This is a Semitic idea; but, then, so is the Church. The State, on the other hand, is an Aryan conception. The real religion both of Athens and of Rome was the State. These radical ideas of Church and State, to which we have grown so accustomed, are, in fact, the products of special races and the salvage of the centuries. The Romans invented “Empire,” the Athenians “Democracy,” the Jews created “Theocracy.”
It may be interesting to inquire how this idea of a spiritual Church—a colony from the unseen and eternal—has been in constant conflict with that other dominant idea of the State; and how, among the nations, England alone has made any serious or successful attempt to reconcile them. For these are the ideas, expressed or implied, of Disraeli. I take the liberty of illustrating these ideas afresh in my own manner, and in continuous commentary, rather than by considering isolated passages scattered through his books and speeches, many of which I shall quote later on. And the standpoint marked by the title of this chapter is the point of view which seems to me to distinguish the many varieties of the theme which he presents, and which evidently fascinated him.
A national Theocracy has always been rejected in the West. The Roman Church, whose ideal is an international Theocracy under an imperial form, is in essence anti-national and cosmopolitan; and for this very reason it became repugnant to those Northern races whose genius makes for nationality and independence. Moreover, it is unable itself to flourish without the temporal appanage of a State; and it therefore tends to become an imperium in imperio. On Western soil religion is unable to thrive as a living force unless aided by the equipments of the State, which the instinct of the West evolved, and to which it is prone; while a non-organised, inorganic creed can no more make a Church, which is a society of believers, than a paper constitution can make a state, which is the community individualised.
A national Theocracy failed also in the East because the faculty for creating a State was deficient. When once Theocracy, pure and simple, vanished from Palestine—“the fatherland of the Spirit”—Israel and Judah were confronted by their inherent inability to found a State. It was this, indeed, which gave rise to the Messianic hope, a hope which yielded to daily motherhood the consecration of divine destiny. For to lend an effective earthly sanction to the theocratic ideal, to reconcile without violence the government of a community under the Eternal and Invisible with the progress of a community under a visible chieftain, a perfect monarch, the founder of a golden age, was required—a theocrat king. The Jewish polity was a Church. All European churches, on the contrary, are polities. This is well recognised by Professor Ewald,[88] who proves that the State, as such, took no root and found no real place in Palestine. The tentatives towards a State conflicted with the native theocratic ideals of race aspiration, and failed to survive them. And when at length the Incarnation displayed the “Perfect King,” whose “kingdom was not of this world,” but “within you,” and whose Kingship was “without observation,” it was the very anti-nationalism of His teaching at a period when Rome had tinged Palestine with Western politics that perplexed or offended a perverse caste of fanatics athirst for national unity, although national independence had crumbled away. When, once more, the Apostle to the Gentiles laid the Pauline foundations of an international Christian Church, the Jewish nationalism, despite the sublime prophecies of Isaiah, grew doubly embittered, and closed its ears to that theocratic message, which was, in fact, the fulfilment of its highest aspirations.
For the ideal of the early Christian Church was undoubtedly an international Theocracy. On this very account it disgusted the Roman patriotism which despised it. But directly it became acclimatised in the West, and prevailed, it also underwent that modification of theocratic ideals which the West always entails. It threw itself into the mould of the State. It assumed the purple of the Cæsars; it “sent forth its dogmas like legions into the Provinces.”
This only happens in Europe; in the East religions are never politicised. The West seeks the tangible and turns to myth the wonders that are literal to the Eastern mind. In so far as the old Egyptian belief was in the priestly power, it may perhaps be termed oligarchical, but not in the Western sense. The Church of Buddha is a spiritual brotherhood, never a State. Islam, like that from which it sprang, is a Theocracy without any inherent organisation. Like it, it eventually chose a monarchical headship; and, like it too, its monarchy came to be cleft in twain. It is, I repeat, only in the West that creeds are politicised. As the earthly sanctions for Christianity coarsened through the centuries, it became at once Cæsarian and cosmopolitan. But the warfare between the so-called secular and spiritual powers, which, indeed, forms the history of the earliest Middle Ages, soon began to impair its birthright of cosmopolitanism. The invincible bias towards nationality of the Northern races asserted itself.
Dante, it is true, dreamed of a real Theocracy. But he was a strong champion of a monarchical State. He staked his hopes on that great Emperor—that “patriot king”—whose premature death dashed his vision to the ground. And after Dante, Savonarola craved a real Theocracy; but it again assumed that Republican shape which, two centuries later, was to play a greater, though as futile, a part in England. The Church one way or another throughout Europe perpetually tended towards becoming “a State within the State,” a “King of kings;” and in this regard it is not a little curious that the present Oratorians still obey the antique Florentine Constitution which St. Philip of Neri transcribed and embalmed as the rule of his order. In the same way the early American Episcopalians brought with them, in their three-yearly Conventions, that Triennial Parliament which William of Orange grudgingly granted to the Tories, and which Walpole was afterwards to repeal for the Whigs. Once more, the Pilgrim Fathers brought the ideal of Republican forms to America; but Republican forms soon passed into democratic facts. From Jemima Wilkinson to Mormonism and Christian science, sects and sectaries have abounded. No religious vagary has lacked its audience and its franchise. America exemplifies the disadvantage of lacking a national comprehensive Church in a country whose aspirations are national. Early in the seventeenth century the Presbyterians persecuted the Quaker immigrants with a ferocity of which Torquemada might have been proud; but in their turn the American Presbyterians eventually fell a prey to their own factions. While she was still a British colony, England unwisely forced on America bishops consecrated at home; but these very bishops were themselves rejected admittance by persecuting Presbyterians, who regarded Episcopalians as Jacobites, and taunted them as Papists. It was the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel that persistently sought to remedy the gross anomaly of the Bishop of London being the Bishop of America.
The Reformation in England was in its essence a national protest against internationalism. Out of it flowed the notion of a national Church like a “national party” (a contradiction in terms but a most remarkable actuality), which it, in common with France, theoretically justified as prior to Roman usurpation. Our Church is one at once rooted in the soil as a civil institution, a source of parish life, a security for local government, a bar at once to oligarchy and bureaucracy, against the exclusion of the many from public life,[89] the trustee of an estate which enables all to become proprietors of the soil, which is, as Disraeli termed it, “the fluctuating patrimony of the great body of the people;” and it is also by inheritance one paramount in the country as a spiritual authority, an educator, a social regenerator, and a mainspring of that tolerance and religious liberty which the great Whig party secured for our country. As Disraeli has pointed out repeatedly, the union of Church and State means the hallowing of the civil power, the investment of secular authority with religious sanction, the loss of which the State would be the first to feel and regret, should the bond be severed.
England, then, is the only nation that has reconciled through compromise the spiritual ideas of Theocracy with the dominant forms of the State.
But the English Church, headed by the English king, was soon faced by Puritanism; and of this phase Disraeli, through his father’s history, was a deep student.