jesus, the extreme of 
 foolishness. Does a man sue you at law for your 
 cloak, let him have your coat also. You will be the 
 gainer by doing this. You will retain that most 
 necessary condition of human happiness, serenity 
 of soul. You can be happy without a cloak; you 
 can be happy without a coat; but you cannot be 
 happy without a quiet mind. In so far as men fol- 
 low the teachings of Jesus, just so far do they ren- 
 der useless that vast machinery by which men at- 
 tempt to administer what they call justice in the 
 world. 
 
 Another feature of the state that roused the 
 wrath of Jesus was the insolence and venality of 
 the office-holding class. The young Nazarene was 
 amazed as he saw men running after and bowing 
 down to their rulers in church and state. These 
 officeholders were using the people for their own 
 advantage, gaining glory for themselves by killing 
 
 *St. Luke, xn. ; 20.
 
 48 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 the people; growing rich by robbing the people, 
 glutting their pride by lording it over the people, 
 and for all this the people gave them adulation and 
 worship. Men desired high place in the state, not 
 that they might serve the people, but that the people 
 might serve them. Jesus looked upon the whole 
 office-holding class from the Emperor down as a 
 parasite on the body politic, and He said to His 
 followers : It shall not be so among you, but whoso- 
 ever will be great among you let him be your ser- 
 vant; and whosoever will be first among you, let 
 him be your slave.* Servants are useful and slaves 
 are profitable; but as for these Emperors, judges, 
 high priests, and what not, whom foolish men wor- 
 ship and call benefactors, they lord it over the 
 people and exercise authority upon them, not for 
 the good of the people, but for their own gain and 
 glory, and, instead of being useful members of so- 
 ciety, do nothing but waste and destroy, and are no 
 better than murderers, robbers, theives, and para- 
 sites. 
 
 This critical, and even hostile, attitude of Jesus 
 toward the state we learn, not so much from any 
 direct allusion to the Roman power in the gospel 
 
 *St. Matthew, xx. : 26, 27.
 
 THE ATTITUDE OF JESUS TO THE STATE. 49 
 
 history, as from the whole trend of His life and 
 teaching. It was not a part of the plan of the 
 Master to come into direct collision with the Roman 
 government until He was ready. He was perfectly 
 willing to throw to Caesar, Caesar's penny for the 
 purpose of keeping Caesar quiet while he went on 
 with His work for God. But He would not for one 
 single moment yield to Caesar, or to Caesar's min- 
 ions, in any thing that had to do with His mission 
 in the world. When they came and told Him to get 
 out of Galilee because Herod sought to kill Him, 
 He said with fine scorn : "Go ye and tell that fox, 
 behold I cast out demons to-day and to-morrow, and 
 the third day I am perfected;" or as a better ren- 
 dering: "I end my course."* 
 
 It may be difficult for us to think of Jesus as in 
 this critical and hostile attitude toward the state. 
 We have thought of Him so long as a mythological 
 being; we have talked of Him so long as meta- 
 physical abstraction, and have placed Him for cen- 
 turies out of the reach of human vicissitudes, at the 
 right hand of the Majesty on high, that we cannot 
 view Him in His historical relations without a 
 shock to our reverence. Yet this historical Jesus is 
 
 *St. Luke, xin. : 32. 
 REL. & POL 4
 
 So RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 the real Jesus ; the Man of God, who founded the 
 religion called Christian, and from whose life and 
 teaching the institution called the church had its 
 origin. Living at the time in which He did live, 
 Jesus could not help seeing the Roman state in all 
 its hideousness, and seeing, He could not help con- 
 demning. He saw Roman soldiers bringing in 
 women and girls and boys whom they had torn from 
 their homes in Armenia and Parthia, and were tak- 
 ing to sell into debasing slavery in Rome. He saw 
 men chained in gangs being driven to the imperial 
 city, there to kill one another in the circus for the 
 amusement of the Roman populace. As He walked 
 along the highways, He stood again and again be- 
 neath a cross and watched the death agony of some 
 wretched Galilean, who had offended the majesty 
 of Rome, and, after a mock trial, had been nailed to 
 the cross and left there to die. Jesus, as He 
 watched that writhing and cursing man, saw in this 
 shameful death His own approaching doom. 
 
 If Jesus was a man, such as His history shows 
 Him to be, and lived at the time when history says 
 He did, then He must have seen all of these iniqui- 
 ties, and, having seen, He could not help condemn- 
 ing ; and this condemnation led Him to conceive of a
 
 THE ATTITUDE OF JESUS TO THE STATE. 51 
 
 society in which none of these evils should have a 
 place; a society in which rulers should not lord it 
 over the people. Where there should be no military 
 establishments to consume the substance of the 
 people, and be the instrument of their oppression; 
 where men should not undertake to judge men, but 
 should leave all judgment to the One Judge and 
 Lawgiver. A society such as Jesus had in mind 
 would not fear the thief or robber because it would 
 value nothing that the robber could take away or 
 the thief could steal ; it would not fear the murderer, 
 for the murderer could only kill the body, and could 
 not reach the true seat of life, which is in the soul. 
 We cannot understand Christianity until we come 
 to see it as a reactionary movement against existing 
 conditions. The Kingdom of God, which Jesus 
 lived and died to establish, was to be all that the 
 Roman Empire was not : a kingdom of peace instead 
 of war, a kingdom of righteousness instead of in- 
 justice, of mercy instead of cruelty. It was the ideal 
 of the great Idealist, the dream of the great 
 Dreamer. 
 
 The attitude of Jesus toward the Roman state is 
 seen most clearly when He Himself comes into di- 
 rect relation to the state. On the last day of His
 
 52 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 life Jesus stood accused of crime at the bar of 
 Roman justice. The charges against Jesus were 
 the crimes of treason and sedition, of treason 
 against Caesar because He said that He Himself 
 was a King; of sedition because he stirred up the 
 people beginning from Galilee even to this place. 
 Now the accounts of the trial of Jesus are most sig- 
 nificant of his attitude to the Roman state. The 
 gospel history tells us that, when Pilate asked Jesus 
 whether or not He was guilty of the charges 
 brought against Him, Jesus answered him never a 
 word; and nothing that the Roman judge could say 
 or do could break the silence of the prisoner.* It is 
 true that the Gospel of John represents Jesus as 
 entering into conversation with Pilate; but it is the 
 opinion of scholars that the conversations and 
 speeches of Jesus, found in the fourth Gospel, are 
 not historical, not the words of Jesus, but words 
 ascribed to Him by the writer of the Gospel. The 
 earlier and more historical accounts of the trial rep- 
 resent Jesus as maintaining perfect silence in the 
 presence of Pilate. When Pilate asked if He were 
 King of the Jews, He answered simply, "So you 
 say;" to the other charges He made no answer at 
 
 *St. Mark, xv. ; Accounts of Crucifixion in Gospels.
 
 THE ATTITUDE OF JESUS TO THE STATE. 53 
 
 all. By His silence Jesus denied the jurisdiction of 
 the Roman court, and refused to plead at the bar of 
 that court. The instant a man refuses to plead at 
 the bar of a court he renders that court powerless to 
 try him. The court can punish the accused ; it can 
 send him to prison or to death; but it cannot try 
 him. The whole onus of the punishment rests upon 
 the court; the prisoner is guiltless of his own con- 
 demnation. Such action on the part of a prisoner 
 is a condemnation of the court; it is a declaration 
 on the part of the prisoner that the court has no 
 jurisdiction; it puts the court on its defense. 
 This is what Charles I. did when he was brought to 
 trial ; what the counsel of Louis XVI. did when the 
 King was accused before the convention. In each 
 of these cases the court was compelled to face the 
 question of its right to try the prisoner, and it was 
 that question, and not the guilt or innocence of the 
 prisoner, that was the great question at issue. And 
 is was this question that Jesus, by His silence forced 
 upon the Roman governor. That silence said to 
 Pilate: I refuse to answer; you have no right to 
 try me. That Pilate felt the embarrassment of his 
 position is evident from the gospel story. If Jesus 
 would only plead, answer, and explain Pilate might
 
 54 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 condemn Him with some show of justice or else 
 have a reason to discharge Him from custody. The 
 refusal of Jesus to plead made the question to be 
 answered, not a question of His guilt or innocence, 
 but a question of the right of Pilate to sit in judg- 
 ment on Him. Under the circumstances, Pilate 
 could do nothing else but send Jesus to His death. 
 
 This action of Jesus was not the action of a mad 
 fanatic; it was the action of the greatest moral in- 
 telligence ever born into the world ; it was the asser- 
 tion of a fundamental principle of the Kingdom of 
 God, in which judgment of man by man has no 
 place. Judge not and ye shall not be judged ; con- 
 demn not and ye shall not be condemned, is the 
 rule of the Kingdom of God. In obedience to this 
 rule, Jesus would not suffer the judgment of man. 
 He went out to die as a protest against the method 
 by which He and countless thousands had been 
 brought to their death by the injustice of the Roman 
 power. 
 
 I have nothing to do in this lecture with the theo- 
 logical aspects of the death of Jesus. We are con- 
 sidering it simply in relation to the state which con- 
 demned and executed Jesus. And the death of 
 Jesus is a condemnation of the state. It brought out 
 as in a lime-light the full hideousness of what in
 
 THE ATTITUDE OF JESUS TO THE STATE. 55 
 
 those days men called justice. It brings out as in a 
 lime-light the horror of much that in these days is 
 called justice. 
 
 As we look out on the world to-day with its vast 
 and expensive military armaments, with its intricate 
 and costly system of so-called justice; as we see its 
 forbidding prisons and its degrading stripes ; as we 
 think of its gallows and its electric chairs ; as we see 
 the worship of earthly riches and worldly power; 
 man lording it over man, the question arises, Was 
 not Jesus mistaken after all? Is not His judgment 
 of the world the judgment of a feeble intellect and 
 an unmanly heart? In making the cross, and not 
 the flag, the symbol of human life did not Jesus 
 strike at the very foundations of society ? Is he not 
 a dangerous man whose death is called for by the 
 highest interests of the state? So thought the men 
 of His day, and they crucified Him; so think the 
 vast majority of men in our day, and they despise 
 Him. Our only answer is that for ages the very 
 best of mankind have seen in Jesus the manifesta- 
 tion of God, have found in His teaching salvation, 
 and in His death redemption, and believe Him to be 
 the Judge of the world. And further, we answer to 
 all cavils against Jesus that we are at the beginning, 
 not at the end, of the Christian era.
 
 The Democratic Church in the 
 Imperial State. 
 
 In the sixty-fourth year of the Christian era, 
 about thirty years after the death of Jesus of Naz- 
 areth, the greater part of the city of Rome was 
 destroyed by fire. This fire broke out in the Circus 
 Maximus, near where the gas works stand in mod- 
 ern Rome. To the mass of the people this fire 
 seemed, not accidental, but intentional. It broke 
 out in several places at once. When under control 
 in one neighborhood, it would blaze forth in 
 another. Men were seen running about with 
 torches, and fire followed in their wake. At the 
 beginning of the fire no efforts were made on the 
 part of the authorities to arrest it. Thousands 
 perished in the flames, and the people were driven 
 into the catacombs and quarries for shelter ; women 
 died in bringing forth their children, and the young 
 and the aged, escaping the flames, perished from 
 fatigue and exposure. It was the general belief of 
 the people that the Emperor Nero was guilty of the 
 crime of setting fire to the city. Nero had com- 
 56
 
 DEMOCRATIC CHURCH IN IMPERIAL STATE. 57 
 
 mitted every atrocity possible to man. He had 
 caused a large number of the chief citizens of Rome 
 to be put to death; he had put away his wife, Oc- 
 tavia, and had made the imperial palace a shameless 
 place ; he had lowered the imperial dignity by mak- 
 ing of himself an exhibition to be clapped by the 
 people; having a weak voice, he imagined himself 
 an Apollo, and, because he could write feeble lines 
 claimed the honors of a Homer. He poisoned Brit- 
 annicus, the son of the Emperor Claudius, while 
 at supper with him, and coolly watched him die. 
 Agrippina, his mother, to whom he owed his eleva- 
 tion to the throne, worried and thwarted him, and 
 he caused her to be murdered in her bed. While 
 Rome was in flames Nero crowned himself with 
 laurel, played upon his fiddle, and imagined himself 
 at the burning of Troy.* He would not allow the 
 people to go near their houses to take away their 
 goods, but looted the city for the benefit of the im- 
 perial treasury. Under the circumstances, it was 
 natural that the people should hold the Emperor 
 responsible for the destruction of the city, and the 
 murmurs were bitter and ominous. To turn suspi-
 
 58 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 cion from himself, the Emperor Nero laid the crime 
 of setting fire to the city at the door of a class of 
 people who were despised and hated by all the 
 world round about them. This helpless, friendless 
 people were made the scapegoats of the Emperor's 
 crime, and were compelled to bear both the blame 
 and the punishment. 
 
 The celebrated Roman historian, Tacitus, in the 
 1 5th book of his Annals, at the 44th chapter, gives 
 an account of this infamous transaction in the fol- 
 lowing words : "Hence, to suppress the rumors, he 
 (Nero) falsely charged with the guilt, and punished 
 with the most exquisite tortures, the persons com- 
 monly called Christians, who were hated for their 
 enormities. Christus, the founder of that name, was 
 put to death as a criminal by Pontius Pilate, Procu- 
 rator of Judea, in the reign of Tiberius; but the 
 pernicious superstition, repressed for a time, broke 
 out again, not only in Judea, where the mischief 
 originated, but through the city of Rome also, whith- 
 er all things horrible and disgraceful flow, from all 
 quarters, as to a common receptacle, and where they 
 are encouraged. Accordingly, first these were seized 
 who confessed they were Christians; next, on their 
 information, a vast multitude were convicted, not
 
 DEMOCRATIC CHURCH IN IMPERIAL STATE. 59 
 
 so much on the charge of burning the city, as of 
 hating the human race. And in their death they 
 were also made the subject of sport, for they were 
 covered with the hides of wild beasts, and worried 
 to death by dogs, or nailed to crosses, or set fire 
 to, and when day declined burned to serve for 
 nocturnal lights. Nero offered his garden for that 
 spectacle and exhibited a Circensian game, indis- 
 criminately mingling with the common people in 
 the habit of charioteer, or else standing in his char- 
 iot. Whence a feeling of compassion arose toward 
 the sufferers. Though guilty and deserving to be 
 made examples of by capital punishment, yet they 
 excited the pity of the people because they seemed 
 not to be cut off for the public good, but victims 
 of the ferocity of one man." 
 
 This classical passage from the historian Tacitus 
 is of vast importance to the Christian, because it 
 is the first allusion to Christianity by any Roman 
 or non-Christian writer, and reveals to us the esti- 
 mation of Christ and his religion by a man remark- 
 able for intellectual insight and humane sentiments. 
 Tacitus was but a child when these events occurred 
 of which he wrote some fifty years after, in the 
 reign of the Emperor Trajan ; and you will per-
 
 60 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 ceive that he carried in his heart through all these 
 years an equal horror for the wickedness and cru- 
 elty of the Emperor Nero and for the superstition 
 and depravity of the Christians. 
 
 We learn from this passage that, within thirty 
 years of the death of Jesus, the religion which He 
 founded had reached the city of Rome, and His fol- 
 lowers were sufficiently numerous and important to 
 attract the attention and to arouse the fears of the 
 imperial authorities. At that early date Christianity 
 had shown itself the implacable foe of the im- 
 perial system. The rapid progress of the religion of 
 the Christ is not exceptional in the religious history 
 of mankind. Religious movements are always most 
 rapid and powerful in their beginning ; they are vio- 
 lent outbreaks of latent force ; they have their origin 
 in that mysterious region of human nature which we 
 now call the subconscious region; that region in 
 which human nature is in touch, not with the seen 
 but with the unseen. Great religious movements are 
 the earthquakes and the volcanic eruptions of human 
 life. For the time being they dethrone the under- 
 standing and break through the rocky crust of cus- 
 tom. Under the power of a great religious emotion 
 man becomes intuitive. He does not reason; he
 
 DEMOCRATIC CHURCH IN IMPERIAL STATE. 61 
 
 sees. He does not act from habit; he is the crea- 
 ture of a great impulse. In the eyes of those about 
 him, he is either a madman or a god. He is the 
 destroyer of the old and the creator of the new. 
 He rushes upon the world like lava from the crater. 
 He is a consuming fire. 
 
 Now Christianity is one of the four or five great 
 original religious movements of the human race, 
 and of these four or five is by far the greatest and 
 most original. In Jesus the simple human soul 
 burst forth in all its splendor; the face of Jesus 
 glowed with the light of pure intelligence ; the heart 
 of Jesus beat with the emotion of pure love. The 
 very garments that Jesus wore radiated light and 
 life from His person. The words of Jesus were 
 living creatures, with wings to carry them to the 
 uttermost part of the earth, having eyes to see into 
 the very secrets of existence, to know God and 
 man. Jesus was not so much the founder of a re- 
 ligion as He was religion itself. He was the pure, 
 white light of truth. He was the piercing fire of 
 unsullied love. He was a glowing flame of holy 
 purpose, and all who came near Him took fire from 
 Him. He was the source of original power to men. 
 His life was the manifestation of the eternal. It
 
 62 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 was as indestructible as air : sin could not touch it : 
 death could not hurt it. Sin and death were 
 destroyed by its presence. To understand religion 
 you must understand religious -men ; and of all re- 
 ligious men Jesus is the King. St. Francis of Assisi 
 and John Wesley are men of the same type only far 
 inferior to this greatest spiritual genius ever born in- 
 to the world ; in whom the Jew found his Messiah, 
 his long expected Messenger from heaven, and in 
 whom the Greek saw in the flesh the very word or 
 reason of the eternal God. When we stand in the 
 presence of Jesus we are in the presence of destruc- 
 tive and creative force. As His follower, Paul said, 
 in Him old things are passed away, and all things 
 are become new. As we know to-day the estimate 
 put upon the person and power of Jesus falls far 
 short of the truth. He has, says Emerson, not so 
 much written His name, as ploughed it into human 
 history. We are all of us living in the era which 
 He ushered in. Ours is the Christian Era, and the 
 distinctive forces of our civilization are Christian 
 forces. 
 
 The creative power of Jesus manifested itself in 
 thought and in life. In the region of thought the 
 personality of Jesus inspired a great literature, and
 
 DEMOCRATIC CHURCH IN IMPERIAL STATE. 63 
 
 in the region of life that personality created a vast 
 institution. When we say that the personality of 
 Jesus gave to the western world the church and the 
 Bible, we can by those two words measure in some 
 degree the extent and duration of His influence. 
 
 Of the relation of Jesus to the Bible and of the 
 Bible to the church, we are not called to speak in 
 this lecture. We will only say in passing that Jesus 
 is in no way responsible for that conception of the 
 Bible which prevails in modern life. Jesus was 
 what in these days we should call a higher critic. 
 He sat in judgment on the Scriptures, discarded 
 as useless the greater portion of the writings that 
 had come down from the past, and interpreted the 
 whole in the light of His own reason and conscience. 
 The power of Jesus lay in the fact that He was not 
 a scripturalist : He was a great teacher because He 
 did not rest His teaching upon any book or books, 
 but upon his own intuitive perception of truth. He 
 said : "Ye have heard that it was said by them 
 of old time, . . . but I say unto you."* And 
 the people were astonished at his teaching. "For 
 He taught them as One having authority, and not 
 as the scribes."-|- As for the New Testament Scrip- 
 
 *St. Matthew, v. : 21, 22. tSt. Matthew, vn. : 28, 29.
 
 64 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 tures, while these were inspired by the personality 
 of Jesus, and reflect the spirit of His life and teach- 
 ing, yet He is not directly responsible for them, as 
 they were not written until long after His death. 
 But, as I have said, this relation of Jesus to the 
 Scriptures, and of the Scriptures to the church, is 
 not germane to our present discussion, and I speak 
 of it only in passing. 
 
 It may surprise us to be told that Jesus is as lit- 
 tle responsible for the modern conception of the 
 church as He is for the modern notion of the Bible. 
 Jesus did not preach the church, but the Kingdom 
 of God ; and, so far as we can gather from the words 
 of Jesus that have come down to us, the Kingdom 
 of God was an inward relation, not an outward 
 institution. Jesus cries again and again : "Say not, 
 lo here, nor lo there, for the Kingdom of God is 
 within you." All the illustrations of the Kingdom 
 have to do with inward dispositions of soul, rather 
 than with outward forms of government and verbal 
 expression of doctrine. The Kingdom of God was 
 to prevail through the glad acceptance of the sov- 
 ereignty of God by the children of the Kingdom in 
 their own hearts and over their own lives. The 
 Kingdom of God was to come by the simple mani-
 
 DEMOCRATIC CHURCH IN IMPERIAL STATE. 65 
 
 festation of its power and life in the world. It 
 was to grow from the seed within the heart, and be- 
 come a tree of life, yielding its fruit after its kind, 
 whose seed was in itself; it was to drive out the 
 Kingdoms of this world as light drives away dark- 
 ness, and as heat dissipates cold. Jesus was a pure 
 idealist, and His conception of the Kingdom of 
 God, an ideal conception. 
 
 At the beginning of His ministry Jesus was all 
 aglow with enthusiasm. He expected that the King- 
 dom of God which He preached would be accepted 
 by His own people with joyful acclaim. He judged 
 others by Himself. To Him the Kingdom of God 
 was the simplest thing in the world. It was to love 
 the Lord His God with all his heart and soul and 
 mind and strength, and to love his neighbor as him- 
 self. To Him righteousness was the supreme good, 
 and pure love the supreme motive, of life. Let ab- 
 solute righteousness be the end for which man lives, 
 and pure love the motive of all his actions, and the 
 Kingdom of God is here, for the Kingdom of God 
 is righteousness and holiness, perfect justice and 
 burning love. 
 
 There is nothing more pathetic in human history 
 than the sublime confidence with which the Prophet 
 REL. & POL. 5
 
 66 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 of Galilee set forth these ideal truths to the men of 
 his generation. To Him they were axioms, the 
 self-evident truths of the moral life. Their rejection 
 by the leaders of His people filled Him with as- 
 tonishment, indignation, and anger. Jesus had no 
 patience with the coldness, the blindness, the stupid- 
 ity, the wickedness of the men who professing to 
 teach the way of God, would not see that the only 
 way was the way of truth, of righteousness, and 
 holiness. Finding that He could make no impres- 
 sion on the higher classes of Jewish society, Jesus 
 turned to the common people for support. He found 
 the mass of the people eager to listen to His preach- 
 ing, but wholly incapable of entering into the spirit 
 and power of His word. Sadly and sternly Jesus 
 said of them that they were a wicked and adulterous 
 generation; a stony-hearted, thorn-choked genera- 
 tion, in which the seed of the word of God could find 
 no root nor place to grow. 
 
 But for all this Jesus did not despair of the King- 
 dom of God, for to despair of the Kingdom was to 
 despair of God Himself. As in the days of Elijah 
 there were in the midst of the national apostacy sev- 
 en thousand who had not bowed the knee to Baal, 
 and who had not kissed him ; so in the days of Jesus
 
 DEMOCRATIC CHURCH IN IMPERIAL STATE. 67 
 
 there were a few whose ears were open and whose 
 hearts obedient to the word of God. And in these 
 few would the Kingdom of God be established. 
 
 Jesus saw very soon after the opening of His min- 
 istry that the preaching of the Kingdom of God was 
 fraught with great danger to Himself. He read His 
 own doom in the doom of the prophets that were 
 before Him. He saw in His own oncoming death 
 the culmination of the wickedness of His people. 
 Their rejection of Him was their final rejection of 
 God. So great a catastrophe did this seem to Jesus 
 that He expected it to be followed at once by an 
 equally great catastrophe in nature. The rejection 
 of the Kingdom of God by His people was to Jesus 
 the end of the world. There are no sayings of His 
 better authenticated than those which He uttered 
 concerning the coming of the last day when the sun 
 should be darkened, and the moon should not give 
 her light; when the stars should fall from heaven, 
 and the powers of heaven should be shaken.* And 
 there is nothing in all the teaching of Jesus that so 
 proves His faith in the Kingdom of God as this be- 
 lief of His, that the existence of the universe was 
 
 *St. Matthew, xxiv. : 29.
 
 68 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 dependent upon the acceptance of His conception 
 of that Kingdom. 
 
 And the church was simply the outward expres- 
 sion of this belief of Jesus. The church does not 
 owe its existence in the world to any formal plan 
 of Jesus, nor to any far-seeing design on the part 
 of His immediate disciples. So far as we can learn 
 from His teaching, Jesus had no conception of an 
 organic body at all, at least not an organic body of 
 long standing. The only officers that He appointed 
 were apostles or messengers, men who were to 
 hurry from place to place and warn the people of 
 the coming of the Kingdom ; and these men should 
 not have passed through all the cities of Israel be- 
 fore that Kingdom should come. It was not a far- 
 distant event; it was to happen in the lifetime of 
 men then living. "Verily, I say unto you that this 
 generation shall not pass till all these things be 
 done."* It has been said that the Christian church 
 rests upon the resurrection of Jesus as upon a 
 foundation. But this is not true, unless we include 
 in the resurrection the belief in the second and im- 
 mediate coming of Jesus. 
 
 The Christian church had its historical origin in 
 
 *St. Mark, xm. : 30.
 
 DEMOCRATIC CHURCH IN IMPERIAL STATE. 69 
 
 a little band of Jewish men and women, who were 
 drawn together by the common belief that Jesus, 
 who had died on the cross, was not in Sheol or 
 Hades, not in the underground region with the 
 spirits in prison; but that He had risen from the 
 dead, and had gone up into heaven ; and that He was 
 to come again with glory to judge both the quick and 
 the dead. Without this expectation of the imme- 
 diate coming of Christ the church, humanly speak- 
 ing, would never have come into existence. At first 
 the church was purely Jewish in character and mem- 
 bership. When the need of organization was felt 
 the church simply adopted the organization of the 
 Jewish synagogue; in fact, the church was at first 
 only a Jewish synagogue or congregation, differing 
 from other Jewish synagogues or congregations by 
 the belief that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah 
 promised by the prophets ; that in Him God had es- 
 tablished His Kingdom, and by Him God would 
 judge the world; and that the judgment of God 
 was nigh at hand, even at the doors. 
 
 Membership in the church was then confined to 
 Jews by birth or Jews by adoption. Only the cir- 
 cumcised could share in the coming salvation. If a 
 man of another nation wished to become a member
 
 70 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 of the Christian synagogue, and share with that 
 synagogue in the hope and expectation of the com- 
 ing of Christ in His Kingdom, then that man must 
 become a circumcised Jew, and keep all the law of 
 Moses. The first great controversy in the Christian 
 church raged round the question whether salvation 
 in Christ was national or universal ; whether the 
 essence of the doctrine of Christ was ceremonial or 
 moral and spiritual. Under the leadership of Paul 
 and other like minded men, universalism won the 
 day, and membership in the church was determined 
 by ethical, not by national or ceremonial, conditions. 
 The rapidity of the progress of Christianity was 
 owing to the fact that already large numbers of men 
 and women were looking to the Jewish religion as 
 the one way to escape from the foulness and silliness 
 of the prevailing religions of the day. It was no 
 longer possible for decent and sensible men or 
 women to believe in Jupiter, the adulterer, or in 
 Venus, the courtesan, or even in Minerva, or any 
 of the twelve gods of Olympus. The Greek Mythos 
 was dead and buried beyond the hope of any res- 
 urrection. Still less could men embrace the vague 
 mysticism, and practice the foul rites of the orgiastic 
 religions of Syria, Egypt, and the East. Everywhere
 
 DEMOCRATIC CHURCH IN IMPERIAL STATE. 71 
 
 men were looking to Judaism as a possible 
 solution of the religious problem for mankind. The 
 stern monotheism of the Jew ; the teachings of the 
 Jewish prophets, which were the common property 
 ot the world, declaring that righteousness and holi- 
 ness were the essential attributes of God, and that 
 by the righteous and holy only could God be wor- 
 shiped; all these considerations drew men to the 
 religion of the Jews as to the only religion which 
 they could respect and reverence. But, while they 
 were attracted by the purity of Jehovah,* they were 
 repelled by his sternness. He was the God of the 
 Jews only. He hated and despised and condemned 
 men of other nations. His justice was partial, and 
 His love was limited. The attitude of the Jew to the 
 Gentile prevented the Jew from becoming a mission- 
 ary nation. You can never convert a people whom 
 you hate and despise. 
 
 But when men like Paul, Barnabas, and Silas 
 came to a world that was hungering and thirsting 
 for righteousness, and taught that the righteousness 
 of God was not to be found in circumcision or un- 
 circumcision, but in faith and love; that Christ 
 Jesus was the wisdom of God and the power of 
 
 The Jehovah of the prophets, not of the histories.
 
 72 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 God ; that in Him dwelt all the fullness of the God- 
 head bodily ; that His unblemished character and un- 
 tiring service manifested the true life of man, the 
 only life acceptable to God, then the people heard 
 them gladly, and the new religion spread from heart 
 to heart as fire spreads when driven by the wind. 
 
 The first effect of the preaching of Jesus in the 
 Greek and Roman world was the moral renovation 
 of that world. As soon as men heard of Jesus and 
 began to worship Him that worship purified the 
 heart. Expecting every day that Jesus would come 
 with all His holy angels, they were anxious lest 
 they should not be ready on the day of His coming. 
 It is difficult for us to exaggerate the influence which 
 the belief in the immediate coming of Christ had on 
 the first generation of Christians, in the Roman, as 
 well as in the Jewish, world. It came as a great 
 hope and an awful fear. If Christ came and found 
 them ready they would hear His voice, stand at His 
 right hand, and enter into His joy ; if they were not 
 ready then they would hear not the voice of the 
 Saviour, but of the judge saying: "Depart from 
 me ye cursed into the fire prepared for the devil and 
 his angels;" and they would be shut out from the 
 Kingdom of God.
 
 DEMOCRATIC CHURCH IN IMPERIAL STATE. 73 
 
 It is hard, I say, for us to comprehend this faith 
 of the primitive believer. It was naive and child- 
 like : the Christian waited for Christ as a child waits 
 for its mother in the dark. And the hoping and the 
 fearing kept the heart from sinning, and a desire 
 for that holiness without which no man can see the 
 Lord became an overmastering passion, leading men 
 to even wild extremes of asceticism. Christianity, 
 as we have seen, was a reaction from the prevailing 
 religion of the world, and rushed from the extreme 
 of sensuality to the extreme of self -mortification. 
 Marriage was despised, and men ran away from 
 the world to macerate themselves in the desert, 
 to fast and weep and pray, crying day and night : 
 "Have mercy, Lord, and take away my sin." 
 
 The preaching of Christ not only resulted in this 
 moral reformation, but, as a further consequence, 
 brought about, also, a social reorganization. 
 
 The Roman world was in a state of social anarchy 
 in the first century of the Christian era. The im- 
 perial government had broken down of its own 
 weight ; the old Roman families, both patrician and 
 plebeian, had perished in the civil wars, or had been 
 destroyed by the jealousy of the Emperors. Base- 
 freedmen like Pallas and Narcissus were the min-
 
 74 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 isters to imperial vices, and the instruments of im- 
 perial cruelty. All dignity, as well as security, had 
 departed from human life. No man could trust his 
 neighbor. Women were betrayed to the lust of the 
 Emperor by their own husbands, and men to his 
 anger by their wives. The government was an ir- 
 responsible tyranny resting upon the military power, 
 and the Roman was no longer a citizen; he was a 
 subject. He was no longer governed by law, but 
 by will. There was nothing between him and de- 
 struction but the caprice of a vicious man. The 
 whole Roman world groaned under this awful deg- 
 radation from which death was the only release. 
 
 Into this world of social disorganization the Chris- 
 tian religion came with its doctrine of the Brother- 
 hood of Man. And this to the Christian of the first 
 age was no mere phrase ; it was the great fact. All 
 men were equal before God, for all were His chil- 
 dren. He was the father of the slave, as well as the 
 master; the Father of the harlot, as well as the ma- 
 tron. The Christian church was simply the house- 
 hold of God, in which His children lived, and, as 
 the love of the mother is strongest for the youngest 
 and weakest of her children, so the love of God 
 went out to those of His family who needed that love
 
 DEMOCRATIC CHURCH IN IMPERIAL STATE. 75 
 
 the most. The church attracted to its membership 
 the outcasts of Roman society; the spiritually halt 
 and lame and blind came flocking in ; the sick came 
 for healing, and the weary for rest. 
 
 The Christian communities were so many little 
 democracies scattered throughout the Roman Em- 
 pire. Each congregation elected its own officers and 
 regulated its own affairs. Within the church a man 
 was a man, having the rights of man. The demo- 
 cratic spirit of ancient Greece and Rome came to life 
 again in the Christian communities. But Christian 
 democracy was not simply a revival of ancient de- 
 mocracy ; it was an advance on that democracy. In 
 ancient times the man existed for the sake of the 
 community. In primitive Christianity the commun- 
 ity existed for the sake of the man. The church was 
 for the people ; not the people for the church. The 
 church was an organization for social service; not 
 an organization for self aggrandizement. Office hold- 
 ers in the church were taken from the people to 
 serve the people. To the Christian church we owe 
 that conception of government which is the under- 
 lying conception of modern times, and which found 
 its perfect expression in the immortal words of 
 Lincoln: "Government of the people, for the peo-
 
 76 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 pie, by the people," describes to a word the govern- 
 ment of the Christian communities in the first and 
 second centuries of the Christian era. 
 
 Between these democratic churches and the im- 
 perial state there could be nothing but deadly hos- 
 tility. The imperial government feared, hated, and 
 despised the churches; feared them because it had 
 a vague misgiving that the church was undermining 
 the foundations of the Empire. The government 
 hated the Christians because the Christians held 
 aloof from all political affairs, and would not join 
 in the worship of the state. And finally, the rulers 
 of the Empire despised the church because the 
 church was made up for the most part of the off- 
 scouring of the Roman world. A society of slaves, 
 and thieves and harlots was beneath the contempt 
 of a Roman gentleman, and we have seen in the 
 historian Tacitus an example of the attitude of the 
 ordinary Roman to the Christian of his day. 
 
 And if the Empire feared, hated, and despised 
 the church, the church looked upon the Empire with 
 horror. It saw in the Empire organized rebellion 
 against God, and it expected every day to see the 
 Empire go down before the wrath of God. In the 
 book of Revelation you can read the judgment of 
 the church upon the Roman world. It was the beast
 
 DEMOCRATIC CHURCH IN IMPERIAL STATE. 77 
 
 risen up out of the sea ; it was the mouth speaking 
 blasphemies; it was Babylon the great, the mother 
 of harlots, and abominations of the earth. The only 
 hope of the world lay in the destruction of the Em- 
 pire. And the Christian expected that destruction 
 by an immediate act of God. So wicked was that 
 old world in the eyes of the Christian, that the 
 earth itself and the sky above it were involved in the 
 guilt of man. Nothing but the annihilation of the 
 whole present order could cure the evil of the times. 
 So the Christian looked for the speedy coming of a 
 day when the elements should melt with fervent 
 heat, and the heavens and the earth then existing 
 should be burnt with fire, and from their ashes 
 should rise a new heaven and a new earth, in which 
 righteousness should dwell.* 
 
 We know that the Christian was mistaken in his 
 belief that the visible universe would be destroyed 
 because of the sin of man. But his mistake was an 
 illusion, not a delusion. That old world was perish- 
 ing, burning itself up in the fires of its own wicked- 
 ness; and out of its ashes a new world was rising. 
 The Christian church was itself the new heaven and 
 the new earth, in which dwelleth righteousness. 
 
 *II. Peter, in.: 10, n.
 
 Jesus' Method of Government. 
 
 In the year 130 of the Christian era the Jewish 
 people throughout the world were thrown into a 
 state of wild excitement by the glad tidings that 
 the long-expected Messiah was come at last. He 
 had unfolded the standard of Jehovah over the ruins 
 of Jerusalem, and the Jews were gathering around 
 that standard by the tens of thousands. The news 
 of the coming of Messiah found the more eager ac- 
 ceptance because the affairs of the Jews were in a 
 desperate condition. The prophecy of Jesus on the 
 hill of Olivet, which He spake against Jerusalem, 
 had been literally fulfilled. Looking down on the 
 city, He is reported to have said: "For the days 
 shall come upon thee when thine enemies shall cast 
 up a bank about thee, and compass thee round, 
 and keep thee in on every side, and shall dash 
 thee to the ground, and thy children within 
 thee; and they shall not leave in thee one 
 
 78
 
 JESUS' METHOD OF GOVERNMENT. 79 
 
 stone upon another, because thou knowest not 
 the time of thy visitation."* These words so ex- 
 actly describe the condition of Jerusalem, in the year 
 70, after the siege by Titus, that one cannot help 
 feeling that the words of the evangelist, ascribed to 
 Jesus, which were written after the fall of Jerusa- 
 lem, were colored by the event itself. Jesus foresaw 
 the doom of the city, and wept over it, but it is not 
 likely that He foresaw that doom in all its particu- 
 lars and horrors. The Jewish wars, waged at the 
 end of the sixth decade of the first century were 
 among the most frightful in the history of human 
 warfare. The Jews were inspired with religious en- 
 thusiasm, and fought with the desperateness of fana- 
 tics. Every hill in Judea and Galilee became a fort- 
 ress ; every valley, a battle field ; city after city was 
 taken by storm and sacked by the Roman soldiery. 
 The siege of Jerusalem lasted for years, and was at- 
 tended with horrors that disgrace the name of man. 
 Every abomination conceivable was committed with- 
 in and without the city. Cannibalism, rape, and 
 murder were among the incidents of that siege. 
 When the city was taken by storm the Romans had 
 to fight their way from house to house, and from 
 
 *St. Luke, xix. : 43, 44, R. V.
 
 8o RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 street to street. The final calamity was the burning 
 and falling of the Temple. With the fall of Jeru- 
 salem the Jewish people were utterly prostrate un- 
 der the power of the Roman. According to the esti- 
 mate of the Jewish historian Josephus, 1,356,460 
 Jews were killed in these wars, and 101,700 were 
 carried into captivity.* For sixty years the Jews 
 waited in sullen despair for God to avenge their 
 wrongs and to give them back their holy city and 
 the land of their fathers. 
 
 At the end of the sixty years the word was 
 passed from lip to lip that the day of vengeance 
 had come. Akiba, the wisest and holiest of the rab- 
 bins, had recognized the Messiah of God in a Jewish 
 adventurer named Coziba, who took the name of 
 Bar-Cochab, The Son of the Star. He claimed to 
 be the star prophesied by Balaam. The pretentions 
 of Bar-Cochab were admitted, first by Akiba, and 
 then by the other Jewish rabbins, and the people 
 at large followed the lead of the elders, and all 
 Israel went after The Son of the Star. Another ter- 
 rible war followed. More than a million Jews lost 
 their lives or their liberty. The whole country of 
 
 *Milman, History of the Jews, vol. 2, p. 380. Murray, 
 1866.
 
 JESUS' METHOD OF GOVERNMENT. 81 
 
 Galilee and Judea was so wasted that it has not re- 
 covered to this day. What was left of Jerusalem 
 was razed to the ground. By order of the Emperor, 
 Hadrian, the plow was passed over the site of the 
 city, and it was sown with salt, and a new city, dedi- 
 cated to Jupiter, was built on an adjoining hill. From 
 that day to this the Jews have been a people without 
 a country; wandering as strangers and pilgrims 
 from land to land. Since the failure of Bar-Cochab 
 no one claiming to be Messiah has risen up in Israel. 
 This brief account of the messiahship of Coziba 
 is of value to us in these lectures because it enables 
 us to compare his messiahship with the messiahship 
 of Jesus. In these two histories, the history of 
 Jesus and the history of Bar-Cochab, the contrast 
 is perfect. Two human characters embodying two 
 distinct conceptions of human government stand 
 over against each other in the white light of history, 
 the one painted in the dark hues of the despair, the 
 other in the glowing colors of hope; the one the 
 cause of measureless misery, the other of infinite hap- 
 piness ; the one an awful failure, the other a marvel- 
 ous success. I think I am safe in saying that the 
 greater number of those who hear these words have, 
 never even heard the name of Coziba, called Bar- 
 REL. & POL. 6
 
 82 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 Cochab. That name is known only to careful stu- 
 dents of history. Bar-Cochab shot like a falling 
 star through the sky of the Jewish-Roman world, 
 followed by a trail of baleful light, and then went 
 out into utter darkness, and his name has long since 
 perished from the memory of man. 
 
 But who has not heard the name of Jesus. To- 
 day* men and women the world over are celebrat- 
 ing his birthday, children are singing, bells are ring- 
 ing, lights are burning, all for joy because Jesus 
 was born. Everywhere men are asking, What did 
 Jesus do? What did Jesus say? What did Jesus 
 mean? and they profess to order their lives, in 
 thought and word and deed, in obedience to the word 
 of Jesus, and in submission to His will. There is 
 no conqueror in history who can compare with Jesus 
 in the extent and duration of His conquest. He has 
 made the little hill tribe of Judah the master people 
 of the world; because of Jesus the folklore of the 
 Hebrew has become the sacred history of the west- 
 ern world, and the heroes of Israel, the heroes of 
 mankind. Jesus to-day has the leadership of man, 
 and human evolution must follow the lines laid down 
 by the life of the Man of Nazareth. 
 
 *Lecture delivered Christmas night.
 
 JESUS' METHOD OF GOVERNMENT. 83 
 
 Now, if we look for the reason of the awful fail- 
 ure of Bar-Cochab, and the marvelous success of 
 Jesus, we will not find that reason in what is called 
 the supernatural. Jesus did not succeed because 
 he was born of a virgin, or because He was reported 
 to have risen bodily from the dead. These legends 
 concerning Him are the result, not the cause, of the 
 marvelous success of the man. These stories were 
 told of Him only because the simple folk could in 
 no other way adequately express their conception 
 of the greatness of Jesus. Only a virgin born could 
 be as pure as Jesus. Only a Son of God could be as 
 great as Jesus. Only a life more powerful than 
 death could have the strength of Jesus. The creeds 
 of Christendom are of value, not as historical state- 
 ments, for the primitive and mediaeval Christian 
 had no historical sense, but they are of immense 
 value as attempts on the part of ordinary men to 
 measure the greatest personality ever born into the 
 world. If we look for the secret of the success of 
 Jesus and of the failure of Bar-Cochab, we shall 
 find that Bar-Cochab was ignorant of the law that 
 governs all real conquests in human history, and 
 that Jesus of Nazareth was the first great moralist
 
 84 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 to discover that law, to give it formal expression, 
 and to apply it to human life. 
 
 Count Leon Tolstoy* tells us that he was once 
 reading the teachings of Jesus to a wise man from 
 the east. The eastern sage, as he heard them, 
 claimed one after another of the sayings of Jesus as 
 original among his own people. But at last there 
 was a saying of Jesus which the eastern did not 
 claim, and which he admitted to be original with 
 the Prophet of Nazareth. This original contribu- 
 tion of the Prophet of Nazareth to the moral wis- 
 dom of the world the eastern sage found in the 
 words, "Resist not evil." 
 
 This wise man displayed all the acumen of his 
 race when he fixed on these words as the words 
 per se of Jesus of Nazareth, for they are the key 
 to his gospel and to the secret of his success in the 
 world. 
 
 Jesus enunciated this great moral discovery in the 
 earlier and calmer years of his ministry. It was one 
 of those truths of God which he saw with that clear- 
 ness of vision which makes his words to be, not so 
 much mere human wisdom, as divine revelation. 
 This saying is the very keystone in the arch of that 
 
 *Quoted from memory.
 
 JESUS' METHOD OF GOVERNMENT. 85 
 
 new law which Jesus proclaimed, and by which he 
 annulled the old law of Moses, the Jewish lawgiver. 
 He cried: "Ye have heard that it hath been said 
 an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth; but I 
 say unto you resist not him that is evil ; but 
 whosoever will smite thee on the right cheek turn 
 to him the other also."* 
 
 Now, no words of Jesus have been such a stumb- 
 ling block to modern Christians as these words ; 
 they cannot believe that Jesus meant just what he 
 said. They reckon this among the hyperbole of 
 the Master; as if by this exaggeration He would 
 call attention to the necessity of moderation in the 
 use of physical force. We are not to resent all inju- 
 ries, but only such injuries as seem to us excessive 
 and to call for retaliation. But the words of Jesus 
 will not bear this explanation. They mean what 
 they say, or they mean nothing; and, if they mean 
 nothing, then the Man who uttered them is guilty 
 of solemnly affirming foolish and dangerous non- 
 sense ; and such a man has no right to the admiration 
 and leadership of men. To call Him Lord! Lord! 
 and at the same time to despise the things that He 
 
 *St. Matthew, v. : 38.
 
 86 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 says, is to be guilty of folly far more foolish than 
 the saying we deride. 
 
 This law is not, as some may suppose, the law 
 of passive obedience, bidding us yield a ready sub- 
 mission to evil in the world. It is not a cowardly 
 surrender to unrighteousness, a fearful cringing to 
 wickedness in high places. It is not the teaching 
 of a craven, who sells his soul for his safety. If 
 such were the meaning of the words of Jesus we 
 might well reject them as immoral and destructive 
 of the highest interests of mankind. The doctrine 
 of Jesus is not the doctrine of passive obedience; 
 it is the doctrine of passive resistance. And it is 
 this doctrine of passive resistance that is the great 
 original doctrine that Jesus has contributed to moral 
 science. We can best see the meaning of this say- 
 ing if we interpret it by the life of Jesus Himself. 
 Surely no one can accuse Jesus of timidity. He was 
 not afraid to arraign the chief priests and rulers 
 of His people at the bar of divine justice; in His 
 short life He made more enemies than most men 
 dare make in a long lifetime. And these enemies 
 were bitter in their hatred, so bitter that nothing 
 but the destruction of Jesus would satisfy them. 
 And Jesus knew the danger of His course of action.
 
 JESUS' METHOD OF GOVERNMENT. 87 
 
 He was not as a child playing with matches in a 
 powder magazine, ignorant of his peril. He knew 
 that He could escape only by submission, and He 
 would not submit for one single instant. His whole 
 life was not a life of obedience, but of rebellion 
 against existing conditions and established authori- 
 ties. 
 
 Jesus was in opposition from the beginning to the 
 end of His days. And it is with His method of war- 
 fare that this saying, "Resist not evil," has to do 
 do not resist evil with evil. Do not resist physical 
 force with physical force. Do not meet calumny 
 with calumny, nor vituperation with vituperation. 
 Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with 
 good, meet calumny with silence and vituperation 
 with kind words. Jesus would carry no sword or 
 spear; He wore no helmet, nor breastplate; there 
 were no greaves of brass upon His legs ; but, for all 
 that, Jesus was armed and protected. He was 
 armed with the only weapons that are effectual for 
 the settlement of disputes among men. He used 
 the only method of warfare by which real conquests 
 can be made. Jesus was wise enough to see that 
 physical force can only decide physical questions. 
 He knew as well as Bonaparte that God is always
 
 88 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 on the side of the strongest battalions and the more 
 skilful commander. A battle never decides any other 
 matter except the relative strength and handling of 
 the different armies. No moral issue is or can be 
 settled by an appeal to the god of battles, for the 
 god of battles knows no more of morality than the 
 wind at sea or the ice blast on the mountain, which 
 drowns and freezes indifferently the saint and the 
 sinner. The questions which physical resistance 
 could decide were not of interest to Jesus. He was 
 not anxious to find out whether the Jew was a bet- 
 ter fighter than the Roman, but only if he was a 
 better man. And the method of Jesus was to pit the 
 manhood of the Jew against the brutality of the 
 Roman. He, the Jew, stood up alone against the 
 whole Roman power, and dared it to do its worst, 
 and it did its worst; but it could not hurt Jesus. 
 He was stronger than Caesar. Caesar could kill the 
 body of Jesus, but after that there was nothing more 
 that Caesar could do; but when the Roman had 
 killed Him, then Jesus could and did undermine the 
 Empire, change institutions, and alter the courses 
 of history. The disbelief of the ordinary man in 
 the saying of Jesus arises from his disbelief in the 
 moral and spiritual life. If a man believes that aft-
 
 JESUS' METHOD OF GOVERNMENT. 89 
 
 er he is dead he can do nothing, why, of course, he 
 will look upon death as the greatest calamity, and 
 will seek to defend his physical life with all the 
 forces at his command. But if a man be convinced 
 that his real life lies in his soul, that physical death 
 is simply an incident, and that by physical death he 
 may acquire the greater influence and more exten- 
 sive power, then physical death will be chosen as 
 the way to victory. Jesus based His doctrine of re- 
 sist not evil upon the further doctrine that evil 
 is limited in its power and operation. It can do so 
 much and no more. And the surest, and, indeed, 
 the only, way to defeat evil is to let it alone ; it will 
 rage and spend itself, and then it will be over and 
 done with. Jesus's method of warfare is to fight 
 evil, not by active resistance, but by passive endur- 
 ance. He was ready, not to kill, but, if need were, 
 to be killed. And the Christian world has, in doc- 
 trine, admitted the wisdom of the method of Jesus 
 by finding in His death the salvation of mankind. 
 It is true that the theologians have obscured the 
 meaning of the death of Jesus by asserting that He 
 died to satisfy the justice that is, the vengeance 
 of God; but this whole idea of taking vengeance is 
 utterly foreign to the teaching of the Master. To
 
 90 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 visit evil with evil is the one thing that He says 
 should never be done either by gods or men. His 
 death did not satisfy the vengeance of God, for there 
 was no god of vengeance to be satisfied. But His 
 death did shame the wickedness of man. It showed 
 the brute in all his brutality, the hypocrite in all his 
 hypocrisy, the traitor in his treachery, and the cow- 
 ard in his cowardice. The death of Jesus was a 
 manifestation of the power of the human soul, pure 
 and simple, to withstand all the forces that can be 
 brought against it. A man's soul is his impregnable 
 fortress. Let him contain himself in that, and he is 
 secure against all adversaries. 
 
 Jesus's method of passive resistance is by far the 
 most economical of life and treasure of any mode of 
 warfare that man can adopt. We have seen how 
 the active resistance of the Jews to the Roman power 
 lead to the death of millions and to the misery of 
 millions more. While the Jews were resisting ac- 
 tively, the Christians were resisting passively. The 
 wickedness of the Roman power was far more hate- 
 ful to the Christian than to the Jew. The Chris- 
 tian would not recognize the validity of that power 
 by so much as casting a grain of incense upon an 
 altar. But the Christian did not wish to kill the
 
 JESUS' METHOD OF GOVERNMENT. gi 
 
 Roman ; he wished to convert him ; and so he mani- 
 fested his hostility to the Roman system, not by 
 fighting the Roman, but by preaching to the Roman 
 that his system was evil, and, if he wished to es- 
 cape from that evil, he must turn from the worship 
 of Caesar to the worship of Christ. And when the 
 Roman was angry with him the Christian suffered 
 the full consequence of that anger, and in so suffer- 
 ing revealed to the Roman a moral greatness which 
 turned the anger of the Roman into admiration, 
 love, and worship. And the loss of life in this war- 
 fare of the Christian against the Roman was as 
 nothing when compared with the loss of the Jews. 
 More Jewish lives were lost in the one year of Co- 
 ziba's insurrection, than Christian lives were lost 
 in the three centuries of Christian persecution. And 
 there was this radical difference, every Jew who 
 died in arms made an enemy for the Jews. Every 
 Christian who died unarmed made a friend for the 
 Christians. So that it became a saying that the 
 blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. The 
 history of Jesus and the history of the establish- 
 ment of Christianity give experimental proof of 
 the soundness of His doctrine. 
 
 The method of Jesus is not only economical, but
 
 92 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 it is effective. If you wish to subdue a man to your 
 will so that he may be your slave, you cannot do 
 it by killing him, for a dead man is no man's serv- 
 ant. You cannot do it by chaining him, for a man 
 in chains has all he can do to carry his shackles. 
 The only way to subdue a man is to win him. If 
 you want him for your very own you must conquer 
 something beside his hands and his feet; you must 
 storm the citadel of his heart, and, instead of mak- 
 ing him fear to disobey, you must make him love to 
 obey. Now you can never make a dog love you by 
 beating him ; still less a man. In all God's universe 
 it is the law that like begets like, hate breeds 
 hatred, and loving wins love. And Jesus, in the 
 sublimity of His spiritual genius, gave expression 
 by word and life to these very simple axiomatic 
 principles, and by so doing put the world in the 
 way of salvation. 
 
 As long as men hate one another and kill one an- 
 other, so long will this world be a hell, and those 
 who live in it, will not live at all, but all their days 
 will be misery and death. 
 
 I do not think anyone can look at the present 
 condition of so-called Christendom without a feel- 
 ing of pity for the foolishness of man and of com-
 
 JESUS' METHOD OF GOVERNMENT. 93 
 
 passion for what must be the shame of Jesus at 
 the conduct of His so-called followers. Here is all 
 Christendom one vast armed camp, spending mil- 
 lions of lives and wasting billions of treasure getting 
 ready to resist evil. And lo and behold all this vast 
 waste of life and treasure is spent to oppose a phan- 
 tom. The only evil which the nations have to re- 
 sist is the evil which these armaments themselves 
 create. If the nations were disarmed the nations 
 would have nothing to fear. If any country in the 
 world to-day were to disarm, and to announce to 
 the world that it did so in the cause of peace that, 
 respecting the rights of others, it would fear injury 
 from none, what do you suppose would happen to 
 that country. Its instant destruction by its more 
 warlike neighbors? Not at all. That nation, es- 
 pecially if it were a strong nation, would instantly 
 attract to itself the whole peace sentiment of the 
 world. It would be like the monastery in the mid- 
 dle ages ; it would gather into itself the moral force 
 of mankind, and, like the monastery, it would in 
 the end rule the world. For the monastery as well 
 as the primitive church interpreted the words of 
 Jesus literally. After the fall of the western em- 
 pire in the fifth century Europe was overrun by
 
 94 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 Barbarians from the north, whose two occupations 
 were drinking and fighting. Every tribe was at war 
 with its neighbor; every man's hand was against 
 every man. In those days men lived in castles and 
 wore chain armor. But in the midst of this univer- 
 sal warfare there were certain men who did not re- 
 sist evil. They built their homes in the forest. Their 
 gates were open day and night to welcome the 
 stranger. If their enemy hungered, they fed him. 
 If he thirsted, they gave him drink. If they were 
 killed, they died praying for their murderers. They 
 were sheep in the midst of wolves, and their de- 
 struction seemed inevitable. But what happened? 
 Why, the monastery became the center of order; 
 the nursery of civilization in Europe. Out of the 
 monastery came the rulers of Europe. Hildebrand, 
 the monk, was more powerful than Henry, the war 
 lord. All the great warriors of the middle age were 
 the servants of the monks. Charlemagne received 
 his Empire from the monastic church. Frederick 
 Barborossa humbled himself at the feet of the 
 monks, and Henry IV. of Germany stood three days, 
 barefooted in the snow, humbly suing for the pardon 
 of a monk. If there were no other instance in his- 
 tory, the monastery would settle forever the ques-
 
 JESUS' METHOD OF GOVERNMENT. 95 
 
 tion as to the relative potency of physical and moral 
 force. The moral is always the greater. 
 
 The ancient law of an eye for an eye, and a tooth 
 for a tooth, is still in a large measure the law of 
 human life as interpreted by the state. A man steals 
 a loaf of bread to satisfy his hunger, and the state 
 steals his liberty to satisfy its vengeance. A man 
 kills another man in the heat of passion, or under 
 great temptation, and the state kills him in cold 
 blood, and without any temptation at all. And it 
 is commonly believed that the doctrine, "Resist not 
 evil," if applied to social life, would throw society 
 back into anarchy. And yet criminology teaches us 
 that severity toward criminals simply increases 
 crime. In the good old times when robbers were 
 broken on the wheel, and thieves were burned at 
 the stake, robbers thronged every forest and beset 
 every highway, while thieves and cut-throats lurked 
 in every lane and alley of the city. As severity 
 toward crime has lessened, the number of criminals 
 and crimes has decreased. If we wish to put an 
 end to crime we must in some way put an end to 
 criminals. But you do not put an end to criminals 
 by putting them in prison or by killing them. If 
 you put a criminal in prison, you make him more of
 
 96 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 a criminal than ever. Prisons are schools of crime, 
 from which men graduate after a longer or shorter 
 period of education to prey upon society. Nor do 
 you put an end to a criminal by killing him. A dead 
 criminal is still a criminal. When the state solemnly 
 executes a man it gives eternal significance to his 
 crime. It can never be changed, but must remain 
 forever a blot on human history. The vengeance 
 of the state falls on innocent and guilty alike. The 
 father and the mother, the wife and the children, 
 must bear the shame of the crime forever. The 
 only way to put an end to a criminal is to make him 
 an honest man. You must in some way reach his 
 soul, and stir within that soul the desire to do good. 
 And, if you would have a man do good you must 
 be good to him; you must reach his soul as Dinah 
 Morris reached the poor soul of Hetty Sorel, the 
 child murderer, reached it not by accusation and 
 severity, but by laying her cheek against the cheek 
 of the hardened sinner until at last the love of Dinah 
 thawed the heart of Hetty. So that heart wept 
 tears of penitence ; and Hetty was no longer a crim- 
 inal, but a sorrowful, heart-broken woman. Victor 
 Hugo was not a mere romancer; he was a pro-
 
 JESUS' METHOD OF GOVERNMENT. 97 
 
 found psychologist; when he told the story of the 
 good bishop and Jean Val Jean. Resist not evil, 
 is the maxim of the good bishop. Jean Val Jean, 
 the convict from the galleys, abuses the holy man's 
 hospitality by stealing his silver spoons. He is ar- 
 rested and brought back to the Episcopal residence. 
 The bishop lies and says to the officer that he had 
 given the spoons to the man, and upbraids Jean Val 
 Jean because he had forgotten to take the silver can- 
 dle sticks as well. Does this act of the bishop make 
 Jean Val Jean more or less a criminal. You know 
 the story. From that instant the soul of Jean Val 
 Jean was transformed. He became so great that the 
 injustice of society could not crush him. The vic- 
 tim of that injustice, he triumphed over it by the 
 greatness of his soul. 
 
 If society were to practice the doctrine of Jesus, 
 of St. Francis of Assisi, and of Victor Hugo, we 
 should soon have no need for our jails and our 
 gallows. If we were always ready to forgive the 
 sinner, we should have no need for further pun- 
 ishment but forgiveness would bring him to peni- 
 tence, and penitence to reformation.* 
 
 *Asylums, not prisons, will mark the next stage in crimi- 
 nal jurisprudence. 
 REL. & POL. 7
 
 98 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 To practice the precept of Jesus is not easy, be- 
 cause it requires the love of Jesus for men, and 
 the patience of Jesus with men. Jesus's love for 
 men was so great that it consumed at once any feel- 
 ing of resentment against them. He pitied and 
 prayed for His murderers in the moment of His own 
 agony and death. Jesus's patience with men was so 
 unlimited that He was willing to wait for ages if 
 only so He could win the heart of man to His way 
 of thinking and feeling. Coziba, called Bar-Cochab, 
 would overthrow the Roman power in a day ; Jesus 
 worked three hundred years to accomplish the same 
 result. Coziba would conquer Rome by force of 
 arms; Jesus by force of love. Coziba would de- 
 stroy; Jesus would assimilate. Coziba's work was 
 done when Coziba died; Jesus's real work did not 
 begin until the day after His death. Coziba and his 
 tribe are men of the past; Jesus is the man of the 
 future. Let those of us who still believe in Jesus 
 take heart. Evolution is on our side. Slowly, but 
 surely, the world is coming round to Jesus's way 
 of thinking. Formerly men gloried in warfare ; now 
 they apologize for it. In old time men went out 
 to kill and to spoil their enemies ; now they go with 
 battleship and army to civilize them. If we kill the
 
 JESUS' METHOD OF GOVERNMENT. 99 
 
 Filipino or the Boer, we do it only for their good. 
 And we are more or less ashamed of ourselves, be- 
 cause we can find no better way to elevate them than 
 the way of violence and treachery. We are ashamed 
 of our slums, of our jails and our gibbets ; and with 
 shame will come sorrow, and with sorrow a better 
 mind ; and by and by we shall agree with Jesus 
 that the only way to conquer our enemy is to make 
 him our friend ; the only way to overcome evil is 
 to overcome evil with good. When that day comes, 
 as it surely will, then we shall hear again the angels 
 singing, "Peace on earth ; good will toward men." 
 
 And, if we choose, that day can come to us to- 
 night. To-night we can be Jesus men; men who 
 will suffer evil, but never do it.
 
 The Imperialized Church. 
 
 On the 27th of October in the year 312 of the 
 Christian era Constantine, son of Constantius Chlor- 
 us, was on the eve of a battle that was to decide the 
 destinies of the Roman Empire. His enemy was 
 Maxentius, a rival for the imperial power, who held 
 the Malvian bridge and barred the way of Constan- 
 tine to Rome. Maxentius was a believer in the an- 
 cient Roman religion, and was using all the means 
 prescribed by the ancient ritual to win the favor 
 of the gods, and to secure their aid in the coming 
 battle. Constantine, knowing that his enemy was 
 thus engaged, was greatly disturbed in his mind. 
 He knew that his fate and the fate of the Roman 
 world was to be decided on the morrow, "and, be- 
 ing convinced," says the historian Eusebius, "that 
 he needed some more powerful aid than his military 
 forces could afford him, on account of the wicked 
 and magical enchantments which were so diligently 
 practiced by the tyrant, Maxentius, he began to 
 seek for divine assistance, and while he was thus 
 
 100
 
 THE IMPERIALIZED CHURCH. 101 
 
 praying with fervent entreaty a most marvelous sign 
 appeared to him from heaven, the account of which 
 it may have been difficult to receive with credit had 
 it been related by any other person; but, since the 
 victorious Emperor himself long afterward declared 
 it to the writer of this history, when he was hon- 
 ored with his acquaintance and society, and con- 
 firmed it with an oath, who could hesitate to credit 
 the relation, especially since the testimony of after 
 times has established its truth. He said that at mid- 
 day, when the sun was beginning to decline, he saw, 
 with his own eyes, the trophy of a cross of light in 
 the heavens above the sun, and bearing the inscrip- 
 tion, 'By this conquer.' 
 
 At this sight he himself was struck with amaze- 
 ment, and his whole army also, which happened to 
 be following him on some expedition, and witnessed 
 the miracle. He said, moreover, that he doubted 
 within himself what the import of this apparition 
 could be; and while he continued to ponder and to 
 reason on its meaning, night imperceptibly drew on, 
 and in his sleep the Christ of God appeared to him 
 with the same sign which he had seen in the heav- 
 ens, and commanded him to procure a standard
 
 102 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 made in the likeness of that sign, and to use it as a 
 safeguard in all engagements against his enemies." 
 Thus in courtly phrase does the historian Eusebius 
 tell us of one of the most important events in the 
 history of the world. With the conversion of Con- 
 stantine the revolution was consummated by which 
 the ancient Greek and Roman world was carried 
 from the worship of the gods of nature, to the wor- 
 ship of God in Christ. That Constantine thought he 
 saw the sign of the cross in the sky is certain. And 
 it is also a matter of fact that he was obedient to his 
 supposed heavenly vision. He made a standard on 
 which he placed the sign of the cross, and, follow- 
 ing this standard, he not only defeated Maxentius 
 at the battle of Malvian bridge, but by an unin- 
 terrupted course of good fortune he made himself 
 master of the Roman world and reunited the Em- 
 pire in his own person. Immediately after the bat- 
 tle of Malvian bridge Constantine and his then 
 eastern colleague, Licinius, issued the famous Edict 
 of Milan,* granting liberty to all Romans to wor- 
 ship, acording to the dictates of their reason and 
 conscience. This Edict was made in favor of the 
 Christians, and its effect was to make Christianity 
 
 *Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, bk. 10, chap. v.
 
 THE IMPERIALIZED CHURCH. 103 
 
 the religion of the Empire. Twelve years after the 
 Edict of Milan Constantine, then sole Emperor of 
 the Roman world, presided at the opening of a great 
 council of Christian bishops and doctors held in the 
 city of Nicsea, and at the death of Constantine, in 
 337, the Christian religion was firmly established 
 as the state religion of the Roman world. Then 
 it was that the adherents of the ancient religions 
 were called pagans, from the word "pagus" which 
 means country; for only rude rustics believed any 
 longer in the gods of the hills and the groves. 
 
 But this triumph of Christianity was not an un- 
 qualified victory for the religion of Jesus. If Je- 
 sus did, indeed, inspire Constantine with the hope 
 of success on the eve of his battle with Maxentius, 
 then Jesus in heaven must have utterly forgotten the 
 teaching of Jesus on earth. He who said, "Resist 
 not evil," could hardly be the same as the one who 
 said, make of my cross a standard, and by means 
 of its magic power go out and conquer your ene- 
 mies. The moral distance between the saying of 
 Jesus and the vision of Constantine is the distance 
 that organized Christianity had traveled from the
 
 i(H RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 death of Jesus on the cross to the conversion of the 
 Roman Emperor by the cross. In those three hun- 
 dred years the imperial state had been profoundly 
 influenced by the democratic church, and the church 
 in turn had been influenced and modified by the im- 
 perial state. 
 
 In the second century, immediately after the fall 
 of Nero, the moral reaction, of which the Christian 
 church was the embodiment, made itself felt in ev- 
 ery section of Roman society, and in every depart- 
 ment of Roman life. The state still looked upon the 
 Christian faith as a deadly superstition, hostile to 
 the life of the Empire. Yet the state itself was 
 stirred to its depths by that doctrine of righteous- 
 ness which was preached by Christian apostles in 
 the lanes and byways of every city in the Empire. 
 
 The fear of God and the enthusiasm for humanity 
 which were generated in the church kindled a fire 
 that spread far and wide throughout the Roman 
 Empire. Everywhere men began to bethink them- 
 selves, and to amend their lives. Emperors began 
 to use their power, not to glut their own lust and 
 cruelty, but to promote the wellbeing of the people. 
 After a short period of disorder the death of
 
 THE IMPERIALIZED CHURCH. 105 
 
 Nero was followed by the accession of Vespasian, 
 a rude soldier, but a just man, who ruled the Empire 
 with wisdom and moderation for the space of nine 
 years, and was succeeded at his death, in the year 79, 
 by his son, Titus, the conqueror of Jerusalem, a man 
 greatly beloved by the army and the people. Titus 
 reigned only twenty-six months, when he was car- 
 ried off by a fever that was then devastating the 
 world. In the person of his brother, Domitian, 
 the Roman world fell once more into the hands of 
 a madman and a tyrant. For fifteen years Rome 
 repeated, in the reign of Domitian, son of Vespasian, 
 the cruelty and licentiousness of the reign of Nero. 
 Gloomy, superstitious, and cruel, this Emperor sac- 
 rificed the leading members of the Senate to his own 
 fears, and terror ruled in Rome until the death of 
 Domitian, who was murdered by his attendants in 
 the year 96. 
 
 The death of Domitian was followed by one of 
 the happiest periods, not only in the history of the 
 Roman Empire, but also in the history of the world. 
 "If," says the historian Gibbon, "a man were called 
 to fix the period in the history of the world during 
 which the condition of the human race was most
 
 106 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 happy and prosperous, he would without hesitation 
 name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian 
 to the accession of Commodus. The vast extent of 
 the Roman Empire was governed by absolute power 
 under the guidance of virtue and wisdom. The 
 armies were restrained by the firm, but gentle, hand 
 of four successive Emperors, whose characters and 
 authority commanded involuntary respect."* The 
 Emperors to whom the historian refers in this pas- 
 sage are Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and 
 Marcus Aurelius. On the death of Domitian, Mar- 
 cus Cocceius Nerva was proclaimed Emperor by the 
 Pretorian Guards and confirmed by the Senate. The 
 new Emperor was an aged senator of blameless life, 
 but too feeble to bear the cares of Empire. Of 
 this no one was more conscious than Nerva himself. 
 With the approbation of the Senate and people the 
 Emperor adopted as his son and successor Trajan, 
 a Spaniard distinguished as a general and a states- 
 man. Trajan shared the imperial power with his 
 father during the lifetime of Nerva, and at his 
 
 *Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, E. Gibbon, 
 chaps, in., iv.
 
 THE IMPERIALIZED CHURCH. 107 
 
 death became the master of the world. Trajan was 
 renowned no less for administrative ability in civil 
 affairs, than he was for martial ambition and mili- 
 tary success. He was the last of the Romans to 
 extend the boundaries of the Empire. He added 
 Dacia, beyond the Danube, and Arabia Petra to the 
 imperial domain, and penetrated with his armies be- 
 yond the Euphrates and the Tigris. He died at 
 Selinus, in Cilicia, as he was returning in triumph 
 to Rome, in the year 117, after a glorious reign of 
 nineteen years. The relation of Trajan to the 
 Christian religion was that of a wise and good man 
 who was troubled by the presence in his Empire of 
 a people who stubbornly refused to conform to an- 
 cient customs or to recognize the divine authority of 
 the government. Trajan used every effort to find 
 out what the new religion really was and the secret 
 of its power over the people. He instructed his 
 friend, Pliny the Younger, governor of Bithynia, to 
 examine the Christians by torture, and to ascertain, 
 if he could, the doctrines which they taught and the 
 nature of their secret rites. On the evidence thus 
 obtained, the Roman philosopher "could detect noth- 
 ing further than a culpable and extravagant super- 
 stition. The only facts he could discover were, that
 
 io8 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 they had a custom of meeting together before day- 
 light and singing a hymn to Christ as God. They 
 were bound together by no unlawful sacraments, but 
 only under mutual obligation not to commit 
 theft, robbery, adultery, or fraud. They met a sec- 
 ond time in the day, and partook together of food, 
 but that of a perfectly innocent kind. The test of 
 guilt to which he submitted the most obstinate de- 
 linquents was adoration before the statues of the 
 gods and of the Emperor and the malediction of 
 Christ. Those who refused he ordered led to exe- 
 cution." Under the circumstances, Trajan could 
 do nothing but sentence the Christians to death for 
 treason against the state. In denying the divinity 
 of the Empire, they denied the Empire itself. If 
 the authority, the Empire, were not divine, it was 
 brutal. If it had not the sanction of the gods, its 
 only sanction was the brute strength of the soldier. 
 In studying the relation of church and state dur- 
 ing the anti-Christian period we must always re- 
 member that we are reading the history of a 
 religious conflict. The city of Rome, as we have al- 
 ready learned, was intensely religious. Its founda- 
 tions were laid in the fear of the gods. To the gods
 
 THE IMPERIALIZED CHURCH. 109 
 
 it looked for favor, for protection, and for victory; 
 and its calamities it ascribed to the anger of the 
 gods. The Christians were guilty of the crime of 
 dishonoring and denying the gods. In the estima- 
 tion of their generations they were atheists, and as 
 such deserved no better fate than to be thrown to 
 the lions and burned at the stake. It was the wise 
 and good Emperor Trajan who sent the holy bishop 
 Ignatius from Antioch to be cast to the wild beasts 
 in the amphitheater at Rome. 
 
 Trajan was succeeded in the Empire by his 
 cousin, Hadrian, who, lacking the military 
 genius and ambition of his predecessor, with- 
 drew the legions from beyond the Tigris, abandoned 
 the conquests of Trajan, and gave to the Empire the 
 blessing of peace. Hadrian was restless by nature, 
 and spent his time in journeying from place to place, 
 investigating the administration of the Empire, and 
 punishing those who were guilty of corruption in 
 office, and so delivering the people from oppressive 
 rule. Hadrian, following the example of Nerva, 
 adopted as his son and successor the best and wisest 
 of the living Romans, the senator Titus Antoninus, 
 called Antoninus Pius, on condition that he would 
 in turn adopt Marcus Annius Verus, afterward 
 called Marcus Aurelius.
 
 i io RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 The joint reigns of Antoninus Pius and Marcus 
 Aurelius, covering a period of forty-seven years, are 
 without doubt the twilight hours of the ancient 
 world. In these two Emperors Roman virtue mani- 
 fested itself in all the beauty and pathos of a sunset 
 glow. Antoninus, the sage, and Marcus Aurelius, 
 the saint, were men who would have done honor to 
 any religion. They ruled in righteousness, and had 
 hearts to pity the miseries of the people. Marcus 
 Aurelius is recognized by men of all creeds as one 
 of the great spiritual leaders of mankind. He lived 
 a life of austere virtue without hope of other reward 
 than the approval of his own conscience. He was a 
 saint in a palace, a humble soul with the world at 
 his feet. That he should have missed the secret of 
 Jesus was his misfortune, and not his fault. He 
 was the last of the ancients; the victim of a dying 
 world. With the death of Marcus on the I7th of 
 March in the year 180, the sun of Roman greatness 
 went down into a night of gloom. Commodus, the 
 son of Marcus, was a tyrant of the worst type, vie- 
 ing with Nero and Domitian for the palm of infamy 
 among the rulers of the world. From Commodus, 
 who was murdered in 190, to the accession of Di- 
 ocletian in 284, twenty-three Emperors rose and fell.
 
 THE IMPERIALIZED CHURCH. in 
 
 Thirteen of these were slain by their own servants 
 or soldiers. Only three, Severus, Aurelian, and 
 Probus, have left names worthy of remembrance. 
 Diocletian, a Dalmatian peasant, made one last ef- 
 fort to destroy Christianity, revive the ancient faith, 
 and to re-establish the authority of the empire. 
 He swept away the last vestige of the ancient Ro- 
 man liberties, and made the government an oriental 
 despotism, pure and simple. His scheme of divid- 
 ing the Empire into four grand divisions under two 
 Emperors and two Caesars was a failure from the 
 first, and, wearied in his effort to hold together the 
 falling state, Diocletian resigned the Empire in the 
 fifty-ninth year of his age and turned his attention 
 to raising cabbages. The retirement of Diocletian 
 was followed by a period of confusion until Con- 
 stantine re-established the imperial power in his own 
 person, and reconstituted the Empire on a Christian 
 basis. Whether Constantine was converted by mir- 
 acle or by reason, his course was dictated by far- 
 seeing wisdom and consummate statesmanship. In 
 the Christian religion he found the only remaining
 
 112 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 faith by which men could live and in the Christian 
 churches the only centers of order in the Empire. 
 
 For three-hundred years the churches had been 
 increasing their numbers and perfecting their or- 
 ganization. They had gathered into their member- 
 ship nearly all the moral worth of the Empire. 
 Men who wished to live clean, sober, industrious 
 lives turned to the Christian church as to a place of 
 safety; for it was the first principle of the church 
 that men should live soberly, righteously, and godly 
 in this present world. The church attracted to its 
 fold by the powerful magnet of holiness. We won- 
 der what brought men into the Christian church and 
 what kept them there. The whole world was 
 against them. Christianity was not fashionable in 
 those days. To become a Christian meant to be- 
 come an outcast. The very name was an accusa- 
 tion. If a man entered the church he did it at the 
 hazard of his life ; he severed the noblest ties of hu- 
 manity; he became an object of hatred to his own 
 father and mother ; his wife and his children looked 
 on him with horror. Yet, for all this, men and 
 women crowded into the church by the thousand, 
 and there they stayed in spite of entreaty, of perse-
 
 THE IMPERIALIZED CHURCH. 113 
 
 cution, and death. Now the power that brought 
 men to the church and kept them there was the 
 power of holiness. It was the longing to be clean 
 that caused men to come and be washed in the wa- 
 ters of baptism. 
 
 Men were drawn to the Christian church, not only 
 by this power of holiness, but also by the sense of 
 brotherhood. Christianity defined religion in terms 
 of social service as well as in terms of personal pur- 
 ity. "Pure religion and undefiled before God and 
 the Father is this : To visit the fatherless and wid- 
 ows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted 
 from the world."* The sense of brotherhood gave 
 to the Christian church that unity which is strength. 
 While all the outside world was groaning under a 
 system of class and cast, the Christian church was 
 inspired by the spirit of equality, which made of 
 every man a person, with the force of a personality 
 to do and to dare for Christ and the church. That 
 is a great age in any community, when every man 
 counts for one, stands for what he is, and contrib- 
 utes what he has to the common cause. 
 
 The primitive Christian churches were not simply 
 
 * James I. : 27. 
 REL. & POL. 8
 
 ii4 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 congregations; they were communities having a 
 common faith and sharing in a common life. While 
 we cannot say that community of goods was the 
 practice of the primitive church for any length of 
 time, yet we can say that community of life was the 
 characteristic of the first age of Christianity. Every 
 Christian had the right to share in the average pros- 
 perity of the Christian world. Vast wealth and ab- 
 ject poverty could not dwell side by side under the 
 shadow of the cross. The wealth was unhappy un- 
 til it had emptied itself to supply the wants of the 
 needy. Thus there was, by the end of the third cen- 
 tury, in every town of the Roman Empire a Chris- 
 tian church bound together by a common belief, 
 inspired by a common hope, and living a common 
 life. 
 
 Each of these societies was under the presidency* 
 of a bishop chosen by itself, and was advised by a 
 council of elders taken directly from the people. 
 At first there was no distinction between the clergy 
 and the laity, the minister was simply a layman in 
 office, no more sacred than the poorest and most ob- 
 scure member of the society. According to Apos- 
 tolic teaching every follower of Christ was a priest 
 
 *Justin Martyr, ist Apology, chap. LXV.
 
 THE IMPERIALIZED CHURCH. 115 
 
 and a king. The rise of the Episcopal order to 
 power was the natural result of the life led by the 
 bishop. While the church was in opposition and 
 subject to persecution the bishop was naturally the 
 first to suffer. He, as the leader of his people, had 
 to bear the blame for them all. His conspicuous 
 position was the post of danger. He stood every 
 day between his people and death. Such a dis- 
 cipline could produce nothing but moral heroes, and 
 such of necessity were the bishops of the anti- 
 Nicaean church, men who hazarded their lives 
 daily for the sake of the people under their charge. 
 And their office compelled them to lives of benev- 
 olence. They were at the beck and call of the poor ; 
 they were the servants of slaves and beggars. 
 Christian history is full of beautiful stories of Epis- 
 copal humility and Episcopal benevolence. We 
 have just been telling our children of Santa Qaus, 
 the giver of gifts, the friend of children. But who 
 of us know that Santa Claus is not the jolly Dutch 
 saint of the nursery, but a gentle bishop, Saint Nich- 
 olas of Mysia, who used to steal about his city and 
 find out secretly the needs of his people and then 
 supply that need by putting money in the window 
 and hiding it in chimney corners. It was men like
 
 n6 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 Nicholas and Polycarp and a host of others who 
 won for the Episcopate its place and power in the 
 world. And it was this government of love that 
 grew stronger and stronger while the government 
 of force grew weaker and weaker, until at last the 
 government by force found its only safety in ally- 
 ing itself to the government by love. 
 
 The triumph of Christianity in the fourth century 
 was the triumph of moral over physical force, and, 
 though that triumph was partial, it was still a victory 
 for all time and for all the world. 
 
 It is true that when Constantine established the 
 Christian religion as the religion of the Empire the 
 church had lost much of its primitive simplicity 
 and purity. Its membership contained vast num- 
 bers who were Christians, not so much from choice, 
 as from inheritance. These were lacking in that 
 zeal which belongs only to the convert; to the man 
 who, after struggle and sacrifice, finds God for him- 
 self. In spite of persecutions the greater number 
 of the Christians lived at ease. They found safety 
 in their numbers. And the virtues of the Christians 
 were conducive to their temporal wellbeing. So- 
 briety and industry, honesty and frugality, produced 
 their natural result, and the Christians became pros-
 
 THE 1MPERIALIZED CHURCH. 117 
 
 perous and wealthy, and with prosperity and wealth 
 came spiritual coldness and a love of this present 
 world. The office of bishop, while it was a place of 
 danger, was also the post of honor ; and men aspired 
 to the Episcopate more for the sake of the honor 
 than for the desire for sacrifice. In spite of the 
 teaching of Jesus, office seeking crept into the 
 church and corrupted its simplicity. 
 
 A still more deadly evil was the spirit of theologi- 
 cal contention, which at this time took possession 
 of the church and changed the religion of Christ 
 into a religion of hatred instead of a religion of love. 
 The fierce contentions which had destroyed the unity 
 of Christians could not but weaken the moral 
 stamina of the community. It was the loss of sim- 
 plicity by reason of theological subtilty followed by 
 theological fury that was the secret of the church's 
 failure in the fourth century to make the kingdoms 
 of this world the kingdoms of God and His Christ. 
 The church surrendered to the Emperor as truly as 
 the Emperor submitted to the church. The con- 
 cordat between Constantine and the bishops was the 
 first of those agreements, since so common, to sacri- 
 fice the essence of Christianity to the safety of its 
 form, and to make the worship of the person of 
 Christ a substitute for the practice of His teaching.
 
 n8 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 Constantine was a man of violent and gloomy 
 temper. He put to death his sister's husband, his own 
 eldest son, and his wife; and yet this was the man 
 whom the bishops of the church fawned upon and 
 chose as the champion of the church of Christ. But 
 in spite of the character of Constantine and the de- 
 generacy of the church, the establishment of Chris- 
 tianity was a forward movement in the history of 
 the race. It was not so much the establishment of 
 the church as it was the recognition of the new ideal. 
 Men were no longer compelled to worship Caesar 
 as divine. He was nothing but a mortal man, God's 
 servant, and subject to the judgment of Christ. 
 Christ crucified was and is a standing reproach to a 
 luxurious and self-seeking world. Vast and im- 
 portant changes in the social state of the Empire 
 followed hard upon the conversion of the Emperor 
 and the peace of the church. Gladiatorial shows, 
 the disgrace of the ancient world, disappeared. The 
 condition of the slave was ameliorated, and slavery 
 was discredited and put in the way of abolition. 
 The desire for personal purity and the passion for 
 social service were honored, not only by the church,
 
 THE IMPER1ALIZED CHURCH. 119 
 
 but by the world. The Christian type of character 
 became the accepted type ; and the Christian type 
 was a distinct advance on that which it supplanted. 
 And in the struggle for Christian perfection the 
 world was saved from the corrupting ideals that 
 were fostered by the ancient religions. 
 
 But, if the Empire became in a measure Christian- 
 ized, the church to an equal degree became imperial- 
 ized. The Episcopate was no longer the post of 
 danger ; it was a position of dignity and honor. The 
 Christian ministry succeeded to the privileges of the 
 ancient priesthoods. The temples of Jupiter, Mars, 
 and Venus became Christian churches, and the 
 Bishop of Rome assumed the title of Pontifix 
 Maximus.
 
 The Subjection of the Eastern 
 Church to the State. 
 
 On Good Friday, in the year 404, the church of 
 Saint Sophia, in Constantinople, was a scene of wild 
 confusion. The soldiers of the Emperor invaded 
 the sanctuary, disturbed the sacrament of baptism, 
 silenced the voice of the minister, stained the bap- 
 tismal waters and the floor of the sanctuary with the 
 blood of the worshipers; the sacred vessels were 
 snatched from the altar, and the sacred elements of 
 bread and wine were trodden under foot. It must 
 not be supposed that the soldiers who were guilty 
 of this sacrilege were heathen men, the willing in- 
 struments of heathen Emperors. On the contrary, 
 they were nominally Christian soldiers, obeying the 
 orders of a nominally Christian Emperor. The 
 cause of the disturbance was the anger which had 
 been roused in the imperial palace by the preaching 
 of the Bishop of Constantinople. The bishop 
 against whom this violence was directed is known 
 
 [120]
 
 SUBJECTION OF CHURCH TO STATE. 121 
 
 to history as Saint Chrysostom. The instigator of 
 the violence was Eudoxia, wife of the Emperor 
 Arcadius. 
 
 Only sixty-seven years had passed away since 
 the death of Constantine, but in that brief period of 
 time the whole character of the Roman world had 
 been transformed. Constantine had removed the 
 capital of the Empire from the city of Rome, on the 
 Tiber, to the site of the town Byzantium, on the Bos- 
 phorus. The Emperor had seen at a glance the 
 vast strategic importance of this site, commanding 
 as it does, the water way from the East to the West, 
 so he seized upon it and made it the seat of his Em- 
 pire. Almost in a night he built a great city in 
 place of the provincial town, and called it New 
 Rome. The buildings of the new city were exe- 
 cuted, says the historian Gibbon, by such artificers 
 as the reign of Constantine could afford, but they 
 were decorated by the hands of the most celebrated 
 masters of the age of Pericles and Alexander. By 
 the command of Constantine the cities of Greece and 
 Asia were despoiled of their valuable ornaments, 
 which were used to adorn this city of the Caesar. 
 The new city, says Mr. Finlay in his history of
 
 122 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 Greece under the Romans, was an exact copy of old 
 Rome. It was inhabited by senators from Rome. 
 Wealthy individuals, likewise, from the provinces 
 were compelled to keep up houses in Constantinople ; 
 pensions were conferred upon them, and a right to 
 a certain amount of provision from the public stores 
 was attached to their dwelling. Eighty thousand 
 loaves of bread were distributed daily to the inhabi- 
 tants of Constantinople. For, though Constantine 
 called the city New Rome, he could not fix that 
 name upon his new capital. The people saw instinc- 
 tively that this city had no right to the name of 
 Rome. It was in no sense the creation of the 
 Roman people. It was the arbitrary creation of an 
 oriental despot; it was the genius and power of 
 Constantine that brought this city into existence, 
 and it was naturally called Constantinopolis, or the 
 city of Constantine, and so it is called even to this 
 present day. A city so built and so constituted 
 could have none of the characteristics of ancient 
 Rome. It was a city without a history. No tradi- 
 tions of ancient liberty haunted its streets and 
 squares, as such traditions haunted the Appian Way, 
 the Via Sacra, the Circus Maximus, and the Forum 
 of old Rome. The Senate, transplanted from its
 
 SUBJECTION OF CHURCH TO STATE. 123 
 
 time-honored seat on the Capitoline hill, lost every 
 vestige of its sacredness and of its authority. It 
 was simply a useless appendage to the imperial 
 court. The world was ruled, not from the Senate 
 house, but from the imperial palace. It was not the 
 conscript fathers that decided the fate of the nations ; 
 it was the eunuchs and the women of the court. 
 The rule of the Sultan in Constantinople to-day is 
 not unlike that of the Christian Emperors from the 
 building of the city by Constantine to its conquest 
 by the Turks in 1453. When the city surrendered 
 to Mahomet II. it did not change its form of govern- 
 ment ; it only changed its master. It was an oriental 
 despotism before its fall, and it has been an oriental 
 despotism ever since. 
 
 At the death of Constantine there was a redivis- 
 ion of the Empire, his three sons, Constantine, 
 Constans, and Constantius, each taking a portion. 
 But this division was of short duration. Constantine 
 II. was killed in battle by the forces of his brother 
 Constans, who in turn was murdered by his own 
 soldiery ; thus leaving Constantius sole ruler of the 
 Empire. All of these Emperors were nominally
 
 124 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 Christian. They took an active part in the affairs of 
 the church. In the great conflict between the Ari- 
 ans and the orthodox bishops, the Emperors were 
 sometimes on one side and sometimes on the other. 
 Constantius banished Athanasius from Alexandria, 
 and Constans gave the Alexandrian a triumphant 
 welcome to Rome. Church and state were only dif- 
 ferent instrumentalities used by the Emperors to 
 further their own ends. On the death of Constan- 
 tius, his nephew, Julian, known as the Apostate, 
 succeeded to the throne, and made one last effort to 
 restore the ancient religion of the Empire. He sur- 
 rounded himself with philosophers, banished the 
 bishops from his court, and sacrificed at the altars 
 of Jupiter and Apollo. But this attempt of the 
 Emperor to revive the old faith ended in dismal fail- 
 ure. The people refused to follow him ; they would 
 not keep the festivals, nor bring offerings to the al- 
 tars of the ancient gods. Julian himself had no real 
 faith in the religion which he tried to restore. It 
 was hatred of Christianity, rather than love of the 
 ancient cult, which caused Julian to set up the one 
 in opposition to the other. And we cannot wonder
 
 SUBJECTION OF CHURCH TO STATE. 125 
 
 that Julian felt bitterly toward the new religion. 
 The Christianity of his day was not the religion of 
 Jesus ; it was the ecclesiasticism of Constantine and 
 the bishops. The sons of Constantine, Christians 
 though they were, had in true oriental fashion put to 
 death the father of Julian and all his kindred, and 
 had kept him in degrading inferiority. The young 
 prince, in order to save his life, was obliged to prac- 
 tise the most consummate dissimulation. When the 
 necessities of the Empire compelled Constantius to 
 intrust Julian with the government of the west, the 
 nephew was still followed by the jealous suspicion 
 of the uncle, and was at last forced to raise the 
 standard of revolt to insure his own safety. The 
 death of Constantius left Julian in sole possession 
 of the Empire, and he came to the throne embittered 
 against existing conditions, and it was this bitterness 
 that led him to revolt against the established reli- 
 gion. The doctrines of the church excited his deri- 
 sion, the divisions of the church caused him constant 
 annoyance, and the ambition of the bishops and 
 clergy roused his contempt; and he thought to get 
 rid of the evils of his time by undoing the work of 
 centuries and bringing back conditions that existed 
 in the Roman world before the preaching of the
 
 126 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 gospel of Christ. But such efforts to restore the 
 past are always futile, and Julian died confessing 
 that the Galilean had conquered. With his death 
 the family of Constantine became extinct, and the 
 Empire was once more the prize of the successful 
 general. At the time of his death Julian was lead- 
 ing an expedition against the Persians. The army 
 raised one of its leading commanders, Jovian, to the 
 throne, who displaced a great number of brave gen- 
 erals and able functionaries whom Julian had ap- 
 pointed because of their zeal for paganism, and in 
 their place put zealous Christians and restored 
 Christianity as the established religion of the Em- 
 pire. "From that period,"* says de Sismondi, "up 
 to the fall of the Empire a hostile sect, which re- 
 garded itself as unjustly stripped of its ancient hon- 
 ors, invoked the vengeance of the gods on the heads 
 of the government, exulted in the public calamities, 
 and probably hastened them by its intrigues, though 
 inextricably involved in the common ruin. The 
 pagan faith, which was not attached to a body of 
 doctrine, nor supported by a corporation of priests, 
 nor heightened by the fervor of novelty, scarcely 
 
 *The Fall of the Roman Empire, J. C. L. de Sismondi, 
 chap. v.
 
 SUBJECTION OF CHURCH TO STATE. 127 
 
 ever displayed itself in open revolt or dared the per- 
 ils of martyrdom ; but pagans still occupied the fore- 
 most rank in letters, the orators, the philosophers 
 (or, as they were otherwise called, sophists), the his- 
 torians, belonged almost without exception to the 
 ancient religion. It still kept possession of the most 
 illustrious schools, especially those of Athens and 
 Alexandria ; the majority of the Roman Senate were 
 attached to it, and in the breasts of the common 
 people, particularly the rural population, it main- 
 tained its power for several centuries, branded, how- 
 ever, with the name of Magic." 
 
 But the ancient faith did more than simply stand 
 aside in sullen opposition. Vast numbers of pagans 
 conformed to Christianity without understanding its 
 principles, or believing in its way of life, and these 
 new adherents transformed the faith of Christ into 
 the likeness of the ancient religion of Greece and 
 Rome. They paganized and imperialized the 
 church of Jesus. It was impossible that the idealism 
 of Jesus should not suffer when it came in contact 
 with the gross realities of the world. The religion 
 of Jesus demanded a purity of heart and a simplicity 
 of life which are impossible of attainment by the 
 mass of mankind. The best that the average man
 
 128 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 can do is to make some approach to the truth as it is 
 in Jesus. Only choice souls, those in whom the 
 moral and spiritual nature is developed in an ex- 
 traordinary degree, can live the life that Jesus pre- 
 scribed as the highest life possible to man. As long 
 as man is of the earth, earthy, he cannot so much 
 as comprehend the character and teaching of the 
 man who lives in and for the spiritual and the moral. 
 It was inevitable that the teachings of Jesus should 
 be misconstrued by His followers, and depraved by 
 the world at large. As soon as the religion of Jesus 
 left its native heath of upper Galilee it began to 
 suffer from the admixture of foreign elements. 
 Paul, fervent follower of Christ, though he was, 
 could not help darkening his Christian teaching with 
 the subtleties and obscurities of the rabbinical 
 schools. The writer of the fourth Gospel, steeped 
 as he was in the philosophy of Plato as interpreted 
 by the Alexandrian Jew Philo Judseus, could not 
 help translating the teaching of Jesus into the terms 
 of that philosophy with which he was most familiar. 
 And when the new religion was torn from its Jewish 
 origin and became the property of the Greco-Roman 
 world then the Greco-Roman world transformed 
 that religion into its own likeness. The Greek made
 
 SUBJECTION OF CHURCH TO STATE. 129 
 
 of Christianity a philosophy; the Roman made of 
 it an empire. 
 
 With the philosophy which the Greek dialectic, 
 under the name of theology, substituted for the reli- 
 gion of Jesus we have nothing to do in these lec- 
 tures, only so far as the contentions of the church 
 were used by the Emperors as a means for subduing 
 the church to the imperial will. Our present con- 
 cern is with the relation of the church to the state. 
 With the establishment of Christianity as the state 
 religion, the Christian commonwealth ceased to ex- 
 ist. That life which the Christians had led apart 
 from the world was no longer possible. When 
 everybody is a Christian nobody is a Christian. That 
 doctrine of the primitive church which taught the 
 communion of saints lost its meaning and remained 
 in the creed, not as an active element in the Chris- 
 tian's faith, but only as an historical deposit. 
 
 While, as we have learned in a previous lecture, 
 community of goods was not a precept or a practice 
 for any length of time of the early church, yet com- 
 munity of life was. The early church was a mu- 
 tual benefit society, in the goods of which every 
 
 REL. & POL. 9
 
 130 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 member's share was according to his need. The 
 bishops of the church were the fathers of the people, 
 having with the father's authority the father's re- 
 sponsibility;* with the care of the children as the 
 uppermost thought in their minds, and the chief 
 duty of their lives. With the establishment of 
 Christianity all this was instantly changed. The 
 gifts which the Emperors bestowed upon the clergy, 
 the immunities which he granted them, soon direct- 
 ed the ambition of the average Christian entirely to 
 ecclesiastical dignities. The bishop was changed at 
 once from a hero to a sycophant. He was willing 
 then, as he has, alas, been only too willing since, to 
 condone every crime in the person of the ruler who 
 was able to promote him to places of honor. For 
 more than a century the spirit of Jesus struggled 
 with the rising tide of corruption within the church. 
 Christianity in the fourth and fifth centuries was not 
 without its saints and martyrs. But these saints and 
 martyrs were not the official leaders of the church, 
 or, if leaders, were driven forth from their leader- 
 ship and made to suffer persecution for the cause of 
 true religion. With the death of Jovian, the Em- 
 pire fell into the hands of Valentinian, a brave and 
 
 * Apostolic Constitutions, bk. 4, i.
 
 SUBJECTION OF CHURCH TO STATE. 131 
 
 worthy officer, who associated his brother Valens 
 with himself in the cares of Empire, Valentinian 
 reigning in the west, and Valens in the east. Val- 
 entinian established universal toleration by law and 
 took no part in the sectarian controversies that di- 
 vided Christendom. Valens was an Arian, and per- 
 secuted the Orthodox party. The Emperors, though 
 they ceded the deity to God in Christ, still considered 
 themselves as Pontifex Maximus, as the head both 
 of the church and the state ; and the fortunes of the 
 various parties within the church rose and fell in 
 accordance with the leaning of the Emperor toward 
 one opinion or the other. 
 
 Gratian, the son of Valentinian, succeeded to the 
 Empire of the west on the death of his father, and, 
 finding himself unequal to the task of governing the 
 distracted world, he chose with great magnanimity a 
 man who was his enemy to share the throne. He 
 adopted Theodosius a Spaniard, the son of a man 
 whom he had sent to the scaffold, as his colleague, 
 and placed him at the head of the armies. Theo- 
 dosius was a devout Christian. He was baptized
 
 132 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 during a serious illness by a Catholic bishop, and 
 when he rose from his sick bed he issued his famous 
 edict establishing the Orthodox or Catholic faith as 
 the religion of the Empire. This edict reads as fol- 
 lows: "To the people of Constantinople We de- 
 sire that all nations who are governed by the rule of 
 our clemency shall practise that religion which the 
 Apostle Peter himself delivered to the Romans, and 
 which it is manifest that the pontiff, Damasus, and 
 Peter Bishop of Alexandria, a man of apostolic 
 sanctity, do now follow, that, according to the dis- 
 cipline of the Apostles and the teaching of the 
 Evangelists, they believe in the one Godhead of the 
 Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in equal majesty, and 
 the Holy Trinity. We order all who follow this 
 law to assume the name of Catholic Christians, 
 decreeing that all others, being mad and foolish 
 persons, shall bear the infamy of their heretical 
 dogmas, and that their conventicles shall not receive 
 the name of churches; they to be punished first by 
 Divine vengeance, and afterward by that exertion 
 of our power to chastise which we have received 
 from the decree of heaven." 
 
 As we read this Edict of Theodosius we won-
 
 SUBJECTION OF CHURCH TO STATE. 133 
 
 der what has become of the Spirit of Jesus. 
 Can these be the words of a disciple of the Prophet 
 of Nazareth, who said "Resist not evil," and 
 who from the cross prayed for his persecutors, 
 saying : "Father forgive them ; they know not what 
 they do?" With this Edict of Theodosius we come 
 to the parting of the ways at which the religion of 
 Jesus and the Christianity of the church separated 
 one from the other, never to meet again in history. 
 The church in the days of her domination forgot 
 the Lord and His teaching, and followed the way of 
 the world. From this hour we begin to read the 
 disgraceful history of persecution, not of the church, 
 but by the church. A new and fearful crime came 
 into existence with the establishment of Christianity 
 as the religion of the world. Men had been pun- 
 ished of old for murder, for adultery, for robbery, 
 and for arson. It was not until the days of tri- 
 umphant Christianity that the crime of heresy was 
 known and visited with imprisonment and death. 
 The Romans punished the Christians, not as here- 
 tics, but as rebels; but when Christianity was set 
 up in the world men and women were condemned 
 for misplacing an iota or misconstruing a passage 
 of scripture. It was dangerous to think, and fatal 
 to express an opinion. It is impossible to compute
 
 134 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 the injury which has come to mankind by the en- 
 forcement of the principle laid down in the Edict of 
 Theodosius. It arrested the progress of Christian- 
 ity in the east. For more than a thousand years the 
 eastern church has been held in the iron hand of an 
 inexorable orthodoxy. The great body of Christ- 
 ians receiving their religion from without, a mere 
 imposition of authority, have long since lost the 
 power of motion, and are an inert mass used to sus- 
 tain the despotism that holds them in subjection. 
 
 From the days of Theodosius the eastern church 
 suffered a rapid and mortal decline. It was Eu- 
 doxia, the wife of Arcadius, the son of Theodosius, 
 who drove St. John Chrysostom into exile, and, 
 seeing the fate of this saint, no bishop dared there- 
 after to brave the wrath of the women and the 
 eunuchs of the palace. Ecclesiastics became the 
 most courtly of men, and bowed low in the ante- 
 chambers of the mistresses and favorites of the 
 reigning Emperor. The great bishops of the fifth 
 century had no successors. It required men of baser 
 mold than Basil and the Gregories to gain and hold 
 the favor of the Eudoxias, Pulcherias, and Theo- 
 doras, and women of like character who, during the 
 sixth and succeeding centuries, were the real rulers
 
 SUBJECTION OF CHURCH TO STATE. 135 
 
 of the eastern Empire. For it was then, as always, 
 in every decadent civilization it is the decadent 
 women that rule the world. It took three hundred 
 years for the Christian religion to become the estab- 
 lished religion of the Roman world, and it took just 
 three hundred years for that religion, as established, 
 to fall from its high place, to become, not a dom- 
 inant, but a subject, religion, a religion which is 
 allowed to exist simply through the contemptuous 
 toleration of its conquerers. 
 
 In the year 620, just three hundred years, less 
 five, after the sitting of the Council of Nice, which 
 fixed the creed of Christendom and made heresy a 
 crime, Mahomet, the Arabian prophet, made his 
 hegira from the city of Mecca to Medina. This 
 hegira or flight of the prophet marks the beginning 
 of the Moslem epoch. Within a few years of the 
 death of the prophet Galilee and Judea, the original 
 home of Christianity, together with Syria and the 
 east, were forever lost to Christendom and to the 
 Empire. Christianity, depraved by a corrupt 
 priesthood, weakened by secession after secession 
 of Nestorian, Eutychian, and other heretics, worn 
 out by endless contentions, worshipping trinities,
 
 136 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 angels, saints, and martyrs, had no power to with- 
 stand the enthusiasts who rushed, out of the Arab- 
 ian desert with their stern, monotheistic creed. And 
 for the next thousand years the history of the east is 
 the history of the Moslem conquest. The Christian 
 church, the subservient instrument of Christian im- 
 perialism, has become the equally subservient slave 
 of Moslem despotism. To this day the patriarch of 
 Constantinople holds his office subject to the will 
 of the Sultan. Having taught passive obedience for 
 so long, the eastern Christian has lost all knowl- 
 edge of and power for passive resistance. He is the 
 slave to the Sultan because he is also a slave to the 
 church. His blind orthodoxy is largely to blame 
 for his tame submission to outrage. 
 
 Before the fall of Constantinople the eastern 
 church made one important conquest for Christian- 
 ity. It was the eastern church that added Russia to 
 the domain of Christendom. But the conversion of 
 the Russians was not the work of an army of zeal- 
 ous missionaries hazarding their lives for the faith ; 
 it was the work of the Byzantine court. Vladimir, 
 the ruler of the Russians, demanded the daughter of 
 the Byzantine Emperor in marriage. His baptism 
 was made a condition of granting his prayer.
 
 SUBJECTION OF CHURCH TO STATE. 137 
 
 Nothing loath, this barbarian, who is described as a 
 monster of cruelty and licentiousness, went to Con- 
 stantinople and was duly baptised and received into 
 holy church. Returning to Russia, Vladimir 
 ordered his subjects to proceed at once to the nearest 
 river and be baptized. This imperial decree was 
 implicitly obeyed, and so Russia became Christian 
 and Orthodox, and Christian, and Orthodox Russia 
 has remained to this present day. 
 
 The Russian church as it exists to-day is a perfect 
 example of one phase of the imperialized church. 
 In Russia the church has no separate existence; it 
 is simply a function of the state. The Czar is the 
 head of the church. The affairs of the church are 
 in the keeping of a bureau of the government. The 
 officer presiding over this department of state is the 
 High Procurator of the Holy Synod, and is always 
 one of the ablest, as he is one of the most powerful, 
 men in the Empire. Podobenoszew, who has held 
 this office during the reigns of Alexander III. and 
 Nicholas, the present Czar, is one of the makers 
 of the modern world. He ranks as a moulding 
 influence with Gladstone, Bismarck, and Leo XIII. 
 A fanatic by nature and a reactionary from
 
 138 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 policy, he, more than any other person, is re- 
 sponsible for the present condition of the Russian 
 Empire. He rules the church with a rod of iron, 
 and looks upon the slightest innovation either in 
 doctrine or in ritual as a crime against the Czar. 
 He was opposed to the emancipation of the serfs, 
 and has set his face rigidly against making any con- 
 cessions to the liberal sentiment of the country. For 
 ages the church has aided and abetted the state in 
 its cruelties and its tyrannies, and consequently the 
 church is sharing to the full in that hatred which the 
 awakening Russian has for all the institutions of 
 his country. Kropotkin, Tolstoy, and other Russian 
 writers have revealed to us the attitude of the en- 
 lightened Russian toward the established church. 
 The sight of the church fills them with loathing and 
 horror. They look upon it as the Judas that has 
 betrayed Jesus. No where in the world are the 
 teachings of Jesus so entirely separated from the 
 doctrines and practices of Christianity as by the Re- 
 formers in Russia. Tolstoy is a disciple of Jesus. 
 He believes that in the teaching of Jesus is to be 
 found the salvation of the world. The saying of 
 Jesus, "Resist not evil," is to him, as we have 
 already learned, the cardinal doctrine of the Lord,
 
 SUBJECTION OF CHURCH TO STATE. 139 
 
 the key to His gospel. Tolstoy has forsaken the 
 court, and given up a brilliant worldly career that 
 he might live the truth as it is in Jesus, and Tolstoy 
 has for the church all the contempt and hatred of 
 the nihilist. The doctrines of the church are, in the 
 estimation of the great novelist and thinker, words 
 without meaning; the ceremonies of the church are 
 senseless forms; the government of the church, a 
 grinding tyranny. In his reaction against the exist- 
 ing church, the liberal Russian has gone to the ex- 
 treme of including what is good and bad, wise and 
 foolish, true and false, in the same condemnation. 
 But for this, not the revolutionist, but the imper- 
 ialized, fossilized church, is to blame. The church 
 has betrayed the cause of Jesus and the cause of the 
 people, and the day of reckoning is at hand. The 
 inert mass of the Russian people is moving with the 
 slowness, it may be of a glacier, but, like the glacier, 
 it is moving and grinding under its dead weight, 
 ancient tyrannies and worn-out customs. There is 
 more to hope from Russia than from any other 
 Christian country to-day. Its reformation in the 
 church and revolution in the state are yet to come, 
 and when they do come they will be far more radical 
 than the reformation and revolution in the west.
 
 140 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 In the next generation we may look to Russia for 
 a new birth of religion and a new birth of liberty. 
 The doctrine of passive resistance and communistic 
 living have a stronger hold in the great Empire 
 than anywhere else in the world. The bomb-throw- 
 ing nihilist is simply retarding the movement that 
 is at last to make the Russian the most Christian 
 and democratic of the nations. Before the present 
 century has finished its course Russia will be free 
 both in church and state. 
 
 During the present century we may also expect a 
 great awakening throughout the whole eastern 
 church. Influences are at work loosening the iron 
 bonds of orthodoxy which have cramped eastern 
 Christianity since the days of Theodosius ; and with 
 the breaking up of orthodoxy will come the revival 
 of religion and the renewal of life. Already the 
 days of Islam are numbered. Mohammedism is a 
 spent force. The religion of Jesus liberated from 
 the swathing bands of pseudo intellectualism and 
 an effete ceremonialism will reconquer the birth- 
 place of Jesus, and make the countries of the east 
 obedient to the faith. But it will be the religion of 
 Jesus, not the religion of the church, that will re- 
 generate the world. The love of the Father and the
 
 SUBJECTION OF CHURCH TO STATE. 141 
 
 love of the brethren will bring peace to distracted 
 nations and churches. 
 
 The church in the east, from the days of Theo- 
 dosius, has been simply a function of the state, and 
 has been used by the state to support the policy of 
 the state. The church has blest the armies of the 
 state, when those armies have gone out to lay waste 
 countries, to burn cities, to murder men, to ravish 
 women, and to enslave children. There is no crime 
 which the church will not condone, so only it is done 
 in the name of the state. From Ivan the Terrible 
 to the Czar Nicholas the autocrat of Russia has 
 found in the clergy the ready instruments of his 
 cruelty and despotism. The clergy are dependent 
 on the Czar and dependence is the fruitful parent of 
 slavery. When the state and the church are one it 
 is always the state that is the one; the church is 
 only a fraction of the unit. An imperial church in 
 an imperial state must either subjugate the state, 
 or be subjugated by the state.
 
 The Supremacy of the Church in 
 the West. 
 
 In the year 452, when Rome was in danger of 
 destruction by the hosts of Attila, the Hun, she 
 owed her salvation,* not to the prowess of her 
 Emperor, but to the sanctity of her bishop. The 
 Scourge of God, as Attila was called, had passed 
 through Germany and Gaul, and had left behind 
 him a desolate waste ; he crossed the Alps, and had 
 devastated northern Italy. The city of Aquileia, 
 then famous for its commerce and its wealth, had 
 yielded after a stubborn resistance and had been 
 given over to the rage and lust of the Tartar horde 
 that followed the banners of Attila and the 
 barbarians killed the men, carried the women and 
 children captive, burned the buildings, threw down 
 the walls, and left the city a smoking ruin. So com- 
 plete was their work of destruction that Aquileia 
 from that day ceased to exist. After the fall of 
 Aquileia there was nothing to prevent the march of 
 
 *Italy and Her Invaders, T. Hodgkin, bk. 2, chap. iv. 
 [142]
 
 SUPREMACY OF CHURCH IN WEST. 143 
 
 Attila to Rome. He had only to pass over the Ap- 
 penines, and he would find the city which for ages 
 had ruled the world, unable to offer the least resist- 
 ance to the invader. The only hope of safety which 
 remained to the panic-striken city lay in the spell 
 which her name still cast upon the rude mind of the 
 barbarian. For, though she had lost her Empire, 
 the city of the Caesars had not altogether lost her 
 prestige. It was not easy for men to shake off that 
 fear and reverence for the city of Rome which dur- 
 ing the period of her dominance had become a habit 
 of mind. Attila himself was afraid of the city ; not 
 of her armies, for she had none ; not of her citizens, 
 for they were at his mercy ; it was the city itself that 
 he feared. Taking advantage of this superstitious 
 awe, Rome sent a deputation of her citizens to 
 reason with the Hun, and to persuade him to cross 
 the Alps and give up his intention of conquering 
 Italy. The spokesman of this deputation was Leo, 
 the Bishop of Rome. So deeply did the venerable 
 appearance of the pontiff impress the barbarian 
 leader that he listened to his eloquence, and yielded 
 to his arguments and turned away, leaving Rome 
 a little breathing time before her final overthrow. 
 This Leo was the first of the great bishops who,
 
 144 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 during the next thousand years, built up out of the 
 ruins of the Roman Empire a dominion far more 
 wonderful and enduring than the dominion of the 
 Caesars. In the days of her greatness Rome gave 
 the world the Caesars ; and in the days of her decline 
 she established the rule of her popes. And of the 
 two the pope was and is the mightier creation. 
 
 As the ancient city of Rome believed that it owed 
 its origin to the favor and intervention of the gods, 
 and therefore was divine, so this new institution 
 within the city traced its origin directly to God. 
 The Bishop of Rome was the direct spiritual suc- 
 cessor and descendant of Peter; and Peter was the 
 Apostle of Jesus, the Son of God, to whom the Lord 
 had given the keys of the Kingdom of heaven, and 
 'upon whom, as upon a rock, He had built His 
 church. It is a matter of indifference whether Peter 
 was ever in Rome or not. It is enough that before 
 the end of the second century the whole Christian 
 church believed that he had been in Rome, and that 
 the Roman church, if it did not owe to him its foun- 
 dation, was nevertheless under his Episcopal rule 
 for the first twenty-five years of its existence. That 
 the church of Rome should be looked upon as the 
 most important of all the churches was the natural
 
 SUPREMACY OF CHURCH IN WEST. 145 
 
 result of the place which the city held in the world. 
 It was the center of Roman life. It was a saying 
 that all roads lead to Rome. From every district of 
 the Empire men were constantly going to or coming 
 from the imperial city. The doings of the city fur- 
 nished talk for the world. Every movement, re- 
 ligious, political, and social, made a home for itself 
 in Rome, that from Rome it might reach out and 
 influence the world. That Christianity was not an 
 exception to this rule follows as a matter of course. 
 The new religion found a soil rich for the sowing 
 of the seed of truth.* Rome was the home of nearly 
 10,000 Jews who had their dwelling place in the 
 quarter called the Trastevere about the base of the 
 Janiculum. This colony of the Hebrews had then, 
 as the Hebrews have now and always, an influence 
 far out of proportion to their numbers. Their race 
 characteristics have not changed in all the centuries. 
 Then, as now, they were a people apart, separated 
 from the world about them by their religious faith 
 and religious practice. The Jews in Rome seem to 
 have been severe and simple in their life and 
 
 *Epistle to the Romans, Paul, chap. I. 
 REL.& POL. 10
 
 146 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 thought. They did not, as the Jews in Alexandria 
 and other centers of Greek culture, seek to accom- 
 modate the faith of their fathers to Greek ways of 
 thought. They held tenaciously to the traditions 
 of the elders and waited patiently for the redemp- 
 tion of Israel. When the Christian apostle came to 
 Rome he found there men and women of the same 
 characteristics, having the same hopes and fears as 
 the men of Judea and Galilee. The same aspira- 
 tions that lead to the eager acceptance of the Mes- 
 siahship of Jesus in Jerusalem gave to that Messiah- 
 ship a welcome in the city of Rome. In Rome, as 
 elsewhere, there was a fringe of Gentile life attached 
 to the garment of Judaism. Men of every nation 
 listened with awe to the teaching of the prophets, 
 and feared and reverenced the God of Abraham, 
 Isaac, and Jacob. It was this Gentile fringe that 
 yielded itself to the preaching of the messengers of 
 Christ, and it was really out of this fringe that the 
 apostles and prophets of the Lord made the new 
 garment of Christianity. There is nothing in the 
 history of the world more interesting to the imag- 
 ination than this movement in the population in the 
 Trastevere in Rome. We can see as in a moving 
 picture men of the character of Peter, simple men,
 
 SUPREMACY OF CHURCH IN WEST. 147 
 
 conscious of a divine mission, moving in and out 
 among the crowded population of this obscure 
 region of the city; telling, almost whispering, into 
 eager ears their story of the life and death of Jesus, 
 of His resurrection, of His ascension into heaven, 
 and of His expected and speedy return to judge the 
 world in righteousness; to cast down the mighty 
 from their seat, and to exalt the humble and meek. 
 Nowhere could such preaching make its way as it 
 could in this mass of people who had nothing what- 
 ever to hope from the world as it was. Nothing but 
 a change as great as that which the coming of 
 Christ would usher in could satisfy these hearts, 
 embittered as they were by the hardness of their 
 lives. The apocalyptic message of Christianity with 
 its crash of worlds was the only message that could 
 rouse these people from their apathy and despair. 
 
 The doctrine of the brotherhood of man found a 
 ready response in old Rome, cherishing as it did its 
 democratic instincts. The thirst for distinction, the 
 horror of oblivion and annihilation, were powerful 
 motives moving men to lay hold of the hope that 
 was set before them. 
 
 The preaching of Christianity was followed at 
 once by the organization of the church. The Christ-
 
 148 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 ian folk became a peculiar people, living a singular 
 life in startling contrast with the life of the city in 
 which they dwelt. In Rome, but not of Rome, these 
 Christians had their meeting places in the cemeter- 
 ies where the dead were buried. For centuries the 
 Roman church worshiped God in the darkness of 
 the Catacombs. Those vast subterraneous chambers 
 underneath the city that to-day astonish the visitor 
 are largely the work of the primitive Christian. In 
 them he hid himself from the wrath of the Emperor 
 and the populace, in them he set up his altar and 
 offered his sacrifice, and in them he laid his dead to 
 sleep in the Lord Jesus. A people living in this 
 way could not help generating a spirit of devotion 
 that would in time master the world. 
 
 In its organization the Roman church followed 
 the plan of the synagogue, which was the model of 
 the church throughout the world. The bishop, the 
 presbyters, and the deacons ministered to the church 
 in government, in teaching, and in charity. The 
 bishops were the head of the church, having the 
 oversight of its affairs; the presbyters were the 
 hands of the church, breaking the bread of life ; the
 
 SUPREMACY OP CHURCH IN WEST. 149 
 
 deacons were the feet of the church, running upon 
 its errands of mercy.* 
 
 From the first, and of necessity, the bishops of the 
 church in Rome were the leaders of the Christian 
 movement in the world. Being in the shadow of 
 the imperial palace, they were the first to suffer 
 from the outbreaks of imperial wrath. To be chosen 
 bishop of Rome in the days of persecution was an 
 honor only to those who saw in death a way to 
 glory. During the early period of its history the 
 average length of an episcopate was eight years, 
 and to nearly all of those who served the church in 
 the days of her adversity tradition assigns the crown 
 of martyrdom. It was this devotion of the Bishops 
 of Rome to the cause of Christ that gave them their 
 leadership. 
 
 When Constantine gave peace to the church, the 
 Roman see was already venerable in the sight of all 
 Christendom. Legend and history combined to 
 make it the holy city of the Christian world. Je- 
 rusalem the home of Christianity was in ruins. 
 Nazareth and Bethlehem were obscure provincial 
 towns. It was in Rome that the Christian imagina- 
 
 *This perfected organization was the work of the second 
 and third centuries.
 
 ISO RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 tion created the world of wonder and miracle in 
 which the human mind was to live for the next 
 thousand years. Already Jesus was exalted to the 
 right hand of God. He was no longer the Son of 
 Man. He was the Second Person of the Holy Trin- 
 ity. He was far above and out of the reach of man. 
 He, the intercessor, needed someone to intercede 
 with Him. In Peter and Paul the church found 
 its human origin. Especially in Peter; for as Paul 
 was the founder of Christian theology, so was Peter 
 the founder of the Christian church. The Bishop 
 of Rome looked upon himself, not as the successor 
 of Christ, but as the successor of Peter. 
 
 When the seat of empire was removed from Rome 
 to Constantinople it left the church of Rome free to 
 develop its own life in accordance with its own 
 genius. The Bishop of Constantinople was the 
 creature of the Emperor, the subservient instrument 
 of imperial power. The Bishop of Rome was inde- 
 pendent; he was more than this; he was the most 
 considerable personage in the city of Rome, its real 
 ruler and guide. He exercised, not only the power 
 which came to him from Peter, but he inherited all 
 the traditions and privileges of republican and im- 
 perial Rome. He was the successor both of Peter
 
 SUPREMACY OF CHURCH IN WEST. 151 
 
 and of Caesar. Unless we clearly grasp the fact that 
 the Roman church is the heir of the Roman Empire, 
 we cannot understand her history, nor the history 
 of the world. From the very first the Roman 
 bishops were conscious of their double inheritance. 
 In season and out of season they insisted that, as 
 bishops of Rome and successors of Peter, they were 
 entitled to the submission of the Christian world, 
 nor was the Christian world slow to admit their 
 claim. The habit of submission to Rome was a 
 part of the Csesarean heritage which came as an 
 heirloom to the see of Rome ; and when to that was 
 added the admitted primacy of Peter the way of the 
 Bishop of Rome was made easy. He called himself 
 the Bishop of Bishops, the servant of servants, and 
 from the seventh century he claimed and was 
 allowed the name of Papa, or Pope of all the church, 
 and Papa or Pope he remains to the present day. 
 
 The condition of the world, as well as the tradi- 
 tions of the church, favored the pretentions of the 
 Roman see. The Roman church was the creation 
 of Divine Providence. The world needed the 
 church to such a degree that without the church we 
 cannot see how the modern western world could 
 have come into existence.
 
 152 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 With the fall of the western Empire in the year 
 476 the state in the old Roman conception of the 
 word, ceased to be. There was no longer any state 
 in Europe; nothing that could stand, about which 
 human life could center, and upon which human 
 society could rest. For the next eight hundred 
 years Europe was in a state of anarchy. During 
 all those ages there was no center of unity, no stable 
 authority. There was no cities of any consequence, 
 for the men of those ages lived in wagons, and were 
 constantly on the move. There were no fixed boun- 
 daries between country and country. Every month 
 saw a new distribution of territory, and every de- 
 cade the rise and fall of a Kingdom. The inhabi- 
 tants of Europe were without a history, without a 
 literature, without a home. The languages of Dante, 
 of Voltaire, of Shakespeare and Luther, were as 
 yet unwritten. They existed only as the illiterate 
 speech of the common people, and as the uncouth 
 jargon of the barbarian. 
 
 Now in the midst of this confusion there was one 
 center of order, one source of authority, one region 
 of light; and this center of order, this source of 
 authority, this region of light, was the Christian 
 church, as that church was centered in the see of
 
 SUPREMACY OF CHURCH IN WEST. 153 
 
 Rome. It is the fashion of those who are outside 
 her pale to ascribe the ascendency of the Roman 
 church to the guileful ambition of her pontiffs. 
 But the student of history knows that the great 
 phenomena of history do not admit of so simple an 
 explanation. We can as well lay the 6 foot 3 of 
 the Maine lumberman to his personal ambition as 
 ascribe the dominance of the Roman see to the 
 personal ambition of the Roman bishops. Their 
 ambition was not the cause, it was the consequence, 
 of their supremacy. Institutions, like individuals, 
 are born, and live, and die in obedience to unchange- 
 able biological laws, and neither institution nor in- 
 dividual, by taking thought, can add one cubit to 
 its stature. 
 
 Speaking of the reign of Leo I., Charles Gore* 
 says : "Circumstances were thrusting greatness 
 upon the see of St. Peter; the glory of the Empire 
 was passing into her hands, the distracted churches 
 of Spain and Africa harassed and torn in pieces by 
 barbarian hordes and wearied with heresies, were 
 in no position to assert independence in any matter, 
 and were only too glad to look to any center whence 
 a measure of strength and organization seemed to 
 
 *Leo the Great, C. Gore, chaps, vi., vn.
 
 154 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 radiate. And the popes had not been slow in rising 
 to welcome and promote the greatness with which 
 the current and tendency of the age was investing 
 them." So far were the popes from being the 
 authors of their own greatness that we may almost 
 say that the Papacy existed, not because of them, 
 but in spite of them. 
 
 Only a very few men of the 200 and more who 
 have occupied the see of Rome, have been men of 
 marked ability. Most of them were men of the 
 caliber of Polk, and Pierce, rather than Washington 
 and Lincoln. Leo the First was one of these greater 
 men of the Papacy. He had the zeal of a priest 
 combined with the administrative capacity of an 
 Augustus. He laid down the lines that the Roman 
 see has followed ever since in the establishment and 
 maintenance of its Empire. Leo was above all 
 things a governor and an administrator. He had 
 a law of ecclesiastical discipline and a supreme 
 canon of dogmatic truth, and these were his instru- 
 ments to subdue a troubled world. He cast the 
 spell of authority upon the mind, as well as the will 
 and actions, of men. He regulated the thoughts, as 
 well as the deeds, of his subjects. The Popes of 
 Rome gave their haughty accord to the decrees of
 
 SUPREMACY OF CHURCH IN WEST. 155 
 
 Nice, Constantinople, Ephesus, and Chalcedon, and 
 gained for themselves the championship of Ortho- 
 doxy. They did not waste their strength in the dis- 
 cussion of the questions which tore the church in the 
 east to ribbons, but they waited until the discussion 
 ended in decision, and then they made that decision 
 their own. They had none of the dialectic restless- 
 ness of the Greek. They were plain, practical men 
 of affairs, and managed the church as their fathers 
 had managed the Republic and Empire. 
 
 After the death of Leo in 461, we do not reach 
 another great Pope until the accession of Gregory 
 in 590. If Leo was the organizer of the Papacy, 
 Gregory was its missionary. The age of Gregory 
 was the age of Catholic expansion. Himself a man 
 of holy life and consecrated genius, he inspired the 
 whole western world with his own zeal. It was 
 Gregory who sent missionaries into England, and 
 converted the Saxon and the Angle to the Catholic 
 faith. He assumed as a matter of right and duty 
 pastoral oversight of Europe. More than 850 of 
 his letters remain to attest his pastoral industry and 
 faithfulness. He administered the vast estates of
 
 IS6 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 the church with the fidelity of an accountant. His 
 sacramentary is the source of our Collects, and his 
 musical arrangement of the service survives to this 
 present day as the most dignified type of sacred 
 song. 
 
 For a century and more after the death of Greg- 
 ory the church felt the impulse of his life. The 
 sixth and seventh centuries was the great mission- 
 ary period of the western church. During this era 
 all of the nations of Europe, with the exception of 
 the Scandinavian, were converted to the faith, and 
 Europe became passionately Catholic and Christian. 
 Then began what we call the Ages of Faith. The 
 belief in God, in Christ, in judgment, in heaven, in 
 hell, in angels, in devils, was not in that pale thing 
 that goes by the name of belief in the churches, 
 Catholic and Protestant, of to-day, but it was an 
 overmastering conviction, leaving no room for hesi- 
 tation or doubt. It was especially this belief in hell 
 that drove men by the thousand into the wilderness 
 to bewail their sins, that created the character of the 
 monk and the nun, and gave rise to the monastic 
 orders. Christianity of the seventh, eighth, and four 
 following centuries took the words of Christ liter- 
 ally, and sought to obey them implicitly. Men took
 
 SUPREMACY OF CHURCH IN WEST. 157 
 
 the vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience, and 
 surrendered themselves without reserve to the ser- 
 vice of God. We cannot in this lecture treat at large 
 of the history of the monastic orders. We mention 
 them because the monastic orders were the means by 
 which the popes established their dominion over 
 Europe. Every monastery was a fortress, every 
 monk was a soldier devoted to the interests of Pap- 
 acy. During this whole period it was the one pur- 
 pose of the papal policy to make the state simply a 
 function of the church. In the city of Rome the 
 bishops had acquired temporal as well as spiritual 
 authority, and there the civil was necessarily sub- 
 ordinate to the spiritual power. 
 
 The Pope was a priest first and a magistrate 
 afterward. The temporal power of the church had 
 its origin in a grant of territory by Pepin, King of 
 the Franks, to Pope Stephen III. Stephen had 
 fled from Rome to escape from the hands of the 
 Lombards, who had established themselves in north- 
 ern Italy, and were pressing toward Rome with the 
 intention of making that city the capital of their 
 Kingdom. At the earnest solicitation of Stephen, 
 Pepin invaded the land of the Lombards, defeated
 
 158 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 them in battle, and drove them beyond the Appe- 
 nines. The territory in the neighborhood of Rome, 
 wrested from the Lombards, was given by the 
 Prankish King to the Pope, to be held and enjoyed 
 by the Apostolic see forever. This donation of 
 Pepin was the origin of the states of the church, 
 which formed the Pope's patrimony, and which he 
 ruled as a temporal sovereign until the year 1871. 
 when the states of the church were merged into the 
 Kingdom of Italy, and Rome became the capital 
 of that Kingdom. The Papal territory was in- 
 creased by a substantial gift made by the son of 
 Pepin, Karl the Great, to the successor of Stephen. 
 This King, better known by his French name of 
 Charlemagne, was called into Italy to complete the 
 work of delivering the Papacy from the fear of the 
 Lombards. Karl, who was the greatest of the me- 
 dieval monarchs, broke the power of the Lombards, 
 and added northern Italy to his own dominions. 
 
 At this time an event occurred which profoundly 
 influenced the history of Europe for the next thou- 
 sand years. Karl the Great visited Italy in the win- 
 ter of 800. On Christmas eve, as he was kneeling 
 at mass, the Pope, Leo III. placed upon his head
 
 SUPREMACY OF CHURCH IN WEST. 159 
 
 the imperial crown, and he was hailed as Caesar 
 Augustus. This revival of the Empire by the act 
 of the Pope in thus placing the crown on the head 
 of the Prankish King was fraught with bitter con- 
 sequences both to Italy and Germany. The German 
 monarchs, following the phantom of Empire, neg- 
 lected to consolidate and organize their own proper 
 Kingdom, so that while France, England, and Spain 
 were growing into well compacted nations, Ger- 
 many was and remained until 1870 a conglomera- 
 tion of petty dukedoms owing nominal allegiance to 
 the Emperor, but in reality independent each of the 
 other, without any central government to regulate 
 internal affairs, or to defend the German from for- 
 eign aggression. Italy, nominally the home and 
 land of the Emperor, suffered from the same evils 
 that afflicted Germany. Divided into a number of 
 petty states, warring with one another, constantly 
 calling in the barbarian from beyond the Alps to 
 settle its family quarrels, Italy was the battle ground 
 of Europe for a thousand years. The Holy Roman 
 Empire which Leo set up in the person of Karl, and 
 which was nothing but the ghost of the Empire of 
 the Caesars, and of which Voltaire said wittily that 
 it was neither holy Roman nor an empire, haunted
 
 160 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 the political life of Europe for just a thousand and 
 six years. It was created by the act of Leo in the 
 year 800; it was dissolved by a decree of Napoleon 
 in the year 1806. Germany and Italy had to wait 
 nearly a century longer before they could come to 
 their own. Both of these countries were unified as 
 a consequence of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. 
 
 This act of Leo had a powerful influence upon 
 the relation of the church and state. From that 
 time the Popes began to claim the right to crown 
 and discrown Emperors and Kings. It required 
 two hundred years for the Papacy to make good its 
 claim to universal sovereignty. 
 
 With the death of Karl his Empire was dissolved, 
 and western Europe fell once more into anarchic 
 confusion. The next two centuries are the darkest 
 and most disgraceful in the history of western 
 Christendom. For a time it seemed as if Europe 
 was to sink back into a hopeless irreclaimable bar- 
 barism. The city of Rome shared to the full in the 
 general confusion. It was during this period that 
 the two houses of Colonna and Orsini made the 
 streets of Rome their battle ground, and divided the 
 city into hostile factions. The Papacy was the
 
 SUPREMACY OF CHURCH IN WEST. 161 
 
 shuttlecock of the contending parties ; beaten to and 
 fro by their battledores, it lost all dignity and all 
 authority within the city. Popes were set up and 
 cast down as this or that party was in the ascendant, 
 until at last the see of Peter was in the gift of the 
 most celebrated courtesan of the age, Theodora, and 
 her equally depraved daughters, Theodora the 
 younger, and Mariposa. That the holy see should 
 have recovered its prestige after this awful degra- 
 dation is owing to the fact that Europe knew little 
 of what was going on in Rome, and to the further 
 fact that Europe had no other center of unity, no 
 other hope of salvation. When things were at their 
 worst a great revival of religion took place in the 
 monasteries. While all the world was given over 
 to lust and rapine, the serious and the sin sick 
 fled from the world as from the wrath of God and 
 sought the salvation of their souls in the seclusion 
 and sanctity of the monastery. Among the monas- 
 teries remarkable for severity of rule and purity of 
 life none surpassed the Monastery of Cluny in Bur- 
 gundy. The Emperor, Henry III., seeking for a 
 man to whom he might intrust the government of the 
 church with some hope of its reformation and restor- 
 ation fixed upon Bruno, Bishop of Toul as the person 
 REL.& POL II
 
 162 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 most likely to effect his purpose. Bruno went to the 
 city of Rome as a simple priest, and would not as- 
 sume the office until he was chosen by the clergy and 
 confirmed by the people of his see city. He would 
 owe his episcopate, not to the appointment of the 
 Emperor, but to the free choice of his flock. With 
 Bruno there went to Rome as his chief adviser a 
 man infinitely greater than himself, who was des- 
 tined to inaugurate and carry out the reformation 
 of the church which the Emperor desired, and then 
 to bring Emperor and Empire into subjection to the 
 see of Rome. Hildebrand, the monk of Cluny, was 
 one of those men whose lives make epochs in the 
 world's history. Holding the office of Archdeacon 
 of Rome during five successive pontificates, he 
 shaped the policy of the Papacy from 1056 to 1122, 
 reigning himself as Pope under the name of Greg- 
 ory VII. for thirty-eight years from 1074 to his 
 death in 1122. Thus for sixty-six years the papal 
 see was under the dominion of one great master 
 mind. Hildebrand was a churchman. He saw in 
 the church the only hope of the world. He asserted 
 and enforced every claim that had been made for the 
 Apostolic see since the foundation of the church in 
 Rome. The Pope, as the successor of Peter, was
 
 SUPREMACY OF CHURCH IN WEST. 163 
 
 the vicar of Christ and the vicegerent of God. 
 He was the actual living voice of God in the world ; 
 he held in his hand the keys of the Kingdom of 
 heaven, whosesoever sins he remitted they were re- 
 mitted, and whosesoever sins he retained they were 
 retained. In his warfare on behalf of the church 
 the Pope made use of two powers, the full resource 
 of which is incomprehensible to the modern mind. 
 These weapons of papal warfare were excommuni- 
 cation and the interdict. By excommunication a 
 man was cut off from the congregation of God's 
 people, and sentenced to temporal and eternal dam- 
 nation. The excommunicate was an outlaw and 
 outcast. It was a crime to hold any intercourse 
 with him or to give him so much as a cup of cold 
 water ; and to die excommunicate was to fall at once 
 and forever into the hands of the devil, and to burn 
 eternally in the fire prepared for this same devil and 
 his angels. Imagine, if you can, the horror of one 
 who was thus shut out from the love of God and the 
 love of man. A belief in the power of the priest- 
 hood to determine the eternal misery of the human 
 soul, gave to the church a mastery over mankind 
 beside which all other mastery is as the little finger 
 of Solomon to the thigh of Rehoboam. And we
 
 164 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 must remember that for more than a thousand years 
 all Europe lived in terror of the papal and priestly 
 curse. 
 
 The excommunication was aimed at rebellious in- 
 dividuals; the interdict at recalcitrant cities and 
 countries. When a city or country offended the 
 papal majesty, the Pope forbade the celebration of 
 the offices of the church in the place which was sub- 
 ject to his displeasure. No church-bell called the 
 people to prayer, new-born children went unbap- 
 tized, the presence of Christ was taken from the 
 altar, the bride went to an unblest marriage bed, 
 and the dead were laid in unhallowed graves. Imag- 
 ine again, if you can, the horror of a community 
 under interdict that believed with all its heart and 
 soul and mind that its temporal and eternal salva- 
 tion depended upon the due and proper celebration 
 of the offices of the church, and which accepted the 
 curse of the Pope as the judgment of God. No 
 visitation of the plague was to be compared in its 
 effect upon the happiness of the people with this 
 visitation of the wrath of the vicar of God. 
 
 The Popes won this their authority over the 
 people by using it in the first instance for the better 
 government of the world and the salvation of the 
 people.
 
 SUPREMACY OF CHURCH IN WEST. 165 
 
 Hildebrand wielded this awful power of the 
 church to destroy two great evils, as he considered 
 them, which were sapping the moral life of the 
 church and the world. The first of these abuses 
 was the marriage, or, as he called it the concubin- 
 age, of the clergy. He would put between the 
 clergy and the layman an impassible gulf. He 
 would have the clergyman renounce his natural in- 
 stincts and still the strongest cravings of his heart. 
 He, the clergyman, must leave father and mother, 
 and wife and children, and houses and lands, and 
 devote himself as a whole burnt offering on the 
 altar of the Lord. That Hildebrand succeeded, 
 even partially, in forcing his system upon the church 
 is a tribute to his genius and to his indomitable will. 
 No one, I think, will claim that Hildebrand succeed- 
 ed in securing the perfect chastity of the clerical 
 order, but the celibacy of that order has been the 
 invariable rule from the days of Hildebrand to the 
 present hour; and to that rule more than to any 
 other fact may be ascribed the solidarity and con- 
 tinuity of the Catholic church. For more than a 
 thousand years that church has never wanted men 
 and women who were ready to sacrifice everything 
 to the cause of the church ; who have no life other
 
 166 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 than her life, no interests other than her interests, 
 and it is with this army of devoted men and women 
 that the world has had to deal since and before the 
 time of Gregory VII., and, so far as we can see, will 
 have to deal until Christian time is no more. 
 
 The other abuse which roused the anger of Hilde- 
 brand, and in the suppression of which he gained 
 a decisive victory for the Papacy, was simony or the 
 sale of ecclesiastical offices. The civil power in the 
 person of the Emperor, the King, or the duke, 
 claimed the right to invest the clergyman into the 
 temporalities of his benefice, and until he was so 
 invested the bishop or the priest could not receive 
 any income from his living. Large sums were paid 
 by the clergy to secure this investiture until it came 
 to pass that ecclesiastical offices were subjects of 
 barter, and had a regular price in the market. Hil- 
 debrand struck at the root of this evil by denying 
 the right of the layman to invest the clergyman into 
 his temporalities, and excommunicating every lay- 
 men who should presume to so invest a cleric, and 
 every cleric who should submit to such investiture. 
 As this decree of the Pope deprived the civil power 
 of a large revenue, and as it made the whole body 
 of the clergy independent of the state, it naturally
 
 SUPREMACY OF CHURCH IN WEST. 167 
 
 roused the opposition of the temporal authorities. 
 The conflict that raged round this question of lay 
 investiture went on for more than a century, and 
 when it ended the substantial victory was with the 
 Papacy. The clergy were freed from the exactions 
 of the state officials; they paid taxes, not to the 
 state, but to the church only, and owed allegiance to 
 no one but the Pope. One of the most dramatic 
 episodes in history is the submission of Henry IV., 
 Emperor and King, to Pope Gregory VII. Ex- 
 communicated by the church, abandoned by his 
 army, forsaken by his people, this war lord came to 
 Canosa, in the Appenines where the Pope was stay- 
 ing and for three days stood outside the palace, 
 barefoot in the snow until the haughty prelate was 
 ready to receive him and grudgingly grant him a 
 pardon. This scene at Canosa made a lasting im- 
 pression on the imagination of Europe. It was an 
 unmistakable sign of the triumph of the Pope. 
 
 After the death of Hildebrand his power was 
 transmitted to a line of successors who pursued his 
 policy with unflinching determination. With the 
 reign of Innocent III., 1198-1216, the Papacy
 
 168 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 reached its highest point in power and in glory. 
 This prelate, chosen Pope in the prime of life, a man 
 of commanding genius and unblemished character, 
 was during his pontificate the real ruler of Europe. 
 He interfered in the most minute details of political 
 and domestic life. He excommunicated kings and 
 laid nations under interdict if they in any way 
 roused his displeasure. He consolidated the power 
 of the clergy, and made the government of Europe 
 sacerdotal. His legates sat in council with the 
 Kings and directed their policy. John of England 
 yielded his crown to the Pandulph, the papal legate, 
 and received it back as the Pope's man. During 
 the reign of Innocent impetus was given to the study 
 of canon law, which was amplified into a vast and 
 complicated system. It was the only code of law 
 binding on the clergy, and it interfered at every pos- 
 sible point with the lives of the laity. By assuming 
 to itself the regulation of marriage the church laid 
 its hand upon the very source of life, and by its 
 power of dispensation was able to bind or dissolve 
 at its will. 
 
 The power of the popes in the thirteenth century 
 was far greater than that of the Caesars. The state
 
 SUPREMACY OF CHURCH IN WEST. 169 
 
 had become in a large measure simply a function of 
 the church. Princes were subordinate to priests, 
 and the Pope could say that he was indeed the vicar 
 of that Christ who was King of Kings and Lord of 
 Lords.
 
 The Fall of Mediaeval Church.* 
 
 The year 1300 was in more senses than one the 
 golden year of the Roman papacy. The long con- 
 flict between the imperial and papal powers had end- 
 ed in the triumph of the pope. The ruin of the house 
 of Hohenstauffen had involved the ruin of the em- 
 pire. The last of the seed of Barbarossa, the gal- 
 lant Conradin, had died upon the scaffold in Naples, 
 bequeathing his wrongs, all that was left him of 
 the vast possessions of his fathers, to his kindred 
 of the house of Aragon. 
 
 So low was the imperial power and dignity that 
 the reigning emperor, Adolph of Nassau, poorest 
 and weakest of German princes, was rated by the 
 pope like a school-boy for becoming the hired sol- 
 dier of Edward of England. 
 
 The spiritual, if not the temporal, power of the 
 pope was acknowledged without dispute from one 
 end of Europe to the other. A vast and highly 
 
 *This lecture was delivered before the Church Club in 
 New York and published in the Church Club lectures of 
 the year 1894. It is republished here by permission. 
 
 [170]
 
 THE FALL OF MEDIAEVAL CHURCH. 171 
 
 organized priesthood looked to him as the sole 
 source of its authority. The regular clergy waited 
 upon his favor for promotion; the monastic orders 
 were, for the most part, under his immediate ju- 
 risdiction, while the mendicants of S. Francis and 
 S. Dominic preached him in every hamlet and at 
 every cross-road of Europe. The fear of him and 
 the dread of him was upon all the nations of the 
 West. His curse had ruined an empire and was 
 withering the power of kings. 
 
 The Crusades had given into his hand the sword 
 of the flesh as well as the sword of the Spirit. He 
 had but to call a war holy, to grant general indul- 
 gence to his soldiers, and to bless their banners, 
 and he was followed by devoted armies that could 
 fight and die, if they could not fast and pray. Fail- 
 ing in his effort to wrest the Holy Land from the 
 infidel, the pope had turned these, his carnal weap- 
 ons, against heretics and personal enemies nearer 
 home ; he preached his crusades indifferently against 
 the Albigenses of Provence and the Colonna of 
 Rome. 
 
 And in the year 1300 a new device was found to 
 attract to Rome the homage and wealth of Europe. 
 In some mysterious way the news went abroad that
 
 172 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 whosoever should, in that last year of the old cen- 
 tury, visit the holy city and worship at the altars 
 of the Apostles, would receive full indulgence and 
 pardon for all his sin. The consequence of this 
 rumor was a mighty movement toward Rome. On 
 the 22d of February the pope, by special "Bull," 
 confirmed the belief of the people, and the streets 
 of his city were thronged with pilgrims, and the 
 basilicas of the Apostles crowded with worship- 
 pers. It is estimated that as many as two hundred 
 and fifty thousand strangers were in Rome on a 
 given day, and more than two millions visited the 
 city during the Jubilee. 
 
 The reigning pope was Benedict Cajetan of the 
 town of Anagni. His immediate predecessor was 
 Peter Morrone, that hermit of Abruzzi, whom the 
 cardinals had chosen as if by inspiration, after a 
 disgraceful struggle, which had kept the see of 
 Rome vacant for more than two years, in the hope 
 that the sanctity of Peter would sweeten the air of 
 the Roman court. But no sooner did the hermit 
 take his name of Celestine V. and enter upon his 
 high and holy office, than he found that the papacy
 
 THE FALL OF MEDIAEVAL CHURCH. 173 
 
 had passed far out of the regions of piety into that 
 of practical politics. Frightened by his vast respon- 
 sibilities, instigated by the advice, if not hurried on 
 by the wiles of Cajetan, Celestine resigned the 
 papacy after a reign of six months. This resigna- 
 tion was made in Naples, where the Pope was then 
 residing, and was accepted by the College of Cardi- 
 nals, who, after a negotiation lasting for ten days, 
 entered into conclave, and, without further delay, 
 elected the ablest of their number, Benedict Cajetan, 
 Cardinal Presbyter of S. Martin, to the vacant see. 
 
 In a few days the newly elected pontiff was 
 crowned, assuming the name of Boniface VIII., 
 and hurried away to Rome. He carried in his train 
 Charles, King of Naples, and Charles Martel, his 
 son, King of Hungary. As the Pope neared the 
 city, the people came forth to meet him with ban- 
 ners and with music, and his entrance was like an 
 ancient triumph. The two kings led his horse by 
 the bridle and afterward waited on him at table. 
 
 The pope was then at the summit of earthly 
 greatness. He was by far the most considerable 
 personage in Europe, if not in the world; his only 
 rival, the emperor, he had reduced to insignificance, 
 while the kings of the West had not yet tried their
 
 174 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 strength against him. But his was not the glory 
 of the morning, it was the passing glory of the even- 
 ing, the splendor of a sun that was going down. 
 
 When Boniface entered upon his office he found 
 three centres of disturbance : In Rome the Colonna 
 stood aloof, the Sicilians were in rebellion, and the 
 King of France was sullen. 
 
 From the eleventh century the Colonna had been 
 the strongest and wealthiest of Roman families. 
 The Orsini were its only rivals in riches and in in- 
 fluence: it had its strongholds within and without 
 the city; it allied itself by marriage to royal and 
 imperial blood; it gave popes and cardinals to the 
 Church. At the election of Boniface two cardinals 
 of the family, James, and Peter the nephew of 
 James, had been the last to give their consent ; they 
 had even hinted that the election itself might be il- 
 legal. The resignation of Celestine was without 
 precedent in the history of the papacy. It was 
 whispered in the conclave and soon came to be the 
 talk of the street that a pope could not resign. Hav- 
 ing once clothed himself with the awful power of 
 the vicar of Christ, he could no more resign that 
 power than God Himself could resign His justice
 
 THE FALL OF MEDIAEVAL CHURCH. 175 
 
 and his mercy. And the true pope was not in Rome 
 but in Abruzzi. 
 
 These evil reports Boniface traced or thought he 
 traced, to the lips of the Colonna. He summoned 
 them to his council. They refused to obey, openly 
 maintaining that he was no true pope; asserting 
 that Celestine was pope and only on the death of 
 Celestine could his successor be elected. The pope 
 answered their defiance by degradation and excom- 
 munication; he deprived the cardinals of their hats 
 and cut off the whole Colonna family from the 
 communion of the Church. The Colonna offered 
 to submit to the pope, but he would not receive their 
 submission, except they would surrender all their 
 strongholds both within and without the city and 
 throw themselves upon his mercy. This, naturally, 
 they refused to do, and Boniface preached a crusade 
 against them, he tore down their houses, stormed 
 their castles, destroyed their chief city, Prenestre, 
 and drove the family to take refuge with the King 
 of France. One member of the family, Sciarra 
 Colonna, was taken captive by the Saracens and he 
 concealed his identity lest they should deliver him 
 to Boniface, as he preferred the galleys of the in- 
 fidel to the dungeons of the true believer. He finally
 
 176 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 escaped into France, from whence he returned to 
 take vengeance on the persecutor of his family. 
 The pope had made a fatal mistake, he had angered 
 but not destroyed these doubters of his title. 
 
 Here is not the place to unravel the interesting 
 and intricate history of Sicily. Its exposed posi- 
 tion has always made it an easy conquest. It had 
 seen Carthaginian, Greek, Roman and Saracenic 
 masters. In the tenth century, the Norman added 
 it to the number of his conquests and founded there 
 one of his numerous kingdoms. Early in the thir- 
 teenth century the line of Norman kings ended in 
 Constance, wife of the Emperor Henry V., son 
 of Barbarossa. Henry claimed the Island of Sicily, 
 together with the kingdom of Naples, in the right of 
 his wife, and what Henry claimed he conquered. 
 He left the kingdoms of Naples and of Sicily to his 
 wonderful son, Frederick II., who made this home 
 of his mother his home, and ruled Germany and the 
 empire from the shores of the Mediterranean. 
 
 It was in their long contest with Frederick that 
 the popes claimed the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily 
 as a fief of the papacy and granted them first to 
 Richard of Cornwall, and afterwards to Charles 
 of Anjou and Provence. After the death of Fred-
 
 THE FALL OF MEDIAEVAL CHURCH. 177 
 
 erick, while his son Conrad was in Germany, striv- 
 ing to secure the empire, and Manfred, natural son 
 of Frederick, had usurped and was reigning over 
 Naples and Sicily, Charles invaded the kingdom, 
 Manfred was defeated and slain, and the power 
 of the French established both on the main land 
 and in the island. But in Sicily that power was of 
 short duration. The extreme and brutal tyranny 
 of the French stirred the southern blood to mad- 
 ness. An insult to a lady of Palermo was the imme- 
 diate occasion of that terrible uprising known as 
 the Sicilian Vespers, which left not a Frenchman 
 alive on the island, whom the Sicilians could find 
 and kill. Conrad V., son of Frederick II., was 
 dead. His son, the little Conrad, perished in his 
 gallant effort to regain the kingdom of his fathers 
 and there was no heir to the great house of Hohen- 
 stauffen, except Constance, daughter of Manfred, 
 who was married to Peter of Aragon. To Aragon 
 the Sicilian turned for help and offered their crown 
 to Peter, the husband of Constance. He accepted 
 it and granted it in his turn to his brother James, 
 with a reversion in favor of his younger brother 
 Frederick. This Frederick of Aragon was the real 
 ruler of Sicily until his death. James soon suc- 
 REL. & POL. 12
 
 178 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 ceeded his brother Peter on the throne of Aragon 
 and left Frederick to govern Sicily. 
 
 When Boniface became pope he succeeded in 
 making peace between James of Aragon and 
 Charles of Naples, one of the conditions of the peace 
 being that James should cede his rights in Sicily 
 to Charles. But in making this peace the pope reck- 
 oned without Frederick and the Sicilians. The 
 Sicilians he treated as his vassals, to be granted to 
 whom he would, and Frederick he tried to beguile 
 by offering him, with the hand of the titular Em- 
 press of Constantinople, the empire of the East. But 
 Frederick thought a kingdom in the hand worth 
 an empire in the bush, and held fast to his tight 
 little island, while the Sicilians would rather die 
 than admit the French again to their homes. 
 
 Frederick defied the pope and the two kings, 
 though one was his brother. His great Admiral 
 Roger Loria defeated the combined papal and Nea- 
 politan fleets and drove them from the sea. And 
 when Loria was seduced from his allegiance by the 
 pope, Frederick, though no longer invincible at sea, 
 was unconquerable on land. The pope thundered 
 out against him every curse to be found in the ar- 
 senal of Rome, but Frederick let him curse, and
 
 THE FALL OF MEDIAEVAL CHURCH. 179 
 
 went on beating Charles of Naples just the same. 
 The pope called Charles of Valois to aid his feeble 
 kinsman of Naples, but this Frenchman did noth- 
 ing but devastate Italy, and increase the hatred 
 that was gathering about the head of Boniface, and 
 went home leaving Frederick in secure possession 
 of Sicily. 
 
 I have dwelt upon the story of Sicily because in 
 that story is the secret of the papal downfall. In 
 their long effort to wrest Naples and Sicily from 
 the Hohenstauffen, the popes had wasted their spir- 
 itual and temporal strength. They delivered them- 
 selves from the fear of one master, only to find 
 themselves given over, bound hand and foot, into 
 the keeping of another. 
 
 In the break-up of the Frankish empire, which 
 resulted in the foundation of the Kingdom of 
 France, that kingdom was ever the favorite of 
 Rome. In their long and bitter struggle with the 
 empire, it was to France that the popes looked for 
 succor, and that aid was paid for by many special 
 grants and dispensations. 
 
 But now that the empire no longer threatened 
 his autocracy, the pope determined to humble this
 
 i8o RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 growing power in the West, which presuming on 
 his favor had not consulted his dignity. 
 
 The reigning King of France was Philip IV., 
 known to history as Philip the Fair. This king was 
 one of those men whose lives strike the midnight 
 hour that marks the beginning of a new day. In 
 his time and under his hand, three institutions which 
 had ruled the life and filled the heart of Christian 
 Europe for three hundred years and more fell into 
 ruin. 
 
 The stars in their courses fought with Philip in 
 his work of destruction. Victory and defeat alike 
 helped him off with the old and on with the new. 
 His armies met with a terrible disaster under the 
 walls of Courtrai and more than two-thirds of the 
 nobility of France perished on that field of spurs. 
 But the death of the nobility was the life of the king. 
 The wars with England and with Flanders did for 
 France what the Wars of the Roses did for England. 
 In those wars the great families were swept away, 
 and with them that institution which was the source 
 of their power and which they, in turn, upheld by 
 their strength. That graded system which came in
 
 THE FALL OF MEDIAEVAL CHURCH. 181 
 
 with the Goth and the Frank, in which the king 
 was only a chief of chieftains, his power resting on 
 that of the great nobles next below him, did not 
 survive the fatalities of the fatal fourteenth century. 
 In England, France and Spain, the king and the 
 people absorbed the power of the nobles; in Italy 
 and Germany the nobles and the cities seized upon 
 the power of the king. After Courtrai, the King of 
 France could no longer rest upon the great feudal 
 lords, for the heads of their houses were for the 
 most part little boys and girls. It was no longer 
 a high-spirited and reluctant nobility whom the king 
 led to the battle, it was a hired and professional sol- 
 diery. From that day to this, the battles of Europe, 
 with rare exceptions, have not been fought with love 
 and loyalty, but with muscle and money. Philip 
 found the feudal system old and weak, he left it 
 a ruin. 
 
 Chivalry was in his day already a matter for sport. 
 The knight errant was the favorite butt of the court 
 fool. What little life was left in that one time 
 beautiful institution found shelter in the great lay 
 orders of the Knights of the Temple and the 
 Knights of the Hospital of S. John. But these or- 
 ders were themselves falling into dissolution; they
 
 182 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 were no longer fulfilling the purpose of their crea- 
 tion. It is not necessary nor possible to believe the 
 awful charges which were brought against the Tem- 
 plars by the king. One charge was sufficient. They 
 were rich and the king was poor, and Philip was not 
 at all nice in his ways of getting money; he would 
 debase the coin, draw the teeth of a Jew, or burn 
 a Templar, so only he might have the money to 
 carry on his wars. And because the Templars were 
 false to their ideal they fell an easy prey to the 
 rapacious tyranny of the king. The destruction of 
 the order of the Temple was the last of Chivalry. 
 It perished in the ashes of Molay. 
 
 But it was in the order of Providence that Philip 
 should fight a fiercer battle and win a more far- 
 reaching victory. He was the avenger of emperors 
 and kings upon popes and priests. 
 
 It was a question of money that led to the quar- 
 rel between Philip and Boniface which ended in the 
 captivity of the papacy. Philip's empty treasury 
 was ever crying for more, and he looked with en- 
 vious eyes upon the vast possessions of the Church 
 and grieved his heart over the stream of gold and 
 silver that flowed from France to Rome. After tax- 
 ing everything else he determined to tax the Church,
 
 THE FALL OF MEDIAEVAL CHURCH. 183 
 
 and demanded of the clergy a fiftieth of their reve- 
 nues. This act of the king the pope considered 
 to be an invasion of his rights, and in his wrath 
 he issued his "Bull" Clericis Laicos, in which he 
 asserted the broad principle that no temporal ruler 
 had any right to impose any tax upon the property 
 of the Church, and he excommunicated every prince 
 or State that should levy such a tax, and every eccle- 
 siastic who should presume to pay it without the 
 permission of the pope. This "Bull" was couched 
 in language insulting to the laity in general and to 
 the King of France in particular. The king an- 
 swered the papal "Bull" with a decree no less per- 
 emptory, forbidding the export from his kingdom 
 of gold and silver coin and military stores without 
 the king's consent. This cut off a chief source of 
 papal revenue, and the pope was forced to temporize. 
 Philip could get along more easily without the pope's 
 communion than he without Philip's gold. The 
 pope hastened to explain that he did not mean to 
 forbid the payment of feudal imposts or voluntary 
 donations of the clergy, or taxes imposed with the 
 pope's consent. He still held that the pope had ex- 
 clusive jurisdiction over all Church men and Church 
 property, and declared Philip excommunicate for
 
 184 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 intruding into that jurisdiction. Philip answered 
 with force, that if he were to fight the battles and 
 defend the property of the Church, the Church must 
 in all justice pay part of the expense. And there 
 the quarrel rested. Philip had his money and the 
 pope did not enforce his excommunication, and there 
 was truce between France and Rome. But it was 
 only that the combatants might breathe themselves 
 for the death-struggle. Between these there was 
 an irrepressible conflict. Philip was set with all 
 the force of his arrogant will upon being sole master 
 in France, while Boniface with fiercer will was de- 
 termined to be master of France, Philip and all the 
 world. 
 
 In the year 1300, when pilgrims from every land 
 did him homage, the heart of Boniface was filled 
 with that desire for universal dominion which makes 
 men mad. If he was the vicar of God on earth, 
 he was the vicar of God, with divine right to rule 
 over both the bodies and souls of men, and he could 
 not bear that the eldest son of the Church should 
 dispute his right to dominion, and he was minded 
 to punish that son and make him obedient to his 
 spiritual father.
 
 THE FALL OF MEDIAEVAL CHURCH. 185 
 
 But Philip was in no filial nor compliant mood. 
 He demanded homage of the Vicomte of Nar- 
 bonne and the Bishop of Magelounne, both liege- 
 men of the pope, and when they refused he cast 
 them into prison. Enraged at this, Boniface sent 
 his legate, the Bishop of Pamiers, to rebuke the 
 king for his rebellious conduct. The Bishop was 
 insolent and Philip placed him under arrest and 
 sent him to keep company with Narbonne and 
 Magelounne. The pope then issued his "Bull" 
 Ausculta Fill, upbraiding Philip in the stern tones 
 of a master. This "Bull" Philip burned amidst 
 the applause of his people in the streets of Paris. 
 
 In his contest with the pope the king was forced 
 to appeal to the people. For the first time he as- 
 sembled the States General, calling representatives 
 of the common people men of the third estate to 
 sit with the nobles in the council of the king. There 
 were three new-born forces fighting with and for 
 Philip that Boniface knew not of. They were the 
 spirit of nationalism, the power of secular learning 
 and the might of worldly wealth. Philip set the 
 nation against the Church; the lawyer against the 
 clergy; the merchant against the monk; and under 
 his leadership these gained a victory which has
 
 :86 . RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 given them the dominion of the world even to this 
 day. 
 
 The emperors were feeble in the presence of the 
 pope because they had no firm foundation to rest 
 upon. Their empire was an idea rather than a fact ; 
 their dominion in the air rather than upon the earth. 
 They were titular lords over many nations and 
 hardly masters of one. They could not appeal to 
 love of home and country, because they themselves 
 had no home nor country. The Swabian emperor 
 was a stranger in his own capital city of Rome. But 
 not so the King of France ; he was a Frenchman who 
 ruled over Frenchmen and he could cry to them in 
 their own tongue, Shall we the people of France be 
 subject to an Italian priest? And with one consent 
 the people answered, No we will be ruled by our 
 own king and by our own laws. The nation became 
 conscious of itself in this quarrel with Boniface. 
 
 The very clergy yielded to the new spirit that was 
 abroad in the earth. They had to yield because 
 virtue had gone out of them. They were no longer 
 what they had been. Once they were the only men 
 of learning in the world; their lips kept knowledge 
 and the people came to them for wisdom. They had 
 created and then interpreted that vast volume of
 
 THE FALL OF MEDIAEVAL CHURCH. 187 
 
 canon law by which the popes ruled in the earth. 
 But in the days of Philip they were opposed by a 
 body of men as learned and far more eager than 
 themselves. The University of Bologna had sent 
 into every nation the students and the advocates 
 of the civil law. These found in the institutes and 
 pandects of Justinian every warrant for the king as 
 the head of the State and no warrant for the pope's 
 temporal authority. In the days of Justinian the 
 pope had nothing to do with the taxes. And the 
 lawyers, being the new men were stronger and 
 fiercer than the clergy and beat them in their own 
 chosen field. 
 
 And then this king had with him the merchants, 
 the men of wealth. Before the crusades there had 
 been little or no wealth in Western and Northern 
 Europe. There had been a rude plenty to eat and 
 drink, but no luxuries or refinements of life. But 
 the crusades opened the East to the West, and silks 
 and spices came from the Levant to Venice and 
 from thence were sold to the nations of the North. 
 And then the cities which were the home of the 
 merchant began to grow stronger than the castle of 
 the noble and the convent of the monk, and the purse 
 of the merchant to outweigh the sword of the knight
 
 i88 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 and the missal of the priest; and the merchant in 
 this fight was with the king. 
 
 Ignorant of the new and mighty forces arrayed 
 against him, Boniface chose this moment to make 
 such claims for himself and for his office as had 
 never been made in the earth. To settle at once 
 and forever the unlimited power of the pope over all 
 men both in things spiritual and things temporal, he 
 issued his famous bull Unam Sanctam Ecclesiam* 
 In this bull he claims for himself and for his office 
 absolute dominion over the lives and thoughts of 
 men. He was nothing else than God on earth; 
 whom he would he set up and whom he would 
 he cast down. He commanded the two swords, the 
 sword of the flesh as well as the sword of the spirit. 
 The one he wielded directly; the other indirectly, 
 the one by his own hand, the other by the hand of 
 princes subject to his will. 
 
 Boniface and his immediate predecessors were all 
 or nearly all that he claimed them to be. But the 
 days of Cajetan were not as the days of Hildebrand, 
 as Boniface found to his cost. Having published 
 the bull Unam Sanctam the pope retired to Anagni 
 that he might prepare and fulminate against the 
 
 *Henderson Doc. Middle Ages, pp. 434, 435.
 
 THE FALL OF MEDIAEVAL CHURCH. 189 
 
 King of France the last terrors of the Church ; the 
 excommunication, the interdict and the crusade. 
 
 News of these his hostile intentions reached 
 France, and two of the king's partisans, Sciarra 
 Colonna and William of Nogaret, without waiting 
 for instructions from Philip, hurried over the Alps 
 and down through Italy with three hundred horse 
 at their back, and before the people of Anagni knew 
 what was going on had taken the city and seized 
 the person of the pope. Boniface did not quail 
 before them. Dressed in his full pontificals, he re- 
 ceived them with an angry dignity that became his 
 office and his character. But his enemies hated the 
 man too deeply to be awed by the pope. They 
 treated him with great violence. Nogaret demanded 
 a full release for the king from all censures of the 
 Church, which, when the pope refused, it is said that 
 Sciarra Colonna smote him in the face. For three 
 days Anagni was given over to violence, and the 
 pope was a prisoner in his own house. On the 
 third day the people rose up and drove the invaders 
 from the city and delivered the pope. Boniface 
 went immediately to Rome; meditating vengeance, 
 but only to die in a rage ; and with him died forever 
 the political and spiritual supremacy of the Bishop
 
 igo RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 of Rome. From that day to this the pope has been 
 a disturbing, but never controlling, power in the 
 political life of Europe. Little by little his dominion 
 has been taken away, until he is nothing else than 
 a private citizen of the kingdom of Italy, and his 
 spiritual supremacy is denied and rejected by the 
 most powerful and intelligent of his former sub- 
 jects. 
 
 Ten days after the death of Boniface the fright- 
 ened cardinals got together and elected Nicholas 
 Boccasini, Cardinal Bishop of Ostia, to the vacant 
 see. 
 
 Nicholas assumed the name of Benedict XL, 
 which was the Christian name of Boniface ; the new 
 pope thus declaring his purpose of sustaining the 
 policy and avenging the wrongs of his predecessor. 
 
 All the princes wrote to congratulate the pope 
 upon his promotion, none more cordially than 
 Philip ; and it seemed as if there might be peace be- 
 tween the pope and the king. The pope quietly re- 
 tired from the advanced position of Boniface ; he did 
 not reaffirm the bull Unam Sanctam, and he did 
 release Philip from the censure of the Church. But 
 with this the king was not satisfied. He wanted not 
 pardon but justification. To justify himself he must
 
 THE FALL OF MEDIAEVAL CHURCH. 191 
 
 condemn Boniface. If Cajetan were a good pope, 
 exercising lawful authority, then Philip had been 
 guilty of a great crime, he had outraged and slain 
 the Lord's annointed. 
 
 Philip pressed the pope for the condemnation of 
 Boniface. 
 
 Not only did the pope refuse this, but he pro- 
 ceeded to anathematize in the strongest language 
 known to spiritual censure all who were in any way 
 concerned in the affair of Anagni. This placed 
 Philip again under condemnation, and another bit- 
 ter war would have followed had Benedict lived. 
 But this mild man was not equal to the task of re- 
 constituting the papacy. It was too much for his 
 physical strength. He died after a pontificate of 
 eight months. 
 
 The first terror of Anagni having passed away, 
 the cardinals gave free play to their political pas- 
 sions in the election of his successor. The college 
 was equally divided between the French and Roman 
 interest, and for ten months no election was possi- 
 ble. The student of papal history must remark with 
 curiosity these vacancies in the papal office and 
 wonder how the body survived so long without its 
 head. After this delay an agreement was made by
 
 IQ2 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 the contending parties, looking to a close of the 
 contest. It was decided that the Roman party 
 should choose the names of three Churchmen from 
 beyond the Alps, and for one of these the French 
 party would vote and so put an end to the scandal 
 of a prolonged vacancy. 
 
 Among the names chosen was that of Bernard de 
 Goth, Archbishop of Bordeaux, a creature of Boni- 
 face, and a sworn enemy of Philip. But the French- 
 men knew their man. They sent a secret message, 
 post haste to Philip, and Philip sent word to Ber- 
 nard to meet him for a private interview in an ab- 
 bey, in a wood near S. John De Angelli. Then 
 Philip made known to the astonished archbishop 
 that he had it in his power to make him pope. But 
 before he could do this he must be assured of the 
 loyalty and fidelity of the man who was now his 
 subject, but who might upon promotion deem him- 
 self his master. The archbishop made every pro- 
 testation of utter devotion to the person and inter- 
 ests of the king, and these two made a compact. 
 Philip would use his interest and secure the election 
 of Bernard, on condition : First, that Bernard, 
 when pope, should release Philip from all censures 
 which he had incurred in his dispute with Boniface ;
 
 THE FALL OF MEDIAEVAL CHURCH. 193 
 
 second, that he should restore to his favor all who 
 had in any way been concerned in the proceedings 
 against that pope; third, that he should condemn 
 the memory of Boniface ; fourth, that he should re- 
 store the Colonna to their dignities, and promote 
 to the college of cardinals such persons as the king 
 should name; fifth, that he should give to the king 
 a tenth of the revenues of the Church for five years. 
 A sixth condition was kept secret to be demanded 
 of the pope at the pleasure of the king. This agree- 
 ment made, the king sent his messenger with all 
 speed back to Rome, and upon his arrival Bernard 
 de Goth, Archbishop of Bordeaux, was chosen pope, 
 and so became the successor of S. Peter and the 
 vicar of Christ on earth. 
 
 The new pope summoned the cardinals to cross 
 the Alps and meet him in Lyons, where he was 
 crowned, taking the name of Clement V. Clement 
 made haste to carry out his contract with the king : 
 he released Philip from all the censures of the 
 Church ; he granted him a tenth of the Church's rev- 
 enue; he restored to papal favor all engaged in the 
 outrages at Anagni, except Sciarra Colonna and 
 William of Nogaret, upon whom he laid a slight pen- 
 ance; but he would not condemn the memory of 
 REL. & POL. 13
 
 194 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 Boniface, and his whole pontificate was spent in a 
 miserable struggle to avoid that fatal blow to the 
 pretensions and power of the papacy. 
 
 To escape from the immediate jurisdiction of 
 Philip, Clement transferred the papal residence from 
 Lyons to Avignon. The poor priest had in his 
 heart that love for France which is the strongest 
 passion with every Frenchman, and he had also 
 that love of ease and pleasure which is so natural 
 to the Gascon. He could not bear to exile himself 
 from France, still less could he bear the turbulence 
 of Rome. So he chose for the spiritual capital of 
 Christendom the softest and lovliest spot in the 
 world. 
 
 Just outside the boundaries of France, in the coun- 
 try of Provence, which was under the rule of 
 Charles of Naples, the pope found his Zoar, his lit- 
 tle city of refuge. Avignon lay upon the left bank 
 of the Rhone, in the midst of a large and fruitful 
 plain. Except for the bitter winds that sometimes 
 come to it, it was, and is, an earthly paradise ; there 
 the skies are clear and the air is soft. Like Israel's 
 promised land, it was a land of oil and wine, a land 
 flowing with milk and honey. 
 
 During the period of papal residence in Avignon,
 
 THE FALL OF MEDIAEVAL CHURCH. 195 
 
 the French influence was supreme. Himself a 
 Frenchman, the pope lent himself easily to French 
 interests. Clement, to his eternal shame, surren- 
 dered the Templars to the rapacity and cruelty of 
 Philip the Fair. He did, indeed, avoid the last 
 degradation, the condemnation of Boniface; but he 
 escaped it only by the skin of his teeth. Philip, 
 worn out and nigh unto death, dropped the perse- 
 cution. 
 
 When Clement died, which he did after a reign 
 of nearly nine years, there was an interregnum of 
 more than two years. There was now no great 
 question dividing the conclave : it was a mere mat- 
 ter of spoils that delayed the election. At last the 
 cardinals were driven together in Carpentras, by 
 the sword of Philip of Orleans, and compelled to 
 a choice. They chose James of Cahors, Cardinal 
 D'Eusa, Bishop of Porto. This man had vowed 
 that if elected he would never mount horse until he 
 set out for Rome; and he did not. After his coro- 
 nation, when he took the name of John XXII., 
 he walked from his house in Carpentras to the river, 
 took a boat and sailed down to Avignon, walked 
 from the shore to the palace, and never left it dur- 
 ing the eighteen years of his pontificate.
 
 ig6 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 At the death of John, the cardinals after long 
 balloting chanced to throw their votes to James 
 Fournier, the least conspicuous member of the col- 
 lege, and to his and their astonishment, elected him 
 to the see of Peter. He took the name of Benedict 
 XII., and during his episcopate of ten years, did all 
 that he could to reform the Church. But the abuses 
 were too much for one old man and he left the 
 Church as he found it. 
 
 After him came Peter Roger, Clement VI., the 
 Limousian noble, of whom it is written that he he 
 was free with the company of women, a gentleman 
 of wealth, of leisure and magnificence. 
 
 After Clement VI. came Stephen Aubert, Inno- 
 cent VI., a good old man, who, in his reign of ten 
 years, did what he could to curb the growing evils 
 of the Church. 
 
 The absence of the popes from Rome was now a 
 scandal that threatened the papacy itself. But the 
 cardinals were native and to the manner born. Avig- 
 non was their home and they hated to think of a 
 change. After the death of Innocent, the college 
 elected William Grimoardi Abbot of the Monastery 
 of S. Victor, in Marseilles. He had said he would 
 die happy, could be but see the pope restored to
 
 THE FALL OF MEDIAEVAL CHURCH. 197 
 
 Rome. The cardinals did not know this when they 
 elected him, else had he not been chosen. 
 
 And the new pope was as good as his word. Ur- 
 ban V., for so he called himself, did try to restore 
 the residence of the popes to Rome. He was 
 crowned at Avignon. But after a while, in the 
 midst of weeping cardinals, he set out for Italy, sail- 
 ing from Marseilles. He came to Corneto, from 
 where he went to Viterbo, which he made his tempo- 
 rary residence, and where he received the submis- 
 sion of Rome. But the change was too much for 
 the old man. Homesickness overcame him, and he 
 returned to Avignon to die. 
 
 To his successor, Peter Roger, the younger Greg- 
 ory XL, belongs the honor of the permanent restora- 
 tion of the papacy to Rome. 
 
 Nephew of Clement ' VI., cardinal at eighteen, 
 a close student, of severe life, he would not endure 
 the looseness of the clergy. To an idle bishop in 
 Avignon he said, "Why are you not in your dio- 
 cese?" The pert answer was, "Why are you not 
 in yours ?" The answer smote him in the face, and 
 he at once decided to go where he belonged, to sit 
 in his seat, which was the seat of St. Peter and St.
 
 ig8 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 Paul. Resisting the pressure that was brought upon 
 him by the cardinals and the court of France, he 
 went sadly back to desolated Rome. He, too, sick- 
 ened of that turbulent city, and was ready to forsake 
 it and return to Avignon, but death stepped in and 
 prevented his desertion. He died in Rome in the 
 9th year of his pontificate, the 47th year of his age 
 and in the 72d year of the captivity. 
 
 While Gregory was on his death-bed the banner- 
 bearers of the city came to the cardinals and told 
 them that it was the will of the people that they 
 should elect a Roman or an Italian pope. The cardi- 
 nals answered that such things were not spoken of 
 out of conclave, and they would at the proper time 
 choose a pope after their own conscience and for 
 the good of the whole Church. The banner-bearers 
 told them that their lives were in danger unless they 
 complied with the wishes of the people. The car- 
 dinals again answered that an election under duress 
 would be null and void, and one so chosen be an 
 usurper and no true pope. When Gregory died, 
 the magistrates came again seeking some assurance 
 from the cardinals that they would elect a Roman to 
 the Roman See. But the cardinals answered them
 
 THE FALL OF MEDIAEVAL CHURCH. 199 
 
 after the former manner; they would elect whom 
 they would elect. 
 
 Then the magistrates determined to force an elec- 
 tion; they guarded the gates of the city; expelled 
 the nobles and all partisans of the cardinals; filled 
 the streets with peasants and mechanics, who hooted 
 the cardinals and followed them into the very con- 
 clave itself, crying "a Roman pope or death." All 
 day the crowds surged about the place of the con- 
 clave, and all night a frightful cry went up of Ro- 
 mano lo Volemo lo papa. Romano lo Volemo. The 
 banner-bearers sent word into the conclave that 
 they could not restrain the people much longer ; the 
 cardinals must elect a Roman or Italian pope or die. 
 
 In their consternation the cardinals cast their eyes 
 hastily upon Bartholomew Pignano, Archbishop of 
 Bari, a man of ability, who was well learned in the 
 canon law, and so would know the invalidity of his 
 election. The cardinals did not know that Pignano 
 was a secret instigator of the riot with a view to his 
 own election. In fright and fear they gave their 
 votes to him, and he was chosen pope. This fact 
 was proclaimed from a window of the palace where
 
 200 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 the conclave was assembled, and the people with a 
 great shout ran to build fires and to ring bells. 
 
 The next day Pignano was enthroned and as- 
 sumed the name of Urban VI. Knowing the ir- 
 regularity of his election, he began at once to sus- 
 pect the cardinals of an intention to declare that 
 election illegal. So he watched them with suspicious 
 closeness, and treated them with great rigor. He 
 developed at once a most violent and tyrannical 
 temper. 
 
 So long as they were in Rome the cardinals did 
 not dare to question Urban's title. But twelve of 
 them escaped to Anagni, and there made oath be- 
 fore the Chamberlain of the Holy See that the elec- 
 tion of Urban was forced and not free. They com- 
 municated this fact to the cardinals which were at 
 Avignon, and warned all Christendom of the ille- 
 gality of the election. 
 
 They were joined by the cardinals at Avignon, 
 and enticed away the only two cardinals who were 
 true to Urban by promising secretly to elect each 
 of them pope, and proceeded with great formality to 
 declare the nullity of their former action and to 
 call upon Urban to give up an office and a title which 
 were not rightly his. Urban raged against them
 
 THE FALL OF MEDIAEVAL CHURCH. 201 
 
 like a wounded bear. He sent soldiers to take them 
 and bring them in chains to Rome. The cardinals 
 fled from Avignon to Fondi in the kingdom of Na- 
 ples, and there they elected Robert of Geneva, one 
 of their own number, to the papacy. 
 
 And so began the great schism, which lasted from 
 the year 1378 to the year 1414. During all these 
 six and thirty years there were two popes in western 
 Christendom, each with his own obedience, each 
 with his bitter partisans. The garment of the 
 Church's unity was torn to shreds, and these con- 
 tending priests were shaking the rags in each 
 other's faces. With Urban went the better part of 
 Italy, England, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Hun- 
 gary and Bohemia. With Robert of Geneva, who 
 took the name of Clement VII., went France and 
 Savoy, Naples and afterwards Spain. After a short 
 sojourn in Naples, Clement retired to Avignon. 
 
 The question of the rightful title to the papacy 
 has not been settled to this day. Saints differed 
 from saints and doctors from doctors. The Coun- 
 cils of Pisa and of Constance could not decide the 
 perplexing question. Roman writers tell us that 
 while it is necessary to salvation to believe that there 
 is an infallible head of the Church on earth, it is
 
 202 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 not necessary to know who that head is. So to 
 this day we do not know which was the voice from 
 heaven, the voice of Urban who condemned Clem- 
 ent, or the voice of Clement who condemned Urban. 
 
 As long as these two lived the war went on, and 
 the papacy sank lower and lower in the estimation 
 of mankind. Clement and Urban each promoted 
 cardinals. So now it was pope against pope and 
 college against college. With Urban there was no 
 thought of compromise. His reign was one of vio- 
 lence, and it was wittily said that he should have 
 called himself Turbanus instead of Urbanus. When 
 Urban died men hoped for the healing of the schism. 
 It was a scandal that was threatening the whole ex- 
 isting order. The popes were in such danger as 
 they had never been before. The people were be- 
 ginning to laugh at them, and a laugh is the end of 
 all pretension. The danger of the pope was the 
 danger of the hierarchy. So the priesthood took 
 alarm and began to work for the peace of the 
 Church. 
 
 The princes and the prelates besought the cardi- 
 nals of Urban not to enter into a new election. But 
 fearing for their cardinalate, they would not listen. 
 First taking an oath that bound whosoever was
 
 THE FALL OF MEDIAEVAL CHURCH, 203 
 
 elected to resign as soon as the pope at Avignon 
 should resign, they chose Peter Thomacelli, Boni- 
 face IX., in the room of Urban; this process was 
 repeated upon the election of Innocent VII., and 
 again swearing on holy Gospel, they chose Angelus 
 Corarius, who assumed the name of Gregory XII. 
 
 In Avignon, where Clement died, his cardinals 
 taking the same oath and making the same protesta- 
 tions, as if to bring the papacy into utter contempt, 
 proceeded to elect the impossible Peter De Luna 
 to the vacant see, who called himself Benedict 
 XIII. Christendom now saw two old men, each 
 claiming to be vicar of Christ on earth; each ex- 
 communicating the other, and the sight was not 
 edifying. 
 
 Churchmen in every part of the Catholic world 
 began to bestir themselves. The University of Paris 
 under the lead of Peter d'Ailly and John Gerson 
 called for a council to reform the Church and its 
 head and members. All Europe responded to the 
 call. Every effort was made to have both popes 
 resign as the easiest way of ending the schism. They 
 both swore that this was the very thing they wanted 
 to, but they backed and filled and did nothing. 
 
 At last the patience of their very partisans was
 
 204 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 worn out. France withdrew from the obedience of 
 Benedict and the king made him a prisoner in his 
 palace. He excommunicated the king and all the 
 king's men and escaped into Spain. 
 
 The majority of his cardinals forsook him, and 
 joining with a majority of the cardinals of Gregory 
 called a council to end the schism. This council 
 met in Pisa, in the year 1409. It was largely at- 
 tended by prelates of every degree. It summoned 
 both claimants to the papacy to appear for judg- 
 ment, that the council might decide between them. 
 On their failing to do so, the council excommuni- 
 cated and degraded both Benedict and Gregory, and 
 commanded the cardinals to elect a new pope. This 
 they did, choosing Peter Candia, a mild Muscovite 
 friar, of feeble health and great age, who took the 
 name of Alexander V. After his election the coun- 
 cil dispersed and the schism was not healed. Spain 
 was still true to Benedict and parts of Italy to Greg- 
 ory. So the Council of Pisa did nothing but make 
 matters worse. After it, there were three popes 
 instead of two. 
 
 And now comes upon the stage a character who 
 sums up in himself all the wretchedness of this 
 wretched period. At the Council of Pisa none was
 
 THE FALL OF MEDIAEVAL CHURCH. 205 
 
 more busy, none made himself more agreeable than 
 Balthazar Cossa, Cardinal Legate of Bologna. He 
 looked after everybody's welfare; arranged for all 
 meetings and brought about the election of good 
 old Peter Candia. And he was chief adviser to Al- 
 exander during his pontificate. For his advantage, 
 Alexander died in ten months and eight days from 
 the day of his coronation. Then Cardinal Cossa, 
 being in his own city of Bologna, terrorized the car- 
 dinals and compelled his own election. He assumed 
 the name of John XXIIL, the most infamous name 
 in the long line of popes. 
 
 The Council of Pisa had directed that another 
 council should assemble in three years, to take up 
 the work of reforming the Church in its head and 
 members. The continuance of the schism and the 
 character of John made that council an imperative 
 necessity. 
 
 The Emperor Sigismund demanded of John that 
 he should summon the council. After long hesita- 
 tion the pope consented, on the condition that the 
 council should be called in his name and acknowl- 
 edge his title. The emperor insisted on joining his 
 name to that of the pope and having the choice of 
 the place of meeting. To these terms the pope at 
 last agreed, and a decree went forth calling a coun-
 
 2o6 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 cil to meet in the city of Constance, in the fall of 
 1414. Meantime the mind of the Church was pre- 
 pared for radical action. Gerson wrote pamphlet 
 after pamphlet, asserting the right of a council to 
 judge and depose a pope. He stood on old Catholic 
 ground. The Church was the head of the pope, 
 not the pope the head of the Church. He was serv- 
 ant not master. 
 
 And now the city of Constance was the center 
 of interest to Christendom. The little town was all 
 astir. Servants of the great prelates and princes 
 came to make ready for their masters, every inn was 
 occupied and every house was an inn. And after 
 the servants came the masters, the emperor and the 
 princes, the pope and the cardinals, the archbishops, 
 bishops, and priests, and a host of doctors and di- 
 vines. It was the largest and most dignified coun- 
 cil that had met in the Church for centuries. 
 
 The great assembly was opened with all splendor 
 and solemnity by the pope, but his heart misgave 
 him as he looked over the vast gathering. He knew 
 that he was in the power of the council, and the 
 council was there to judge him.
 
 THE FALL OF MEDIAEVAL CHURCH. 207 
 
 To protect itself from being overborne by a host 
 of Italian prelates in the interest of the pope, the 
 council decided to vote by nations Italy, France, 
 Germany and England, and afterward Spain, each 
 having one vote, and so once more nationalism tri- 
 umphed over universalism, and the national churches 
 of the next century cast their shadows before. The 
 first business of the council was the healing of the 
 schism. John XXIII. was pope in possession, 
 should the council judge his claim. The council 
 did not judge his claim ; but it did judge his charac- 
 ter, and condemn him as unfit to reign. 
 
 Nearly one hundred charges were brought against 
 him. Into many of these, such as incest, rape and 
 murder, the council refused to enter, as their dis- 
 cussion would but scandalize the more an already 
 scandalized Giristendom. The council decided to 
 judge him on the ecclesiastical charges of heresy 
 and simony. Every effort was made to compel the 
 pope to cede the papacy. 
 
 This the pope at first consented to do. But he re- 
 pented of his good resolution, escaped in the dis- 
 guise of a groom to Schaffhausen, a stronghold of 
 his friend Duke Albert of Austria, and from there he 
 dissolved the council. But the council stood firm.
 
 208 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 It made its great declaration of rights in these mem- 
 orable words: "That the present council, lawfully 
 assembled in the city of Constance, and representing 
 the whole Church Militant, holds its power imme- 
 diately from Jesus Christ, and all persons, of what- 
 ever state or dignity (the papal not excepted), are 
 bound to obey it, in what concerns the faith, the 
 extirpation of the schism and the reformation of the 
 Church in its head and members." It went on with 
 the trial of the pope, and condemned and deposed 
 him. 
 
 Albert of Austria surrendered him to Sigismund, 
 and Sigismund gave him up to the council. He was 
 thrown into a dungeon; his spirit broken; he sub- 
 mitted to the council ; he confessed his crimes ; he 
 ceded the papacy. And so ended in shame the 
 shameful schism. 
 
 Gregory XII., by two of his cardinals, ceded his 
 right to the papacy for a cardinal's hat. 
 
 The emperor went a long journey into Spain to 
 procure like action from Benedict; but he could 
 do nothing with that old termagant; pope he was, 
 and pope he would be. The emperor left him in 
 Pensicola with his two cardinals one to hold his 
 candle and the other to hold his book, while he him-
 
 THE FALL OF MEDIAEVAL CHURCH. 209 
 
 self rang the bell and cursed the council and all the 
 adherents of the council : he cursed Balthazar Cossa 
 and Angelus Corarius; he cursed the emperor and 
 the empire; he cursed the king of France and all 
 the French people; he cursed England's king and 
 England's folk, Castile, Aragon and the whole pen- 
 insula and all the islands of the sea. And then, in 
 one comprehensive swoop, he cursed the whole 
 world except himself and the two cardinals of his 
 obedience, and he remained in that attitude of curs- 
 ing until the day of his death. 
 
 But if Sigismund did not bring the cession of 
 Benedict, he brought something of greater value to 
 the council : he brought the accession of Spain. 
 Representatives of the various Spanish kingdoms 
 came with the emperor, and in public assembly re- 
 nounced the obedience of Benedict and gave their 
 consent to the acts of the Council of Constance. 
 This made the council supreme in Western Christ- 
 endom. It proceeded at once to anathematize and 
 depose Peter De Luna, calling himself Benedict 
 XIII. It left him to wither in the heat of his own 
 curses in his own little town of Perpignan, while 
 it declared the papacy vacant. The polity of the 
 Church had now undergone a complete revolution: 
 REL. & POL. 14
 
 210 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 a revolution as complete as that of the French gov- 
 ernment, when, on the loth of August, 1792, the 
 Constituent Assembly deposed Louis XVI. and de- 
 clared the throne vacant. That the revolution in 
 ecclesiastical polity was not permanent was owing 
 entirely to the weakness of the Council of Constance. 
 That council was called for the defence of the Faith, 
 for the extirpation of the schism, and for the ref- 
 ormation of the Church in its head and members. 
 It accomplished only one of these purposes : it did 
 heal the schism after Constance there are no more 
 antipopes but it did not reform the Church either 
 in its head or members. 
 
 It did indeed reform the head of the Church for 
 a moment by the simple and summary process of 
 cutting off one head and putting on another ; but it 
 left the great body of abuses just as it found them. 
 The Emperor Sigismund besought the council to 
 proceed with the reformation of the Church before 
 the election of a pope. But to this the council would 
 not listen. It was an assembly of ecclesiastics eager 
 for place and power. Every cardinal aspired to be 
 pope. Every bishop hoped to be a cardinal; every 
 priest a bishop. The one thought in everybody's 
 mind was, Who will be the new pope?
 
 THE FALL OF MEDIAEVAL CHURCH. 211 
 
 The impatience of this thought hurried the coun- 
 cil on to an election. The council, however, would 
 not trust the election to the cardinals. It created 
 a special electoral body. To the college of cardinals 
 were joined thirty representatives from the council : 
 six from each of the five nations. It was supposed 
 that conflicting interests would make the contest 
 a tedious one, but to the astonishment of all the con- 
 clave elected almost at once Otto, Cardinal Colonna, 
 to the papal see. The election was received with 
 joy by the whole council and city. The new pope 
 was a prince of the Roman city as well as of the 
 Roman Church; he was a man of irreproachable 
 morals and of considerable learning. He was 
 crowned in Constance in the midst of the rejoicing 
 of the people. He assumed the name of Martin V., 
 and in him was hailed the beginning of a new era. 
 And it was a new era. The great mediaeval papacy 
 was gone, never to come back again.* With Martin 
 V. begins the purely Italian papacy. He was the 
 beginning of a line of popes which ended with the 
 pontificate of Leo X. These popes were Italian 
 princes whose sole end and purpose was not to rule 
 the Church, but to enrich their own families and to 
 
 *Milman, Latin Christ, bk. 13, chaps, vin., xx. M.
 
 212 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 beautify their own city of Rome. This line of popes 
 contains one or two names of repute: the lovely 
 name of Thomas of Zarzanna, Nicholas V., crea- 
 tor of the papal city, so dear to the tourist ; and the 
 gentle name of yneas Silvius Piccolomini, Pius II., 
 last preacher of crusades. But the papacy declined 
 with frightful rapidity from Martin V., until it be- 
 came the prey of the licentious and rapacious Rodri- 
 go Borgia, Alexander VI., and the plaything of 
 Giovanni de Medici, Leo X. 
 
 And for this decline the Council of Constance 
 was to blame. Never did an assembly of men fail 
 so miserably in the main purpose that called them 
 together. They took from the papacy all that made 
 it great, and left it all that made it mean and mis- 
 erable. Much of its power was gone, but all its 
 stealings were left it. The pope was turned loose, 
 not to rule the world any more, but to batten on 
 its riches. 
 
 Soon after his coronation, Martin V. dropped 
 down to Rome, and with him went the life of the 
 council. It dragged its weary way along for a 
 while, and then dispersed, leaving the Church in 
 the main as it found it unreformed in its head,
 
 THE FALL OF MEDIAEVAL CHURCH. 213 
 
 unreformed in its members left it to await the 
 wrath of God in the storms of the sixteenth century. 
 But the Council of Constance did something. It 
 did for Western Christendom what the parliament 
 of 1688 did for England ; as that killed forever the 
 absolute and divine right of kings, so this council 
 put an end forever to the absolute and divine right 
 of popes. Since 1414 the power of popes and 
 priests has been passing into the hands of the peo- 
 ple, so that it can now be truly said of them, as of 
 the present sovereign of England, that they reign 
 but do not rule. The pope still fills a vast place 
 in Christendom, but it is not the place of Hilde- 
 brand, or even of Cajetan. Men no longer fear his 
 interdict nor his excommunication. The excom- 
 municated Dollinger was buried in honor, with the 
 Archbishop of Munich standing by and baring his 
 head in reverence before the open grave. The 
 reign of the popes may continue for ages, but the 
 rule of the popes is over.
 
 The Rise of the National 
 Churches. 
 
 In the year 1517 Frederick, Elector of Saxony, 
 was filled with shame and indignation as he saw his 
 people flocking to buy indulgences of one Tetzel, 
 the agent of Albert, the Archbishop of Mainz and 
 Magdeburg, who in turn was the agent of Pope 
 Leo X. Albert, himself, an elector of the Empire, 
 and a brother of the Elector of Brandenburg, had 
 contracted to pay 30,000 gulden into the papal 
 treasury as the price of his Archbishopric. This 
 prelate, a young voluptuary of extravagant habits, 
 had no intention of paying the 30,000 gulden out of 
 his own purse. This sum of money must in some 
 way be filched from the people. There was in 
 those days a method of robbery which was both 
 safe and sacred; it was robbery authorized by the 
 state and blessed by the church. The robbers were 
 Popes and Archbishops, who, by threats and per- 
 suasion, caused the people to exchange their gold 
 and their silver, the wages of their toil, for pieces 
 of paper called indulgences. These indulgences had 
 
 [214]
 
 RISE OF THE NATIONAL CHURCHES. 215 
 
 no value whatever in this world, but they were sup- 
 posed to be cashed in the world to come. A man, 
 having purchased this indulgence, might dismiss 
 the thought of his sin from his mind. He had con- 
 doned for his guilt by money payment, and he was 
 promised a speedy deliverance from the pains of 
 purgatory. The traffic in indulgences was based 
 upon the superstitious fears of men, and was an 
 unfailing source of revenue to the church. 
 
 The anger of the Elector of Saxony was kindled 
 against this practice because he saw it was enrich- 
 ing his rival, the Archbishop of Mainz. It was his 
 people who were paying the price of the Arch- 
 bishopric into the coffers of the Pope. But, fret 
 and fume as he might, the Elector Frederick saw 
 no means of redress. He could not appeal to the 
 Emperor, because the Empire was without a head, 
 and the vacant throne was the prize, for which three 
 Kings of Europe were contending, each of whom 
 was anxious for the favor of the Pope and the vote 
 of the Archbishop of Mainz. If the Elector had 
 appealed to Rome, the Pope and the Cardinals 
 would have laughed in his face, for it was the Pope 
 who furnished the indulgences which Tetzel had for 
 sale. For the Elector of Saxony there was no re-
 
 2i6 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 lief, and he had to stand by and bite his nails as he 
 saw the good money of his people flowing a steady 
 stream of gold and silver into the pockets of his 
 hated rival.* 
 
 Just when matters were at their worst relief came 
 from an unexpected quarter. Frederick, who was 
 a lover of learning, had founded a university in his 
 city of Wittenberg. In that university was a young 
 Augustinian monk, who was renowned as a scholar 
 and a saint. This monk, the son of a miner of 
 Eisleben, was a man of the people, who all his life 
 long had stood in the presence of God, and in that 
 presence had learned the true value of indulgences, 
 as of all other priestly wares which were sold to 
 the people. He pronounced the indulgences worth- 
 less because they had not the Divine indorsement. 
 And this monk, having the courage of his convic- 
 tions, proclaimed the fraudulent character of the 
 papal wares to all the world. No sooner had the 
 Wittenberg professor spoken out than he found an 
 immediate response in the hearts of all the people. 
 The word of Luther not only hindered the 
 
 *L. Ranke, History of Reformation in Germany, bk. 2, 
 chap. vn.
 
 RISE OF THE NATIONAL CHURCHES. 217 
 
 sale of indulgences in Saxony, and so saved 
 the money of the Elector, but it released 
 forces that brought about the destruction of 
 the whole ecclesiastical system of which the sale 
 of indulgences was a part. Beginning with a denial 
 of the right of the Pope to authorize the sale of 
 indulgences, the German reformer went on by logi- 
 cal necessity to deny to the Pope any right at all 
 over the heart and mind of man. God in Christ was 
 the only power to whom the conscience of man owed 
 allegiance, and God's mind and will were expressed 
 in the Holy Scriptures. The movement which 
 Luther inaugurated was not so much a reformation 
 as it was a revolution, and a revolution far more 
 radical than the reformer himself had any notion of 
 bringing about. Luther was a churchman and a 
 schoolman, and what he desired was a reformation 
 of the church and an enlightenment of the school. 
 What he really did was to deliver man from bond- 
 age both to church and school, and set him free to 
 work out his own intellectual and spiritual salva- 
 tion with fear and trembling. 
 
 Luther, in making his appeal to scripture simply 
 substituted authority for authority, the authority 
 of the written tradition for the authority of the oral
 
 2i8 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 tradition of the church. He made the Apostolic 
 age the infallible rule of truth. 
 
 This position of Luther was without any basis in 
 pure reason. If we can ascribe infallibility to the 
 first age of Christianity, then we can with equal 
 justice predicate infallibility of all ages. But, while 
 the position of Luther was untenable in the light of 
 pure reason, it was impregnable as against his ad- 
 versaries at the time. The church proclaimed the 
 Old and New Testament Scriptures to be the Word 
 of God, and to the judgment of that Word the 
 church was bound to submit its actions and its 
 claims. 
 
 Because the life of humanity is progressive, there- 
 fore it is that mankind advances step by step. It 
 was not possible for the reformers of the sixteenth 
 century to see the full consequences of their own 
 contention, and to grant to men at once that perfect 
 freedom of thought, and that comparative freedom 
 of action, which after four centuries we see to be 
 the natural outcome of their teaching. The first 
 result of the action of Luther was not to produce a 
 higher order, but to bring about a greater confusion. 
 When that strong man, the Papacy, was bound,
 
 RISE OF THE NATIONAL CHURCHES. 219 
 
 then the whole world flocked about him to spoil his 
 goods, and the lion's share of the spoil was appro- 
 priated by the Kings and princes. As after the fall 
 the Pope there was no earthly divinity from which 
 kings could derive their title, they claimed to have 
 it direct from God. It is in the centuries immedi- 
 ately succeeding the Reformation that we hear of 
 the divine right of Kings, and in which Europe 
 falls a prey to that system of absolute monarchy 
 which ended in the horrors of the French Revolu- 
 tion. 
 
 Luther was a powerful factor, both in casting 
 down the Papacy, and in setting up the Kings. In 
 fighting the Pope, the reformer was fighting the 
 battle of the Kings. Because of the Reformation, 
 religion was in a manner localized and nationalized. 
 Each ruler became the head of a religion within his 
 own dominions. No one at the Reformation period 
 dreamed of permitting the people to think and 
 choose for themselves. Luther, who exercised the 
 right of private judgment himself, refused that 
 right to all others. By virtue of his genius and of 
 his political alliance with the princes of North Ger- 
 many he aspired, himself, to the office of infallible 
 teacher of mankind. He thundered against the
 
 220 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 Swiss reformer, Zwingli, with the same violence 
 that he thundered against the Pope. Luther was 
 not the champion of free thought ; he was, as I have 
 said, the champion of the written as against the oral 
 tradition of Christianity, of the local, against the 
 universal, church. 
 
 The immediate result of the Reformation was the 
 establishment of the national churches of northern 
 Europe, in which the Kings and the theological 
 faculties were the Popes and the Cardinals. It was 
 expected that the people at large would meekly fol- 
 low their rulers in every change of religion. The 
 Protestant Reformation was not so much the work 
 of the preachers as it was the work of the princes. 
 It was the German princes who entered their sol- 
 emn protest against the action of the Diet of Speyer 
 and thus gave name to the new religion that had 
 entered the world. And at the Diet of Augsburg, 
 in 1555, it was decided by way of compromise that 
 the head of each separate state of Germany be per- 
 mitted to adopt either the Catholic or the Protestant 
 creed and that the subjects of each state must con- 
 form to the religion of the ruler. This decision not
 
 RISE OF THE NATIONAL CHURCHES. 221 
 
 only divided Germany into Protestant and Catholic, 
 but it made the head of the state also the head of the 
 church. Even in Catholic countries it was Catho- 
 licism, and not Papacy, which survived the Reform- 
 ation. The power of the popes was everywhere sub- 
 ject to the power of kings. The days of excom- 
 munication and interdict were over, and the spiritual 
 was everywhere, except in the states of the church, 
 subject to the temporal authority. 
 
 The division of Europe into Protestant and Cath- 
 olic countries gave rise in the sixteenth century to 
 the religious wars which wasted western Christen- 
 dom for a hundred years. Freedom of thought was 
 not dreamed of, and prosecution for opinion's sake 
 was considered the bounden duty of princes. Not 
 only did Catholics persecute Protestants, and Pro- 
 testants, Catholics, but Protestants raged against 
 Protestants, and put them to death. Luther re- 
 joiced when Zwingli was killed in battle, and Calvin 
 burned Servetus in the market place of Geneva. It 
 was this division of Protestantism against itself that 
 arrested the progress of the movement, lost France 
 to the Reformation, and brought about the Catholic 
 reaction. 
 
 When we calmly consider the history of the
 
 222 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 Reformation we see that it was not the people at 
 large who profited by that movement, but it was in 
 the main the upper classes, the princes and the 
 nobility, who reaped the benefit. The princes suc- 
 ceeded to the power of the Pope, and the nobility 
 to the wealth of the clergy. After his condemnation 
 by the Pope Luther made his appeal, not to the 
 people at large, but to the Christian nobility of the 
 German Empire, and he professed to place his faith 
 in the newly elected Emperor and in the princes of 
 the Empire. In the peasants' war Luther was 
 strongly on the side of the rulers as against the 
 people, and to this day the national establishments 
 which are the product of the Reformation move- 
 ment are the churches of the so called higher 
 classes; the churches in which the rulers, political 
 and mercantile, of the Protestant world find them- 
 selves at home. 
 
 This relation of church and state, which followed 
 upon the preaching of Luther, had its most perfect 
 example in England. There was in England at the 
 time no spiritual genius like Luther, or Zwingli, or 
 Calvin, but there was a King of indomitable will and 
 unscrupulous ambition, who took advantage of the 
 religious ferment to establish his absolute authority
 
 RISE OF THE NATIONAL CHURCHES. 223 
 
 over both church and state. When Henry deter- 
 mined to cast off the authority of the see of Rome, 
 he found his willing instruments among the higher 
 dignitaries of the church. The Bishops and the 
 Deans and the heads of colleges were for the most 
 part ready to follow the King in his work of revolu- 
 tion. The people on the whole were passive. The 
 English people had not the same reason to hate the 
 Roman see which moved the people of Germany; 
 and would have been satisfied with a reasonable 
 redress of grievances and a reform of the more 
 flagrant abuses. That England is to-day the most 
 Protestant of nations, is owing not to the preach- 
 ing of Luther, but to the influence of Calvin, and 
 more especially to the blunders of the see of Rome. 
 Henry was not a follower of Luther. He earned his 
 title of Defender of the Faith by writing a treatise 
 against the heresies of the German agitator. Henry 
 remained in all essentials a Catholic to the day of 
 his death. His quarrel was not with the church, 
 but with the Pope. Had the Pope yielded in the 
 matter of the divorce of Catherine, the King might 
 have remained all his life a faithful son of the 
 church, and the Reformation in England had a dif- 
 ferent history. But the Pope could not, and the
 
 224 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 King would not, yield. So Henry, by an act of 
 royal power, separated the Church of England from 
 the communion of the Church of Rome. This act 
 of the King saved the Church of England from that 
 loss of historical continuity which was the great 
 misfortune of the reformed churches on the con- 
 tinent. The ancient liturgies of the church were 
 preserved intact, and were translated into English, 
 and in the prayer book of the English Church have 
 become the priceless heritage of the English people. 
 The ancient ministry of Christendom in its three- 
 fold form of bishops, priests, and deacons, was left 
 in possession of the offices of the church, and, more 
 important than all, the buildings themselves, the 
 cathedrals and the parish churches, were, under the 
 King as under the Pope, the houses of prayer and 
 praise for the English people. Whether this preser- 
 vation of the liturgy, the ministry, and the churches 
 in England was good or evil will depend upon the 
 value which we give to historical continuity. If we 
 prize things that are ancient; if we believe that the 
 evolutionary process is better than the revolution- 
 ary, then we will look upon the reformation in 
 England, despite the crimes of its authors, as being 
 upon the whole beneficial to the spiritual interests
 
 RISE OF THE NATIONAL CHURCHES. 225 
 
 of mankind. But that it was an unmixed good will 
 be maintained by no one, except by such as see in 
 themselves and in the ecclesiastical body to which 
 they belong, the last and final work of God. 
 
 The English church was at the reformation, local- 
 ized and nationalized, as was no other church in 
 western Christendom. The great Catholic churches 
 of France, Spain, Italy, and Austria had free com- 
 munion among themselves, and so had the Protest- 
 ant churches of North Germany, Switzerland, and 
 Scandinavia; but the English church was isolated 
 from all Christendom by her denial of the suprem- 
 acy of the Bishop of Rome on the one hand and her 
 refusal to admit the validity of the ministry of the 
 Protestant churches on the other; and in this posi- 
 tion of proud isolation the Church of England has 
 remained to this present. She is the most purely 
 national of all the churches. 
 
 Henry, with a brutality that marked all his 
 actions, subjected the spiritual to the temporal 
 power. The King, by royal decree and act of Par- 
 liament, became supreme head of the Church in 
 England. He appointed her officers and prescribed 
 her doctrine. He burned men at the stake, or be- 
 headed them, on Tower Hill, if they refused to ac- 
 REL. & POL. 15
 
 226 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 cept the royal supremacy, or presumed to reject the 
 dogma of the real presence of the Eucharist. The 
 flower of English manhood and womanhood, in the 
 persons of Sir Thomas More and Ann Askew, per- 
 ished by ax and fire, the one because his Catholic 
 and the other because her Puritan principles did 
 not follow the exact line laid down by this supreme 
 head of the English church. When Henry died the 
 head of the English church was a precocious boy of 
 sixteen. The brief life of Edward VI. was the criti- 
 cal period of the Church of England. A Protestant 
 by conviction, he carried the church far enough 
 along the way of reform to save the old establish- 
 ment from destruction. The movement of the 
 English people toward Protestantism was not ar- 
 rested, it was accelerated, by the brief, violent, and 
 ill-advised reign of Mary, the Catholic. The fires 
 of Smithfield did more to make the people of Eng- 
 land Protestant than the preaching of Latimer and 
 Ridley. When Mary died the religious fate of Eng- 
 land was settled for all time. England then took her 
 place among the Protestant nations, if not among 
 the Protestant churches; and there she has re- 
 mained until this present day. 
 
 I think the fair-minded student of history will say
 
 RISE OF THE NATIONAL CHURCHES. 227 
 
 that the greatest evil connected with the reformation 
 in England was the suppression of the monasteries 
 and the distribution of their properties among the 
 favorites of the court. No matter how corrupt these 
 institutions might be, there was no excuse for the 
 wholesale robbery which followed their dissolution. 
 The property of the monasteries did not belong to 
 the King or the courtiers; it was property held in 
 trust for pious and charitable uses, for the benefit, 
 not of a class, but of the whole people of England, 
 and England paid the penalty of this gross injustice 
 by the pauperizing of a large portion of her popu- 
 lation. 
 
 It was Queen Elizabeth who gave to the Church 
 of England that constitution of compromise and 
 comprehension which has made this church excep- 
 tional among the churches of Christendom. Queen 
 Elizabeth was a Catholic at heart, and would have 
 been content to acknowledge the Pope as the spirit- 
 ual head of the church if she could have done so 
 with safety to her throne and her life. She was 
 forced by the logic of her position into the cham- 
 pionship of European Protestantism. But it was 
 her wish to retain within the national establishment 
 men of the old, as well as of the new faith. She
 
 228 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 preserved the Catholic creeds and the Catholic 
 offices of worship. She made bishops and arch- 
 bishops to fill the ancient sees. She retained the 
 ornaments of the church as they had been in the 
 reign of Edward. She organized the church so that 
 there would be room in it for all her subjects, ex- 
 cept the extreme Catholic and the extreme Puritan, 
 and for these she wished to have no place either in 
 her church or in her Kingdom. This handiwork of 
 Elizabeth has stood the test of time. It was 
 threatened with destruction by the extreme Catholic 
 in the days of Elizabeth herself and in the days of 
 King James II. It was temporarily overthrown by 
 the extreme Puritan in the time of Cromwell. But 
 it has survived all disasters, and seems to-day secure 
 in the affection of the majority of the English peo- 
 pie. 
 
 Its relation to the state is the relation of subjec- 
 tion. The Crown now acts through the Prime 
 Minister who represents the people. The Crown 
 appoints the Bishops of the church, and the 
 Parliament makes its laws. That such a situa- 
 ation is endurable is owing to the character 
 of the English people and to the peculiar con- 
 stitution of both church and state. The English are
 
 RISE OF THE NATIONAL CHURCHES. 229 
 
 at once the most progressive and most conservative 
 of people. The most progressive when it is a matter 
 of principle ; the most conservative when it is a mat- 
 ter of form. The English church will freely allow 
 every clergyman to deny the damnatory clauses of 
 the Athanasian creed in his sermon, but will compel 
 him to say them in the service. Canon Henson, the 
 radical, and Canon Newboldt, the ritualist, are 
 equally devoted to the liturgical worship of the 
 church. It is the strength of the Church of England 
 that men of widely different opinions are of one 
 mind in worship and in work. 
 
 It is the weakness of this establishment that its 
 higher officials are more apt to reflect the mind of 
 the powers that be, than they are to reflect the mind 
 of Christ. The ecclesiastic rises in his calling from 
 a town or country curacy to the Episcopal throne 
 through the favor of the civil power. He must, in 
 order to succeed, combine the qualities of the saint 
 with the character of the courtier; he must at the 
 same time be able to please God and the King ; and 
 of the two it is more necessary to his worldly pro- 
 motion that he please the King. England has pro- 
 duced the finest examples of these courtier-prelates, 
 men who were both pious and politic. Such men
 
 230 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 make excellent officials, but are not great leaders. 
 Dr. Arnold, of Rugby, said that the English church 
 was rebuked daily by the 46th verse of the HQth 
 Psalm, which reads : "I will speak of thy testimo- 
 nies also, even before Kings, and will not be 
 ashamed." It is the constant temptation of the 
 King-made bishop to attune his message to the 
 Kingly ear. When the King is to be rebuked you 
 must not ask that task of the courtier prelate, but 
 must call in some rough, rude man of the people, 
 some man like Elijah the Tishbite, or John the Bap- 
 tist, or Jesus of Nazareth. 
 
 Because of this tendency to subserviency the es- 
 tablished churches have long since ceased to be the 
 conscience keepers of the people of Europe. The 
 nonconformist bodies in England are a protest 
 against the too great conformity of the English 
 establishment, to the world of royalty and nobility. 
 
 This evil of excessive conformity is constitutional 
 with all state establishments. When the church is 
 the mouthpiece of the state it can only speak the 
 words which the state puts in its mouth. When the 
 state approves of slavery the clergy of the state 
 church will have no difficulty in finding that slavery 
 is a divine institution ; if the state is militant the
 
 RISE OF THE NATIONAL CHURCHES. 231 
 
 priesthood will bless the banners, and pray for the 
 victory of the national arms. The state church of 
 Russia is a perfect example of the complete sub- 
 servience of an established church to the govern- 
 ment which sustains it. It has always been so, and 
 as long as human nature is human nature it always 
 will be so. The hope of Russia is not in the Arch- 
 bishop of Moscow, but in priests like Agathon, and 
 in prophets like Tolstoy and Kropatkin ; and what is 
 true of the Russian church is true of all churches. 
 The English church owes whatever greatness it may 
 have to-day, not to its long line of archbishops, but 
 to preachers like Wickliff and Wesley; to such 
 parish priests and poets as George Herbert and 
 John Keble; to such earnest souls as Simeon the 
 Evangelical, and Newman the Catholic. High of- 
 fice and high character are seldom found together 
 in this world, for too commonly high character is 
 the price of high office. 
 
 Another evil which is the outcome of the civil 
 establishment of religion is the false estimate which 
 is put upon, not only official position, but upon the 
 accidents of official life. Its salaries, its clothing, 
 its palaces, are considered as marks of divine grace 
 and favor, and as a necessary means of holding the
 
 232 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 world in awe. Men are judged by these outward 
 accidents of their career, rather than by their in- 
 trinsic character. In our modern capitalistic 
 churches clergymen are rated as $3,000, $5,000, or 
 $10,000 men. The successful clergyman, the man 
 whose pictures are in the church papers, is the man 
 who goes from the $3,000 to the $5,000, and from 
 the $5,000, to the $10,000 church. It is the belief 
 of many in England that, if the bishops were to lose 
 their palaces, they would lose their power. Some- 
 times they have a bishop, like the present Bishop of 
 London, who does not care to live in a palace, but 
 the church says to him : You must live in a palace, 
 because in the nature of things, bishops and palaces 
 always go together. There is grim humor in the 
 financial statement recently put forth by this same 
 Bishop of London. His income is $30,000 a year. 
 It takes it all to keep up his two palaces, and the 
 poor man is in danger of being bankrupt. 
 
 I fear that the visit of the Archbishop to this 
 country will have a tendency to promote this con- 
 fusion of values in the mind of the American Epis- 
 copal church. This conception of the Episcopal 
 office as depending for its efficacy upon the earthly 
 accidents that attach to it is already rife among us.
 
 RISE OF THE NATIONAL CHURCHES. 233 
 
 In the opinion of many of the leading members of 
 our communion the dignity of the Episcopal office 
 depends upon the extent of territory over which the 
 bishop presides, and upon the wealth of the church 
 as expressed in property and contributions. The 
 American, and indeed the modern, is prone to con- 
 found greatness with bigness. Measured by this 
 standard the life of Jesus was most insignificant, the 
 country through which He preached was no larger 
 than Monroe and Ontario counties combined, and 
 the town that he made his home not so large as 
 Canandaigua. 
 
 It will be a blessed day for Christianity when this 
 materialistic conception of greatness perishes from 
 out the thought of the Christian world ; when it will 
 be allowable for the Bishop of Rome to leave his pal- 
 ace of many thousand rooms, to disband his guards, 
 and disperse his retinue, and live as Peter lived 
 in the humble quarter of the Trastevere under the 
 Janiculum. The cause of the Gospel will not be 
 hindered when a man like the Bishop of London 
 can dispense with mansions of state and live as Paul 
 lived, in his own hired house; the ministry will not 
 be depressed; it will be exalted, when men are 
 valued for their salt more than for their salary.
 
 234 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 The established churches of the world are every- 
 where in decay, and must soon pass away, and their 
 disappearance will not be an unmixed evil if with 
 them goes that worldliness, which more even than 
 grosser sin is the enemy of the religion of Jesus.
 
 Relation of Church and State 
 in the United States. 
 
 In the year 1620 a little ship of 180 tons' burden 
 was beating up against the wind along the shore 
 of Cape Cod in the Bay of Massachusetts. Exclu- 
 sive of the crew, this ship had on board just 100 
 souls. From a human point of view there could 
 be nothing more insignificant, nothing more forlorn, 
 than this weather-beaten vessel with its storm-tossed 
 passengers on the desolate coast of what was then 
 the unbroken wilderness of New England. But, 
 looked at in the light of after events, we see in this 
 ship a new ark of salvation for mankind. To par- 
 allel this event, we must go back to the days when 
 the ark landed the patriarch Noah and his sons 
 on the Mountain of Ararat, or to the days when Ab- 
 ram heard in Ur of the Chaldees the voice of God 
 saying unto him: Get thee out from thy country 
 and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, 
 unto a land that I will show thee of.* Or, if these 
 stories of Noah and Abram seem to us legendary 
 
 *Gen. xii.: I. 
 
 [235]
 
 236 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 and without basis in fact, then to find an event of 
 greater importance than the beating of the May- 
 flower into the Bay of Massachusetts we must go 
 back to the day when a little band of men and 
 women gathered together in an upper chamber in 
 Jerusalem to wait for the promise of the Lord. 
 
 The men and women in that ship had in their 
 keeping the future history of the world. They were 
 destined to shape the policy and inspire the heart of 
 a new people; to create a nation in which church 
 and state were at last to be absolutely one. In which 
 the principles of human government as these prin- 
 ciples were expounded by Jesus of Nazareth were 
 to be the foundation stones of a great national 
 polity. 
 
 Four months before they sighted Cape Cod these 
 people had sailed out of the port of Plymouth in 
 the south of England for the purpose of seeking 
 a new home in a strange land. They were driven 
 to this enterprise by the desire to find a place where 
 they might worship God according to the dictates 
 of their own consciences. They were men and 
 women who were unable to conform to the religious 
 life of the country of their nativity. As we have 
 already heard, the state religion, as established by
 
 RELATION OF CHURCH AND STATE. 237 
 
 the Elizabethan settlement, was a compromise in- 
 tended to include all but the extreme Catholic and 
 the extreme Puritan. For a while this effort to com- 
 prehend the whole nation in the ecclesiastical es- 
 tablishment was successful ; but in the nature of 
 things this state of absolute equilibrium could not 
 last long. If the people of England had been with- 
 out reason or conscience they might have followed 
 the Kings and Queens of England in every vagary 
 of religion, and rested content in the religious life 
 which was marked out for them by the royal will. 
 But, being men of thought and feeling and sturdy 
 independence, the Islanders were certain sooner or 
 later to rebel against the authority that sought to 
 regulate their consciences, and to curb the exercise 
 of their reason and their will. When the Pope ex- 
 communicated Queen Elizabeth the extreme Cath- 
 olics renounced their membership in the Church of 
 England.* When James I., in 1607, uttered his 
 famous tirade against the Puritans, who sought re- 
 lief from some of the forms of the church, saying 
 with royal spleen : I will make them conform, or I 
 will harry them out of the land, then the Puritan 
 saw it was time for him to escape from bondage, and 
 
 *Making of New England, John Fiske, chap. n.
 
 238 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 he separated himself from the church of his fathers. 
 The leader of this band was William Brewster, of 
 the town of Scrooby, in Nottinghamshire. Before 
 Brewster, men called fanatics had refused to con- 
 form to the doctrine and discipline of the established 
 church; but these, like all forerunners, had to go 
 each his own way, and left no permanent result 
 behind them. William Brewster was a Puritan 
 who hoped to reform the church from within, 
 and he remained in the church until the 
 action of James made the church too nar- 
 row to contain men of his type. He gath- 
 ered together a company of men and women who 
 met on Sunday for divine service in his own draw- 
 ing room at Scrooby Manor. The pastor of this 
 congregation, for congregation it had become, was 
 John Robinson, a native of Lincolnshire. This man 
 had no ordination other than that which came to 
 him from God and from the choice of his fellow- 
 men. He was learned, gentle, pious, and, for his 
 age, tolerant, and, out of the abundance that God 
 had given him, he ministered to the people. Among 
 those who gathered together every Lord's Day in 
 the drawing room of Scrooby Manor was William 
 Bradford, a lad of seventeen, already remarkable
 
 RELATION OF CHURCH AND STATE. 239 
 
 for his intelligence, his piety, and his weight of 
 character. He was destined to take a leading part 
 in the stirring events to come. The meetings of 
 this little congregation could not go on unmolested. 
 Already the Stuarts were preparing for their doom 
 by seeking to drive their subjects into their own 
 way of thinking and believing. The wrath of the 
 King was hot against such men as Brewster, Rob- 
 inson, and Bradford. And these followers of Jesus, 
 remembering the words of the Lord, "When they 
 persecute you in one city, flee ye unto another,* 
 sought safety from the anger of James by flight into 
 Holland. Under the guidance of Robinson, they 
 made a settlement in Leyden, where a residence of 
 eleven years welded them into a compact organic 
 body. 
 
 But these men were not only Christians ; they were 
 also Englishmen ; and they desired their children to 
 be born Englishmen, and to live under English law. 
 In the course of the centuries England had developed 
 an institution that reconciled law and liberty. This 
 institution was representative government. The an- 
 cient democracies had failed to secure both law and 
 liberty because they knew of no way for the people 
 
 *St. Matthew, x. : 23.
 
 240 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 to act except in the mass ; and the mass is at last the 
 mob, and the mob is the natural prey of the leader. 
 The imperial system was the necessary outcome of 
 the effort to extend the democratic rule of Rome 
 over Europe. The only way that Rome could rule 
 was by having the central government send agents 
 out to rule the people. This is imperialism pure 
 and simple, as we see it in the Empire of Russia 
 and in the Roman Catholic church to-day, and it was 
 the system that prevailed all over the continent of 
 Europe until the nineteenth century. But in Eng- 
 land another system of government was devised. 
 Instead of the central government, sending agents 
 to rule the people, the people sent agents to rule the 
 central government. The English people kept in 
 their own hands that power of the purse without 
 which no government can exist. "No taxation 
 without representation," is the watchword of Eng- 
 lish civilization, and marks the difference between 
 modern and ancient democracy. 
 
 The English exiles at Leyden craved the posses- 
 sion and exercise of their political, as well 
 as of their religious, rights and duties ; indeed, with 
 them their religious included their political rights. 
 Moved by these considerations the Pilgrims secured
 
 RELATION OF CHURCH AND STATE. 241 
 
 a charter and set sail for the new world. Before 
 landing on the shores of their future country these 
 men had made for themselves a written Constitu- 
 tion, had chosen governor and councillors, and had 
 organized both a church and a state. In this organi- 
 zation the spiritual power was supreme and the 
 state was a function of the church. 
 
 This settlement of the congregation of Leyden 
 at Plymouth attracted to that region the thought 
 of the Puritan element in England, which was grow- 
 ing more and more restless and refractory under 
 the limitations of the English establishment. In 
 the early years of Charles I. a large company of 
 Puritans determined to migrate and establish a Pur- 
 itan church and state in the land which God had pro- 
 vided for them. These men followed in the wake 
 of the Pilgrims of Leyden and settled upon the 
 shores of Massachusetts bay. Before leaving Eng- 
 land this new band of Puritans elected John Win- 
 throp as their governor, and, like the men of Ley- 
 den, migrated, not as individuals, but as an organ- 
 ized state. They were perfectly conscious of what 
 they were doing and of the far-reaching significance 
 of their action. They believed that God was calling 
 them to lay the foundations of a new and great 
 REL. & POL. 16
 
 242 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 Kingdom a Kingdom in which God should be the 
 absolute ruler and His word the only law. The 
 ideal of the Puritan was a Mosaic theocracy adapted 
 to the form and principles of English constitutional 
 law. This union of religious enthusiasm with the 
 forms of practical government gave stability to the 
 Puritan state, and is the secret of Puritan domina- 
 tion in America. 
 
 It was not the purpose of these founders of the 
 Puritan commonwealth to grant either liberty of 
 thought or liberty of action. Their conception of the 
 church and of the state forbade their entertaining 
 the notion of what we call religious liberty. In 
 their estimation it was treason to doubt the plenary 
 inspiration of the Bible, or to question the doctrines 
 of the church. They endeavored to secure the ab- 
 solute identity of church and state by limiting po- 
 litical privileges to the members of the church. We 
 cannot in this lecture enter minutely into the his- 
 tory of this Puritan state-church. It is easy to speak 
 scoffingly of the bigotry and narrowness of the Pur- 
 itan, to tell lurid stories of the whipping of here- 
 tics, the hanging of women, and the burning of 
 witches ; but it is not so easy to measure the moral 
 value and the spiritual potency of that conception
 
 RELATION OF CHURCH AND STATE. 243 
 
 of the state which looks upon it as the instrument of 
 divine justice; which teaches that officers of the 
 state are the vicegerents of God. Such a concep- 
 tion is the only one that can make the state other 
 than a merciless machine. If the state is not divine 
 it is brutal. 
 
 And when to this conception you join that other 
 pregnant doctrine of which the Puritan was the ex- 
 ponent, which declares the sacredness and the right 
 of the common man; when you make every man's 
 destiny an expression of the eternal will of God, 
 then you have a foundation for government which 
 cannot be shaken. Every man in the Puritan con- 
 ception is a church-state in himself. In the man 
 the spiritual power must be supreme. Conscience, 
 not interest, must be the guide of life. Each man 
 is a divinely inspired, divinely guided, political and 
 spiritual power, and the state is simply a federation 
 of these political and spiritual units in a general gov- 
 ernment. Each man is to have his voice heard and 
 his vote counted in the consideration and deter- 
 mination of the affairs of state. This union of Teu- 
 tonism and Hebraism; this marriage of Mosaic 
 theocracy to English democracy, is the contribution 
 of English Puritanism to the political life of the
 
 244 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 world, and the modern state is the offspring of this 
 union. It does not matter that the Puritan church- 
 state as the Puritan conceived it did not outlast the 
 lives of the first generation. That was a foregone 
 conclusion. In the very nature of things a govern- 
 ment based upon the Calvinistic interpretation of 
 Holy Scripture must be short-live^XBut, while 
 the Puritan church-state failed as an institution, it 
 endured as an idea. The Puritan influence dom- 
 inated all other influences in American life from the 
 landing of the Pilgrims down to the close of the 
 Civil War. The south contributed to the American 
 commonwealth administrative ability; the middle 
 Atlantic states were the seat of commercial activity 
 and kindly philanthropy, but Puritan New England 
 was the breeding place of spiritual enthusiasm and 
 high moral purpose. It was the belief of the Pur- 
 itan that was the motive power of the American 
 Revolution. It was the stern conviction of the 
 Puritan that not King George, but God, was the 
 rightful sovereign in America, not the Parliament of 
 England, but the people of the united Colonies, were 
 the sole keepers of the purse and the only source of 
 political power; and it was this conviction of the 
 Puritan that sustained the people of the country 
 through the long years of the Revolutionary War.
 
 RELATION OF CHURCH AND STATE. 245 
 
 It is curious to remark how, up to the days of 
 the Civil War, and in a measure beyond that period, 
 each section of English North America reflected the 
 character of the first settlers. The south was col- 
 onized by adventurous sons of the nobility and 
 gentry of England, who came to secure for them- 
 selves estates in the new land which were denied 
 them in the old. These men lived, not in towns, but 
 on plantations ; each man was a sovereign lord in 
 his own domain, having servants and slaves under 
 him. This potentate kept his chaplain to look after 
 his spiritual affairs, as he kept his overseer to look 
 after his temporal affairs; but he himself looked 
 sharply after both chaplain and overseer. He be- 
 lieved in church and state, with the church in duti- 
 ful subjection to the state. The south was the nat- 
 ural home of the English establishment; the clergy 
 came in the wake of the gentry, and the parish 
 church was built beside the county court house. The 
 southerner called the name of his new countries after 
 the name of his queens and his kings. Virginia, 
 Carolina, and Georgia all express the notion that the 
 king is the source of authority and the state an en- 
 tity in and of itself. This southern gentry had all
 
 246 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 the virtues and vices of its class. It was given to 
 command; it was brave and adventuresome; it was 
 proud and arrogant ; it differentiated the poor from 
 the rich, the landowner from the landless, and put 
 all power in the hands of the landlord ; it made labor 
 servile, and subjected the great mass of the laborers 
 to absolute ownership and control of the ruling class. 
 
 The southern colonies gave to the nation generals 
 and governors, but not priests nor prophets. Its 
 clergy were the servants of the gentry rather than 
 the servants of God, and the questions that agitated 
 the church in the south were not questions of doc- 
 trine or discipline; they were questions of clerical 
 salaries and ecclesiastical status. 
 
 The Puritan and southern conception of the re- 
 lation of the state and the church gave rise to dis- 
 tinct and hostile civilizations which struggled for 
 the mastery on American soil for nearly a century. 
 When at last these two conceptions came into col- 
 lision the Puritan prevailed over the southern and 
 reduced it to subjection. As in the Revolutionary, 
 so in the Civil War, it was the New England Puri- 
 tan that gave the spiritual enthusiasm and moral 
 purpose to the struggle. It was Lloyd Garrison, 
 Wendell Phillips, John G. Whittier, Owen Love joy,
 
 RELATION OF CHURCH AND STATE. 247 
 
 and John Brown that were the prophets and mar- 
 tyrs of the cause. The south in the person of Lin- 
 coln gave administrative ability, but the spirit that 
 sustained and guided the contest was the spirit of 
 New England. 
 
 The Middle Atlantic states were settled very 
 largely for commercial reasons. It was the canny 
 Hollander, intent on gain, that cast anchor on the 
 shores of Manhattan island and the canny Hollander 
 reigns there still. He was something of a Puritan 
 himself, but his puritanism had never been able to 
 quite get the better of his prudence. His struggle 
 with Spain had been a struggle for existence, not 
 so much for political and religious liberty as for 
 the right to live. When once the Hollander was 
 free to do as he pleased he turned his attention to 
 commerce and made riches the goal of his ambition. 
 He had neither the political training nor the stiff- 
 necked fanaticism of the English Puritan, but he 
 had a commercial genius which gave him in a single 
 generation the commercial leadership of the world. 
 The commercial instinct of the Hollander made him 
 see at once the vast commercial advantage of the 
 Island of Manhattan, and there he planted his colony 
 and gave a character to that island which it has not
 
 248 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 lost to this day. The city on the Island of Man- 
 hattan is fast becoming the center of the world's 
 exchanges and the commercial capital of mankind. 
 With this spirit of commercialism the spirit of Puri- 
 tanism is now in deadly conflict, and upon the is- 
 sue of that conflict depends, not only the spiritual 
 welfare of the people of America, but also the spir- 
 itual history and spiritual welfare of the world for 
 ages to come. The warfare that is waging to-day 
 is the warfare between the merchant and the minis- 
 ter; the minister, who believes in God, the mer- 
 chant, who believes in gain; the minister, who be- 
 lieves that man is a person, the merchant who be- 
 lieves that man is a thing. 
 
 Our study of history has shown us that there are 
 only two possible relations of church and state. Ei- 
 ther the church must be in subjection to the state, 
 or the state to the church; that is, either spiritual 
 or material interests must prevail. In all great 
 formative periods it is the spiritual interests that 
 are supreme ; in all times of degeneration and decay 
 material concerns have the upper hand. To speak 
 of the separation of church and state is to speak of 
 the separation of soul and body. If the state is with- 
 out a church it is without warrant in the conscience
 
 RELATION OF CHURCH AND STATE. 249 
 
 of man ; if the church is without a state it is without 
 power in the life of the world. The church without 
 the state is a disembodied spirit; the state without 
 the church is a putrefying corpse. When the church 
 is true to itself and true to its God it becomes the 
 conscience of the state. Then the state must be in 
 subjection to the church, or the state must perish. 
 When the church forgets its high calling, and be- 
 comes simply a function of the state, then both 
 church and state go down in one common ruin. 
 
 The present separation of the religious from the 
 civil and political life of the nation is cause for 
 grave apprehension for the future of the American 
 people. A glance at the religious phenomena of our 
 time and country will reveal strange and startling 
 facts. 
 
 Were a Paul of Tarsus to visit us as he visited 
 the Athenians, he would cry to us, as he did to them : 
 "I perceive that in all things ye are very religious." 
 The outward forms of religion are in in evidence 
 with us as they were with the Athenians of the 
 Apostolic age. The Athenian still paid homage by 
 cult and ceremony to the gods of Olympus. He was 
 careful to have the twelve major and all the minor 
 divinities represented by the altars of his city; and,
 
 250 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 lest he should have overlooked someone of the heav- 
 enly hierarchy, he built an altar to the unknown 
 God. As in Athens, so to-day every phase and form 
 of the great Christian cult is represented in the re- 
 ligious life of America. In this year of grace, the 
 nineteen hundred and fifth, there are 28,689, 2 ^* 
 persons enrolled as Christians upon the books of the 
 various ecclesiastical bodies. These persons are in- 
 cluded in 143, more or less, religious corporations 
 which are in competition for membership. The two 
 great sections of Christendom, the Protestant and 
 the Catholic, divide this Christian membership un- 
 evenly between them, about two thirds of the Chris- 
 tians of the country are registered in the Protestant 
 societies, and about one third in the Catholic 
 churches. 
 
 The Protestants are mainly included in seven 
 great denominations, Methodists, Baptists, Luther- 
 ans; Disciples of Christ, Presbyterian, Congrega- 
 tional, and Episcopal. 
 
 The Catholics are for the most part emigrants and 
 children of emigrants, who have come into this 
 country since the middle of the last century and who 
 derive their notions of life and government from 
 
 The World Almanac.
 
 RELATION OF CHURCH AND STATE. 251 
 
 Latin and Celtic, rather than from English, sources. 
 Maryland was, indeed, settled by English Catholics 
 dissatisfied, as were the Puritans, with the settle- 
 ment of Elizabeth. But the Catholics of Maryland, 
 like the Catholics of England, were never sufficiently 
 numerous or important to influence to any degree 
 the polity either of their church or their country. 
 The Catholic church in America to-day is Celtic, 
 Latin, and South Germanic, and embodies the tone 
 and temper of these races rather than of the English. 
 In the Catholic body we have among us the me- 
 diaeval church and the mediaeval Empire. In the 
 government of this vast organization the people 
 have no voice. Power is centralized in the hier- 
 archy; the hierarchy centers in the Pope, who ap- 
 points his bishops and sends his legates to rule his 
 people. The Pope and the Czar are the last repre- 
 sentatives in Europe of the ancient imperial system 
 of ruling church and state. 
 
 The Lutheran body is composed of emigrants and 
 children of emigrants from Protestant Germany. It 
 represents the German love of the Fatherland, and 
 the conservative theological thought of the German 
 people. 
 
 Passing to the other Protestant denominations, we
 
 252 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 find that the Methodists are the most numerous and 
 the most democratic. The Methodist body owes 
 its origin to that great movement among the English 
 people; led by a simple priest of the Church of 
 England, which broke up the repose of the English 
 establishment, which revived religion and reformed 
 the world. The Methodists in America are the con- 
 verts and descendants of the converts of those he- 
 roic circuit riders who in the latter part of the 
 eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth centuries 
 traveled from settlement to settlement in the wil- 
 derness preaching the pardoning grace of God. To 
 these preachers the middle west owes its Christian- 
 ity and civilization, and the middle west is the chief 
 'home of Methodism to this day. The Baptists and 
 the Disciples of Christ form really one great body, 
 and have their principal habitat in the mountainous 
 region of the south. It is in that region that you 
 find to-day a survival of the stern, hardshell, close- 
 communion Baptist, who holds immersion necessary 
 to salvation, and looks upon the unimmersed as out- 
 side the covenanted mercies of God. In the north 
 the Baptist communion includes much of the cul- 
 ture and wealth of the country, and, while still prac- 
 ticing the Baptist forms, does not exclude the rest
 
 RELATION OF CHURCH AND STATE. 253 
 
 of Christendom from membership in the church 
 of Christ. 
 
 The Presbyterian church represents the sturdy 
 Scotch element in American life. It is strongly 
 English in its political tendencies, and Calvinistic 
 in its theology. Its membership is evenly distributed 
 over the country, and is made up largely of the suc- 
 cessful men of business. The Congregational body, 
 together with its offspring, the Unitarian, has its 
 headquarters in Boston, and is most numerous in 
 New England. It is the direct heir of the Puritan, 
 and is the church of the scholar, the reformer, and 
 the mystic. The Episcopal church is the daughter 
 of the Established Church of England, with which 
 it is in communion. It looks to Oxford for its theol- 
 ogy, and to the hierarchy of England as the source 
 of its spiritual life. It holds that Episcopal ordina- 
 tion is necessary to the validity of the ministry, and 
 maintains the position of isolation among the Chris- 
 tian churches which is the characteristic of the Eng' 
 lish communion. It claims to keep the middle way 
 between Romanism and Protestantism, and hopes 
 to bring the whole world to accept its position of 
 compromise. It is divided into two parties, the 
 high and the broad, or conservatives and liberals.
 
 254 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 The high church party is strongest with the clergy, 
 and the broad with the laity. This church centers in 
 New York, and its stronghold is the Atlantic sea- 
 board. It is the church of the banker and the law- 
 yer, and leads the conservative element in social and 
 political life. The smaller Christian bodies are the 
 representatives of certain narrow phases of discipline 
 or doctrine, and are not influential in the life and 
 thought of the country. 
 
 We find thus, upon examination, that we have 28,- 
 000,000 of Christians, officered by 114,000 men di- 
 vided into eight principal camps ; and, when we con- 
 sider the promise of Jesus that He would be with 
 two or three of His followers, and that He would 
 grant their prayers, we cannot help asking, What 
 are these Christians praying for to-day? Are they 
 asking for justice in the state, for purity in social 
 life, for honesty and fair dealing in business, for 
 mercy toward the weak and pity for the erring? 
 Are they praying for peace upon earth and good will 
 toward men, And, if so, why are their prayers not 
 answered? Why are we to-day in the hand of the 
 political spoiler? Why are our cities reeking with 
 impurity? Why are our politics our shame and re- 
 proach? Why is our society a society of broken
 
 RELATION OF CHURCH AND STATE. 255 
 
 homes and childless women? Why are the weak 
 crying for succor, and the sinner dying for want 
 of pardon?
 
 The Commercialized Church in 
 the Commercialized State. 
 
 On the morning of January 30, 1905, the mayor 
 of the city of Rochester, in the state of New York, 
 read an able paper on municipal government before 
 the ministerial association of that city. The mayor 
 opened his discussion with the statement that the 
 church and state have now no organic relation. The 
 only survival of the bond of union which once 
 united these two institutions is the formal acknowl- 
 edgment of the sovereignty of God which is ex- 
 pressed in the oath of office that the state requires 
 of its officers as they enter upon their duties. This 
 oath of office is a solemn religious act, giving divine 
 sanction to the functions of the legal officer. When 
 the mayor takes this oath he is bound, not simply to 
 the service of the people, but also and more solemnly 
 to the service of God. He is in the highest sense 
 of the word an ordained, consecrated man. Like 
 the King of Israel, he is the Lord's annointed, and 
 to the Lord he must give an account. When an of- 
 ficer of the state takes his oath of office seriously he 
 [256]
 
 THE COMMERCIALIZED CHURCH. 257 
 
 makes of the state a religious institution, it rests, 
 not only in the consent of the people, but also upon 
 the will of God. Mr. Lincoln in his first inaugural 
 address declared his intention of maintaining the 
 Constitution and enforcing the laws throughout the 
 length and breadth of the land, and then, pleading 
 with the men of the south, he said : "You have no 
 oath registered in heaven to destroy the govern- 
 ment, while I shall have the most solemn one to pre- 
 serve, protect, and defend it."* Then the great, 
 gaunt man lifted up his hand and called God to wit- 
 ness that in all he did or said he was the servant, 
 not simply of human law, but also of divine justice, 
 and from that day the man went as one who was set 
 apart to the service of God.* 
 
 So, the mayor of Rochester, in calling the atten- 
 tion of the ministers to the fact that he "had reg- 
 istered an oath in heaven" to enforce the laws of 
 the city and protect its interests against all comers, 
 certified to his hearers that he, like Melchizedek, 
 King of Salem, was a priest of the most high God 
 and a minister about holy things. I do not think 
 that either the mayor or the ministers recognized 
 the full significance of this passing allusion to the 
 
 ""Lincoln, ist Inaugural. 
 REL.& POL. 17
 
 258 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 oath of office. I fear both minister and mayor failed 
 to see that the oath of office, if other than an idle 
 form or a bit of blasphemy, gives divine sanction 
 to civil life, and makes of the mayor, a minister of 
 religion.* 
 
 This inattention to an important fact and a great 
 underlying principle arose from an inveterate habit 
 on the part of both mayor and minister of inclosing 
 human life into two compartments which have no 
 opening into each other. These compartments are 
 the secular and the sacred. The secular incloses the 
 mayor and all that belongs to him; the sacred in- 
 closes the ministers and all that belongs to them. 
 The mayor came to the ministers, as a messenger 
 might come from Mars, to let these inhabitants of 
 another sphere into the secrets of his own planetary 
 existence. With a naivete that was charming, the 
 mayor took for granted that the ministers would 
 not be interested in anything that lay outside their 
 own circle of being. The only function of the city 
 government which he explained at any length was 
 that which has to do with the closing of the saloons 
 
 *The oath of office is simply a declaration of the sacred 
 character of the mayor's office. The oath is nothing; the 
 sacredness everything.
 
 THE COMMERCIALIZED CHURCH. 259 
 
 on Sunday. Again, I fear that neither the mayor nor 
 the ministers were conscious of the latent sarcasm 
 that thus, by implication, limited the interests of 
 the ministers. It was nothing to them whether the 
 homes of the people of their city were wholesome or 
 unwholesome; nothing to them whether the officers 
 of their city were honest or corrupt; nothing to 
 them whether the children of their city were being 
 trained to wisdom or to folly; nothing to them 
 whether the streets of their city were hideous or 
 beautiful ; nothing to them that the merchants of 
 the city turned girls and women by the thousand 
 out into the streets of the city in the middle of the 
 night, these girls and women exhausted by sixteen 
 hours of toil, left, so far as the merchants were con- 
 cerned, to become the prey of any passerby. All 
 this was secular, and did not concern the minister. 
 It was the opening of the saloon on Sunday that 
 roused his interest, because Sunday is the little bit 
 of time which he has tried to enclose in his sacred 
 compartment, and claims as his own. The Sunday 
 saloon encroaches upon the territory of the Sunday 
 church, and if the Sunday saloon be opened the 
 ministers fear that the Sunday church may have to 
 be closed, and the occupation of the minister be gone.
 
 260 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 I have seen many strange sights in this strange 
 world in which I find myself a sojourner, but never 
 a stranger, sadder sight than to see four-score men 
 sitting, not only silent, but contented, under an im- 
 plication that proclaimed their own utter impotence 
 and the impotence of their God. For, if the minister, 
 with God on his side, cannot win out against the 
 barkeeper in a fair and open competition, then what 
 is the use of the minister, and where is the power 
 of his God. 
 
 The mayor did say that, if the ministers could get 
 out of their compartment and get into his they could, 
 if they would, help him in the exercise of the func- 
 tions of his sacred office. The mayor confessed, that 
 with the best will in the world he was not free to 
 do what he thought for the highest interests of the 
 city. Because of a certain evil power which was 
 strong and rampant in his compartment, he was 
 sore let and hindered in doing the work that was 
 set before him, and he prayed the ministers for help. 
 But, as he mentioned the name of this power, every 
 minister that heard that name shuddered; for he 
 knew that the self-same power was in his compart- 
 ment, keeping him from the full performance of his 
 duty. The name of the power that checked the 
 mayor and throttled the minister was "money."
 
 THE COMMERCIALIZED CHURCH. 261 
 
 The church and state might be separate worlds, 
 their orbits intersecting only at the Sunday laws, 
 but they were both revolving in the atmosphere of 
 a corrupt commercialism.* 
 
 This power which has silenced the voice of the 
 church and paralyzed the Constitution of the state 
 began to dominate both church and state immediately 
 after the close of the Civil War. In the first or con- 
 stitutional period of American history, which ended 
 with the administration of John Quincy Adams, the 
 American people were engaged in the work of es- 
 tablishing a stable government which should secure 
 to themselves and to their children the liberties for 
 which they had struggled in the Revolutionary era. 
 In that period the will of the people was supreme in 
 the choice of the officers of the government and the 
 affairs of state were in the hands of men who were 
 consecrated to their task by a sense of obligation to 
 their conscience and their God. Webster in the 
 Senate, Marshall and Story on the Bench, and 
 Quincy Adams in the Presidential chair, were the 
 kind of men found in public life in the first period 
 
 *Commerce should be the servant, not the master, of 
 church and state. As a servant, it is ennobling; as a 
 master, a depraving influence in human life.
 
 262 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 of our history. At this time our country was mainly 
 agricultural, and the industrial life centered in the 
 farm. Commerce or trading was in the hands of 
 individual merchants, who were known by name, 
 and were directly responsible to the people of their 
 vicinage for their actions. The press was used for 
 the expression of personal opinion, and centered in 
 the editor. The church exercised the office of 
 moral and spiritual guidance ; it was mainly Protes- 
 tant and Puritan, and the minister was a highly re- 
 spected member of the community. This primitive 
 period of American history was, of course, not per- 
 fect, but it was healthy; the state and the church, 
 commerce and agriculture, were each exercising 
 their normal functions. The English race was still 
 fairly pure and immensely prolific, and the family 
 was the seat of a stern domestic government. Di- 
 vorce was rare, and barrenness uncommon. 
 
 The next period of national history, beginning 
 with the election of Andrew Jackson and ending 
 with the close of the Mexican War, was marked by 
 the rise of party politics and the great Irish and Ger- 
 man migrations. In this period Americans began 
 to consciously seek office for the sake of the emolu- 
 ment connected therewith. The powerful politician
 
 THE COMMERCIALIZED CHURCH. 263 
 
 whose business it was to manipulate conventions and 
 carry elections made his appearance in the persons 
 of Amos Kendall and Thurlow Weed. Our elec- 
 tions from that period have been not simply the con- 
 test of two differing policies for supremacy, but a 
 battle of the ins and outs for the offices. During 
 this period the common man of the country became 
 conscious of his power: the old Federal aristocracy 
 gave place to the new democracy, of which Jack- 
 son was the type. The vast emigration from Ireland 
 and Germany brought the Catholic church into im- 
 mediate juxtaposition to the native Protestant bodies 
 and the spiritual force of the country was drawn 
 more and more from the direction of civil and social 
 affairs into the channels of ecclesiastical warfare and 
 theological discussion. The use of steam and ma- 
 chinery stilled the hum of the spinning wheel in the 
 farm house, destroyed in a measure the independ- 
 ence of the farmer, and centered industrial life in 
 the factory and the city. Commerce was still, in 
 this period, in the hands mainly of individual mer- 
 chants directly responsible to the people. It was 
 a period strongly individualistic and competitive. 
 The leaders of the mercantile world were such men 
 as A. A. Low, George Peabody, and Moses Taylor,
 
 264 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 men of high character and strong religious convic- 
 tion who looked upon their wealth as a trust which 
 they held from God for the use of the people. 
 
 With the close of the Mexican War the struggle 
 of the slave power for supremacy reached its acute 
 stage. For the next twenty-five years the people of 
 the United States were absorbed in a contest which 
 was to determine whether this country were to be 
 all slave or all free. The spiritual forces of the 
 country escaping the control of the formal religions, 
 were occupied in the warfare of freedom against 
 slavery. The abolitionist found himself excom- 
 municate. When Thomas Morris, the leader of 
 abolitionism in Ohio, made his famous speech 
 against Clay in the United States Senate, ending 
 with the words: "The negro shall yet be free,"* 
 he was read out of the Democratic party, and be- 
 came a political outcast, and when he died he was 
 denied burial by the Methodist church. The failure 
 of the churchf to grasp the moral significance of 
 the slavery agitation lowered its prestige, and gave 
 its power into the hands of men of the people. The 
 highest type of man in that age was everywhere 
 
 *Life of Thomas Morris, B. F. Morris. 
 tThe last defense of slavery was written by the presiding 
 bishop of the Episcopal church.
 
 THE COMMERCIALIZED CHURCH. 265 
 
 alienated from the churches. Whittier, the saintly 
 poet; Emerson, the seer; Garrison and Phillips, the 
 prophets ; Brown, the martyr ; Sumner, the tribune, 
 and Lincoln, the far-seeing moral statesman, were all 
 of them outside and some of them under the ban of 
 the Orthodox churches. The fall of Puritanism as 
 a theological system controlling American thought, 
 which was the consequence of this failure of the 
 ministry as a class to see the moral question involved 
 in the slavery agitation and which was precipitated 
 by the Unitarian secession, left the American people 
 without any formal theological system in which to 
 center their thought and life, and the result is the 
 theological chaos and the religious paralysis in the 
 midst of which we are now living. 
 
 The close of the Civil War was followed by moral 
 exhaustion. The prophets and the priests, the mar- 
 tyrs and the soldiers, of the slavery crusade had lost 
 their lives in gaining their cause. Lincoln was dead, 
 Sumner was dead, Whittier was dead, Phillips was 
 dead, Emerson was dead, Beecher was decadent, and 
 over the dead and dying bodies of these heroes a 
 new power arose to claim supremacy in the land, 
 and this power was the power of the merchant. The 
 man of the purse assumed the leadership which had
 
 266 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 until then been held by the man of the pen and the 
 man of the sword. Before the people were aware, 
 within ten years of the war, American life was com- 
 mercialized, and both church and state were in the 
 power of the mercantile class. It was this class, 
 and this class only, that profited by the war. When 
 the war closed the mercantile class were in posses- 
 sion of the bonded debt of the country, which 
 amounted to $2,400, 000,000,* with an annual inter- 
 est charge of $150,000,000. The mercantile class had 
 paid about 33 1/3 cents in gold on a dollar for these 
 bonds, and had purchased them for the most part, 
 not in money, but in army supplies sold at a fabulous 
 profit. While the soldier was dying on the battle- 
 field, and the people were sacrificing every comfort, 
 the army contractor was growing rich by taking 
 advantage of the necessities of his country. As soon 
 as the war was over the people set to work to pay 
 off every dollar of this debt in gold coin. This de- 
 termination of the people made the bonds which had 
 been purchased for 33 1/3 cents on the dollar, worth 
 from no to 130 cents on the par value. And all this 
 immense accretion of value went to enrich the mer- 
 cantile class. And it was this war debt which was 
 
 *Channing, History United States, p. 559.
 
 THE COMMERCIALIZED CHURCH. 267 
 
 the source of their power over the political, social, 
 and religious life of the country. 
 
 The era of industrial organization and concentra- 
 tion in which we now live dates with the close of 
 the Civil War. Before the war there had been signs 
 of the coming time. Rochester was the headquar- 
 ters of one of the earliest of those vast corporations 
 which are now so common in the industrial world. 
 Certain merchants formed a corporation and pur- 
 chased the stock of the various telegraph companies 
 which were operating in the Western States, and 
 the economies incident upon consolidation and reor- 
 ganization made these profitless properties profit- 
 able, and made the stock which had been purchased 
 at a low rate worth more than its face value. About 
 the same time the railroads of New York and Penn- 
 sylvania were consolidated into trunk lines and the 
 New York Central, and Pennsylvania , railroad 
 stock became a part of the current wealth of the 
 country. This immense increase of available wealth 
 added to the inflated currency of the country, gave 
 rise to an era of speculative railroad building. Two 
 transcontinental roads were projected and brought 
 to completion, and thousands of miles of rails were 
 laid in the wilderness. Then it was that the money
 
 268 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 power began to make itself felt in the political life 
 of the country. For a consideration Congress was 
 persuaded to give millions of acres of the public 
 lands to private corporations, and to loan these cor- 
 porations millions of money. 
 
 The sound of the guns of the Civil War had hard- 
 ly died away before this foe of civil purity, corrupt 
 commercialism, began to threaten the liberties of the 
 country. In the last Congress of the Johnson ad- 
 ministration and the first Congress of the Grant ad- 
 ministration the railroad companies had their paid 
 agent in the House of Representatives in the per- 
 son of Oaks Ames, and the stock of the Credit 
 Mobilier was freely used to secure desired legisla- 
 tion. The name of the Vice-President of the United 
 States was tainted with corruption. The reputation 
 of the most popular politician and statesman of 
 the day was smirched, and his political career ar- 
 rested. But the main field in which the railroad 
 exploiter evinced his skill was not in the United 
 States Congress with its limited power; it was in 
 the legislatures of the states, and in the common 
 councils of the cities, with their power to grant 
 charters and privileges. I need not rehearse the 
 shameful history of the Gould-Fisk outrage upon the
 
 THE COMMERCIALIZED CHURCH. 269 
 
 rights of the people in New York and adjacent 
 states. These men bought legislatures, common 
 councils, and judges of court as they would buy 
 cattle in the market. They entrenched themselves 
 like banditti, and defied the process of law. They 
 made common cause with the Tweed ring in New 
 York, and were as brazen as a harlot in their work 
 of corruption. They bought everything they wanted 
 from judicial integrity to woman's honor, and they 
 paraded their purchase in the sight of the world. 
 They made no secret of the ownership of Judge Car- 
 doza, and Fisk paraded Jessie Mansfield in an open 
 carriage drawn by four horses through the streets 
 of New York. What these men did openly was done 
 secretly on a far more extensive scale by men whose 
 reputation remained untarnished, and who attended 
 divine service with the regularity of a devotee. Dur- 
 ing his palmy days the anteroom of William Tweed 
 was crowded with leading merchants seeking special 
 privileges and exemptions from the common council 
 of which Tweed was the owner. It was proved in 
 the Lexow investigation that it was really the mer- 
 chants of New York who employed Croker and gave 
 him his power. 
 
 It was at this time that corrupt commercialism
 
 270 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 subverted representative government, and substi- 
 tuted personal and semi-imperial government in its 
 room. It did this by laying hold of and manipulat- 
 ing the party organizations in its own interests. 
 This corrupt commercial class had no political, as 
 it has no religious, convictions. It was Republican 
 or Democratic as suited its purposes. Its stronghold 
 was the party primary, which it used to establish 
 and maintain its control of the political life of the 
 country. It left to the people the forms of liberty, 
 but all real power was in the hands of one man, who 
 was the agent of the commercial class in its deal- 
 ing with the politicians. This system of government 
 has fastened itself as a fungus upon the formal gov- 
 ernments of the country, and is slowly but surely 
 sapping their strength and taking away their life. 
 I need not go into detail; the matter is notorious, 
 and the mayor confessed that he, the elected magis- 
 trate of the people, was more or less in subjection 
 to this power which the people did not set up, but 
 which was an alliance between the commercial and 
 political classes for the purpose of controlling the 
 official government and making it subservient to 
 their private and personal ends. And what is a mild 
 case of varioloid in Rochester is virulent smallpox
 
 THE COMMERCIALIZED CHURCH. 271 
 
 in other and richer cities ; and as for the states, the 
 ordinary citizen has quite given them up in despair. 
 He goes through the form of voting for governor, 
 but he knows that he has no more voice in the choice 
 of the governor of the state than the Roman people 
 had in the choice of their consul in the days of the 
 Roman Empire. 
 
 It was the commercialization of industry that 
 made possible the commercialization of the state. 
 Before the present organization of industry, in the 
 days of the individual shop and factory, the man 
 who owned the shop or the factory had risen from 
 the ranks of labor in his line of life; his business 
 was the product of his savings and his skill ; he was 
 in touch with his workmen as being himself one of 
 them. But immediately before, during, and since 
 the Civil War the owners of the great shops and fac- 
 tories are not skilled workmen ; they are simply mer- 
 chants. They buy and sell human skill and human 
 labor as they buy and sell raw cotton and sugar. 
 This system places the worker entirely at the mercy 
 of the buyer and seller; and the conflict which is 
 now going on between these two classes, is a con- 
 flict, not only to determine the relative status of these 
 two classes, but it is to determine the character of
 
 272 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 the government of the country for ages to come. 
 The issue of this contest will decide whether Amer- 
 ica is to be a Democracy of the English type or an 
 Empire of the Roman type; whether the people as 
 a whole are to rule, or be ruled. At present 
 the commercial class rules. It is in possession of the 
 government and makes the laws; it is the employer 
 of the professional and industrial classes, and holds 
 them in subjection; it is in possession of the public 
 utilities, and can levy taxes upon the people without 
 their consent. 
 
 It rules in social life as well as in the state, and 
 makes money the measure of the man. "See, there 
 is the great Schwab," said a business man of New 
 York to me one day. "Why the great Schwab?" 
 said I. "Because he is under forty years old, and he 
 is worth so many millions of dollars." "So," said 
 I, "did he earn it by honest toil?" "Oh, no!" 
 "Did he inherit it?" "Oh, no!" "Did he steal it?" 
 "Well, no!" "How did he get it?" "He made it." 
 Then I looked at Mr. Schwab with interest. He 
 was greater than the United States, which cannot 
 make a dollar of money, while Mr. Schwab could 
 make it by the million. 
 
 It is this doctrine that money can be made that is
 
 THE COMMERCIALIZED CHURCH. 273 
 
 the source of our present distress. The old doctrine 
 that money must be earned, inherited, or stolen gives 
 place to the new doctrine that money can be made ; 
 and there are thousands of men who are making 
 it as easily as they light a cigar, and are passing it 
 out to the people. How they do it you can learn 
 from the current literature of the day. This rating 
 of man in terms of money is the mark of Anti- 
 Christ, for a man's life does not consist in the 
 amount of money he has made. 
 
 Corrupt commercialism has subsidized the press, 
 centered its control in the counting room, and made 
 its most highly paid functionary the advertising 
 agent. It has taken possession of our streets and 
 made them hideous with poles and wires. It has 
 vulgarized travel, and made the name of America 
 a byword for puerile extravagance on the continent 
 of Europe. It builds churches and gladly listens to 
 the preaching of the gospel and insists on the or- 
 thodoxy of its doctrine, but it is careful to keep the 
 minister with his gospel in that closed compartment 
 over the door of which it writes the mystic word 
 "sacred," and in which it does not permit the com- 
 mon affairs of e very-day life to be so much as men- 
 REL. & POL. 18
 
 274 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 tioned, lest they should disturb the holy quiet of the 
 place. 
 
 It goes without saying that there are high-minded 
 men in the commercial class, who deplore present 
 conditions as sadly as the sternest moralist in the 
 land. But what can they do ? Such a merchant was 
 once speaking to me of the evil effects which came 
 from the employment of women in certain depart- 
 ments of commercial enterprise. "Why do you not 
 stop it in your establishment?" said I. "Blank, 
 Blank, & Company cannot regulate the commercial 
 life of the United States," was the answer. And 
 that is the substance of the whole matter. You and 
 I, together with Blank, Blank, & Company are in the 
 power of a state-church whose god is gain, whose 
 heaven is commercial success, whose hell is com- 
 mercial failure. This commercial state-church is 
 the keeper of the keys of its heaven and hell. It 
 can admit to the heavenly light of commercial pros- 
 perity, or it can shut out into the darkness of com- 
 mercial adversity. In matters of religion it is lordly 
 tolerant. You can believe anyone of the one hun- 
 dred and forty creeds of Christendom that you 
 please. You can belong to this or that political 
 party; but there is one thing you must do or die.
 
 THE COMMERCIALIZED CHURCH. 275 
 
 You must go to the plain of Dura and at the sound 
 of the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, dulci- 
 mer, and all kinds of music, you must fall down 
 and worship the golden image which this modern 
 Nebuchadnezzar has set up. And the question now 
 confronting the American people, and especially 
 the people who profess and call themselves Chris- 
 tians, is, What are you going to do about it ? Dare 
 you, like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego, trust 
 your God and brave the fire, or are you ready at 
 the very first note of the cornet to fall down and 
 worship the golden image which Nebuchadnezzar 
 has set up ?
 
 Present State of the Churches. 
 
 In his address before the Ministerial Association, 
 the mayor of Rochester said, in effect, that the gen- 
 tlemen before him could have any kind of a city 
 government that they really desired. This state- 
 ment, I take it, was based upon the fact that the 
 ministerial association represented the moral senti- 
 ment of the community, and that in the long run it 
 is the moral sentiment of the community that cre- 
 ates and continues civic institutions. Our munici- 
 pal, state and national governments can never go 
 far below, nor rise far above, the average moral 
 status of the people. Legislatures can make laws, 
 but the legislatures cannot enforce them. If the law 
 does not express the moral judgment of the people, 
 it becomes a dead letter. If, then, the ministers 
 of the churches are the moral force of the com- 
 munity; if they are the accredited teachers of the 
 national morality; if the people look to them for 
 guidance, then it follows as a matter of course that 
 whatever government the ministers want the min- 
 isters can have. But, as a matter of fact, if there 
 [276]
 
 PRESENT STATE OF THE CHURCHES. 277 
 
 is one class more than another which is shut out 
 from civic influence and political activity, that class 
 is the ministerial. It is not considered becoming 
 for a minister so much as to express an opinion on 
 any subject of current politics. He is a minister 
 of religion, and in the popular estimation religion 
 and politics have nothing to do with each other. 
 Not only is the minister thus excluded from all 
 direct participation (except that he may cast his 
 secret ballot) in the political life of the community 
 in which he lives, but he is not expected, nor even 
 permitted, to have anything to say in regard to the 
 great industrial and economic questions that en- 
 gage the attention of the people. In the conflict be- 
 tween capital and labor neither the capitalist nor 
 the laborer has any use for the minister. In 1901 
 the General Convention of the Protestant Episco- 
 pal Church appointed a standing commission on 
 capital and labor, having among other duties that 
 of "being in readiness to act as arbitrators, should 
 their services be desired, between men and their 
 employers, with a view to bring about mutual con- 
 ciliation and harmony in the spirit of the Prince of 
 Peace." This commission reporting in 1904 says : 
 "Taking the definitions of our duty in reverse
 
 278 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 order, we have to say regarding arbitration that no 
 request for our services has been received." Dur- 
 ing the three years from 1901 to 1904 the indus- 
 trial world was the scene of strikes and lockouts, 
 which disturbed the peace of the country and caused 
 the waste of millions of money; but in no case did 
 the contending parties turn to this commission of 
 the Protestant Episcopal Church or any other 
 church commission for a solution of their diffi- 
 culties. If a clergyman like the distinguished 
 Catholic Bishop of Peoria was placed upon the 
 arbitration commission it was not because he was 
 a clergyman, but because he had as a man inter- 
 ested himself in and informed himself con- 
 cerning the great issues involved. For the 
 churches and the ministers as such there is 
 no part cast in the great drama of social evolu- 
 tion which now occupies the stage of the world. 
 There is one field of human effort which fifty or 
 sixty years ago the clergyman claimed as his own. 
 The education of the youth of the country was then 
 almost exclusively in the hands of the ministers 
 of religion. The presidents of our larger colleges 
 and universities and likewise of our smaller col- 
 leges, and the head masters of our academic
 
 PRESENT STATE OF THE CHURCHES. 279 
 
 schools, were of necessity and as a matter of course 
 ordained ministers of some one of our religious de- 
 nominations. The teaching profession was largely 
 ministerial in its makeup. So that one might al- 
 most take it for granted that a professor in a col- 
 lege was also a clergyman. But during the last 
 fifty years the province of education has passed 
 from under the power of the clerical body into the 
 possession of the laymen. The presidents of all 
 our larger universities and colleges are laymen, 
 and if some of our smaller colleges are still re- 
 quired by their charters to have a clergyman as 
 their head, then such clergyman is careful not to 
 emphasize his clerical character; in dress, in man- 
 ner, in thought, he is in accord with the lay, rather 
 than with the ministerial, world. Our academic 
 schools, following the lead of our universities and 
 colleges, are seeking their teaching staff among 
 laymen, and if by chance they do employ a clergy- 
 man they take care that he is not clergyman enough 
 to hurt him. And as for the great public school 
 system which the people have created for the edu- 
 cation of their children, that, as we too well know, is 
 not only free from, but antagonistic to, clerical in- 
 fluence. There is nothing that the people resent
 
 28o RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 more quickly than the interference on the part of 
 any church or denomination with the common 
 schools of the country. 
 
 As the clergyman looks out on the world to-day 
 he is apt to cry : "Where do I come in ?" He finds 
 himself debarred from any real and active partici- 
 pation in the political, industrial, educational, or 
 social life of the world in which he lives. And in 
 this enforced isolation his manhood withers and his 
 interest in life dies out. 
 
 Now, if we seek for the reason of this waning of 
 ministerial influence we find it in that divorce of 
 what is called religion from life which is the char- 
 acteristic of the modern world. Religion has no 
 place in our politics, no place in our business, no 
 place in our education, no place in our society. 
 Its province, if it have any, lies outside our every- 
 day life and far beyond our everyday thought. We 
 hear on every side of the evil of divorce, the break- 
 ing of the bond of union between husband and wife, 
 but what divorce is more desolating than the di- 
 vorce of life from religion; these are not simply 
 husband and wife, one of which can die and the 
 other live, but they are body and soul, neither of 
 which can really exist without the other. If it
 
 PRESENT STATE OF THE CHURCHES. 281 
 
 were the fact that life and religion were parted 
 asunder never to come together again, then life 
 would be worthless and would soon end in despair, 
 and go down into the gloom of death. 
 
 But the truth is that religion is entering into life 
 and spiritualizing every department thereof as it has 
 not since the primitive days. It is not dying out ; it 
 is only changing its mode of operation. It refuses 
 any longer to be shut up in churches, and is striv- 
 ing to make itself a home in the street, in the shop, 
 in the market, in the common council chamber. 
 
 The clerical order is losing influence, not because 
 the world is growing less religious, but because it 
 is more religious that it was sixty years ago. Re- 
 ligion has to-day a wider scope and a farther reach 
 than the clerical interpretation permits it to have. 
 
 The churches and denominations, which now 
 claim to represent the religious interests of man- 
 kind, are the rear-guard of the powers that make 
 for religious progress. They are the product of 
 spent forces. The Catholic church is the survival in 
 the modern world of the imperialistic system that 
 from the fourth to the fourteenth centuries was the 
 system common to both church and state; in which 
 all men were in theory subjects of the Emperor and
 
 282 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 the Emperor the subject of the Pope. In this sys- 
 tem the people are in bondage to the clergy, who 
 claim to stand between them and God, and from 
 whose lips the people must receive knowledge. 
 The Pope, shut up in the Vatican, is a sign to the 
 world of the status of the Catholic church. It is 
 permitted to exist only so long as it secludes itself 
 from the activities of e very-day life. It is imperial- 
 istic in its government, and unscientific in its 
 teaching, and it has no place in a democratic and 
 scientific age. The great national churches of 
 north Europe and England are the creation of the 
 spirit of monarchy and of privilege; they are the 
 handiwork of the Kings, the nobles, and the gentry 
 and mark the triumph of the King, the nobles, and 
 the gentry over the Pope and the Emperor. These 
 churches are aristocratic in government and unsci- 
 entific in doctrine, and have no place in a democratic 
 and scientific age. The great denominations, such as 
 the Methodist and the Baptist, are composed mainly 
 of the middle class. They represent the revolt of 
 the tradesman against the domination of the 
 gentry. These denominations are occupied with 
 minor morals, are unscientific in their doctrine, and 
 are out of touch with the workmen and the poor,
 
 PRESENT STATE OF THE CHURCHES. 283 
 
 who in our day are slowly and painfully emerging 
 from their servile state, and are claiming a name 
 and a place for themselves in the regulation of the 
 affairs of the world. 
 
 The great salient fact in the present life of the 
 western world is the democratic revolution. This 
 revolution has been in progress for six hundred 
 years, and has proceeded by regular stages. In 
 the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it delivered 
 the Kings from the domination of the church and 
 the Empire ; in the sixteenth and seventeenth centu- 
 ries it made the Kings subordinate to the nobility and 
 the gentry; in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen- 
 turies the middle class became dominant, the manu- 
 facturer and the shopkeeper drove the nobility and 
 gentry from power, and now this class is struggling 
 for supremacy with the common people, with the 
 hand worker and the wage earner, in whose su- 
 premacy the democratic revolution will reach its 
 goal. It is with this phase of the revolution that 
 the world is now occupied, and in this crisis the 
 organized churches are not, for the most part with 
 the rising people, but are either indifferent or are 
 with the dominant class. The churches stand for 
 privilege; the bishops in the Episcopal churches
 
 284 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 are a privileged class among the clergy; the clergy 
 are a privileged class among the people; the 
 wealthy are a privileged class in society. But privi- 
 lege of any and every kind is becoming every day 
 more and more odious. Equality, political, social, 
 and intellectual, is a constantly growing demand, 
 and all institutions that stand simply upon privilege 
 are passing away. The democratic revolution is 
 the working out into the life of the world of the 
 life and teaching of Jesus. The only privilege 
 which He claimed for himself, or allowed to others 
 was the privilege of service and sacrifice, and that 
 is the only privilege that can endure in the day of 
 the social revolution that is at hand. 
 
 But if the churches are wanting in the democratic 
 spirit which is necessary to any wide influence in 
 the present revolutionary era, they are still more 
 wanting in the scientific spirit, without which it is 
 impossible for any institution, no matter how vener- 
 able, to have any intellectual standing in the mod- 
 ern world. The universe of thought in which we 
 live is the product of the scientific movement, and 
 the work of the scientific movement has been to 
 substitute law for miracle as the basis of all the 
 operations of nature. In the primitive ages man
 
 PRESENT STATE OF THE CHURCHES. 285 
 
 was under the dominion of his fears and of his 
 imagination, and the world of thought in which he 
 lived was necessarily imaginary. His thought 
 world was not the product of his reason ; it was the 
 creation of his fancy. He viewed the universe 
 about him, not in the clear light of dispassionate 
 intelligence, but in the refracted light of his hopes 
 and his fears. For him nature was without unity 
 and without continuity. His terrified soul filled the 
 earth and the air with beings, like himself, only 
 more powerful, who used the forces of nature for 
 the purpose of expressing their pleasure or displea- 
 sure. All ancient religion was based upon the 
 miracle; upon the belief that there are beings, like 
 men, only greater, who can use the forces of nature 
 to attract attention and to express their love or their 
 hatred. In all history the gods are simply deified 
 men, who, instead of smiting with the arrow or 
 striking with the sword, smite with the pestilence 
 or strike with the lightning. 
 
 The theory of the miracle looks upon every event 
 in nature as having reference to the well- or ill-being 
 of some particular man or men. When religion is 
 based upon miracle then a flood of water, or a vol- 
 canic eruption, is looked upon as a direct visitation
 
 286 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 of the wrath of God. The religion of miracle which 
 the primitive imagination created held full posses- 
 sion of the world down to the beginning of the sci- 
 entific era; which era may be roughly dated from 
 the publication by Copernicus of De Orbium Coeles- 
 tium Revolutionibus in 1530, which affirmed the fact 
 of the revolution of the earth upon its axis and its 
 annual journey around the sun. From that day to 
 this the religion of the reason has been in conflict 
 with the religion of the fancy, and truth has been 
 contending with imagination. Slowly, but surely, 
 scientific reason has reconstructed the universe. It 
 has driven the vast horde of ancient gods and de- 
 mons into the limbo of things impossible. It has 
 made the primitive miracle incredible, because the 
 ancient miracle and the modern conception of law 
 cannot coexist in the same mind. Under the pressure 
 of the scientific conception of uniformity and contin- 
 uity the miracle has been driven from one strong- 
 hold to another until now it is making a last and 
 desperate stand in one region of the world and in 
 one period of time. The ordinary Christian does 
 not give a moment's serious consideration to the 
 miracles of which he reads in the history of Greece 
 and Rome, or which he finds in the literature of the
 
 PRESENT STATE OF THE CHURCHES. 287 
 
 east. He does not go into any long course of rea- 
 soning to prove or disprove these stories; he sets 
 them down at once as the myth, the legend, the 
 folk-lore, of the Roman, Greek, and Indian peoples. 
 The Protestant views with impatient indignation 
 the miracles of the Catholic church in the middle 
 ages, and derides the miracles which the same 
 church claims to perform at the present day. The 
 vast mass of sensible Christians look upon the 
 cures effected by the Christian Scientist, not as 
 miraculous, but as being partly the operation of 
 well-known laws of psychological therapeutics and 
 partly mere delusion. But in spite of their rejec- 
 tion of all miracles in the so-called pagan world, in 
 the mediaeval church, and in modern times, the 
 great Protestant national churches and denomina- 
 tions base all their teaching upon the miracle. 
 They claim that their religion is the one exception 
 in the religious history of the world. All other 
 religions are the product of historical causes. The 
 ancient religions sprang from man's imaginative 
 interpretation of nature. They contained elements 
 of eternal truth, but in their conception of the rela- 
 tion of the gods to the natural world everyone 
 knows that they were in error. But, when we
 
 288 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 come to our own religion, we affirm what we deny 
 in regard to the religions of ancient and mediaeval 
 times, and we base our belief in our miraculous 
 religion upon our possession of a miraculous book. 
 
 Of course, a belief in the inerrancy of the Bible 
 is no longer possible to an educated man, or for 
 anyone in fact, who reads his Bible with reason- 
 able intelligence and attention. It does not need 
 profound scholarship; it only requires ordinary 
 common sense, to see that the Bible is not the mir- 
 aculous book which orthodox theology claims it 
 to be. It is not the higher critic; it is the ordinary 
 modern reader, who has reverently placed his 
 Bible among the great literatures of the world, 
 and finds that both he, himself and his Bible have 
 gained immensely by the operation. He can read 
 his Bible now with pleasure and profit, since, in 
 reading, he does not have to outrage his intelli- 
 gence. 
 
 In the light of scientific research, the Founder 
 of Christianity no longer stands apart from the 
 common destiny of man in life and death, but He 
 is in all things physical like as we are, born as we 
 are born, dying as we die, and both in life and 
 death in the keeping of that same Divine Power,
 
 PRESENT STATE OF THE CHURCHES. 289 
 
 that heavenly Fatherhood, which delivers us from 
 the womb and carries us down to the grave. When 
 we come to know Jesus in His historical relations, 
 we see that miracle is not a help, it is a hindrance, 
 to an intelligent comprehension of His person, His 
 character, and His mission.* We are not alarmed, 
 we are relieved when scientific history proves to us 
 that the fact of His miraculous birth was unknown 
 to Himself, unknown to his mother, and unknown 
 to the whole Christian community of the first gen- 
 eration. 
 
 Believing this, we are no longer compelled to 
 look upon the scientific movement as irreligious, 
 but are able to see in it a greater confirmation of 
 religion; a scientific religion based, not upon the 
 sporadic miracle, but upon the eternal law. We 
 are no longer compelled to look for our God in 
 some obscure event of the past. We have but to 
 lift up our eyes to see Him in the outgoings of the 
 evening and the morning, of all the days of our 
 pilgrimage. 
 
 The scientific movement has within the last fifty 
 years acquired a momentum that is irresistible. 
 
 *Encyclopedia Biblica, vol. 3, p. 294; Hasting's Diet of 
 Bible, vol. in. p. 286. 
 REL. & POL. 19
 
 ago RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 It has taken possession of every educational insti- 
 tution from the kindergarten of the common school 
 to the post-graduate course of the great universi- 
 ties. The theological seminaries are the only edu- 
 cational institutions which have not adopted the 
 scientific method of investigation and reasoning. 
 In resisting the scientific movement the churches 
 are resisting the inevitable. For twenty-five hours 
 in every week our children are taught by trained 
 instructors that the miracle has no place in nature, 
 and then for twenty-five minutes in every week 
 our children are taught, by untrained instructors, 
 when they see fit to come to our Sunday Schools, 
 that the universe is based upon miracle. For one 
 hundred and sixty-seven hours in every week all 
 our thought and our action is based upon the con- 
 viction that the miracle has no place in nature. We 
 trust ourselves and all that we have to our un- 
 faltering belief in the unchanging laws of the uni- 
 verse, this for one hundred and sixty-seven hours ; 
 and then for one hour a few of us, when it is con- 
 venient, go to our churches and pretend to believe 
 that the universe is based upon miracle. In our 
 lecture rooms, in our laboratories, in our factories, 
 in our counting rooms, we utterly discard the mode
 
 PRESENT STATE OF THE CHURCHES. 291 
 
 of reasoning which we use in our churches. The 
 clergyman himself discards his pulpit method when 
 he comes to deal with the practical affairs of life 
 or with the miracles of the Hindu, the Catholic, or 
 the Christian Scientist. And yet with this fact of 
 the complete divorce of theological thought from 
 living thought staring us in the face, we wonder 
 why the people do not come to the churches, and 
 marvel at the waning of ministerial influence. 
 
 The scientific movement is not only constructing 
 the thought world in which mankind must live for 
 ages to come, but it is also profoundly influencing 
 the political, social, and industrial life of the world. 
 Science has unified the world to an extent and in 
 a way that the old religions never dreamed of. 
 The God of science is not the God of the Hebrew, 
 nor of the Christian. He is the God of the whole 
 earth, and not only of the earth, but of the infinite 
 reach of the heaven. The man of science knows 
 his God as God has never been known before. He 
 is face to face with his God every moment of his 
 life. He has learned through long experience to 
 believe in that God, who is the Father of Lights,
 
 292 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 with whom there can be no variation, nor shadow 
 that is cast by turning. 
 
 The life of the man of science is necessarily 
 favorable to the development of the religious char- 
 acter. What can be more ennobling than an intense 
 love of truth for truth's sake? There is not in all 
 religious history a more saintly character than that 
 of Charles Darwin. His patience, his self-restraint, 
 his quiet, uncomplaining endurance of pain and 
 calumny, are as indicative of spiritual power and 
 of true religious character as are the mortifications 
 of St. Bernard or the ecstacies of St. Teresa. It 
 cannot be by accident that the breath of scandal 
 has never soiled the name of any of the great 
 leaders of science. The man of science finds his 
 God as David, Job, and Jesus found theirs. For 
 Him, "the heavens declare the glory of God, and 
 the firmament showeth his handiwork;" for him 
 are unloosed the bands of Orion and the sweet influ- 
 ences of the Pleiades. He sees the glory of God 
 in the grass of the field, and the providence of God 
 in the fall of the sparrow. There may be elements 
 of religion lacking in the man of science, but in his
 
 PRESENT STATE OF THE CHURCHES. 293 
 
 love of truth, in his reverence for law, in his respect 
 for fact, in his hold upon reality, the man of science 
 is not as the unenlightened church member thinks, 
 an unbeliever, but a profound believer. He has 
 a faith in his convictions which is beyond the faith 
 of the mediaeval saint. Science is not simply a 
 philosophy, it is a passionate religion, and a relig- 
 ion that is unifying the world. A German physi- 
 cian discovers the X-ray, and in six months' time 
 the X-ray is used in every hospital from the rising 
 to the setting of the sun for the alleviation of 
 human misery. It is science that has made possible 
 the great industrial organizations that are the won- 
 der and the terror of the industrial world. A trust 
 magnate told me that the telephone was the cause 
 of the trust. Industrial commercialism is wiser in 
 its day and generation than the churches of light. 
 It is not afraid of the truth. It rewards discovery 
 with its greatest prizes while in the churches even 
 to this day, discovery is a crime, and invention is 
 of the devil. No reason for the loss of ministerial 
 influence is so potent as the fact that the churches 
 stand outside this great movement for unity which 
 is the characteristic movement of the modern world. 
 Being unscientific, the churches cannot account for
 
 294 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 themselves, nor for any of the religious phenomena 
 of the world. They one and all have to plead the 
 miracle as the reason of their own existence and of 
 the present state of the world. 
 
 The forces of formal Christianity are ineffective 
 because they are disorganized, demoralized, and 
 divided. Churches and denominations nullify the 
 efforts each of the other. Episcopal bishops do all 
 they can to defeat the purposes of the Catholic 
 bishops. The Catholic bishops look upon the Epis- 
 copal bishops as both schismatic and heretical and 
 as enemies of Christ and the church. The unedu- 
 cated Protestant looks upon the great Catholic 
 church as the work of the devil, and the unedu- 
 cated Catholic looks upon the Protestant as the 
 child of Satan. The educated man, both Catholic 
 and Protestant, is becoming ashamed of this con- 
 dition, and the laymen are leaving the quarrel en- 
 tirely in the hands of the clergy. As for the out- 
 side world, it looks upon this dispute with amused 
 vexation and with, "A plague on both your houses," 
 goes about its business. While the churches are 
 without unity, they must be without influence. The 
 ministerial body cannot be the servant of the 
 people as long as it is the servant of its denomina-
 
 PRESENT STATE OF THE CHURCHES. 295 
 
 tional formularies. These formularies cannot be 
 all true; and it follows that in some respects all 
 these formularies are false. The only way the 
 formularies can be tested is by the scientific method, 
 and the scientific method the churches resolutely 
 refuse to use; and, therefore, the churches are 
 hopelessly divided and helpless. 
 
 We ministers seem to me like a man traveling in 
 the night, who falls over a precipice; in his fall he 
 seizes upon some uneven surfaces of the rock. 
 With one hand he holds on to the miracle, with the 
 other he holds on to his denominational difference. 
 All night long he sweats blood in his agony, as he 
 feels his hands loosening upon the crumbling stone, 
 and fears that at any moment he may fall into the 
 black abyss of Atheism that yawns beneath him. 
 But if he would only let go he would find himself 
 on the solid earth, and would hear a voice saying 
 to him: "Hear, O man! the Lord thy God is one 
 Lord; and to love the Lord thy God with all thy 
 heart, and all thy strength, and all thy mind, and 
 to love thy neighbor as thyself, is more than the 
 creeds and the churches." 
 
 As long as we, the ministers, are desperately hold- 
 ing on to the waning miracle and to the crumbling
 
 296 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 denominational difference we are in no condition to 
 fight for eternal truth and justice. We are trying 
 in a pitiful way to get back into real life through 
 what we call the institutional churches. The 
 apostle serves tables, and the prophet becomes a 
 teacher in gymnastics; and we think we have done 
 a great thing in doing for the people what they 
 can do much better for themselves. Meanwhile 
 the message of the Master is not carried, and the 
 Word of the Lord is not spoken. 
 
 Hear, now, oh ye churches, the sum of the whole 
 matter: There are three great spirits at work 
 creating the world that is and that is to be: 
 The spirit of scientific investigation, that will know 
 nothing but the truth; the spirit of democratic 
 revolution, which will trust no one but the people; 
 the spirit of social evolution, which will call no 
 man common or unclean. If the churches wish 
 for influence in the world that is and is to be, 
 they must master these spirits and make them their 
 own. The churches must become scientific, demo- 
 cratic, and socialistic. And, if they do so, then the 
 churches will merge into the church and the church 
 will no longer be separate from the state, nor the 
 state from the church, but these two will be one 
 flesh.
 
 The American Church-State. 
 
 In his address before the ministerial association 
 the mayor of Rochester urged upon his hearers 
 the necessity of attending the primary elections if 
 they wished to have any real influence in the gov- 
 ernment of their city. He pointed out the fact that 
 these primaries are the source of political power. 
 At these primaries delegates are chosen to the 
 various party conventions, which conventions de- 
 clare public policies and name candidates for pub- 
 lic office. The primary is the headwater of our 
 political and social life, and upon its purity depends 
 the health of the community. It would seem, there- 
 fore, the duty of every citizen to guard the primary 
 from all contamination, and as the ministers are, 
 by office, the guardians of the moral well-being of 
 the state, they of all men ought to watch over the 
 primaries. But the suggestion that the ministers 
 should directly influence the primaries, as the 
 primaries of the great parties are now conducted, 
 is a suggestion that would call forth a sneer and a 
 laugh. The minister can be present at the primary 
 [297]
 
 298 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 only by the complete abdication, not simply of his 
 ministerial office, but also of his religious feelings 
 and of his moral character. He would seek in vain 
 in the primary for any evidence of religious senti- 
 ment or moral principle. If the primary were held 
 in a room, that room would reek with tobacco 
 smoke, and the men in that place would not hesi- 
 tate to desecrate it with their coarseness, their pro- 
 fanity, and their obscenity. A closer acquaintance 
 would reveal the fact that moral considerations 
 have no place in the transactions of the primary. 
 No fear of public ill, no hope of public good, has 
 lodgment in the heart of any man in that meeting. 
 Everyone who is an actor in that scene seems 
 moved by some low, petty desire. The managing 
 mind of the meeting is some professional politician 
 whose sole purpose is to keep his hold on the party 
 organization for personal and mercenary reasons. 
 The names of the men on the ticket presented to 
 the minister and for whom he is expected to vote 
 are, for the most part, names of men of whom he 
 has never heard before, and of whose standing and 
 character he is wholly ignorant. And then there is 
 the appalling fact that in the primary a large pro- 
 portion of the voters can be influenced by the most
 
 THE AMERICAN CHURCH-STATE. 299 
 
 paltry motives. A dollar or less in money, the 
 promise of a day's work, a pat on the back by the 
 leader of the ward, a glass of liquor, is all that is 
 needed to secure the support of this riff-raff of the 
 saloon that is gathered into this meeting to deter- 
 mine the destinies of the American people. 
 
 Beside all this, the primary is not what it pre- 
 tends to be. It is not a meeting of free citizens for 
 the purpose of selecting men who shall represent 
 them and declare their will in the formulation of 
 public policies and the nomination of public offi- 
 cers. The men in the meeting are not acting free- 
 ly; they are obeying the behests of a sinister out- 
 side influence which has predetermined their action. 
 A moral and religious man has the same grief and 
 pain of soul in a modern political primary that he 
 has in a brothel ; in the one, as in the other, he sees 
 the prostitution of the highest and holiest to the 
 most degrading and basest use. In his estimation 
 the prostitution of the functions of the state to 
 private, personal, and mercenary ends is even more 
 appalling and disastrous than the prostitution of 
 woman. The poison of the one may be kept within 
 bounds, but the evil virus of the other corrupts the 
 whole body politic. Now it is evident that a min-
 
 300 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 ister of religion cannot be present as a participant 
 in the doings of the primary any more than he can 
 be present as a participant in the doings of a house 
 of shame. His very presence there is a rebuke or 
 a surrender. If he dares to exercise his office of a 
 prophet, and reprove the iniquity of the primary, 
 he is told in language more forcible than polite 
 that the primary is not a prayer meeting. He is 
 made to understand in the most unmistakable man- 
 ner that religion is not politics, nor politics re- 
 ligion. 
 
 In the great majority of American minds this 
 assertion that politics is not religion would have 
 the force of a self-evident axiom ; and yet the whole 
 history of the world proves that while religion is 
 much more than politics yet politics is religion. 
 Woodrow Wilson* in his treatise on "The State," 
 speaking of the government of the ancient Greek 
 cities, says: "In every way the political life of the 
 city spoke of religion. There was a city hearth in 
 the prytaneum on which a fire sacred to the city's 
 gods was kept ceaselessly burning; there were pub- 
 lic repasts at which, if not the whole people, at 
 least representatives sat down to break the sacred 
 
 *Woodrow Wilson, The State, p. 31.
 
 THE AMERICAN CHURCH-STATE. yn 
 
 cake and pour out the consecrated wine to the gods ; 
 the council feast to which the King invited the 
 elders, though also a social feast, was first of all a 
 sacred, sacrificial repast, over which the King pre- 
 sided by virtue of his priestly office. There were 
 festivals at certain times in honor of the several 
 deities of the city, and the council always convened 
 in a temple. Politics was a religion." 
 
 And what is true of ancient Greece is true of all 
 great nations and all pure politics. Gerritt Smith, 
 in his pamphlet on "The one test of character," 
 has expressed this thought so aptly that I will give 
 it in his words : "We are told, that a church should 
 not meddle with politics. There is, however, 
 nothing on earth that should give it more concern. 
 Politics, rightly interpreted, are the care of all for 
 each, the protection afforded by the whole people 
 to every one of the people; and hence a church 
 might better omit to apply the principles of Christ 
 to everything else than to politics. Manifestly, I am 
 not speaking here of the satanic politics, which 
 have ever cursed every part of the world, but of 
 the heaven-commanded and heaven-imbued poli- 
 tics, which have never yet extended their blessed 
 sway over any people."
 
 302 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 It is only a passing phase of modern thought 
 that has attempted to separate the religious and po- 
 litical interests of mankind. In the great permanent 
 thought of the world politics is religion. Politics 
 was religion when Moses led the Children of 
 Israel up and out of Egypt and laid the foundation 
 of the Hebrew state in the ten commandments. 
 Politics was religion when Isaiah poured his in- 
 spired scorn on the Egyptian policy of the Jewish 
 politicians, and when Jeremiah sternly condemned 
 Jehoiakim the son of Josiah, King of Judah, to the 
 burial of an ass. Politics was religion when Jesus, 
 the Son of David, based the Kingdom of God on 
 the beatitudes and the five negative laws of right- 
 eousness. Politics was a religion when the Greeks, 
 inspired by Athena and led by Mars, saved Euro- 
 pean civilization on the field of Marathon. Politics 
 was a religion throughout the whole period of 
 republican purity in Rome. Every Roman believed 
 that Romulus had built the city on the hill that the 
 gods had chosen, and that Numa, their law-giver, 
 was inspired with wisdom by a divinity. Politics 
 was religion in the days of Charlemagne when he 
 took churchmen into his council and made Alcuin 
 the chief adviser of the state. Politics was religion
 
 THE AMERICAN CHURCH-STATE. 303 
 
 when Henry of Germany sought Bruno of Toul to 
 work with him for the restoration of order in 
 Europe. Politics was religion when Langton, 
 Archbishop of Canterbury, at a meeting of the 
 barons, at St. Paul's Cathedral, produced the char- 
 ter of Henry I. and made it the basis of the Great 
 Charter of English liberties, which the bishops and 
 barons compelled John to sign at Runnymede. 
 Politics was religion when Cromwell and his Iron- 
 sides swept the armies of Charles I. from the field 
 of Marston Moor, and destroyed forever the doc- 
 trine of the divine right of Kings to rob and op- 
 press the people. Politics was religion when the 
 Pilgrims in the cabin of the Mayflower in the pres- 
 ence and fear of God constituted themselves a 
 commonwealth, and made themselves the seed corn 
 of the great American nation. Politics was religion 
 when George Washington knelt in the snows of 
 Valley Forge and prayed for the political salvation 
 of his people, and when the same man went from 
 St. Paul's church in New York city to his inaug- 
 uration as first President of the United States. 
 Politics was religion when Abraham Lincoln, in 
 his second inaugural, gave utterance to the spirit 
 of religious consecration which for four years had
 
 304 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 kept him steadfast to a sacred duty, and, with 
 malice toward none, with charity toward all, laid 
 his life a sacrifice on the altar of his country. Poli- 
 tics was religion when Theodore Roosevelt, leaving 
 the limitations of his office, acting as the high 
 priest of American morality and religion, compelled 
 the labor leaders and the coal operators to come 
 before him and settle their quarrel that was bring- 
 ing misery upon the poor and anarchy upon the 
 nation. Politics was religion in the city of Roch- 
 ester when ministers left their churches and women 
 the sacred retirement of their homes and went upon 
 the political platform to plead for the purity and 
 integrity of our public school system, and to secure 
 to our children an education based upon the science 
 of pedagogy, and not upon the necessities of the 
 spoilsman. Politics is religion because it has to do 
 with major morals, with the relations of men to 
 each other in communities, with honesty in trade, 
 with gentleness in action, with truth in speech. 
 The nation exists as a polity for the purpose of de- 
 tecting dishonesty, for suppressing violence, and 
 for discovering truth and uncovering falsehood. 
 The one cry that goes up from man to God is for 
 justice. All the prophets from Moses to Jesus de-
 
 THE AMERICAN CHURCH-STATE. 305 
 
 clare it to be the will of God that righteousness be 
 done in the earth. God is righteousness and in 
 righteousness is His Kingdom established. 
 
 And the nation, the state, and the city have no 
 other function than to translate righteousness into 
 the definite forms of justice. When the Constitu- 
 tional Convention of 1787 sent forth the Consti- 
 tution which it devised for the government of the 
 nation it did so in these words : "We, the people 
 of the United States, in order to form a more per- 
 fect union, establish justice, insure domestic tran- 
 quility, provide for the common defense, promote 
 the general welfare, and secure the blessings of 
 liberty to ourselves and our children, do ordain and 
 establish this Constitution for the United States of 
 America." 
 
 Now can any man write a more perfect descrip- 
 tion of the Kingdom of God on earth or in heaven 
 than is to be found in these words? A government 
 resting upon such principles as these is not a god- 
 less policy; it is a holy religion; and all the more 
 so because the religion is unconscious, resting in 
 
 REL. & POL. 20
 
 306 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 the great eternal laws of justice as surely and 
 serenely as the earth rests in the law of gravitation. 
 When the people of the United States decreed 
 by constitutional amendment that the government 
 should never by law establish any religion, they 
 did actually establish the only religion that could 
 comprehend in its membership the whole American 
 people. A religion having as its basis the prin- 
 ciples of individual liberty and obedience to right- 
 eous law is really the religion of the golden rule. 
 Nor has this religion been simply a theory power- 
 less to work righteousness in the world. It has 
 created a great and happy people. Never before 
 in the history of the world have so large a number 
 of human beings lived together under one govern- 
 ment, so little restrained by governmental control ; 
 with so many opportunities, with so many advan- 
 tages, intellectual, social, and physical, as are now 
 living in the United States of America. This pop- 
 ulation has come from every region of the earth 
 and from races most alien to each other, and yet, 
 under the influences of the religious principles 
 underlying the American republic, these alien ele- 
 ments have been welded into one compact Ameri- 
 can citizenship. This wonder has come to pass in
 
 THE AMERICAN CHURCH-STATE. 307 
 
 a way so simple that it has escaped observation. 
 By a sublime instinct the American people have 
 created the organ that has resolved race and relig- 
 ious differences into the larger life of a common 
 citizenship. Gently, but firmly, the people with- 
 drew the education of the children from under the 
 hand of all lesser religions, and placed it in the 
 power and keeping of the larger religion of the 
 state.* The common school is the great resolvent. 
 The German, the Italian, the Pole, the Hun, enter 
 that school and come out Americans. In my 
 neighborhood are Italians who in a single genera- 
 tion have become ardent Americans. They speak 
 the language of the country and understand the 
 genius of its laws. Without the public school the 
 United States would be an undigested mass of alien 
 races. By means of the public school we are a 
 homogeneous people. We are told that the public 
 schools have no religion. But if religion be love, 
 and joy, and peace in the holy air of God, then the 
 public schools have done more to promote true re- 
 ligion than all the churches in the land. What the 
 
 *The religion of the churches has to do with the salvation 
 of the individual, the religion of the state with the salvation 
 of the community ; hence it is the greater.
 
 308 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 churches and denominations are doing their utmost 
 to prevent the common schools are accomplishing. 
 They are uniting the American people in a great 
 common religion, a religion based upon the scien- 
 tific method which finds God in the present truth: 
 a religion which is democratic, and finds the high- 
 est expression of law in the common judgment of 
 the whole people; a religion which is socialistic in 
 that it is controlled by the social organism, 
 the state, and knows no distinction of rank or 
 class, and looks only to the public welfare. As I 
 look about the city of my residence, and see our 
 beautiful schoolhouses, with their splendid equip- 
 ment, and know that, so far as this city is con- 
 cerned, this mighty molding institution is guided 
 and governed by the single purpose of giving to the 
 children the best physical, intellectual, and moral 
 training of which the children are capable and 
 which the appliances can secure, then, like John in 
 the presence of Jesus, I say these must increase, 
 while we must decrease. 
 
 All church and denominational differences are 
 melting away under the warmth generated by the 
 public school. We cannot hold our young in our 
 different churches, because they have learned in
 
 THE AMERICAN CHURCH-STATE. 309 
 
 our public schools that our differences are not es- 
 sential. They see no moral difference between the 
 Methodist and the Baptist, between the Episco- 
 palian and the Presbyterian, between the Catholic 
 and the Protestant, between the Jew and the Christ- 
 ian. They see that the common humanity is greater 
 than the denominational difference. And we have 
 all come to believe with our children. In our busi- 
 ness, in our social intercourse, in our intellectual 
 life, all sectarian differences have disappeared. In 
 life we have made, not creed but character, the 
 test of our approval. It is only on Sunday that we 
 go to our churches and work hard to keep our be- 
 lief that it is necessary to be a Presbyterian or a 
 Baptist, a Methodist or an Episcopalian, a Catho- 
 lic or a Protestant, a Jew or a Christian, in order 
 to be acceptable to God. But the children are 
 learning better than all this. They are reading the 
 story of man as it is found in the myth, the legend, 
 the folk-lore and the chronicles of all peoples, and 
 comparing this story with that of the Hebrew 
 people, they see at once that the history of this 
 people is not exceptional. That it has its elements 
 of myth and legend and folk-lore as well as the 
 Greek and the Hindu. So our children are begin-
 
 310 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 ning to catch a glimpse of that God, whose revela- 
 tion has come, not to one, but to all, nations, a 
 God who revealed Himself to our Aryan fore- 
 fathers by the name of Varuna in the stars; who 
 inspired the Greek with the worship of Athena in 
 the air; who made Himself known to Moses as 
 Jehovah in the burning bush ; and by the mouth of 
 the prophet cried: This is the name whereby He 
 shall be called, "The Lord our Righteousness." By 
 the study of comparative religion our children are 
 learning that God manifested Himself to the Aryan 
 races as Light and Power, to the Semetic races as 
 Justice, Mercy, and Truth. And in the last age 
 He focused these two great religions in the person 
 of Jesus, the Christ, who is to us Righteousness 
 and Peace and the Light that lighteneth every man 
 that cometh into the world. 
 
 This great church-state of America has driven 
 out the age-long hatred of the Christian toward 
 the Jew. In this church-state the Jew finds every 
 disability removed. He is honored or dishonored just 
 as he does or does not do justice, love mercy, and 
 walk humbly with his God. It is only a few Sun- 
 days ago that an honored Jewish Rabbi spoke
 
 THE AMERICAN CHURCH-STATE. 3" 
 
 with acceptance from a Presybterian pulpit. And 
 yet we cannot read the signs of the times. 
 
 It is because the interests committed to the state 
 are so vast that the primary, which is the source 
 of political power, is so vitally important. Our 
 city government has not only the education of our 
 young, it has our lives, our property, our health, in 
 its keeping. The two ministers of religion who are 
 doing the most for the common salvation to-day 
 are the mayor and the health officer. The 
 mayor is devoting himself with unselfish ardor to 
 the public welfare. The health officer, who has 
 many of the characteristics of the mediaeval saint, 
 has saved the lives of hundreds of children. For- 
 merly the average number of funerals of children 
 dying of cholera morbus in this parish in the month 
 of August was five. In the last few years we have 
 not had one, thus proving that scientific religion 
 is, at least, the physical salvation of the people. 
 
 If there is one point on which I would take issue 
 with the mayor in his admirable address it is the 
 importance which he seemed to ascribe to party or- 
 ganizations. Parties are simply voluntary organ- 
 izations of the people for the purpose of securing
 
 3i2 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 the adoption of certain governmental policies. Par- 
 ties have no legal existence ; the breath of the people 
 creates them, and the breath of the people can blow 
 them away. The mayor seemed to think that there 
 was some party organization that could stand be- 
 tween the people and their will. No such party 
 organization exists or ever did exist. Three great 
 parties have served the uses of the American people 
 in the course of their history. The Federalist 
 party, which under the leadership of Madison and 
 Hamilton brought about the union of the states 
 under the Federal Constitution; the Democratic 
 party, which under the leadership of Jefferson and 
 Van Buren secured the safety of the nation by plac- 
 ing it on the broad foundation of manhood suf- 
 frage ; the Republican party, which saved the Union 
 from destruction and delivered the country from 
 the curse of slavery. The so-called Whig party 
 under the leadership of Webster continued the work 
 of the Federalist in consolidating the Union, and 
 under the leadership of Clay was a party of fac- 
 tious opposition. The Federalist party passed 
 quietly away when its work was done. The Demo- 
 cratic party, after ruling almost uninterruptedly for 
 sixty years, came under the malign influence of the
 
 THE AMERICAN CHURCH-STATE. 313 
 
 slave power, lost the confidence of the people, and 
 went down to defeat in 1860, from which defeat it 
 has never been able fully to recover. The Republi- 
 can party was the creation of that religious enthu- 
 siasm which looked upon slavery as an abomin- 
 ation in the sight of God. It was the moral senti- 
 ment of the country that gave existence to the 
 party of Lincoln, and the people have not yet for- 
 gotten the years of stress and storm through which 
 they were carried by this political organization. 
 But there is nothing sacred about the Republican 
 or any other party; it must serve the people, or it 
 must perish. There is more than a strong suspi- 
 cion abroad that both of the existing political par- 
 ties are under the malign influence of a corrupt 
 commercialism. It is the belief of an increasing 
 number that our laws are being made, not in the 
 interest of the whole people, but in the interests of 
 a special class. We see our common councils, our 
 state legislatures, even our national Congress, sacri- 
 ficing the common welfare to individual and cor- 
 porate greed. This corrupt commercialism is mak- 
 ing merchandise of our office-holding class, bribing 
 the dishonest and brow-beating the honest. Now let 
 this suspicion ripen into conviction, and the party
 
 314 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 or parties responsible for this condition will be 
 swept out of existence by a more everwhelming 
 defeat than that which befel the Whig party in 
 1852, or the Democratic party in 1872. Parties are 
 for the people, and not the people for parties. 
 
 And it is with the people that all parties, states, 
 and churches have at last to reckon. As long as 
 these organizations in any way serve the purposes 
 of the people, the people will serve the organiza- 
 tions, and will continue them in being. But as soon 
 as an organization ceases to respond altogether to 
 the demands of the people then that organization is 
 on its deathbed, and its passing away is only a 
 question of time. Every organization, social, politi- 
 cal, and religious, carries within itself the princi- 
 ples of its own dissolution. Organizations are to 
 the life of the race what the human body is to the 
 life of man. They are subject to disease, old age, 
 decay, and death. In the day of our Lord Jesus 
 Christ those forms of civil and religious life in 
 which men had lived for ages had lost their power 
 to satisfy the souls of men, and the people of west- 
 ern Asia and of Europe forsook the temple and the 
 synagogue, abandoned the forum, and the academy, 
 and created the Christian church and the Christian
 
 THE AMERICAN CHURCH-STATE. 315 
 
 nations. For a thousand years the mediaeval church 
 was the teacher, the guide, the protector, of the 
 people of Europe. The church exercised over the 
 nations the care and the authority of a parent, but 
 in the fourteenth century the parent had grown old 
 and decrepit, while the children had come to man's 
 estate. The church could no longer meet the re- 
 quirements of the people, in consequence of which 
 the people went out of the church by the millions 
 and established the national churches as a tempo- 
 rary refuge. Not finding these national churches 
 adequate to their spiritual needs, multitudes of the 
 people seceded from them and created the great 
 denominations. 
 
 To-day the denominations, as well as the national 
 churches, are failing to satisfy the demands of the 
 new age, and the people are leaving them by the 
 millions, and are seeking new forms for the expres- 
 sion of their spiritual and moral life. It is in vain 
 that the churches and denominations plead their age 
 in justification of their authority; for their age is 
 the one thing that is against them. It is because 
 they are old and have lost their power of adaptabil- 
 ity that they are losing their hold upon the intel- 
 ligence of men. The churches and the denomina-
 
 316 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 tions are living to-day upon their past achieve- 
 ments. Men honor them and reverence them more 
 for what they have done than for what they are 
 doing. The Catholic Church sits in the modern 
 world as the aged grandparent of modern civiliza- 
 tion. As such we owe her veneration, but not 
 obedience. Her thoughts and wishes, like all the 
 thoughts and wishes of the aged, dwell in the past. 
 Her pontiff sits in the Vatican, and dreams of the 
 good old times, when all men were subject to the 
 church, and the church was obedient to the Pope. 
 But, sad though it be, the good old times will never 
 come again. The authority of the Catholic church 
 over the reason and conscience of mankind is gone 
 forever. 
 
 The national churches and the denominations are 
 the parents of the existing order ; but they, too, have 
 reached a point when parental authority is difficult 
 of exercise. The children have grown up, and 
 have a will and a mind of their own. What is oc- 
 curing in the religious and political life of the world 
 to-day is that which occurs in every household: 
 The boys and girls become men and women, but 
 the father and the mother will not see it; and the 
 consequence is alienated affections and broken
 
 THE AMERICAN CHURCH-STATE. 31? 
 
 hearts. Happy is that family in which the father 
 and the mother grow young with the children, and 
 receive from the lips of the children the wisdom of 
 youth. What is true of the family is true of the 
 churches. Happy is that church which listens to 
 the children as they stand in the midst of the doc- 
 tors, both hearing them and asking them questions. 
 The age-long tragedy of the world is this misun- 
 derstanding between the young and the old. Well 
 said the prophet: "Your old men shall dream 
 dreams, and your young men shall see visions."* 
 Dreams and visions, past and future, old and young, 
 are not these the necessary stages in the evolu- 
 tion of life? He that is young to-day will be old 
 to-morrow ; he that is old to-day was young yester- 
 day. Let the youth venerate his own old age in the 
 old age of his father, and let the father respect his 
 own youth in the youth of his son, and then shall 
 the dream and the vision be one. 
 
 Existing political parties in the United States, 
 like existing religious institutions, are smitten with 
 age. Political parties are, in their nature, much 
 shorter lived than religious organizations. They are 
 created by the people for a definite purpose. When 
 
 *Joel, XI. : 2&
 
 318 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 that purpose is accomplished the party ceases to be. 
 Because of what it has done a party may live long 
 in the affections of the people, and the people may 
 use it for general purposes even after its special 
 work is accomplished. But a party cannot live 
 forever simply upon its history. It must do the 
 present will of the people or it must die. The peo- 
 ple will never forget the debt of gratitude which it 
 owes to the old Democratic party for carrying it 
 through the great bloodless revolution in the last 
 century, by which political power was transferred 
 from the few to the many. Speaking of this revo- 
 lution in his "History of Political Parties in the 
 State of New York," Mr. Hammond says: "I am 
 now to approach a period in the political history of 
 this state when an event occurred in a measure un- 
 precedented in any other part of the world, but 
 which, highly to the honor of this country, and 
 fortunately for its inhabitants, is not unusual in the 
 United States. The event to which I allude is a 
 change by the will of a majority of the people, 
 peaceably and constitutionally expressed, of some of 
 the important and fundamental principles of the 
 government. I say important and fundamental 
 principles, because the sovereign power of creating
 
 THE AMERICAN CHURCH-STATE. 319 
 
 the Executive and one branch of the Legislative 
 Department of the government was in a measure 
 transferred from one class of men to another, and 
 because the power of disposing of nearly the whole 
 patronage of the state was actually changed, and 
 I may add, that one branch of the law-making pow- 
 er was abolished, and the functions held and exer- 
 cised by that department transferred to an individ- 
 ual. In past ages in every other country such a 
 change could only have been effected by physical 
 force ; here it was brought about by moral power."* 
 It had been well for the Democratic party if it 
 had gone on in its work of equalizing the political 
 life of the people, and had given political rights to 
 the laborer in the south as it gave political rights 
 to the laborer in the north. By drawing an arbi- 
 trary line, and being one thing in the south and 
 another thing in the north, the Democratic party 
 became the cause of its own destruction. Its al- 
 liance with the slave power, being in flat contradic- 
 tion to its own fundamental principles, caused it 
 to lose the confidence of the people and they went 
 out of it by the hundred thousand to form the Re- 
 
 *Hammond, History of Political Parties in the state of 
 New York, vol. 2, chap. i.
 
 320 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 publican party, the purpose of which was to limit 
 the area of slavery, and put in the way of grad- 
 ual extinction. The Republican party was called 
 upon to do more than it promised. It carried the 
 nation through the great crisis of its history, and 
 gave to it freedom and unity. For the work that 
 it has done the people will always hold it in reverent 
 affection. But the Civil War is over, and new is- 
 sues are upon us. Neither the Republican nor the 
 Democratic party is meeting the demands of the 
 new age. Manhood suffrage for the white and 
 personal liberty for the colored race are both 
 achieved. But they have not been made effective. 
 Of what good is manhood suffrage if its only use 
 is to vote one set of office holders in and another set 
 of office holders out; of what use is personal free- 
 dom if it cannot be exercised in speech and action. 
 Manhood suffrage should be used for the enfran- 
 chisement of man from industrial thralldom and 
 social disadvantage. Personal freedom should be 
 used for the purpose of securing and maintaining 
 personal dignity and personal power. The new age 
 is upon us; the age of industrial freedom and so- 
 cial equality; the age that is to deliver man at last 
 from bondage to man. In old time the princes and
 
 THE AMERICAN CHURCH-STATE. 321 
 
 nobles delivered themselves from the bondage to 
 the King; claimed and acquired the right to share 
 with him in the government of the state. More 
 recently the middle class, the merchant and the 
 lawyer, freed itself from dependence on the prince 
 and the noble, and became dominant in the politi- 
 cal life of the world. And now the great mass 
 of the people who do the world's work are pressing 
 forward to claim an effective place for themselves 
 in the social and political economy of the nations. 
 They are asking for themselves and their children 
 a share in those privileges which hitherto have 
 been the privilege of the few. They are demanding 
 decent homes to be born and to die in and sufficient 
 leisure for thought and for prayer. The miner in 
 the darkness of the mine is dreaming of light, and 
 the girl in the noise and ugliness of the factory is 
 thinking of beauty and quiet. The people are mov- 
 ing, and the old organizations must move with 
 them or perish. Serve or die is the stern decree 
 of fate. If the churches exist largely for the pur- 
 pose of supporting the clergy, and the political par- 
 ties for the purpose of providing places for the 
 politicians, then both churches and parties are 
 doomed. 
 
 REL. & POL. 21
 
 322 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 The church-state in America, which includes 
 all parties and all churches, has done great 
 things ; but greater remain to be done. It has given 
 political power to the people. But the people must 
 now use that power to secure industrial opportunity 
 and social betterment. We have learned how to pro- 
 duce, but not how to distribute. We have vast, 
 fabulous wealth at one end of the social scale, and 
 bare subsistence at the other. The forms of law 
 are used to divert the earnings of the honest and 
 industrious into the purse of the dishonest and the 
 idle. Widows and orphans are beguiled into buy- 
 ing undigested securities which prove to be undi- 
 gestible, and which rob the widow and the father- 
 less of their little all. To correct these abuses, 
 and to call the nation back to its high and holy 
 calling as a church-state whose duty it is to promote 
 the general welfare, to secure domestic tranquil- 
 lity, and above and before all to establish justice, 
 is the task to which the American people must set 
 itself without delay. 
 
 We are upon the threshold of a movement that 
 shall carry mankind to a higher stage of being. 
 No one is satisfied with the present conditions. The 
 rich are ashamed, and the poor are angered. The
 
 THE AMERICAN CHURCH-STATE. 323 
 
 time is at hand for preaching the gospel to the 
 poor. We will build no more cathedrals or 
 churches, if we can help it, until we have delivered 
 the poor from the slum and the sweat shop. We 
 will send no missionaries to the heathen to preach 
 a Christ whose name we glorify, but whose teach- 
 ing we despise. We will not ask the people to come 
 to our churches until our churches are purified from 
 a corrupt commercialism. When our Christian mer- 
 chants close their stores at a decent hour on Sat- 
 urday nights, then we can expect to have hearty 
 worship on Sunday morning. When these same 
 merchants pay proper wages to the girls and the 
 women whom they employ, so that these same girls 
 and women are in no danger of having to sell their 
 souls to keep their bodies alive ; when we have hon- 
 esty in trade and open dealing in corporations, 
 why then, and not till then, will the people think of 
 coming to the churches. What we need is a moral 
 and spiritual reformation, and we need it at once. 
 Our church-state is in danger. The abomination 
 of desolation is in the Holy Place. 
 
 How shall we bring this reformation about? I 
 hear you cry. Why in the simplest way in the 
 world : Heed the words of the mayor of Rochester,
 
 324 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 and go to the primary. Go first to the primary of 
 your own heart, and see that no malign and sinis- 
 ter influence rules your will. See to it that you sub- 
 ject your own petty desires to the general good. 
 Dare to speak the truth though so to speak cost 
 you friends and place and power. If the primary 
 of your heart be clean, then can you think of cleans- 
 ing the city, the state, and the nation. Go to the 
 primary of your home and bring up your children 
 in the belief that man is more than money, and that 
 property rights are always to be subject to per- 
 sonal rights. Then go to the primary of your ward, 
 insist that the meeting shall be open and free, meet, 
 not in a saloon or a barber shop, but in the assem- 
 bly room of your schoolhouses ; speak for decency 
 and order and open discussion; demand of your 
 alderman the same unblemished personal character 
 that you would demand of your minister; let the 
 man whom you send to a convention represent you, 
 and not some outside sinister influence; make your 
 primaries political schools for the discussion of na- 
 tional and state policies. If the old parties are cor- 
 rupt then form a new party that will do the will 
 of the people. Have large, wide, uplifting views 
 for yourself, for your city, for your state and your
 
 THE AMERICAN CHURCH-STATE. 325 
 
 nation, views befitting the high and holy religion 
 of justice and mercy and truth. 
 
 And as for you, O ye unprivileged classes, who 
 have been put off with words about trinities and 
 unities, about incarnations and personalities, the 
 worn-out terminology of the Greek dialectic, and 
 have been told that to say these things is true re- 
 ligion, know this that pure religion and undefiled 
 before God and the Father is this: "To visit the 
 fatherless and the widow in their affliction, and to 
 keep himself unspotted from the world." 
 
 Know this, also, that some of us are not going to 
 think so much of the heaven which lies before us 
 as of the heaven we can leave behind us. After we 
 are gone millions and millions will be born into our 
 great church-state of America and we cannot bear 
 to think that they will be born into a land of de- 
 praved ideals, of religious dissonance, and social 
 discontent. Before we close our eyes in death we 
 would like to see the promise of a better day, when 
 men shall no longer make gain their god; when 
 they shall no longer say one thing in the church and 
 do another in the world; when they shall cease to 
 quarrel about God, and try to obey Him ; when 
 the rich man shall not glory in his riches, nor the
 
 326 RELIGION AND POLITICS. 
 
 strong man in his strength; when this earth shall 
 be the home of a virtuous, happy, contented race 
 of men and women ; when all nations will be united 
 in the religion of justice, mercy and truth, and have 
 it as their mission to form a more perfect union, to 
 establish justice, to insure domestic tranquillity, to 
 promote the general welfare, and to secure the bless- 
 ing of liberty to themselves and their children.
 
 I 
 
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