Church and State as Seen in the Formation of Christendom

As, then, we considered lately the position of man as to his knowledge of God and of himself in the “many days” which ensued after the fall before the death of Abel, so let us glance at his condition in these same respects at the starting-point of this new life of man. First of all, out of the wreck of the old world Noah had carried the two institutions, one of which makes the human family in its natural increase, while the other constitutes its spiritual life – marriage and sacrifice. In marriage we have the root of society; in sacrifice the root of religion. These had not perished, neither had they changed in character. They were the never-displaced foundation of the race, an heirloom of paradise never lost; marriage, as established in the primeval sanctity before man fell, sacrifice as superadded to man’s original worship of adoration, thanksgiving, and prayer immediately upon his fall, in token of his future recovery. God, in selecting Noah to repair the race, made him, in so far like to Adam, the head of the two orders, King and Priest, and from that double headship the actual government of the world through all the lines of his posterity descends.

Thirdly, we find in Noah’s family the divine authority of government expressly established; for in the protection thrown over human life the power to take it away in case of grievous crime is also given. Authority to take life away belongs of right to the giver of life alone. He here bestows the vicarious exercise of it upon that family which was likewise the first State, and the fountain-head of actual human society. “At the hand of every man, and of his brother, will I require the life of man: whosoever shall shed man’s blood, his blood shall be shed, for man was made to the image of God. But increase you, and multiply, and go upon the earth, and fill it.” We have then the charter here of human society;⁸ the delegation to it of supreme power by the Head of all power, to be vicariously exercised henceforward over the whole race as it went out, conquered, and replenished the earth; the sacredness of man’s life declared, in virtue of that divine image according to which he alone of all creatures upon the earth was made, yet power over that life for the punishment of crime committed to man himself in the government established by God. An absolute dominion over all beasts was given at the same time to man; first for himself, in virtue of his distinction from the beast, in virtue of the divine image resting upon him, a delegation of divine power was set up in the midst of him, the supreme exercise of which is the power of life and death. Civil government therefore was no less created by God than marriage, and sacrifice, with the religious offices belonging to it. Like them it was ratified afresh in the race at this its second starting-point.

But, fourthly, it was as Father and Head of the race that the first act of Noah leaving the ark was to offer sacrifice; he offered it for himself and for all his children. With him, as offering in a public act the homage of his race, the great covenant of which we have been speaking was made. Besides the divine things bound together in the institution of sacrifice – the accord of four acts, adoration, thanksgiving, prayer, and expiation, which express man’s knowledge of his condition of God’s sovereignty, and of his own last end, as well as the dedication of his will to God – great temporal promises, such as the dominion over all other creatures, and the filling the earth with his race, promises which belong to man as one family and one race, were made to Noah in this solemn covenant ratified in sacrifice. The common hopes of the whole community for the present life and the future also were jointly represented in it. It is, in fact, the alliance of the civil government with religion, of which we see here the solemn ratification. Noah the Father, the King, and the Priest, sacrifices for all, where all have a common hope, a common belief, a common knowledge, a life not only as individual men, but as a family, as a race, as a society.

Thus in marriage, in sacrifice, in the vicarial exercise of divine power by civil government, and in the alliance of that government with the worship of God, we have the four central pillars on which the glorious dome of a sacred civilisation in the human family, when it should be conterminous with the whole earth, was intended to rest. These four things date from the beginning of the race; they precede heathenism, and they last through it. Greatly as man in the exercise of his free-will may rage against them, grievously as he may impair their harmony, and even distort by his sin the vast good which that harmony ensures and guards into partial evil, yet he will not avail to destroy the fabric of human society resting upon them before the Restorer comes.

Noah having lived 600 years before the flood, and having been the preacher of justice for 120 years to a world which would not listen to him, has his life prolonged for 350 years after the flood. During this time he is to be viewed as the great Teacher of his family, like Adam when he came out of Paradise. What the Fall was in the mouth of Adam the Deluge was in the mouth of Noah, a great example of punishment inflicted on man for the disregard of God as his end. It is hard to see how God could have more completely guarded those two beginnings of human society from the corruption of error and the taint of unfaithfulness than by the mode in which He caused them to arise, in that He formed them both through the teaching of a family by the mouth of a Parent, and the government of a race by the headship of its Author. For the larger society sprung actually out of brethren as the brethren themselves out of one parent. “They have,” to use Bossuet’s striking recapitulation, “one God, one object, one end, a common origin, the same blood, a common interest, a mutual need of each other, as well for the business of life as for its enjoyments.” And one common language, it may be added, serves as the outward expression, the witness, and the bond of a society so admirably compacted, based, as it would seem, on so immovable a foundation.

Let us sum up in three words the history so far as it has yet been recorded. The foundation of all is man coming forth by creation out of the hand of God. He comes forth as one family in Adam. Falling from his high estate by his Father’s sin, he receives a religion guarded and expressed by a specific rite of worship, which records his fall, and prophesies his restoration. After this the family springs from parents united in a holy bond, which, as it carries on the natural race, is likewise the image of a future exaltation. As he increases and multiplies the divine authority is vicariously exercised in the government of the race as a society. That government is strictly allied with his religion. It is most remarkable that the last end of man dominates the whole history; that is, all the temporal goods of man from the beginning depend on his fidelity to God. Disregard of this works the Fall; the same disregard works the Deluge. It remains to show how that compact and complete society instituted under Noah depended, as to the maintenance in unimpaired co-operation of the great goods we have just enumerated, upon the free-will of man to preserve his fidelity to God; that is, to show how in the constant order of human things there is an inherent subordination of the temporal to the spiritual good, as for the individual so for the race.

2. —The Divine and Human Society in the Dispersion

The divine narrative of the beginning of human society ends with an event of which the consequences remain to the present day, and from which all the actual nations of the earth take their rise. The blessing and command given to Noah and his family were, “Increase and multiply and fill the earth.” It would seem that the family of man continued in that highly privileged and guarded state which has just been described during five generations, comprehending perhaps the life of Noah and Shem. Of all this time it is said, “The earth was of one tongue and the same speech.” The division of the earth among the families of a race by virtue of a natural growth, which was itself the effect of the divine blessing and command, did not carry with it as a condition of that growth the withdrawal of so great a privilege as the unity of language. God had formed the human family out of one; had built it up by marriage; cemented it by a religious rite of highest meaning; crowned it with His own delegated authority of government, and sanctified that government by its alliance with religion. Unity of language is as it were the expression of all these blessings. The possession of language by the first man, the outer vocalised word, corresponding to the inner spiritual word of reason, was a token of the complete intellectual nature inhabiting a corporeal frame – a fact expressed by the doctrine that the soul is the form of the body – which constituted his first endowment. And in a proportionate manner the possession of one language as the exponent of mind and heart by his race, was the most effective outward bond of inward unity which could tie the race together, whatever its numerical and local extension might be. It is to be noted that though the cause of the deluge was that “the earth was corrupted before God, and was filled with iniquity” (Gen. vii. 11), yet God had not withdrawn from man the unity of language, perhaps because the revolt of man had not hitherto reached to a corruption of his thought of the Divine Nature itself. But now ensued an act of human pride and rebellion which led God Himself to undo the bond of society, consisting in unity of language, in order to prevent a greater evil. The sin is darkly recorded, as if some peculiar abomination lay hid underneath the words; the punishment, on the contrary, is made conspicuous. “And the earth was of one tongue and the same speech. And when they removed from the east, they found a plain in the land of Sennaar and dwelt in it. And each one said to his neighbour, Come, let us make brick and bake them with fire. And they had brick instead of stones, and slime instead of mortar. And they said, Come and let us make a city and a tower, the top whereof may reach to heaven: and let us make our name famous before we be scattered abroad into all lands. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the children of Adam were building. And He said, Behold it is one people, and all have one tongue; and they have begun to do this, neither will they leave off from their designs till they accomplish them indeed. Come ye, therefore, let us go down and there confound their tongue, that they may not understand one another’s speech. And so the Lord scattered them from that place into all lands, and they ceased to build the city. And therefore the name thereof was called Babel, confusion, because there the language of the whole earth was confounded; and from thence the Lord scattered them abroad upon the face of all countries.”

It may be inferred that the city and the tower thus begun point at a society the bond of which was not to be the worship of the one true God. As a matter of fact, thenceforth and to all time the name of Babel has passed into the languages of men as signifying the City of Confusion, the seat of false worship, the headship of the line of men who are the seed of the serpent, and of that antagonism which the primal prophecy announced as the issue of the fall.

But the severity of the punishment and its nature seem further to indicate that we are here in presence of the beginning of the third great sin of the human race, in which, as in the former, the free-will of man, his inalienable prerogative and the instrument of his trial, runs athwart the purpose of God. The first was the sin of Adam’s disobedience resulting in the Fall; the second the universal iniquity of the race punished by the Deluge; the third is the corruption of the idea of God by setting up many gods instead of one, a desertion of God as the source of man’s inward unity, which is punished by the loss of unity of language in man, the voice of the inward unity, as it is also the chief stay and bond of his outward unity. The multiplication of the race and its propagation in all lands was part of the original divine intention. When the bond of living together in one place and under one government was withdrawn, there remained unity of worship and unity of language to continue and to support the unity of the race. Man was breaking his fealty to God not only by practical impiety, as in the time before the flood, but by denial of the Divine Nature itself as the One Infinite Creator and Father; God replied by withdrawing from rebellious vassals that unity of language which was the mark and bond of their living together as children of one Parent. With the record of this event Moses closes his history of the human race as one family, which he had up to this point maintained. He had hitherto strongly marked its unity in its creation, in its fall through Adam, in its first growth after the fall, and in the common punishment which descended upon it in the flood, and again in its second growth and expansion from Noah. Language is the instrument of man’s thought, and the possession of one common language the most striking token of his unity; and here, after recording the withdrawal of that token by a miraculous act of God in punishment of a great sin, Moses parts from all mention of the race as one. He proceeds at once to give the genealogy of Shem’s family as the ancestor of Abraham, and then passes to the call of Abraham as the foundation of the promised people. He never reverts to the nations as a whole, whom he has conducted to the point of their dispersion and there leaves.

Through this great sin the division of the earth by the human family started not in blessing, but in punishment. “The Lord scattered them abroad upon the face of all countries.” He who had made the unity of Noah’s family, Himself untied it, and we may conceive that He did so because of that greatest of all crimes, the division of the Divine Nature by man in his conception of it, his setting up many gods instead of one.

Let us see how this sin impaired, and more and more broke down, that privileged civilisation brought by Noah from before the flood, and set up by him in his family.

If God be conceived as more than one, He ceases by that very conception to be self-existing from eternity, immense, infinite, and incomprehensible, he ceases also to have power, wisdom, and goodness in an infinite plenitude; and, further, He ceases to be the one Creator, Ruler, and Rewarder of men.

Thus the conception of more gods than one carries with it an infinite degradation of the Godhead itself, as received in the mind and heart of man.

But it likewise unties the society of men with each other, and lays waste the main goods of human life. Thus it was in the case of Noah’s family. As it was planted by God after the deluge, it possessed a distinct knowledge and worship of Him, as the one end and object of human life. This knowledge and worship were contained, as we have seen, in the rite of sacrifice and its accompaniments. Proceeding from this, it possessed the love of God, obliging men to mutual love, a precept the more easy because it was given to those who, as members of one family, were brethren. From these it followed that no man was stranger to another man; that every one was charged with the care of his brother; and that a unity of interest itself bound men to each other.⁹

But all these goods are dependent on the first. For if men do not worship one and the same God, as the Creator, the Ruler, and the Rewarder of all, their life ceases at once to have one end and object; their love to each other is deprived of its root, for they suppose themselves to be the creatures of different makers, or not to be made at all, to spring out of the earth, or to come into the world no one knows how, whence, or wherefore. Again, the natural brotherhood of man depends on his origin from one family, which must be the creature of one maker. And if the root of this natural affection and brotherhood be withered, men become strange to each other, rivals in their competition for the visible goods of life; they cease to care for others, and cease to be united in one interest.

When the family which had formed a patriarchal state became by natural growth too large to live together, the natural process for it was that it should swarm, and each successive swarm become a patriarchal state. Here was in each the germ of a nation, as they occupied various countries. Naturally, they would have parted in friendship, and if the bond of belief and of language had continued unbroken, they would have become a family of nations; they would each have carried out and propagated the original society from which they sprang without alloy or deterioration.

What actually took place was this. The division of the race into separate stems, and the corruption of the conception of God into separate divinities, pursued a parallel course, until the deities became as national as the communities over which they presided. As there ceased to be in their thought one God of the whole earth, they ceased to believe in one race of man, nor does any good seem to have more utterly perished from the peoples who sprung out of this dispersion than the belief in the universal brotherhood of man; and the conduct which should spring out of that belief, the treatment of each other as brethren.

That their having lost the consciousness of such brotherhood is no proof that it never existed, has been established for us by the new science of comparative grammar in our own day in a very remarkable instance. The careful study of a single family of languages in the great race of Japhet has proved beyond question that those who came after their dispersion to speak the Sanscrit, the Persian, the Greek, the Latin, the Celtic, Slavic, and Teutonic tongues, all once dwelt as brethren beside a common hearth, in the possession of the same language. Yet, in ancient times, it never crossed the mind of the Greek that he was of the same family with the Persian, by whose multitudinous inroad he was threatened; to him the barbarian, that is the man who did not speak his tongue, was his enemy, not a brother. As little did the Saxon, when he displaced the Celt, and gave him, too, the name of barbarian,¹⁰ as not understanding his tongue, conceive that he was of the same family. It was with no little wonder that the first French and English students of Sanscrit found in it uneffaced the proofs of its parentage with Greek and Latin.

The study of the comparative grammar of various languages, when carried out as fully in other directions, may have in reserve other surprises as great as this; but the proof of unity in this case, where yet the divergence has proceeded so far, of unity in a family from which the greatest nations of the earth have sprung, and whose descendants stretch over the world, tends to make the unity of the original language of man credible on principles of science, independently either of historical tradition or of revelation, while it shows into what complete and universal oblivion a real relationship may fall.

With the belief in one God, then, fell the belief in one human brotherhood as well as the existence of one human society. Each separated stem became detached from the trunk, and lived for itself. It is true that each state, as it began, was patriarchal; but identity of interests was restricted to the single state; beyond its range there was war, and within it, in process of time, war led to conquest, and after conquest the conquering leader became head of the conquered. Thus the patriarchal state, in which the head of the family was its priest, passed into kingdoms compacted by war and its results, in an ever-varying succession of victories and defeats.

But it is our special task to see what portion of the goods, which belonged to the race when undivided, passed on to its several stems in the dispersion with which Moses closes his account of the one human family.

The universal society stops at Babel, and national existence begins; that is, a number of inferior local unities succeed to the one universal. It would be well if we had a Moses for guide through the long period which follows, but he restricts his narrative to Abraham and his family, and to such incidental notice of the nations with whom they come in contact as their history requires. When we reach the beginnings of history in the several peoples who took their rise at the dispersion, a long time has intervened. The bond of one society in a race seems to consist in unity of place, of language, of religion, and of government. Now for man in general the unity of place was taken away by the dispersion itself. As to language, the lapse of a thousand years was more than sufficient to make the inhabitants of various countries strange to each other and barbarians. Men of different lands had long utterly ceased to acknowledge each other as brethren. As to religion, the worship of the one true God had passed into the worship of many false gods in almost every country each one of which had its own gods, generally both male and female, whom it considered as much belonging to itself as its kings or its cities. This diversity of deities in each nation, and the appropriation of them by each to itself, was become a most fertile principle of division and enmity among men. But if man had lost the unity of religion he had created for himself in every land an institution which might be said to be universal: the division of men into bond and free, the institution of slavery. That condition of life whereby man ceased to be a member of a family invested with reciprocal obligations and rights, came in fine to be regarded, not as a person, but as the thing of another man, that is the institution which man had made for himself in the interval between the dispersion of Babel and the commencement of authentic history in each nation. Man, who had divided the unity of the Godhead, had not only ceased to recognise the one ineffaceable dignity of reason as the mark of brotherhood in all his race demanding equality of treatment, and the respect due to a creature who possesses moral freedom, but had come to deprive a vast portion of his kindred of the fruit of their labour, and to confiscate their toil for his own advantage.

There remains the fourth bond of unity, government, whether national, tribal, or municipal, without which social existence is not possible; and this, as the nations emerge into the light of history, appears everywhere among them standing and in great vigour. In the vast majority of cases that government clothes itself in the form of royalty; the king is undoubtedly the most natural descendant of the patriarchal chief, the father passing by insensible gradation into the sovereign. But whether monarchy or republic, whether the rule of the many or of the few, government, by which I mean the supreme dominion in each portion of the race over itself, of life and death over subjects, is everywhere found. Nowhere is man found as a flock of sheep without a shepherd.

Over these unrecorded years of human life, which want their prophet and their bard, sounds yet the echo of perpetual strife. If mighty forms loom among their obscurity, and come out at length with fixed character and a strong and high civilisation, such as the Assyrian and Egyptian, the Indian and Chinese monarchies, and so many others of more or less extent and renown, we know that states have suffered change after change in a series of wars. The patriarchal ruler has given way to the conquering chief; conquest has humiliated some and exalted others. What remains intact in each country, and after all changes, is government itself. This carried on the human race.

But if we examine more closely this race which is thus scattered through all countries, which speaks innumerable tongues, has lost the sense of its own brotherhood, worships a multitude of local gods, is divided, cut up, formed again, and torn again with innumerable wars, and has degraded a large part of itself into servitude, so as to lose as it would seem all semblance of its original unity, we yet find running through it, existing from the beginning as constituent principles which the hand of the Creator has set in it, four great goods.

1. For what hand but that of the Creator could have impressed ineffaceably upon a race, misusing as we have seen to such a degree the faculty of free-will, such an institution as marriage, in which the family, and all which descends from the family, is contained? The dedication of one man and one woman to each other for the term of their lives, for the nurture and education of the family which is to spring from them, is indeed the basis of human society, but a basis which none but its Maker could lay. It exists in perpetual contradiction to human passion and selfishness, for purposes which wisdom or the pure reason of man entirely approves, but which human frailty is at any time ready to break through and elude. If we could so entirely abstract ourselves from habit as to imagine a company of men and women thrown together, without connection with each other, without any knowledge, any conception beforehand of such an institution, and left to form their society for themselves, we should not, I think, imagine them one and all choosing to engage themselves in such a union, resigning, respectively, their liberty, and binding themselves to continue, whatever might happen to either party, however strength and vigour might decline on one side, or grace and attractiveness on the other, in this bondage for life. Yet this institution of marriage is found established, not, as was just imagined, in a single company of human beings thrown together, but in a thousand societies of men separated by place, by language, by religion, and by government. The most highly policied among them are the strictest in maintaining its purity; and the higher you are enabled by existing records to ascend in their history, the stronger and clearer appears the conception of the duties of the married state. It is surrounded with all the veneration which laws can give it, and the blessing of religion consecrates it. Take marriage among the Romans as an instance. Their commonwealth seems to be built upon the sanctity of marriage and the power of the father. The like is the case with China, the most ancient of existing politics. There is not one nation which has gained renown or advanced in civilisation but shows, as far back as you can trace its history, this institution honoured and supported. I leave to mathematicians the task of calculating what are the chances of such an institution springing up in so great a multitude of nations according to an identical rule, guarded in all of them with whatever protection religion and law could afford, except by the fiat of a Creator in the manner described by Moses. The signet of God impressed on Adam at his origin could alone create such a mark on his race; the Maker alone lay such a foundation for it.

We find this institution in the course of time and in various countries debased by polygamy, and corrupted by concubinage. These aberrations testify to the force of human passion, and the wantonness of power and wealth ever warring against it, but they only enhance thereby the force of the institution’s universal existence from the point of view from which I have regarded it.

2. Take, secondly, the rite of bloody sacrifice. It would be hard to find anything more contrary to reason and feeling than the thought that taking away the life of innocent creatures by pouring out their blood could be not only acceptable to the Maker of those creatures, but could be accepted by Him in expiation of sin committed by man. Yet this is the conception of bloody sacrifice; this was expressed in the rites which accompanied it; and besides this particular notion of expiation, which is the correlative of sin, the most solemn duties of man, that is, Adoration, Thanksgiving, and Petition, the whole expression of his obedience to God, and dependence on God, were bound up with this rite, and formed part of it. And we find this rite of sacrifice existing from the earliest times in these various nations; continued through the whole of their history, solemnised at first by their kings and chief men, and then by an order of men created for that special purpose, and in every nation themselves holding a high rank in virtue of their performing this function. What, again, are the chances of a rite so peculiar being chosen spontaneously by so many various nations, and chosen precisely to express their homage for their own creation and continuance in being, to make their prayers acceptable, and above all, to cover their sin, to serve as an expiation, and to turn away punishment. This is the testimony which Assyria and Egypt, which Greece and Rome, which India and China bear to their original unity. If God instituted this rite, at the fall itself, as a record and token of the promise then made, its existence through the many changes of the race becomes intelligible; on any other supposition it remains a contradiction both to reason and feeling, which is like nothing else in human history.

The institution of sacrifice comprehends with its accompaniments the whole of religion. It suffered the most grievous corruption in that it was offered to false gods, to deified men, to powers of nature, to those who were not gods but demons. Again, its meaning was obscured, and the priests who offered it were not pure in their lives. But whatever abominations were at any time or in any place connected with it, its peculiarity, its testimony to the unity of the race, to the power which established it, remain without diminution.