NATIONAL CHURCH ESTABLISHMENTS.

The following Essay was addressed by Dr. Arnold to the "Hertford Reformer," he also wrote on the relations of Church and State, which had been examined in some letters in the same journal under the name of "Augur," by Sir Culling Eardley Smith.-Life and Correspondence.

I. YOUR correspondent "Augur" has entered upon a great subject, and he treats it like a man who has thought upon it much and well. No subject can be so important, for, in fact, it includes every other moral evils are ever at the root of such as are physical and political; and for moral evil I know of only one cure, and that is Christianity, by its double influence as a Religion and as a Church. This double character of Christianity is continually forgotten: strip it of either of its two essential parts, and you destroy its virtue, although not in an equal degree. The Church without the Religion is, as we all see, worthless. I do not think we enough understand that the Religion without the Church is comparatively powerless-that it benefits comparatively only a few individuals, while for the mass of mankind it produces effects wholly unworthy of the promises which were bestowed on it.

Augur understands the way in which the Priesthood has superseded the Church he speaks strongly of this evil; but he is mistaken, I think, in connecting the evils of a Priesthood with an Establishment. There is no natural connexion between them; for although where all men are beset with the heresy of the Priesthood, their Establishment, if they have one, will unavoidably bear the marks of their common error, yet the Church can never exist in its perfection without an Establishment, if men will but consider what an Establishment properly is, and what principles it involves.

The people of a certain country are, we will suppose, Christians; while at the same time they are politically sovereign; that is, they can impose taxes, make laws, and enforce them if need be by capital punishments. By being a sovereign society their control extends over every

part of human life; the education, habits, and principles of the several individuals of their society are matters in which they have a direct con. cern. But a Christian society with a general control over human life, with a direct interest in the moral welfare of its members, and a sovereign power of affecting this welfare by laws, rewards, and punishments, is already a church. It can only cease to be so by forfeiting, more or less, its Christian character; for it is manifest that a Christian government, acting in the name of a Christian people, is bound to shape its practice and its institutions according to Christian principles, that is, in every thing that relates to moral good; it is bound to do the exact business of a Church, nor can it resign this high duty without being most deeply culpable.

It is bound therefore to provide for the Christian education of the young, for the Christian instruction of the ignorant, and for the constant and public dissemination of Christian principles amongst all classes of its people. It is as much bound to do this, as it is bound to provide for the external security of society, or for the regular administration of justice.

Now by the actual law of England, there is a very large portion of the property of the country set apart for these objects; and it has been set apart so long, that it can in no sense be called a tax upon the private property of any single individual. What utter madness would it be to take this public property, and give it away to a certain number of individual landholders! It would be an act of folly unrivalled by the most wanton extravagance of the worst government on record;-it would be an act of direct robbery also;-for it is a robbery committed against society, when public property is given away to individuals;-it is a robbery against the existing generation and their remotest posterity.

That this portion of public property is not applied in the best man. ner for the fulfilment of its proper objects, may be, and I think is, perfectly true. It may have maintained a priesthood to the injury of the Church, because the priesthood so long set up an unchristian claim to be the sole representatives of the Church. The rector of every parish was said to be "persona ecclesiæ ;”—he is in law "a corporation sole," as it is called, because in his single person the rights of the church in that parish are held to be vested. Alter this in its proper measure ;-do not let the priest continue alone to represent the Church; -but restore the true and living institution which has been corrupted; --and do not commit the fatal error of extinguishing disease by death : of removing the evils which have impaired the excellence of the best of all institutions only by destroying the institution itself.

I therefore hold it to be an especial blessing that we have in England two facilities for reviving the efficiency of the Christian Church

throughout the country, such as we most of all desire. 1. We have an ample portion of public property already devoted by law to the especial objects of the Church, independent of any tax upon individuals, or any voluntary subscriptions whatever. 2. In the great recognized principle of the King's or Queen's supremacy, which may truly be called the charter of the Church of England, we have the truth clearly established that the Church or Christian society has the complete power of self-government, and is not subject to any privileged caste of priests, whether they may happen to be few or many, or whether their government be called a Presbytery, a Synod, a Convention, a Council, or a Papacy.

II. THE STATE AND THE CHURCH.

I assure your Correspondent Augur, that however different the roads by which we may at present appear to be travelling, the point at which we are both aiming is I trust and believe one and the same. My views of the most perfect condition of the Church have no reference to mere worldly expediency; I love to entertain them, because the Church, as they represent her, appears to me best fitted to perform her appointed work, of bringing many souls to God.

Augur, as it seems to me, imagines that a Christian State and Church must differ from one another, because his notions of a State are too low, whilst the Church, such as he conceives it to be, is rather the Church perfected, than the Church as it ever has been, or as it ever can become, except, as I think, through that very system which in his judgment is so degrading to it.

Of course if the object of a State be merely, as Warburton represents it, the protection of men's bodies and goods, then the ideas of Church and State are necessarily distinct. And the same conclusion follows also if we hold that the object of a Church, either solely or principally, is to perform certain external ceremonies or to teach certain abstract opinions.

But these are the notions of sensualism on the one hand and of priestcraft on the other, not of true philosophy and Christianity. The State has a far nobler end than the care of men's bodies and goods: the Church has a far nobler end than the performance of ritual services or the inculcating abstract dogmas-the end of both is the highest happiness of man; and this must be his moral happiness; but the dif

ference between them has sometimes been, that the State when not Christian has pursued its object ignorantly: the Church has always known how to pursue it rightly, but it has not always acted according to its knowledge. The true object of the State, which the old philosophers distinctly recognised and laboured to carry into effect, has been as we know continually lost sight of through the evil passions of men ; insomuch that Government has come to be regarded as a mere necessary evil, an encroachment upon individual liberty, not to be desired but endured; and of which the smallest possible dose, so to speak, is the most desirable. And the Church, through the same evil nature of man working in this instance by the system of priestcraft, has so fallen short of its true object, and so turned aside after a false one, that it too has been regarded as an enemy to man's happiness, and the most perfect school of all truth and goodness has been branded as the source of superstition and of folly.

If the object of the State and that of the Church be always in intention identical ;-and if in a Christian State it is really identical ;-that is, the Christian State and the Church have precisely the same notions of man's moral happiness ;-and if the State by virtue of its sovereign power can control men more effectually than any less sovereign society; if again they have neither of them of necessity a distinct external form, which cannot be made to assimilate to that of the other ;-then the two institutions may be identical ;—and that common object which both pursue will then be pursued most effectually when they are identical;―i. e., when the State is Christian, or to express the same thing in other words, when the Church is sovereign.

A hundred fancied forms of evil, will I know start up in the minds of your readers when they shall have followed me to this point. One set of them imagines that a sovereign Church implies spiritual tyranny and persecution; another fancies that to mix the name of State with that of Christianity, is to secularize religion, or even to dethrone Christ from His headship of the Church, and to set up a king or a parliament in His place. I believe that my abhorrence of both these evils is as great as that of any man alive; but if you have patience with this discussion, and these letters are not occupying the room of more interesting matter, it will not be difficult to show that the system which I am upholding implies neither of them, but rather repels them both.

For the present, I must consider Augur's arguments drawn from the addresses of St. Paul's Epistles, from which he thinks it follows that the early Churches consisted only of true Christians. Yet it is certain that those very Epistles notice evils existing in every one of those Churches quite inconsistent with such a supposition; and the particu

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lar expression translated in our Bible "Saints," on which Augur apparently grounds an argument, signifies not that those to whom it plied were personally holy, but that they were God's covenanted people now, as the Israelites had been formerly. For the proof that the utmost heterodoxy of belief as well as irregularity of practice were to be found amongst the members of the primitive Churches, and that they were therefore as much mixed societies as any existing Church is now, I would refer your correspondent to the following passages :-Romans, xvi. 17, 18; 1 Corinthians, iii. 1—3; vi. 7, 8, 15-20; viii. 9-12; xi. 17—34; xv. 12; 2 Corinthians, xi. 12—15; xii. 20, 21; Galatians, iii. 1—4; iv. 11 ; v. 7—15; Philippians, ii. 4, 20, 21; iii. 17-19; 1 Thessalonians, iv. 3—8; v. 14; 2 Thessalonians, iii. 11, 12; 1 Timothy, i. 6, 7—what is implied in the charge iii. 3; v. 22, 24, 25; vi. 9, 10; 2 Timothy, i. 15; iii. 6—9; Titus, i. 12, 13; Hebrews, iii. 12, 14; James, ii. 1-9; iii. 8-10; iv. 1-10; 1 Peter, iv. 15; 2 Peter, ii. per totum; 3 John, 9—11. See also the character given to so many of the seven Churches in the first chapters of the Revelations. And above all, I appeal to the character given by our Lord Himself, not of the world only, but of His Church, the Kingdom of God, St. Matthew, xiii. 47-50. Yet this Church so described as containing alike both good and evil, is compared, v. 33, to the leaven which influences the whole mass;-and this the Christian Church, with all its corruptions has done and will do ever.

Let Augur also consider the mixed multitudes of three thousand persons at a time who were sometimes admitted into the Church, exactly as was the case when Augustine first preached in England. Is it possible to conceive that all these men were deserving of the name of Saints, as implying personal holiness? The system of the Apostles was not to set out with a select society, which if they had done, Christianity could never have triumphed as it did; but to receive in the first instance all who were willing to come, and then by a gradual process to purify them more and more. And, in point of fact, the Christian Church at the end of the first century, and in the second, had a stricter discipline, and enjoyed generally a higher standard of truth and holiness, than it had done for some years after its first foundation.

I would gladly therefore include in the Church all nominal Christians, and by so doing we should greatly increase its efficacy, and it might be raised gradually, not in our days certainly, but in days to come, to as great a degree of purity as was ever attained by the smallest and most exclusive congregation. For we should remember how much of real evil will still lurk in the narrowest sect that most vaunts its purity; all those bad passions of covetousness, envy, and uncharitableness,