II

The problem created in this way is not in its essence a new one. Since the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire, the conflict between the national state and the church—whether conceived as an independent association within the commonwealth or as an international society—has provided some of the most significant passages of political history. The struggle for religious freedom in England (which in the event proved the spring of other liberties) was essentially a struggle to secure the right of voluntary religious associations to determine their own religious life and practices; and while the legal decision in the Scottish Churches’ case was a revival of the Austinian doctrine of state-sovereignty, and an assertion on the part of the state of its own right to sit in judgment upon the religious proceedings of a church, the ensuing situation proved so impossible (as has already been pointed out) that the legal decision had to be annulled by a special piece of legislation. Since that decision most of the “free” churches in England have taken steps to safeguard themselves against similar intrusions on the part of the state. In the present situation, however, such security cannot be absolute since the state still has something to say to the legal instruments under which the churches hold their temporalities. But the entire episode shows how clear is the British sense that the omnicompetency of the state does not extend into the sphere of religious life and practice; and the “Life and Liberty” movement in the Established Church of England is an indication that the control of the state even over a state church is not beyond challenge.

The success with which the independent religious association has established its right to live in the face of the state is probably due to the circumstance that the region in which it claimed freedom was strictly defined; and it may be argued that the state has been on the whole more successful in resisting the claims of the church as an international society because those claims were allowed to enter regions in which the church’s competency could be reasonably denied. The case of Lamennais’ illustrates the point. Lamennais began life as a fervent monarchist and Catholic. He held strongly to the doctrine of the “two societies,” the temporal and the spiritual of which the King and the Pope respectively were the heads.[[39]] These two societies were distinct and within their own sphere, independent of each other. But when the monarchy encroached upon the freedom of the spiritual society, Lamennais broke with it, and when later the papacy insisted upon a withdrawal of his opinion that it had no rights outside the spiritual sphere, he broke with the papacy also. He acknowledged the existence of a borderland in which the interests of both were commingled—“that undiscovered country,” as Lord Acton has put it, “where church and state are parted”; but the broad configurations of the frontier were plain enough. For the most part the relations of church and state as institutional authorities have consisted of assaults and intrigues and forays in this “no man’s land”; and it has not been historically to the advantage of either. And the whole history of this conflict in France and out of it points to the moral that without some clear definition of function, the relation of the state to other associations within and without itself must be one of continual conflict—that is to say, of course, so long as the state and the other associations speak in terms of right and authority. Granted a measure of good-will, the task of delimiting frontiers should not be insuperable; but if a church or a labour union insists on its rights while the state insists upon its authority, the natural result will be confusion.

[39]. “Toute declaration qui supposerait de mon part, meme implicitement, l’abandon de la doctrine traditionelle de deux societés distinctes, independante chacune dans son ordre, serait non pas un acte de vertu, mais un acte coupable. La conscience ne le permet pas—.” This was Lamennais’ reply to a papal demand for retractation in 1833. See Boutard, Lamennais II., 387.