In Scotland the relations of Church and State rest on the Act of Union, in France on the Concordat made by Napoleon with the Pope in 1801. In England there is no definite formulated agreement; and any such agreement would be entirely contrary to the English genius. But in a deeper sense, there is a contract, which is the product of 1200 years of history, of which the terms vary from generation to generation, and which is commended by each age to the forbearance and the statesmanship of its successors. The terms of that contract are in the main fixed by the State. In any case, whether the Church remains established or not, the State has ultimate power over her temporal possessions, as over all temporal possessions held within its territory. But, if the Church is to remain connected with the State, perpetual difficulties must arise, unless means are found to leave the Church free, in matters as well of doctrine as of ritual, both to legislate through her own organs, and to exercise an independent spiritual jurisdiction. It is for the interest of the State that the Church should be allowed to make her service for the English nation as fruitful, as powerful, and as little a hindrance to her own spirituality as possible.
III. Lastly we may consider the way in which the Church, quite irrespective of any direct connection with the State, as a natural consequence of its position as a spiritual society and of its teaching as to fundamental moral and spiritual truths, acts as a purifying and elevating agent on the general social life of mankind, on all its manifestations and organs.
If man is 'metaphysical nolens volens,' it is equally true that he is metapolitical, to use Martensen's happy word, nolens volens. And metapolitic means 'that which precedes the political as its presupposition, that which lies outside and beyond it as its aim and object, and by which the political element is to be pervaded as by its soul, its intellectually vivifying principle[452].' Every statesman, every real leader of men, has consciously or unconsciously, such a metapolitic; he holds, that is, certain views as to man's place in the world, as to the meaning and possibility of progress, as to the aims as distinct from the machinery of government, as to the relations of nations to one another and to humanity, which determine his general attitude towards all kinds of questions with which he has to deal. It is clear, for instance, that the groups of ideas which govern the fatalist, the pessimist, and the humanitarian, are widely different.
Now the Church is the home and dwelling-place of certain great regulative ideas as to man's destiny and function, and his relation to God and other men, the treasure-house to which they were committed, or the soil in which they germinated. These ideas, if accepted and acted on, or so far as accepted and acted on, must transform and remodel, not only the inward life, but also the whole outward life in all its spheres. Thus S. Paul deduces from the Christian conception of man, the duties of husbands, wives, fathers, children, masters, servants, subjects, rich persons, old men, old women, young men, young women. And so, now rapidly, now slowly, according to the vigour and purity at successive periods of the Christian society, now thrown inwards by periods of persecution or by the rising tide of evil, now borne outwards in periods of rapid expansion and missionary enterprise, now brought to bear on new conditions of life and new social groupings, now traced back to their source, and tested by the life and words of the Word of God, the Christian ideas of man, and of his relation to God radiate through the life of mankind, at once sustaining and correcting its aspirations, and its ideals of righteousness.
The root ideas of this Christian anthropology rest on the Christian conception of God as one yet threefold. Thus on the one side, Christianity attaches to the individual personality a supreme and infinite value as the inmost nature of one made in the image of God, redeemed by the self-sacrifice of Christ, and indwelt by the Spirit of God. And thus it develops the sense of separate personal responsibility. It is on this basis that what is true in humanitarianism rests. Behind all class and social differences lies the human personality in virtue of which all men are equal[453]. But on the other side it frankly recognises man's inherently social nature. It is not good for man to be alone. And family, State, and the Church on earth are training places for a perfected common life in the City of God.
The effect of this conception of man and his destiny is to place the State and its associations in their true position as not ultimate but secondary, as means and not ends. Alongside of the earthly kingdom, with its wealth, its honours, its ambitions, its wide and far-reaching influence, it sets another kingdom, the City of God, with its own standards, its own principles, its own glory, its own blessedness, as the end of mankind, the goal of history. 'The nations shall walk amidst the light thereof, and the kings of the earth do bring their glory into it[454].' And, in so doing, it judges and corrects the splendour of earthly States.
In thus contrasting the earthly State with the City of God, Christianity is no doubt exposed to the old accusation, that it makes men bad citizens. And the old answer is still true, 'let those who think that the doctrine of Jesus Christ cannot contribute to the happiness of the State, give us soldiers and officers such as it bids them to be, subjects and citizens as faithful as Jesus Christ commands, husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, children, masters, servants, kings, judges, living according to the laws of religion, men as punctual in their payment of taxes, as pure in their handling of public funds as are the true Christians: they will be soon forced to admit that the maxims of the Gospel when practised cannot but give a State great happiness and great prosperity[455].' It is not too much but too little Christianity which destroys States; for passion and wilfulness are the great disintegrating forces of the world, and everything which strengthens individuals to resist them, so far strengthens the bonds of social union. But the service which Christianity renders to States goes far beyond this negative result. If the true meaning of progress be moral, and not material, there can be no greater contribution to the well-being of society than that of maintaining the Christian type of character with its humility, its purity, its sincerity, and again its strong and beneficent activity.
In the present discussion the State has been put first and the Church second. In order of time the State is first. And what has been attempted has been to shew how starting with the State and its institutions, the higher order which was initiated by the historical Incarnation (though not without preparatory and imperfect anticipations in earlier and especially in Jewish history), comes in to mould, to purify, and to supplement. But these words only express partial aspects of the whole process by which a higher order acts on a lower. It interpenetrates far more deeply than can be expressed in any classification of the modes of its operation. The Christian religion has been acting on the group of States which we call Christendom from the first days when stable organizations formed themselves after the entrance of the new life of the Germanic races into the remains of the dying Roman Empire. It has been the strongest of all the influences that have moulded them throughout their history. It has pierced and penetrated the life of individuals, the life of families, the life of guilds, as well as the laws and institutions, the writings and works of art in which they have embodied their thoughts and hopes. They are in a sense its children. It is impossible to regard them as S. Augustine regarded pagan Rome. But deep and penetrating as has been her influence and manifold her consequent implications with the existing national and social life of mankind, the Church is essentially Catholic, and only incidentally national. It is their Catholic character so far as it remains, at least their Catholic ideal, which gives to the different fragments of the Church their strength and power. The 'Church of England' is a peculiarly misleading term. The Church of Christ in England is, as Coleridge pointed out, the safer and truer phrase. And this fundamental Catholicism, this correspondence not to one or another nation, but to humanity, rests on the appeal to deeper and more permanent needs than those on which the State rests. It is thus that the true type of the Church is rather in the family than in the State, because the family is the primitive unit of organized social life. Not in the order of time, but in the order of reason, the Church is prior to the State, for man is at once inherently social and inherently religious. And therefore it is only in the Church that he can be all that it is his true nature to be.
[407] Law, Third letter to the Bishop of Bangor, second edition, 1762, p. 66.
[408] Martensen, Christian Ethics, special part, second division, Eng. Transl. p. 98.