Egypt of the Pharaohs and of the Khedivé

by F. Barham Zincke

The History, then, of these two buildings throws much useful light on the history of the later phases of the progressive relations to each other of the State and of the Church; and of the rights, the duties, the proper field, and the legitimate work of each. The questions involved in these points have been answered very differently at different times, in accordance with the varying conditions of society: but the answers given have, on the whole, been such as to assist us in understanding two particulars of importance: first, that the character of the relation of the two to each other among any given people, and at any given time, is dependent on the conditions of society, then and there; on the point knowledge has reached; the degree to which it has been disseminated; and on the course antecedent events have taken. (The relation, at any time established, does, of course, re-act on the conditions which gave rise to it, and so has some effect in shaping, and colouring, their character in the proximate future.) And, in the second place, that there is observable, throughout History, if its whole range be included in our view, a regular evolution and ever-growing solution of the great question itself.

All the peculiarities, and particulars of the history, of these two buildings, such, for instance, as that they stand side by side, and yet are quite distinct from one another; that the Ecclesiastical building is very old, very ornate, and imposing, and was very costly; and that the Civil building is modern, but on an old site; that it too was costly, and is very ornate and imposing, and in its ornamentation and aspects affects somewhat the Ecclesiastical style; that they are in the hands of distinct orders of men belonging to the same community; that the work carried on in them is quite distinct, and yet that ultimately their respective work is meant to contribute, by different paths, and with different sanctions, to the same end, that is to say, the bettering of man’s estate—all this symbolizes with sufficient exactness the history and character of the conflicts, and of the relations, past and present, of the Church and of the State amongst ourselves.

I am here taking the word Church in its widest, most intelligible, and only useful sense—and which is the interpretation history puts on the phenomena the word stands for—that of the conscious organization of the moral and intellectual forces and resources of humanity for a higher life than that which the State requires and enforces. It is untrue, and as mischievous as untrue, to talk of Religion—that is, the effect on men’s lives of the doctrine which the Church has elaborated—as if it were something apart, something outside the natural order of things, something up in the air, something of yesterday, which has no root in man’s nature, and the history of which is, therefore, not coincident with the history of man. Like every thing else of which we have any knowledge, it is the result of certain causes. And in the case of this effect, of which the Church is the personal embodiment, the affiliation is distinct and palpable. Poetry and Philosophy are as much manifestations of it, as what we call Religion, when we are employing the word in its popular, restricted signification. They do, indeed, so entirely belong to it that there could be no advance in Religion, I might almost say no Religion at all, without them. And, conversely, Religion supplies to the bulk of mankind all the Poetry and Philosophy that will ever be within their reach. Poetry (which uses Art as one of its instruments of expression), dealing with things both objectively, as they appear to address themselves to us, and subjectively, as they are seen through the medium of our own sentiments; and Philosophy, dealing with the ensemble of things as they are in themselves—the two, working in these ways, and endeavouring to organize sentiment and knowledge, or, in other words, human thought and the world of external facts, for the sovereign purpose of nurturing and developing our moral being, if they do not give rise to Religion, yet have, at all events, largely contributed towards expanding, purifying, and shaping it. Every one can see how Philosophy and Poetry contributed each its part to the construction of the Old Dispensation. It is equally plain that Christianity originally rested on a profoundly philosophical view of the Old Dispensation, considered in connexion with the then new conditions of the world. And it was, precisely, because the view taken was so profound, because it went so completely to the bottom of all that then and there had to be dealt with, that it was felt and seen to be thoroughly true. For the same reason it was as simple as it was true. And it was because it was so entirely in accord with man’s nature and history, and with the conditions on which the world had then entered, that it was understood to be, and received as, a Revelation from God. This was the internal evidence. And in the old Classic world, which we can now contemplate ab extra, and without prepossession, we see that the only teachers of Religion were first Poetry, and then Philosophy: at first mainly the former, and afterwards mainly the latter. And thus were they the means by which the outer world, at all events, was prepared for Christianity.

If, then, we take the word Church in the sense I am now proposing (and I am concerned here only with the interpretation History gives of the phenomenon), it will help us to understand how it happens that every Church, at certain stages in its career, comes into conflict with the State, or the State with the Church; and, too, how it happens that, at certain conjunctures, the action of the State, as it is, is to restrict and to thwart the action of the Church, as it should be; and why it is that, in the end, the latter must always carry the day. It will also lead us to think that in the future the Clergy will not have the entire decision of religious questions; but that, strange as it may sound to us, the Poet, the Historian, and the Philosopher will, sooner or later, be able to make their ideas felt in the discussion and shaping of these matters. It has been so in the past; and we may suppose that it will be so again in the future. Even now the lay Prophet has no insignificant auditory, and it is one that it is growing rapidly in every element of influence. We have no reason for believing that the world will be content to leave, for ever, its own highest affair in the hands of those only whose function, as understood and interpreted, at present, by the majority of themselves, is to witness to what were the thoughts of their own order, in an age when that order thought for mankind; and did so, sometimes, not in complete accordance with the common heart, conscience, and aspirations of mankind, certainly not with what they are now, but rather with what the Church supposed would complete and strengthen its own system; at all events, always in accordance with the insufficient knowledge, sometimes even with the mistaken ideas, of times when the materials supplied by the then existing conditions of society, and by the then state of knowledge, for the solution of the problem, were not the same as those supplied by our own day.

In old Egypt—under the circumstances it could not possibly have been otherwise—the Church administered, and was, the State: the State was contained within it. The distinction between things civil and things religious had not emerged yet. This fact deeply modified the whole being of the Church. Its resultant colour thus came to be compounded of its own natural colour and of that of the State. This primæval phase can never again recur. The increase and dissemination of knowledge; the idea and the fact of civil as opposed to ecclesiastical, we may almost say of human as opposed to divine legislation, and the now thoroughly well ascertained advantage of the maintenance of civil order by civil legislation, have made the primæval phase, henceforth, impossible among Europeans, and all people of European descent. We may add, that it has, furthermore, become impossible now on account of the higher conception that has been formed of the duty and of the work of the Church itself.

The Middle Ages present to our contemplation the curious and instructive picture of a long-sustained effort, made under circumstances in many respects favourable to the attempt, and which was attended by a very considerable amount of success, to revert to and to re-establish the old Egyptian unspecialized identity of the two. This effort was in direct contradiction to the relation in which the early Christian Church had placed itself to the State; though, of course, it was countenanced, apparently, by the early history of the Hebrew Church, which, like that of Egypt, had necessarily embraced, and contained within itself, the State, in the form and fashion that had belonged to the requirements of those times. That it had been so with it, however, only shows, when we regard the fact, as we can now, historically, that society, there and then, was in so rudimentary a condition, that its two great organs of order, progress, and life had not yet been specialized; the ideas and means requisite for this advance not having been at that time, among the Hebrews, in existence.

The State, here, amongst ourselves, had, throughout the whole of this middle period, been asserting that it had a domain in which it was supreme; that the Church had usurped a great part of this domain, and was still endeavouring to extend its usurpations; and that there could be no peace till the whole of this usurped ground had been recovered. At last the State became sufficiently enlightened and strong to establish its supremacy in the domain it claimed; and to estop the Church from its usurpations. This was a great gain. The work, however, was very far from having been completed. What was done, though much, was in truth only a beginning. What further was required was that the State should forthwith address itself to the discharge of the high and fruitful duties that belonged to the position it had assumed. But the fact was that it did not yet fully and clearly perceive either what had become its own sphere, rights, and duties, or what had become the sphere, rights, and duties of the Church. Some, indeed, of the conceptions it formed on these points were entirely erroneous, as both the teaching of History—now better understood—and the inconveniences, the evils, and the necessities of our present condition have since demonstrated. The correction of these errors is a very important part of the task of the present generation. The unsettled character of the actual relation of the State and of the Church to each other, and the resultant uneasiness and tenderness felt by each, and the way in which, by these causes, each is at present crippled for much good it might be doing, are to be attributed to these errors. These are matters in which History is our only guide and interpreter. A knowledge of the origin, nature, aims, and fortunes of this long conflict in past times, enables us to understand its present position, and to foresee its future course. We are at a certain point in a chain of events: and nothing throws light on the events that are coming except the events that have been now evolved.

When ideas, through their having been traditional for many generations, have got a strong hold on men’s thoughts and feelings, it is impossible to break away from them, and in some matters to face in the very opposite direction, at a moment. Ideas grow, and decay: they are not subject to instantaneous transformations, like the figures in a kaleidoscope. This explains the partial acquiescence by the State in the theory that the Church was only the State acting in another capacity: as it were a committee of the whole House for some politically necessary objects; and with an authority that must be maintained. There was merely a colourable amount of truth in this. Practically, and relatively to the condition society had reached, it was a mistake; and one that was unworkable in every particular. The Church, whatever might have been the case in the early stages of society, is not now the State in another capacity. It has ceased to have now any directly political objects. It has no authority in the sense in which the State has: the authority of the State being such as can be enforced by pains and penalties, and by physical constraints; whereas the authority of the Church is only that of moral and of intellectual truth—as much as, and no more than, it claimed eighteen hundred years ago. In this matter its present advantages are that it has not to contend for existence against hostile established religions, and a consequently hostile tone of morality and of society; for what is now generally recognized, in the moral order, is precisely its own principles.

The logical and practical issue of this mistake was the mischievous conclusion that the teaching of all morality, including that which is necessary for the order and well-being of modern societies, must be left exclusively to the Church; and that the State must confine its own action to the repression of crime, and to the protection of person and of property; and this only by the way of punishment. Now each of these two propositions has, in a certain sense, and from a certain point of view, though not those belonging to these times, enough plausibility to enable a kind of defence of it to be set up; but, at the same time, each contains such an amount of real falsity to the existing circumstances and conditions of society, as to issue in incalculable mischief both to the State and to the Church; both in what it has caused, and is causing, to be done, and in what it has hindered, and is hindering, from being done.

This was a mistake which assigned to the Church work, which what have now become its constitution, its real objects, and the means and forces at its disposal, incapacitate it from doing; and which led the State to abdicate what is now its highest, and really paramount, function. It put both the Church and the State in a wrong position, and on a wrong path. It enfeebled, depraved, and shackled both. It brought them into inevitable conflict with each other. It made them both aim at what could never be more than very imperfectly attained by the means they were respectively endeavouring to employ. Its results were confusion, anarchy, and failure. Hence came about the neglect by the State of national education. And hence the claims of the Church to educate the nation. Hence the fierce contradictions to these claims, expressed in a blind demand, as if that were the only way of effectually contradicting them, for secular education, that is to say, for the exclusion of morality from education, and its limitation to an acquaintance with the instruments of knowledge, plus a little physical instruction. This would make things far worse than they are at present. It would be prohibiting the acquisition, by those who are now the depositories of power, of the knowledge and sentiments requisite for its right use. It would be creating, and setting at work, in the midst of us, the most efficient machinery imaginable for the general demoralization of the community. It would be going some way towards transforming the commonwealth into an aggregation of wild beasts, but of wild beasts possessed of knowledge and reason. The concession of this by the State would be the renunciation of its first and most imperative duty. Hence, in short, all the imbroglio and the evils of the present situation of this great question; and all the misunderstandings and hot conflicts between those on the one hand, whom logic, working with wrong data, has made secularists, but to the exclusion of secular morality, the chief point of all, and, on the other hand, those whose fealty to what is highest and best, and should be supreme in man’s nature, even when regarded only as a political animal, has obliged them to enrol themselves as supporters of (I am afraid we must say internecine) denominational teaching in the education of the people. It is obvious that, as it is the duty of the State to regard the community as a single family, and to endeavour to bring its members to act harmoniously together, it would be better, both theoretically and practically, to exclude the inculcation of these differences from the Schools of the State: that, if it must come, would come with less evil from the denominations themselves.