To the man who does not recognise the harmony between them, religion and the world are divorced, as it were. Religion has no place in politics or business, and scarcely even in family life. These secular matters begin to be considered as the devil’s concerns. A man must choose whether he will be a monk or man of the world, or still more often he tries to live at the same time two separate lives, the one sacred, the other secular, trusting that he shall be able to atone for the sins of the one by the penances and devotions of the other. This was the condition into which the dogmatic creed of the Schoolmen had, in fact, brought its adherents. It is a matter of notorious history that there had grown up this vicious severance between the clergy and the laity, and between things religious and secular, and that in consequence religion had lost its practical and healthy tone, while worldly affairs were avowedly conducted in a worldly spirit. The whole machinery of confession, indulgences, and penances bore witness as well to the completeness of the severance as to the hopelessness of any reunion.
But to the man who does recognise in the laws of nature the laws of the Giver of the golden rule, the distinction between things religious and things secular begins to give way. In proportion as his heart becomes Christian, and thus catches the spirit of the golden rule, and his mind becomes enlightened and begins to understand the laws of social and political economy, in that proportion does his religion lose its ascetic and sickly character, and find its proper sphere, not in the fulfilment of a routine of religious observances, but in the honest discharge of the daily duties which belong to his position in life.
The ‘Christian Prince’ of Erasmus.
The position assumed by Erasmus in these respects will be best learned by a brief examination of the ‘Institutes of the Christian Prince.’
First he struck at the root of the notion that a prince having received his kingdom jure Divino had a right to use it for his own selfish ends. He laid down at starting the proposition that the one thing which a ‘prince ought to keep in view in the administration of his government is that same thing which a people ought to keep in view in choosing a prince, viz. the public good.’[584]
Christianity in his view was as obligatory on a prince as on a priest or monk. Thus he wrote to Prince Charles:—
‘As often as it comes into your mind that you are a prince, call to mind also that you are a Christian prince.’[585]
Duties of a Christian Prince to his people.
But the Christianity he spoke of was a very different thing from what it was thought to be by many. ‘Do not think,’ he wrote, ‘that Christianity consists in ceremonies, that is, in the observance of the decrees and constitutions of the Church. The Christian is not he who is baptized, or he who is consecrated, or he who is present at holy rites; but he who is united to Christ in closest affection, and who shows it by his holy actions.... Do not think that you have done your duty to Christ when you have sent a fleet against the Turks, or when you have founded a church or a monastery. There is no duty by the performance of which you can more secure the favour of God than by making yourself a prince useful to the people.’[586]
Having taken at the outset this healthy and practical view of the relations of Christianity to the conduct of a prince, Erasmus proceeded to refer everything to the Christian standard. Thus he continued:—