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heart of man.

But it likewise unties the society of men with each other, and lays waste the main goods of human life. Thus it was in the case of Noah's family. As it was planted by God after the deluge, it possessed a distinct knowledge and worship of Him, as the one end and object of human life. This knowledge and worship were contained, as we have seen, in the rite of sacrifice and its accompaniments. Proceeding from this, it possessed the love of God, obliging men to mutual love, a precept the more easy because it was given to those who, as members of one family, were brethren. From these it followed that no man was stranger to another man; that every one was charged with the care of his brother; and that a unity of interest itself bound men to each other.[9]

But all these goods are dependent on the first. For if men do not worship one and the same God, as the Creator, the Ruler, and the Rewarder of all, their life ceases at once to have one end and object; their love to each other is deprived of its root, for they suppose themselves to be the creatures of different makers, or not to be made at all, to spring out of the earth, or to come into the world no one knows how, whence, or [Pg 30] wherefore. Again, the natural brotherhood of man depends on his origin from one family, which must be the creature of one maker. And if the root of this natural affection and brotherhood be withered, men become strange to each other, rivals in their competition for the visible goods of life; they cease to care for others, and cease to be united in one interest.

When the family which had formed a patriarchal state became by natural growth too large to live together, the natural process for it was that it should swarm, and each successive swarm become a patriarchal state. Here was in each the germ of a nation, as they occupied various countries. Naturally, they would have parted in friendship, and if the bond of belief and of language had continued unbroken, they would have become a family of nations; they would each have carried out and propagated the original society from which they sprang without alloy or deterioration.

What actually took place was this. The division of the race into separate stems, and the corruption of the conception of God into separate divinities, pursued a parallel course, until the deities became as national as the communities over which they presided. As there ceased to be in their thought one God of the whole earth, they ceased to believe in one race of man, nor does any good seem to have more utterly perished from the peoples who sprung out of this dispersion than the belief in the universal brotherhood of man; and the conduct which should spring out of that belief, the treatment of each other as brethren.

[Pg 31] That their having lost the consciousness of such brotherhood is no proof that it never existed, has been established for us by the new science of comparative grammar in our own day in a very remarkable instance. The careful study of a single family of languages in the great race of Japhet has proved beyond question that those who came after their dispersion to speak the Sanscrit, the Persian, the Greek, the Latin, the Celtic, Slavic, and Teutonic tongues, all once dwelt as brethren beside a common hearth, in the possession of the same language. Yet, in ancient times, it never crossed the mind of the Greek that he was of the same family with the Persian, by whose multitudinous inroad he was threatened; to him the barbarian, that is the man who did not speak his tongue, was his enemy, not a brother. As little did the Saxon, when he displaced the Celt, and gave him, too, the name of barbarian,[10] as not understanding his tongue, conceive that he was of the same family. It was with no little wonder that the first French and English students of Sanscrit found in it uneffaced the proofs of its parentage with Greek and Latin.

The study of the comparative grammar of various languages, when carried out as fully in other directions, may have in reserve other

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surprises as great as this; but the proof of unity in this case, where yet the divergence has proceeded so far, of unity in a family from which the greatest nations of the earth have sprung, and whose descendants stretch over the world, tends to [Pg 32] make the unity of the original language of man credible on principles of science, independently either of historical tradition or of revelation, while

it shows into what complete and universal oblivion a real relationship may fall.

With the belief in one God, then, fell the belief in one human brotherhood as well as the existence of one human society. Each separated stem became detached from the trunk, and lived for itself. It is true that each state, as it began, was patriarchal; but identity of interests was restricted to the single state; beyond its range there was war, and within it, in process of time, war led to conquest, and after conquest the conquering leader became head of the conquered. Thus the patriarchal state, in which the head of the family was its priest, passed into kingdoms compacted by war and its results, in an ever-varying succession of victories and defeats.

But it is our special task to see what portion of the goods, which belonged to the race when undivided, passed on to its several stems in the dispersion with which Moses closes his account of the one human family.

The universal society stops at Babel, and national existence begins; that is, a number of inferior local unities succeed to the one universal. It would be well if we had a Moses for guide through the long period which follows, but he restricts his narrative to Abraham and his family, and to such incidental notice of the nations with whom they come in contact as their [Pg 33] history requires. When we reach the beginnings of history in the several peoples who took their rise at the dispersion, a long time has intervened. The bond of one society in a race seems to consist in unity of place, of language, of religion, and of government. Now for man in general the unity of place was taken away by the dispersion itself. As to language, the lapse of a thousand years was more than sufficient to make the inhabitants of various countries strange to each other and barbarians. Men of different lands had long utterly ceased to acknowledge each other as brethren. As to religion, the worship of the one true God had passed into the worship of many false gods in almost every country each one of which had its own gods, generally both male and female, whom it considered as much belonging

to itself as its kings or its cities. This diversity of deities in each nation, and the appropriation of them by each to itself, was become a most fertile principle of division and enmity among men. But if man had lost the unity of religion he had created for himself in every land an institution which might be said to be universal: the division of men into bond and free, the institution of slavery. That condition of life whereby man ceased to be a member of a family invested with reciprocal obligations and rights, came in fine to be regarded, not as a person, but as the thing of another man, that is the institution which man had made for himself in the interval between the dispersion of Babel and the commencement of authentic history in each nation. Man, who had divided the unity of the Godhead, had not [Pg 34] only ceased to recognise the one ineffaceable dignity of reason as the mark of brotherhood in all his race demanding equality of treatment, and the respect due to a creature who possesses moral freedom, but had come to deprive a vast portion of his kindred of the fruit of their labour, and to confiscate their toil for his own advantage.

There remains the fourth bond of unity, government, whether national, tribal, or municipal, without which social existence is not possible; and this, as the nations emerge into the light of history, appears everywhere among them standing and in great vigour. In the vast majority of cases that government clothes itself in the form of royalty; the king is undoubtedly the most natural descendant of the patriarchal chief, the father passing by insensible gradation into the sovereign. But whether monarchy or republic, whether the rule of the many or of the few, government, by which I mean the supreme dominion in each portion of the race over itself, of life and death over subjects, is everywhere found. Nowhere is man found as a flock of sheep without a shepherd.

Over these unrecorded years of human life, which want their prophet and their bard, sounds yet the echo of perpetual strife. If mighty forms loom among their obscurity, and come out at length with fixed character and a strong and high civilisation, such as the Assyrian and Egyptian, the Indian and Chinese monarchies, and so many others of more or less extent and renown, we know

that states have suffered change after change in a series of wars. The patriarchal ruler has given [Pg 35] way to the conquering chief;

conquest has humiliated some and exalted others. What remains intact in each country, and after all changes, is government itself.

This carried on the human race.

But if we examine more closely this race which is thus scattered through all countries, which speaks innumerable tongues, has lost

the sense of its own brotherhood, worships a multitude of local gods, is divided, cut up, formed again, and torn again with innumerable wars, and has degraded a large part of itself into servitude, so as to lose as it would seem all semblance of its original unity, we yet find running through it, existing from the beginning as constituent principles which the hand of the Creator has set in it, four great goods.

1. For what hand but that of the Creator could have impressed ineffaceably upon a race, misusing as we have seen to such a degree the faculty of free-will, such an institution as marriage, in which the family, and all which descends from the family, is contained? The dedication of one man and one woman to each other for the term of their lives, for the nurture and education of the family which

is to spring from them, is indeed the basis of human society, but a basis which none but its Maker could lay. It exists in perpetual

contradiction to human passion and selfishness, for purposes which wisdom or the pure reason of man entirely approves, but which

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human frailty is at any time ready to break through and elude. If we could so entirely abstract ourselves from habit as to imagine a company of men and women thrown together, without connection with [Pg 36] each other, without any knowledge, any conception beforehand of such an institution, and left to form their society for themselves, we should not, I think, imagine them one and all choosing to engage themselves in such a union, resigning, respectively, their liberty, and binding themselves to continue, whatever

might happen to either party, however strength and vigour might decline on one side, or grace and attractiveness on the other, in this bondage for life. Yet this institution of marriage is found established, not, as was just imagined, in a single company of human be-ings thrown together, but in a thousand societies of men separated by place, by language, by religion, and by government. The most highly policied among them are the strictest in maintaining its purity; and the higher you are enabled by existing records to ascend in their history, the stronger and clearer appears the conception of the duties of the married state. It is surrounded with all the veneration which laws can give it, and the blessing of religion consecrates it. Take marriage among the Romans as an instance. Their commonwealth seems to be built upon the sanctity of marriage and the power of the father. The like is the case with China, the most ancient of existing politics. There is not one nation which has gained renown or advanced in civilisation but shows, as far back as you can trace its history, this institution honoured and supported. I leave to mathematicians the task of calculating what are the chances

of such an institution springing up in so great a multitude of nations according to an identical rule, guarded [Pg 37] in all of them

with whatever protection religion and law could afford, except by the fiat of a Creator in the manner described by Moses. The signet

of God impressed on Adam at his origin could alone create such a mark on his race; the Maker alone lay such a foundation for it.

We find this institution in the course of time and in various countries debased by polygamy, and corrupted by concubinage. These aberrations testify to the force of human passion, and the wantonness of power and wealth ever warring against it, but they only enhance thereby the force of the institution's universal existence from the point of view from which I have regarded it.

2. Take, secondly, the rite of bloody sacrifice. It would be hard to find anything more contrary to reason and feeling than the thought that taking away the life of innocent creatures by pouring out their blood could be not only acceptable to the Maker of those creatures, but could be accepted by Him in expiation of sin committed by man. Yet this is the conception of bloody sacrifice; this was expressed in the rites which accompanied it; and besides this particular notion of expiation, which is the correlative of sin, the most solemn duties of man, that is, Adoration, Thanksgiving, and Petition, the whole expression of his obedience to God, and dependence on God, were bound up with this rite, and formed part of it. And we find this rite of sacrifice existing from the earliest times

in these various nations; continued through the whole of their history, solemnised at first by their kings and chief men, and then

by an [Pg 38] order of men created for that special purpose, and in every nation themselves holding a high rank in virtue of their performing this function. What, again, are the chances of a rite so peculiar being chosen spontaneously by so many various nations, and chosen precisely to express their homage for their own creation and continuance in being, to make their prayers acceptable, and above all, to cover their sin, to serve as an expiation, and to turn away punishment. This is the testimony which Assyria and Egypt, which Greece and Rome, which India and China bear to their original unity. If God instituted this rite, at the fall itself, as a record and token of the promise then made, its existence through the many changes of the race becomes intelligible; on any other supposition it remains a contradiction both to reason and feeling, which is like nothing else in human history.

The institution of sacrifice comprehends with its accompaniments the whole of religion. It suffered the most grievous corruption

in that it was offered to false gods, to deified men, to powers of nature, to those who were not gods but demons. Again, its meaning was obscured, and the priests who offered it were not pure in their lives. But whatever abominations were at any time or in any place connected with it, its peculiarity, its testimony to the unity of the race, to the power which established it, remain without diminution.

3. Thirdly, let us take the great good of civil government. The human race is scattered over all countries, in divisions which range as to amount of population [Pg 39] from the smallest independent tribe to the largest empire. God suffered them to pursue their own course, to engage in numberless wars, and to pass through a succession of the most opposite circumstances, but He implanted in them from the beginning, and preserved in them throughout, the instinct of society, which develops in government. And He established that government in possession by the patriarchal constitution of life, which each portion of the race at its first start in independence took with it. By this He maintained order and peace, as a rule, in the bosom of each community; the smallest and the greatest alike possessed the commonwealth in the midst of them, which was thus, independent of walls and forts, a citadel of safety. Not even the most savage tribe in the most desolate northern wilderness, barren shore, or inland lake, was left in its self-wrought degradation without this support. In cultured nations, such as the Egyptians, Assyrians, Persians, Indians, Chinese, the State attained a high degree of perfection; while from the practice of the Hellenic cities Plato and Aristotle could draw principles of government which are of value for all time; and Rome, the queen-mother of cities, has been the teacher of state-wisdom to mankind. But what

I wish to note here is that civil government was everywhere throughout the dispersion of the nations a dam, constructed by Divine Providence, sufficiently strong to resist the inundation of evils brought about by man's abuse of his moral freedom. It was the moon in heaven which shone as a stable ordinance of God amid the storms and darkness [Pg 40] of human life in the fall of heathendom. It belonged to man as man and never departed from him; because as conscience was given to the individual, the witness and mark

of God, sovereignty was given to the community, a delegation of the divine kingship. "It is entirely by the providence of God that

the kingdoms of men are set up," says a great father.[11] "He gave to every one of them, said the Son of Sirach, commandment

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concerning his neighbour. Their ways are always before him, they are not hidden from his eyes. Over every nation he set a ruler, and

Israel was made the manifest portion of God" (Ecclus. xvii. 12-15).

The human race, from its beginning and through all its dispersion, was never in any of its parts without civil government. The headship of Adam, repeated in Noah, itself a vicarious exercise of divine authority, rested, amid its dispersion and partial degradation, upon each portion of the race, so that it might never be kingless and lawless: never a herd, always a society.

This great good had also its corruption, into which it very frequently fell; the corruption of tyranny. Against this the Book of Wisdom (vi. 2-5) warned: "Hear therefore ye kings and understand: learn ye that are judges of the ends of the earth. Give ear, you that rule the people, and that please yourselves in multitudes of nations. For power is given you by the Lord, and strength by the most High, who will examine your works, and search out your thoughts: because being ministers of his kingdom, you have not [Pg

41] judged rightly, nor kept the law of justice, nor walked according to the will of God." But this corruption of tyranny no more

destroys the good of government or its testimony as the mark of the Creator, than the corruption of marriage by concubinage, or

the offering of sacrifice to false gods, impairs the testimony of those institutions.

4. The fourth good which I shall note as running through all the nations of the dispersion, is the alliance between government and religion. Distance of place, diversity of language, division of the idea of God into separate divinities, which become the guardians of their several peoples, these causes all co-operate to sever from each other the various peoples and to make them enemies. But observe, at the same time, with this hardening and estrangement of the peoples from each other, the enlacement of all human life, public and private, by the rites and ties of religion in each society. At the head of the new race we have seen Noah offering sacrifice for his family, and a covenant with the whole earth struck in that sacrifice between God and man. That aspect of the public society towards religion was not altered during the whole course of heathendom, and in all its parts. It is a relation of the strictest alliance. No nation, no tribe of man, up to the coming of Christ, conceived any condition of society in which the Two Powers should not

co-operate with each other. "If it be asked," says Bossuet,[12] "what should be said of a State in which public authority should be es-

tablished [Pg 42] without any religion, it is plain at once that there is no need to answer chimerical questions. There never were such States. Peoples, where there is no religion, are at the same time without policy, without real subordination, and entirely savage." It is a fact which we see stretching through all the times and all the nations of the dispersion, that however tyrannical the government, and however corrupt the belief, still the separation of government from religion was never for a moment contemplated. A Greek or a Roman, and no less an Egyptian or an Assyrian, an Indian or a Chinese, must have renounced every habit of his life, every principle in which he had been nurtured, to accept such a divorce. For all of them alike, "ancestral laws" and "ancestral gods," went together. He who was traitor to the city's worship was considered to overthrow its foundation. In this point of view heathendom in all its

parts continued to be profoundly religious. It risked the life of a favourite of the people when the statues of a god at Athens were mutilated, as it was supposed, with the connivance of Alcibiades; and Marcus Aurelius, stoic philosopher as he was, offered countless sacrifices for the Roman people, as Noah offered sacrifice for his family; and the Chinese Son of Heaven is to this day the father of his family who unites religious and civil power in his sacred person, and calls upon his people for the obedience of children.

The corruption of this relation between civil government and religion, which was an original good of the race, was the forcible maintenance of the polytheistic [Pg 43] idolatry with all the moral abominations which it had introduced. But the corruption does not belong to the relation itself; it issues, as in the preceding cases, from the abuse of his free-will by man.

Here then are four goods, marriage, religion, as summed up in sacrifice, civil government, and alliance between civil government and religion, which we find embedded in the whole human society from the beginning, going with it through all its fractions, untouched by its wars, dissensions, and varieties of belief, suffering indeed each one of them by man's corruption, but lasting on. The force of any one of them as testimony to the unity of God who alone could have established it in the race, and so through Him to the unity of the race in which it is found established, and so, further, to the whole account of Moses, would be very great and not easily re-

sisted by a candid mind seeking nothing but the truth. But how great is the cumulative evidence of the four together to the exactness

of the account of the race's origin, establishment, and education, which we receive through Moses.

How strangely also are these goods of the race contrasted each one of them and all together with a great evil, universal like them, but man's own invention, the result of his wars and of the destruction of the feeling of brotherhood, in the various portions into which the race divided. The hideous plague-spot of slavery, which yet is one institution running through the race, attests also its unity, attests by its contrast with the four goods, by its practical denial of their beneficent action [Pg 44] so far as the slave is concerned, the degradation of the race from that condition of a family having one end in the worship of one God, one brotherhood, a common care and charge of its members, a common interest in which it started.

The sum then of the whole period which begins from the dispersion of mankind at Babel and runs on to the coming of Christ is

the progressive moral degradation of a race founded in the unity of a family. That unity itself rested upon the fidelity of the race

to the belief and worship of the God who created it. The race voluntarily parted from this belief and worship; its own division fol-

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lowed; mutual enmity supplanted brotherhood, and the end is to create two classes of men, dividing society in each nation into the bond and the free. The nations themselves have lost all remembrance that they were once actually brothers by one hearth. Yet they still contain in themselves indisputable proof of that original unity. There is not only the common nature which language, the token of reason, raises to a dignity utterly incommensurable with the condition of any other animal; but great divine institutions planted at the beginning endure amid the corruption which has dimmed their original beauty, and testify to the providence which has preserved them amid the surging flood of heathenism for future restoration of the race.

3.--Further Testimony of Law, Government, and Priesthood in the Dispersion.

The account of the human race in its origin and its [Pg 45] dispersion thus presented allows for the existence of tribes in every part of the world, who, through their isolation, the effect of nomad life, war, and severities of climate, but most of all by that tendency to degrade itself--to fall from known truth to error--which is the characteristic of the race, and through the impairing of social life which thus ensues, have left records of their uncultivated or even savage condition, which an eager search is continually discovering. These records have been taken as aids to a theory which, rejecting the scriptural and traditional account of man's origin, would wish

him to start from men of different races, or from universal savagery, or even from the ape as an ancestor. But, while on the one hand the existence of such tribes is no difficulty in the scriptural record of the dispersion, where they may be fully accounted for by the causes above-mentioned, the universal existence of the four great goods in the most ancient nations, where they appear also purest

at the most remote time, is quite incompatible with either of the three invented origins of the human race. Neither different races of men, originally distinct and separated, nor universal savagery, and far less fathership of the ape, will develop into simultaneous existence four uniform institutions found through the widest range of divided nations, such as marriage, a religion based on sacrifice, civil government, and the alliance between government and religion. An original language accounts for the proofs of unity embedded in the primary structure of the Aryan tongues, and science professes its full belief in such unity. It is [Pg 46] but a parallel to this to say that a creative hand impressing itself on the plastic origin of the race accounts for the existence of these goods in the most-widely severed branches of it. But that scattered savages should emerge from savagery into cultivation of the same ideal, or different races

in their dispersion pitch upon the same very marked peculiarities of social life, or the ape teach his offspring the highest require-ments of human society, such imaginations are contrary to the collective testimony of reason, experience, and history. Perhaps one must go altogether beyond the bounds of true science to account for their arising, and attribute them to that passionate dislike of a creating God, which is the recoil from the condition of a creature subject to responsibility for his actions.

On the contrary, pure historical inquiry, going back in the dry light of science to the archaic society of nations as they first appear to us at the beginning of written records, shows this remarkable chain of facts. A condition of things is found existing, of which the only explanation is that family was the nidus out of which sprung forth the House, then the Tribe, then the Commonwealth

with its patriarchal government. When property is traced to its origin it seems to be first found in the family as joint-ownership; and further, its succession is blended inexplicably with the existence and state of the family. Again, the close union of government with religion finds its root in the family. No testimony can be more unsuspicious than that of the learned author of "Ancient Law," who observes (p. 4), [Pg 47] that "the earliest notions connected with the conception of a law or rule of life are those contained in the Homeric words kkmkk and Themistes." "The divine agent, suggesting judicial awards to kings or to gods, the greatest of kings, was Themis." She is the assessor of Zeus, the human king on earth, not a law-maker, but a judge. The Themistes are the judgments,

in fact, of a patriarchal sovereign, "whose judgment, when he decided a dispute by a sentence, was assumed to be the result of direct inspiration." And Themis and Themistes were (p. 6) "linked with that persuasion which clung so long and so tenaciously to the hu-man mind of a divine influence underlying and supporting every relation of life, every social institution. In early law, and amid the rudiments of political thought, symptoms of this belief met us on all sides. A supernatural presidency is supposed to consecrate and keep together all the cardinal institutions of those times, the State, the Race, and the Family. Men, grouped together in the different relations which these institutions imply, are bound to celebrate periodically common rites and to offer common sacrifices; and every now and then the same duty is even more significantly recognised in the purifications and expiations which they perform, and which appear intended to deprecate punishment for involuntary or neglectful disrespect. Everybody acquainted with ordinary classical literature will remember the Sacra Gentilicia which exercised so important an influence on the early Roman law of adoption and of wills. And to this hour the Hindoo Customary Law, in which some of the [Pg 48] most curious features of primitive society are ste-reotyped, makes almost all the rights of persons and all the rules of succession hinge on the due solemnisation of fixed ceremonies at the dead man's funeral, that is, at every point where a breach occurs in the continuity of the family."

Thus every king, as history begins, appears in a position which recalls the memory of Adam or of Noah, as the divinely appointed judge, whose office springs out of his fathership. The original consecration, which rested on the government of the race when it begun, is seen not yet to have parted from its scattered members in their tribal or national insulation.[13]

It is observed of Homeric Greece that "the people in its orderly arrangement of family or clans, or tribal relationships coming down from the patriarchal form of life, derives its unity from its king, whose power as little springs from the people as that of the father from his children." Thus he possesses this power not in virtue of compact or choice, but simply from Zeus.

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kk mkk pkk pkkkkk kkkkkkkkkmkk kkkkk' kkkkkk.

kkk kkkkkk pkkkkkkkkkkk* kkk kkkkkkkk kkkk,

kkk kkkkkkkk, k kkkk kkkkkk pkkk kkkkkkmkkkk

kkkpkkkkk' kkk kkmkkkkk, kkk kkkkkk kmkkkkkkkk.

--Iliad, 2. 203.

This conception shows itself not merely on occasion in the poet, as perhaps in the well-known epithets, Jove-born, Jove-nurtured, friend of Jove, or in the genealogies which connect with the gods the princely races by [Pg 49] ties of blood, but he has a distinct theory on the subject variously expressed.

kpkk kkpkk' kmkkkk kmmkkk pmkk

kkkpkkkkkk kkkkkkkk, k kk kkkk kkkkk kkkkk.

Agamemnon's sceptre, the symbol of his rule over the Peloponnesus, is referred to the immediate gift of Jupiter.

The effect of this evidence, says the author just before cited, derived from comparative jurisprudence, is to establish that view of the primeval condition of the human race which is known as the "Patriarchal Theory." This is, "that the eldest male parent--the eldest ascendant--is absolutely supreme in his household. His dominion extends to life and death, and is as unqualified over his children and their houses as over his slaves; indeed, the relations of sonship and serfdom appear to differ in little beyond the higher capac-

ity which the child in blood possesses of becoming one day the head of a family himself. The flocks and herds of the children are

the flocks and herds of the father; and the possessions of the parent, which he holds in a representative rather than a proprietary character, are equally divided at his death among his descendants in the first degree, the eldest son sometimes receiving a double share under the name of birthright, but more generally endowed with no hereditary advantage beyond an honorary precedence." "The sum of the hints given us by legal antiquities" is that "men are first seen distributed in perfectly insulated groups, held together by obedience [Pg 50] to the parent. Law is the parent's word. When we go forward to the state of society in which those early legal conceptions show themselves as formed, we find that they still partake of the mystery and spontaneity which must have seemed to characterise a despotic father's commands, but that at the same time, as they proceed from a sovereign, they presuppose a union of family groups in some wider organisation. The next question is, what is the nature of this union and the degree of intimacy which it involves? It is just here that archaic law renders us one of the greatest of its services, and fills up a gap which otherwise could only have been bridged by conjecture. It is full in all its provinces of the clearest indications that society, in primitive times, was not what

it is assumed to be at present, a collection of individuals. In fact, and in the view of the men who composed it, it was an aggregation of families. The contrast may be most forcibly expressed by saying that the unit of an ancient society was the Family, of a modern society, the Individual."

"In most of the Greek states, and in Rome, there long remained the vestiges of an ascending series of groups, out of which the State was at first constituted. The Family, House, and Tribe of the Romans may be taken as the type of them; and they are so described to us that we can scarcely help conceiving them as a system of concentric circles which have gradually expanded from the same point. The elementary group is the family, connected by common subjection to the highest male ascendant. The aggregation

of Families forms the [Pg 51] Gens or House. The aggregation of Houses makes the Tribe. The aggregation of Tribes constitutes

the Commonwealth. Are we at liberty to follow these indications, and to lay down that the commonwealth is a collection of persons united by common descent from the progenitor of an original family? Of this we may at least be certain, that all ancient societies regarded themselves as having proceeded from one original stock, and even laboured under an incapacity for comprehending any reason except this for their holding together in political union. The history of political ideas begins, in fact, with the assumption that kinship in blood is the sole possible ground of community in political functions; nor is there any of those subversions of feelings, which we term emphatically revolutions, so startling and so complete as the change which is accomplished when some other principle--such as that, for instance, of local contiguity--establishes itself for the first time as the basis of common political action. It may be affirmed, then, of early commonwealths that their citizens considered all the groups in which they claimed membership to be founded on common lineage."

"The conclusion, then, which is suggested by the evidence is, not that all early societies were formed by descent from the same ancestor, but that all of them, which had any permanence or solidity, either were so descended, or assumed that they were. An indefinite number of causes may have shattered the primitive groups; but wherever their ingredients recombined, it was on the model or principle of an association of [Pg 52] kindred. Whatever was the fact, all thought, language, and law adjusted themselves to the assumption" (p. 131).

"On a few systems of law the family organisation of the earliest society has left a plain and broad mark in the lifelong authority of the Father, or other ancestor, over the person and property of his descendants, an authority which we may conveniently call by its later Roman name of Patria Potestas. No feature of the rudimentary associations of mankind is deposed to by a greater amount of evidence than this, and yet none seems to have disappeared so generally and so rapidly from the usages of advancing communities"

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(p. 135).

"It may be shown, I think, that the Family, as held together by the Patria Potestas, is the nidus out of which the entire Law of Persons has germinated" (p. 152).

"When we speak of the slave as anciently included in the Family, we intend to assert nothing as to the motives of those who brought him into it or kept him there; we merely imply that the tie which bound him to his master was regarded as one of the same general character with that which united every other member of the group to its chieftain. This consequence is, in fact, carried in the general assertion already made, that the primitive ideas of mankind were unequal to comprehending any basis of the connection inter se of individuals apart from the relations of Family" (p. 164).

"The point which before all others has to be apprehended in the constitution of primitive societies, is that [Pg 53] the individual creates for himself few or no rights and few or no duties. The rules which he obeys are derived first from the station into which he is born, and next from the imperative commands addressed to him by the chief of the household of which he forms part" (p. 311).

Then as to the union of government with religion:--"A stage occurs in the history of all the families of mankind, the stage at which a rule of law is not yet discriminated from a rule of religion. The members of such a society consider that the transgression of a religious ordinance should be punished by civil penalties, and that the violation of a civil duty exposes the delinquent to divine correction" (p. 23). At the time of the Code of the Twelve Tables, "Roman society had barely emerged from that intellectual condition in which civil obligation and religious duty are inevitably confounded" (p. 18).

For, in fact, originally, "Law is the parent's word" (p. 125), and "the civil Laws of States first make their appearance as the Themistes of a patriarchal sovereign" (p. 166); that is, "as separate, isolated judgments, which, consistently with the belief in their emanation from above, cannot be supposed to be connected by any thread of principle" (p. 5). Moreover, as to the origin of Property:--"It is more than likely that joint-ownership, and not separate ownership, is the really archaic institution, and that the forms of property which will afford us instruction will be those which are associated with the rights of families and the groups of kindred" (p. 259), as shown in the Indian village-community, [Pg 54] the Russian and Slavonic village. And "we have the strongest reasons for thinking that property once belonged not to individuals, nor even to isolated families, but to larger societies composed on the patriarchal model" (p. 268). Thus the author conjectures "that private property, in the shape in which we know it, was chiefly formed by the gradual disentanglement of the separate rights of individuals from the blended rights of a community" (p. 269).

He remarks "a peculiarity invariably distinguishing the infancy of society. Men are regarded and treated not as individuals, but always as members of a particular group. Everybody is first a citizen, and then, as a citizen, he is a member of his order--of an aristocracy or a democracy, of an order of patricians or plebeians; or in those societies which an unhappy fate has afflicted with a special perversion in their course of development, of a caste; next he is member of a gens, house, or clan; and lastly he is member of his family. This last was the narrowest and most personal relation in which he stood; nor, paradoxical as it may seem, was he ever regarded as himself, as a distinct individual. His individuality was swallowed up in his family. I repeat the definition of a primitive society given before. It has for its units not individuals, but groups of men united by the reality or the fiction of blood-relationship" (p. 183). "The history of jurisprudence must be followed in its whole course, if we are to understand how gradually and tardily society dissolved itself into the component atoms of which it is now constituted; by [Pg 55] what insensible gradations the relation of man to man substituted itself for the relation of the individual to his family, and of families to each other" (p. 185).

Such is the strong--may we not say irrefragable?--testimony which the condition of human society, as it emerges into the light of history, bears to the family as the cradle of man's life. It is in the original soil of the family that the four goods we have noted, marriage, religion, government, and the alliance between religion and government, spring up together. Further, also, they are seen to be not separate, one here and another there, but bound together in the strictest coherence. For if this human race be thrown up and down throughout the world, divided and insulated in its several parts by vast distances and by thousands of years, even the scattered limbs are shaped in the mould stamped upon it at its birth, and in them government, law, property in its origin and its succession, and religion bear witness to the family character. This archaic society, from the Pacific to the Atlantic Oceans, from Scythia in the north to India in the south, is never a crowd of individuals but an organic structure: Adam and Eve prolonged and living in their race. We see that in the beginning the fathership of God created a human plant which should reveal Himself in its development, bearing in its structure and fruit an undying witness to His nature; and serving, in spite of corruption and decline, for the future exhibition of His fathership in a yet higher degree, even to the communication of the divine nature.

[Pg 56] Whatever may be the interval of time which runs out between the dispersion of the family at Babel, and the appearance of each separate member on the platform of history--and the longer this time, the greater the marvel we note--the family remains in each as a sort of universal kkkmkk upon which the commonwealth, the government, property viewed in itself and in its descent, law, and religion itself rest. The "natural state" and the "social compact" when inquired into become unsubstantial fictions; "theories

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plausible and comprehensive," as the author of ancient law observes, "but absolutely unverified" (p. 3). Man is seen to be the child

of Adam; and all the relations of men to each other to have been originally determined by that origin, and persistently maintained in its mould.

Now let us return to the relation between the Spiritual and the Civil Power, which forms part of this original constitution of the race.

At the head of the human race we have seen, first in Adam and then in Noah, the junction of the two orders, sovereignty and priesthood. There never was a time when the race was without government; there never was a time when the race was without sacrifice. The delegated authority of God rested ever upon the former for the prosperity of man's life upon earth; the worship of the one God, man's Creator and End, was summed up in the latter. All human life consists of the tissue formed by the two; and as in his first abode man's condition was subject to his obedience to the divine command, so throughout his course his worship of God [Pg 57] ruled his temporal condition. The lot of the antediluvian world bore witness to that truth. With Noah the experience began afresh. Then once again the covenant with Noah and his seed after him was made in sacrifice, in which the unity of God and the religion

of man stand recorded, and man's earthly lot is made dependent on the purity of his worship. Thus the two orders are seen in their origin to be both of divine institution; just as the life of man upon earth was from the beginning subordinate to his ultimate end, so government, which was created for the former, was subordinate to worship, which was created for the latter.

Let us follow rapidly the relation between man's social state and his religion, arising out of such origin, that we may note how the degradation of worship entailed the degradation of society.

In Noah and his sons, so long as the earth continued of one tongue and speech, the priesthood belonged to the head of the family. That was its natural descent. We may suppose that the dispersion began with the same rule, but we are not able to say how long

that rule continued in force. There was intended to be one priesthood offering one sacrifice over all the earth to the one God. How

prodigious became the degradation when the divine unity was lost! A variety of gods was introduced; a similar variety of priesthoods followed: and the sacrifice, which was the rendering of supreme homage to the one Creator and Lord of life, in which was contained the everliving prophecy of man's future restoration, was prostituted to a number of deities, the [Pg 58] offspring of man's sensual imagination, or of perverted tradition, or of worship of natural powers, or of demoniacal trickery.

As soon as the patriarchal State was changed by war into the State founded by conquest, the natural appurtenance of the priesthood to the head of the family must at least have been modified. It was probably often attached to the actual head of the State. But it does not need to trace step by step the debasement of worship and the multiplication of deities which took place in the Gentile world.

It is enough to see how the whole mass of nations had by the time of Christ become divided from each other in their civil societies and their religious belief. But we may note that as with the loss of belief in one God the nations originally lost the belief in their own brotherhood, so their national gods became the stronghold of national prejudices and hatreds. Thus a debased religion was turned into a source of cruelty to man, who had no bitterer enemy to his life and welfare than a foreign god; and instead of human life be-ing sacred to man, it was sometimes even an act of worship to immolate him to an idol.

It is not too much to say that the profound enmity of the Gentile nations to each other was grounded in the variety of their gods; and in this instance religion, which in its purity is the bond of human society, had become a main cause of alienation between the members of the race.

The alliance of the State in each nation with its religion was, as we have seen, an original good of the [Pg 59] race; and it continued through all the debasement of worship. Had that worship maintained its original purity, the alliance would have been an unmixed good. But as the belief became corrupt, it ended in the public force being ever at the command of error. The final issue of this alliance seems to have been when the State had laid hold of religion to deify, as it were, itself. The Roman emperors were the most complete, but by no means the sole, bearers of this corruption. They were considered to embody in their single persons the united majesty of the gods. Whoever refused obedience to their worship was guilty of the double crime of sacrilege and treason.

If this be a correct summary of the relation between the Two Powers as it issued in the final condition of Gentilism, it is clear that the State had far less declined from the high purpose for which it was instituted, that is, the preservation of human society, than the priesthood from the corresponding purpose which belonged to it, that is, the worship of God and the sanctification of human life. The civil power was still in every respect a lawful power. And obedience was due to it for conscience' sake, as expressly declared

by our Lord and His Apostles. But the priesthood had been so utterly debased by its worship of false gods, which tore from it the crown of unity, and by the abominations which its rites in too many instances carried with them, that it had ceased to be a lawful power. It had moreover fallen, at least in the Roman empire, and from the time of the Caesars, under the dominion of the State.

[Pg 60] Yet down to the very coming of our Lord the veneration which had belonged to the original character and institution of

the priesthood is made manifest by the clear acknowledgment that the authority of the priest was not derived from the king. The

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Gentiles in the lowest depths of their moral degradation referred the excellency of the priesthood to its divine origin. The honour due to God, and the thought of the future world, were so imbedded in the original constitution of human society everywhere, that even in a pantheon of false gods, and in a service paid to numberless male and female deities, the priest's office itself was held to be divine.[14]

In the case of the Romans, it is true that when the free state was suppressed by the empire, the priesthood and the imperial power were improperly conjoined in the same person. But this conjunction was at once a novelty and an usurpation. Thus the office of Pontifex Maximus, first seized by Lepidus after the death of Julius Caesar, and after Lepidus assumed by Augustus, and then kept

in succession by the following Caesars, whether through the adulation of the people or their own pride, seemed to pass as a proper title of their principate, and was numbered among the honours, even of the Christian emperors, down to Gratian, who refused and prohibited it. Nevertheless the functions of these two powers were reckoned as distinct; but in the time of the Kings and the free Commonwealth this distinction was much more marked.

[Pg 61] Dionysius of Halicarnassus thus describes the Roman Pontifical College:--"They have authority over the most weighty af-fairs; they are judges of all sacred causes, whether among private persons, or magistrates, or ministers of the gods; they legislate for all sacred things which are not written or prescribed by custom, enacting laws and customs as seems to them good; they examine into all magistracies to which sacrifice and worship of the gods belong, and scrutinise all priests; they keep watch over the ministers which these use in their sacred office, so that the sacred laws be not transgressed; they instruct and interpret for lay persons who do not understand what concerns the worship of gods or genii. If they observe any disobedient to their commands, they punish them according to the due of each. They are themselves exempt from all trial and punishment. They render account neither to senate

nor to people. It would be no error to call them priests, or sacred legislators, or custodians, or, as we should prefer, rulers of sacred things. On the death of any one another is elected to his place, not by the people, but by themselves, whoever of the citizens they judge the most meet."[15] From this account of the historian, says Bianchi, we may deduce the following conclusions:--Firstly,

how great was the power of the Roman Sacerdotes in judging matters of religion, in which the magistrates were subject to them. Secondly, their authority to punish those who transgressed their [Pg 62] laws, independently of kings and magistrates. Thirdly, their immunity from the civil power, even of the Commonwealth itself, to which they were not bound to render an account of what they did. Fourthly, the distinction which existed between the power of the priests and that of the civil magistrates, which results not merely from the points recited, but also from the reflection that the Pontiffs were perpetual, while the magistrates under the free Commonwealth were temporary. The latter were created by the suffrages of the people; in the former vacancies were filled by the College of Pontiffs itself. This custom lasted from Numa's time to the year of Rome 601, when Cneius Domitius, tribune of the people, transferred the right of filling vacancies from the College to the people; this was abolished by Sylla in his dictatorship; but again restored by the Tribune Titus Labienus during Cicero's consulship. But finally the right of electing its members was given back to the College of Pontiffs by Augustus.

The Pontifex Maximus, though created by the suffrage of the people, was always taken from the College of Pontiffs, and his office was perpetual. Augustus would not take it from Lepidus during his life, though he took it after his death. Thus the power of the Supreme Pontiff was by no means confused with that of the magistrate or the prince; and the assumption of this priesthood by the Caesars makes it evident that they recognised it not to be part of the prince's power to intrude into matters of religion; and that they needed [Pg 63] a sacerdotal power in order to superintend sacred things. It was for the sake of this superintendence, Dio observes, that the emperor always assumed the office of Pontifex Maximus, in virtue of which he became master of all religious and sacred things.

The example of Cicero pleading before the College of Pontifices for the restoration of his house, which had been dedicated by Clodius to Concord, a plea involving their power to revoke a tribunicial law passed by Clodius, is a remarkable testimony to the pontifical authority: "If ever," he said, "a great cause rested on the judgment and power of the Priests of the Roman people, it is this;

in which all the dignity of the commonwealth, the safety, the life, the liberty, the public and private worship, the household gods, the

goods, the fortunes, and the homes of all seem intrusted to your wisdom and integrity."[16]

The fair conclusions from these facts, says Bianchi again, are that the Romans knew religion to be directed to a higher end than temporal felicity, though they did esteem it also necessary for the preservation of the State; that the power of the priesthood was distinct from the civil power of the magistrate; that it had the right to judge in all cases of religion without interference from the magistrate; that immunity and exemption from the civil power belonged to it.

It is needless to go through the various nations of antiquity in order to show the veneration which everywhere belonged to the office of the priest. That is [Pg 64] shown likewise in the frequent connection of the royal power with the priesthood; but though thus connected, they were not confused; kings were priests, not in virtue of their kingship, but by a distinct appointment. Plato asserts

that in some nations the priesthood was reputed so excellent that it was not considered to be properly placed save in the person of

the king; and that among the Egyptians it was not lawful for any king to command the people without being first consecrated to the

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priesthood. By this fact is seen how the sacerdotal dignity was esteemed by antiquity, even in the darkness of idolatry; and, at the same time, how the power of the priest was considered to be distinct from the power of the sovereign. Plato gives his own judgment when he says that the creation of priests should be left to the care of God; and that they should be elected by lot, in order that the person destined to so high an office may be divinely chosen.[17]

All that it is requisite here to point out seems to be that, however great was the degradation of worship produced by the character of the gods worshipped, as well as by the divisions of the godhead which the multiplying of divine beings brought with itself, yet two things survived in the minds of men: one the intrinsic excellence of worship in itself, as the homage paid by man to a power above himself; and the other, the sense that this worship was a thing of divine institution, coming down from heaven upon earth, quite distinct in character from civil rule, and if exercised by [Pg 65] kings, exercised not because they were kings, but in virtue of a separate consecration. Thus, if the patriarchal origin of property, law, and government is borne witness to by the most ancient institutions, customs, and feelings of men, which witness likewise extends to the unity of the race, so likewise the original independence of the priestly order as to all its sacred functions and the sense of its divine origin, which runs through so many nations, bear joint witness to the unity of the race and to the truth of the Mosaic record. They convey a manifest contradiction to the theory that man sprung originally from a number of different races, and likewise to the theory that he grew up originally in a state of savagery.

The force of the testimony consists in this: first, a priesthood appears everywhere; secondly, it is connected with the rite of sacrifice; thirdly, it usually comprises an order of men devoted to the purpose of divine worship, or at least having special functions which by no means belong to the civil ruler as such, so that if he performs them, it is as priest and not as king; fourthly, this order has a special authority from the Divine Being or Beings whom it represents, not subject to the civil rule; fifthly, injury to the priest's person or contravention to his order in divine things is esteemed as an injury done to the God whom he represents.

The peculiarity of a priesthood must therefore be added to the peculiarity of the rite of sacrifice upon which his office rests, and both together form an order of ideas so marked and distinctive as to establish the [Pg 66] unity of the race in the several portions of which they appear; and at the same time it establishes, as the common inheritance of that race, an overwhelming sense of human life being founded, preserved, and exalted by a communion between heaven and earth: it is, in short, a sense of man lying in the hand of God.

We have hitherto followed the dispersion of Babel in its Gentile development down to that ultimate issue in which a long and unbroken civilisation is combined with an extreme moral corruption; now let us revert to the divine plan which was followed to repair this evil.

At a certain point of time, when forgetfulness of the divine unity was becoming general, God chose one man out of whom to form a nation, whose function should be the preservation of a belief in this unity. Abraham, the friend of God and the forefather of Christ, was called out of his own country that he might preserve the religion of Noah, and that "in him all the kindreds of the earth might be blessed" (Gen. xii. 3). In the second generation his family was carried down into Egypt, and became, in the security of that kingdom, a people, but it likewise fell into bondage. From this it was redeemed in a series of wonderful events under the guidance of Moses, was led by him into the desert, and there formed into a nation by the discipline of a religious, which was also a civil code. In the law given on Mount Sinai we see once more the constitution of the society established in Noah. The whole moral order of the world contained in the ten commandments is made to rest upon the sovereignty of God: "I am the Lord; [Pg 67] thou shalt have no strange gods." From this precept, which fills the first table, proceed the precepts which, in the second, maintain the order of society: "Honour thy father and thy mother; thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not steal," and the rest. Such, says Bossuet, is the general order of all legislation. The ten words of God form the core of a complete religious and civil code, in which the two Powers exist in an ideal no less than a practical union. The individual and the national worship is the same, and the society springs out of it, the root being,

"I am the Lord;" but the persuasiveness of redemption is added to the power of creation: "I am the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage." Abraham, the father of the people, had exercised the patriarchal priesthood and the patriarchal sacrifice in his family; but just as God had not chosen Abraham because he was the first-born, so Moses, taking the patriarchal priesthood, with a special sanction, set it not in the first-born of the tribes, but in another tribe, and in a family of this tribe. He took, further, the rite of sacrifice, which had existed from the beginning, only developing its meaning in a series of ordinances, which, as St. Paul tells us, all pointed to Christ: "Almost all things according to the law are cleansed with blood, and without shedding of blood is no remission" (Heb. ix. 22). But while there is here a complete union in faith, in practice, and in worship, for every true Israelite and for the whole people, while there is one source of authority to the three, the bearers of the dig-

nities which represent this triple life of man [Pg 68] are separated. Moses instituted, in the person of Aaron, a high priesthood which

from that time stands through the whole history of his people at the head of their worship, superior in all that concerns it to the civil authority, which is bound to consult it and obey it, not only in the things of God, but in the chief civil acts which regard the nation. The outcome of this work is the creation of a people whose function is to bear on the worship of the one true God and faith in the Redeemer to come, a royal, prophetic, and priestly nation, the special domain of the promised Messias.

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I have no need here to follow this people through the trials, revolts, chastisements, and humiliations of 1500 years. It is sufficient to observe the result at the coming of Christ. The nation at length, as the fruit it would seem of captivity and suffering, has accepted with one mind and heart the doctrine and worship of one God; the Jewish priesthood, uncorrupted in its essence by any of the abominations of polytheism, offers the daily morning and evening sacrifice, which typified the Lamb of God, in the spirit of Adam, Noah, Abraham, and Moses. The power of the State had indeed just passed to a Roman lord, but it left the rites and practices and doctrines of the Jewish faith untouched in the hands of the High Priest and the Great Council, which sat in this respect in the chair of Moses,--a great and manifest distinction, perhaps, from the condition in this respect of the whole Gentile world. In Rome, at least, the worship "of the Immortal Gods," though blended with the whole growth of the [Pg 69] State, and seated triumphantly in the Capitol, was simply subservient to the Civil Power: in Judea, a small and despised province of Rome, the religion was the life of the people, which had been made a people that it might be God's domain, and, with all its divisions, was filled from the highest to the lowest with an universal expectation of the promised Christ, who was to be Prophet, Priest, and King.

In the relation between the two Powers, Gentilism required a total reconstruction, in order that the priesthood, existing in it from the beginning, might be completely purified, derived afresh from God, and receive from Him an independence which it had lost from

the moment that it lost its fidelity to the One Creator,--and such a gift would be a token of divine power. Judaism, on the contrary, made, after the programme of God, an image in the nation of what the Christian people was to be in the world, required only to acknowledge in the Christ the purpose for which it was appointed, that the law might go forth from Sion and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.

CHAPTER II.

RELATION BETWEEN THE CIVIL AND THE SPIRITUAL POWERS AFTER CHRIST.

1.--The Spiritual Power in its Source and Nature.

[Pg 70] Taking as our basis the historical outline of the relation between the Civil and Spiritual Powers which has preceded, let us

attempt to have present to our minds the state of this relation at the death of Christ.

The great world-empire had then been ruled in most peaceful security for half a generation by Tiberius. Under him lay a vast variety of nations, professing as strange a variety of gods and of worship paid to them, but all, with one exception, accepting a religious supremacy in him as Pontifex Maximus of the Roman religion. The Princeps of the civil power, the Imperator of the civil force, was also Chief Priest of religion, and by that union held in his hands those two Powers, an attack upon either of which constituted, as Tertullian testifies, the double guilt of majesty violated and sacrilege incurred. Within these limits, and with this condition, it was free to the several nations to practise their ancestral rites as well as to believe in their ancestral gods, at least within their ancient territorial bounds. [Pg 71] There can be no doubt that these nations generally clung to their several rites and beliefs, not only from the force of nurture and habit, but also as remnants of their former independence as nations. As little can we doubt that the great Roman power was employed to maintain and protect them as part of the constituted order of things and in prevention of sedition. This, so far as the Roman dominion extended, was the outcome of that long succession of wars, and changes of rule ensuing on wars, which forms the history of mankind so soon as it leaves the nest of pristine unity at the epoch of the dispersion. It is clear that through the whole of this Gentile world, while amity had not been broken between the Civil and the Spiritual Powers, the priesthood, which represented the latter, had everywhere become the subject of the former. It is no less clear that this subjection was repaid with support. This condition of things was most clearly expressed as well as most powerfully established in the position of the Roman Emperor, who, as he received the tribunitial power, which in union with the consular was distinctive of the imperial dignity, from the Senate, so received also the supreme authority in matters of religion which belonged to the Pontifex Maximus. This authority had indeed been

in its origin and its descent from age to age in the Roman city distinct from secular power, but henceforth became practically united with the civil principate. That undivided supremacy betokened the ultimate constitution of the heathen State, antecedent to the com-ing of Christ, in what concerns the relation [Pg 72] between the two Powers. According to this, the Civil Power prevailed over the Spiritual, and casting off the subjection to religion in which itself had been nurtured, directed all its actions to a temporal end.

Far otherwise was it with that people which Moses, under the divine command, had created according to the pattern which he saw in the Mount. Chosen by God to conduct the race of Abraham out of captivity into the promised land, he alone in the history of the Israelitic race united in himself the three powers bestowed by unction of Priest, of Prophet, and of King. These powers he left to the people he was forming, but did not deposit them all in the same hands. His creation of the priesthood in the tribe of Levi, and of the high priesthood in the person of his brother Aaron and his lineal descendants, stands without a parallel in all the history of the world before the coming of Christ as an act of transcendent authority. For instead of the original priesthood of the first-born, which he found existing as it had been transmitted from the earliest time, he selected a particular tribe, which was not that of the first-born, to bear from that time forth the priesthood among the children of Israel; and further, he selected a particular person in that tribe, his brother Aaron, to erect in him the high priesthood, the most characteristic institution of the Jewish people. In like

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manner he took the ancient institution of sacrifice, dating, as we have seen, from Paradise itself, and formed it into an elaborate system to be carried out day by day through the whole succeeding history of [Pg 73] his people, by priests springing from the person of the first High Priest. At the door of the Tabernacle, in the presence of all the assembled tribes, Moses invested Aaron with the priestly garments, especially the ephod, bearing attached to it the Rational, which contained the twelve stones indicating the twelve tribes of the holy nation, by which the High Priest, consulting God, issued the oracle of doctrine and truth. Moses further set the mitre on his head, bearing on its golden plate the inscription, "Holiness to the Lord;" and pouring on his head the oil of unction,

he anointed and consecrated him. Thus the whole Jewish priesthood descended from above, being gathered up in one person, from whom all succeeding priests were drawn, and the sous of the first High Priest were to continue the line for ever according to primo-geniture.

The High Priest's office had in it four points peculiar to him beyond the office of the ordinary priest. First, once in the year, on the

great day of the atonement, he alone entered into the most holy place, "not without blood, which he offered for his own sins and

the sins of the people" (Heb. ix. 7), inasmuch as he sent into the wilderness one he-goat, charged with the sins of all the people, and sacrificed the other, whose blood he carried into the sanctuary, sprinkling it seven times over against the oracle, to expiate the sanctuary from the uncleanness of the children of Israel (Lev. xvi. 15, 16). He thus once every year represented in his person the whole sacred nation in that most remarkable act of confessing its guilt before God, and offering an expiation of [Pg 74] it, which pointed even more to a future Redeemer. Secondly, he consecrated the whole body of the priests and Levites for their several work. The oil

of unction poured upon his head was the palpable sign of priestly power transmitted from him to the priest, in which, again, he was an image of the future High Priest. Thirdly, whenever the civil rulers of the nation required advice in matters concerning the good

of the whole people, it was the office of the High Priest to inquire for them by means of the breastplate of light and truth, which he

carried upon the ephod. The relation of the Civil to the Spiritual Power was symbolised in the first bearer of the former after Moses,

to whom Moses was commanded by God to communicate "part of his glory." God said to Moses, "Take Joshua the son of Nun, a man in whom is the spirit, and put thy hand upon him, and he shall stand before Eleazar the priest (who had then succeeded his father Aaron in the high priesthood), and all the multitude, and thou shalt give him precepts in the sight of all, and part of thy glory, that all the congregation of the children of Israel may hear him. If anything be to be done, Eleazar the priest shall consult the Lord for him, he, and all the children of Israel with him, and the rest of the multitude, shall go out and go in at his word" (Num. xxvii.

18). Thus David afterwards consulted God by Abiathar, the High Priest in his day. Fourthly, on all questions concerning the deca-logue, or commands in the moral law, or the ceremonial law, which embraced the whole field of the divine worship, or the judicial law, which concerned reciprocal rights [Pg 75] and duties between man and man, the High Priest possessed a supreme and decisive jurisdiction, from which there was no appeal.

It is necessary to distinguish between the third of those privileges, the judgment by the breastplate of light and truth, which was an extraordinary gift of God, bestowed at particular times, and analogous in this to inspiration, and the fourth, the supreme jurisdiction and judgment of the High Priest, which belonged to him as an ordinary part of his office, and may be likened to a perpetual divine assistance inherent in it.[18]

2. Such was the high priesthood in its institution, and its operation through the whole of Jewish history down to the final destruction

of the Temple corresponds to its institution.

The children of Israel were made a nation for a specific purpose, that is, in order that the race of Abraham, by Isaac his chosen son, should maintain upon earth, in the midst of an ever-growing defection, the worship of the one True God, and should likewise em-body and represent no less that which was bound up in this worship, the promise of redemption given at the beginning of the world. The reason of its existence, therefore, was to be the bearer of the Messianic idea. To this all its ordinances and sacrifices pointed,

and in the execution of all this purpose the High Priest was the chief organ. The Pontificate was the stem of the nation, of which

the civil unity was made from the beginning dependent on the spiritual. On Aaron, by God's command, [Pg 76] Moses devolved one "part of his glory;" and when Eleazar had succeeded his father in the office of High Priest, and Moses was about to die, he devolved, by the same divine command, another part of his glory upon Joshua, appointing him to lead the children of Israel into their promised inheritance. To invest him with this solemn charge, the civil leadership of the nation, he brought him before Eleazar the priest, that, according to his instruction, Joshua and the whole congregation "should go out and go in." This relative position of Eleazar and Joshua is continued in the respective religious and civil rulers during several hundred years down to the kingship of Saul.

When the Israelites chose themselves a king after the pattern of the nations round them, the word of God to Samuel respecting their act is, "They have not rejected thee, but me, that I should not reign over them" (1 Kings viii. 7). Nevertheless God sanctions the erection of a kingdom, leaving unaltered the position of the High Priest. During the time of the kings the high priesthood continues the centre of Jewish worship; and when the civil unity is broken by the revolt of the ten tribes, they revolt likewise against the worship which had its seat in Jerusalem and was gathered up in the High Priest. The long-persistent iniquity of the people is punished by the captivity, and when a portion of the nation comes back to take root afresh in its own land, it is in the high priesthood more than ever that its unity is restored and maintained. Thus, through the three periods of Israelitic history, under the judges, [Pg 77] under

the kings, and after the return from captivity, the High Priest remains the permanent centre of Jewish life, the organ of spiritual, and

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therein of civil unity. Our Lord recognises this spiritual ruler as at the head of the Great Council, "sitting in the chair of Moses." At His birth Herod inquires of this authority where Christ should be born, and receives the undoubting answer, "In Bethlehem of Juda." Of Him Caiaphas, being then High Priest, uttered the famous prophecy denoting the great act of His mediatorial sacrifice; and the same Caiaphas, sitting as supreme judge of the nation, adjures Him by the living God to declare if He be the Christ; and our Lord answers the adjuration by the explicit declaration of His divine Sonship, and His authority to be Judge of the living and the dead.

The judges pass, the kings pass, the nation goes into captivity; it comes back chastened, and faithful at length to its belief in the divine unity and the promises attached to it; and through all this, up to the time of accomplishment, the High Priest sits in the chair of Moses, and offers expiation on the day of atonement, and the priests emanate from his person, and prophecy speaks from his mouth. He is the ordinary judge of the whole people, the guardian and interpreter of the divine law, whose decision is final and supreme.

3. That people lost its civil independence, which was merged in the great Roman empire, but its spiritual independence, centred in its High Priest, was preserved to it. At no period of its history was this independence more remarkably maintained. Philo, himself a Jew [Pg 78] settled in Egypt, says, "Innumerable pilgrims from innumerable cities flock together by sea and land, from East and West, from North and South, on every festival to this Temple (of Jerusalem) as to a common harbour and refuge, seeking peace there in the midst of a life of business or trouble."[19] "The Holy City," he says in another place, "is my country, a metropolis not of the single country of Judea, but of many others, on account of the colonies from time to time thence sent forth." But not only was this city such a metropolis to all Jews in every part of the world, and the High Priest the centre of the worship which drew them from all parts of the world, but his spiritual authority extended over them in the several cities which they inhabited as well as when they came up to Jerusalem. This was the power borne witness to by St. Paul, when "yet breathing out threatening and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, he went to the High Priest and asked of him letters to Damascus to the synagogues, that if he found any men and women of this way, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem." This was the power which counterworked and persecuted St.

Paul himself wherever he went, through which "five times he received of the Jews forty stripes save one, and was thrice beaten with

rods" (2 Cor. xi. 24). This was the power which, wherever the Apostles went, preaching the Gospel under the cover of a religion which enjoyed legal sanction, and so disobeyed no [Pg 79] Roman law, encountered them, and, after endless particular persecutions, succeeded at last with Nero in getting them put beyond the pale of the protection which their character of Jews might afford them, and placed under the ban of the empire as preachers of a new and unsanctioned religion. They were but summing up a long course of previous persecution in this act, which was the master-stroke of Jewish antagonism, by which they fulfilled to the uttermost the divine prediction: "Therefore, behold I send to you prophets, and wise men, and scribes; and some of them you will put to death and crucify, and some of them you will scourge in your synagogues, and persecute them from city to city" (Matt. xxiii. 40). And it was followed at once by the destruction of the city, the Temple, and the priesthood, as the prophecy ran, "Behold your house shall

be left to you desolate." The position of the High Priest in this last period of Israelitic history, the forty years which elapsed from the day of Pentecost to the destruction of the city and Temple, represents him most vividly as the guardian, judge, and mouthpiece of a religion which, though national, had colonies in all parts of the world, and in which not only the central seat of the worship and the country of Judea, but the colonies also, in whatever part of the world they might be situated, acknowledged his spiritual jurisdiction. This privilege was given by Julius Caesar, as to the Roman empire, and continued by Augustus. It is of much moment to understand the history of the first forty years of the Christian Church.

[Pg 80] 4. So completely had the high priesthood created by Moses, and the whole system of worship, sacrifices, rites, and ceremonies which it presided over and guarded, fulfilled the purpose for which it was created. It presented in all its parts a type and a prophecy of Christ and His kingdom--a type and a prophecy which through fifteen hundred years of action and suffering had wrought itself out in the heart of a people who, now deprived of their civil, but enjoying a spiritual, independence, lay scattered through the whole world, ready to receive the spiritual kingdom. Through all Gentiledom the sacerdotal authority had become, by its corruption of the high truths of religion, the serf or minion of the Civil Power, but to the Jews the worship of their God was in its own nature supreme, and did not admit of interference even from that power which they acknowledged to rule absolutely in temporal dominion. The same scribes and pharisees and people who cried out before the Roman governor, "We have no king but Caesar," were ready

a few years afterwards to sacrifice their lives rather than admit into Jerusalem a statue of the Emperor Caligula, which seemed to

them an impugnment of their religious law. And the Jewish people during the years of our Lord's teaching and ministry were looking for their Messias, and when they should acknowledge Him, were ready to acknowledge Him not only as Priest and Prophet but as King also. So deeply had the words of Moses sunk in their hearts: "That God would raise up to them a prophet of their nation and of their brethren like unto him, whom they [Pg 81] were to hear" (Deut. xviii. 18); that is, a Prophet bearing, as Moses alone had done, the triple unction, and who was to be supreme in teaching, in priesthood, and in rule. The civil subjection of the people

brought out more strikingly by its contrast their spiritual independence, and the banishment, which scattered a number of them into all lands, provided everywhere a seed-plot in which the Gospel might be planted--a little gathering not only of Jews, but of Gentile proselytes, "who feared God" in every place, and so could more readily receive the doctrine of God incarnate and crucified upon their belief of God the Creator. Had the Jews remained in their own land, they would not have had the perception of a spiritual

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jurisdiction founded upon a divine hierarchy alone, and stretching over the whole earth, disregarding all national divisions and restric-tions, and binding Parthians and Medes, Elamites and Mesopotamians, Egyptians and Libyans, Cretes and Arabians, Greeks and Romans into one. The mould into which the Gospel was to be cast had been wrought out even through the obstinacy, the sins, and the punishments of the chosen people, and was now complete to receive and bear the tree for the healing of the nations. The high priesthood had come forth from Moses by express inspiration, and bearing its people through centuries of most various fortune, had imaged out exactly the Christian high priesthood and rule to which it was to yield.[20] A prophecy embodied in a [Pg 82] fact which unites a people into an indissoluble organisation, and works through centuries moulding generation after generation, and gathering into one prodigious monument of priesthood, sacrifices, ceremonies, and temple, and the hopes and devotion of a race, this is the ground which our Lord selected for the basis of the spiritual kingdom which He would set up. He had provided Moses as a servant

to construct the model of the house which hereafter He would build Himself; He had inspired Moses to create Aaron and draw out of him the levitical priesthood, because Himself would commission Peter, the perpetual fountain of the Christian priesthood, and would make Peter for all nations that which Aaron had been for one.

But, as in all the preceding history, God left to man the exercise of his free-will. It was not open to the Jews indeed to frustrate the divine purpose, but it was open to them to receive or not receive the Christ when He came. They were ready to receive a glorious but not a suffering Christ. And the High Priest, sitting at the head of the Great Council of the nation, in the chair of Moses and in the dignity of Aaron, instead of accepting, rejected and slew Him with the Roman death of crucifixion, by the hand of the Roman governor, the bearer to the nation of the Roman imperial power. The High Priest slew Him further on the affected charge that He was plotting against the emperor's power; in reality because He acknowledged Himself to be the Christ, the Son of God.

Let us take, then, what I am about to say as facts [Pg 83] which have been hitherto undisputed. There have been, and there are, unbelievers in plenty of the Christian truth and Church, but no one has, I believe, hitherto been found to deny that Christ was put to death by Pontius Pilate at the instigation of the Chief Priest and the Sanhedrim. Let us take this as a fact, and put ourselves in thought at the great Sabbath during which His Body rested in the tomb. It is the Body of one executed with the greatest ignominy,

between two thieves, by a most cruel death, under the authority of the Roman governor, upon the charge that He claimed a kingship which interfered with that of the emperor, at the instigation of those who rejected His claim to be their Messias, the Son of God.

His Body, even when dead, ceases not to be under the jurisdiction of the Roman governor, who commits its custody to His chief enemies, those whose instigation has brought about His death. Their seal is set upon His tomb, and their guards watch it. Taking these bare facts, as acknowledged by friend and foe, can any situation of more complete impotence be conceived by human imagination than this? He has come, and taught, and worked miracles, and been rejected by His own. He has been put to death in the name and

by the power of the world's lord, who bears the crown of majesty and wields the authority of worship. The guards of His enemies sit beside His tomb.

Such was the fact on the great Sabbath, the high day of the Jewish Pasch.

What can be conceived more improbable at that [Pg 84] moment, and under these circumstances, than the fact which we have now to record as following in its evolution during so many ages? The sovereign in whose name and by whose power that Body had been put to death held undisputed in his hands the supremacy of Spiritual as well as Civil Power through the great world of Gentilism, represented by the Roman empire. From that Body was to spring, beginning with the morrow, the distinction and independence of the Spiritual over against the Civil Power, which was to dissolve this twofold supremacy throughout the whole range of that empire. And this was to be accomplished by a series of actions arising out of the sole proclamation of envoys taken from the people which had rejected Him--a proclamation derived from the commission which He should give in the Body raised again to life. The distinction, indeed, of the two Powers, so far from being new, has been coeval with the human race itself, as we have seen; but it has been broken down by human sin in all nations but one, and that one, created for its maintenance, made, through all its history, prophetical for its fulfilment when the time of that fulfilment came, has rejected its Bearer; and yet out of its bosom, on the morrow, is to go forth that word of power which in the end shall change the condition of human society, and create it after another order.

It will be well thoroughly to grasp the truth that all which followed depended upon a fact, the supernatural character of which can-not be exaggerated. We are considering the Spiritual Power which arose and diffused [Pg 85] itself in the world from the Person of Christ. It took its origin from the Body in which He appeared to His Apostles after His resurrection. Without their belief in that resurrection, as evidenced to all their senses, there was no ground for their conduct. Without the reality of that resurrection there was no source for the Power. It would seem that, whatever else the Christian order of things may be, it must be supernatural and

miraculous, since, to exist at all, it presupposes a fact which is a lordship over nature and a miracle in the highest degree. Without this

primary miracle all Christian faith is vain, and in the power which worked it all subsequent miracles are included. That the fact took place, let the results which followed testify, at the beginning of which our exposition stands. The Jews expected a Messias, who, according to the prophecies long enshrined in their nation about Him, was to be Priest, Prophet, and King. They put to death one who claimed to come before them in this triple character. From one dead, so long as he continues dead, no life can spring. But life and multifold life sprung up here; therefore He who was dead had arisen, and all of which we have to speak is the result of His life. The

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fundamental truth on which we have to dwell is the going forth of a supernatural power from the Person of Christ.

We have seen Adam in Paradise created in the full maturity of intellect and will, and placed at the head of a double order of things, of civil and of spiritual authority. We have now to consider that greater One whom Adam prefigured, and who, coming forth from [Pg 86] the tomb, assumed forthwith that double headship. When the great act of His pontificate had been accomplished in giving

up His Body to death for the sins of the world, and its efficacy acknowledged by His resurrection, He declared to His Apostles "that

all power had been given to Him in heaven and upon earth." This all-power in heaven and on earth, given to the God-man as the fruit of His incarnation and the reward of His sacrifice, divides itself into two--temporal and spiritual. The first is that by which He disposes of all persons and all events. This power He has not delegated to any one in chief, but keeps it in His own hands. Yet it is a part of this power of which it is said, "By me kings reign, and princes decree justice." The whole civil sovereignty is founded on an apportionment to it of the divine sovereignty for the maintenance of human society. A part of the second or Spiritual Power He delegated to St. Peter in chief, and to the Apostles, with St. Peter at their head. Out of this all-power He set up and sent forth in them

a royal priesthood to proclaim and maintain the truth which He had come to declare to the world; that is to say, He took His own priesthood and put it upon them, investing it with a reproductive ordering and maintaining power in His spiritual kingdom. To it He attached the gift of truth, that is, of communicating, unfolding, guarding, the whole body of doctrine which He came upon earth to declare; and in it He placed the jurisdiction which is necessary to the priesthood in order to exert itself in offering the sacrifice and in dispensing the sacraments [Pg 87] which He instituted, and in guarding the truth with which they are bound up.

That power, then, which He designated in the keys given to Peter, in the Rock which He set in his person, in the pastoral charge which He laid upon him over His sheep, and in which He sent forth His Apostles to make disciples all nations, to baptize them in the sacred Name, to teach them to observe all which He had commanded, and in the exercise of which He promised to remain with

them to the end of the world, is one and indivisible in itself, and triple in its range and direction--a priesthood proclaiming the truth and ruling in the sphere which belongs to its priesthood and its teachings. As Adam is created one and complete, and his race springs from him, so this kingdom of Christ springs complete from Him in its regimen, which is not the result of history, but formed in

His Person before its history begins, as He is at once Priest, Teacher, and King. Thus this Power comes from above, not from below; proceeds from emanation; is not gathered gradually by accretion; is an effect of positive institution, derived from the Head; not the effect of a need or the working out of a natural capacity in the body.

The root of that Power is the act for the accomplishment of which our Lord Himself took our flesh upon Him--the act of His high priesthood, by which, having taken our flesh, He took also the sins of the world upon Himself, and offered Himself for them on the cross. It is as Redeemer that He is Priest, the sacrifice of His body being the offering which He made. It is in the [Pg 88] perpetual service and offering of that body that the priesthood which He created for others exists and provides the perpetual bread of life, which is the food of sanctification, for His people. In the priesthood, therefore, we have to deal with the whole range of subject which embraces grace on the part of God and worship on the part of man. It is most fitting that all spiritual power should grow upon this stock. All priesthoods in the world from the beginning had been connected, as we have seen, with the sense and acknowledgment of guilt; and with the rite of sacrifice. In the Aaronic priesthood this has been specially noted. Thus it bore a perpetual

prophetical witness to the act which Christ accomplished. All future priesthood dated from the accomplishment of that act, and took its force from it. Thus it was truly the central act of human history. Had not the Son of God assumed our nature, He could not have been a Priest. His priesthood, therefore, carried in it the two great divine acts--His incarnation and His satisfaction, which make up the economy of human salvation. The first direction, then, of the power which He delegated is that of the Priest.

The second is that of the Teacher. A principal part of His ministry while on earth certainly was to teach. He was the Prophet that was to come into the world, and all that He taught bore reference to the two acts just dwelt upon, that He came forth from God and was going to God. Not a sentence of His teaching but presupposes His Incarnation and His Passion. That whole body of truth, therefore, which He did not write [Pg 89] down Himself, but committed to the living ministry of His Apostles, proceeds, as it were, out of His Pontificate, and rests upon it. It is the truth of the Word made flesh, and of God sacrificed for His creatures. The gift

of teaching, as the illuminating power in His Church, corresponds to the virtue of faith in the taught, and implies the possession of truth in the teacher. As the priesthood has a perpetual sacrifice stored up within it, and a perpetual gift of grace accompanying it, so the teaching has a perpetual gift of truth. The fountain of truth, therefore, in this Power, can be no more discoloured and polluted than the fountain of grace in the priesthood can be turned into sin. By virtue of it Christ remains for ever the one Teacher and Mas-ter whom all His people have to follow. Theology is an outcome of this Power. The issuing of doctrinal decrees is grounded upon it, and the censure of writings and of all false opinions on whatever subject which may impair Christian doctrine.

The third direction of the one Power is that of ruling and ordering, not to be separated from the former two, since it consists, in fact, in the free, legitimate, and ordered use of them, and has, therefore, been termed Jurisdiction, inasmuch as it is government in the whole domain of grace and truth. In every government there is a power which administers, a power which legislates, a power which judges, and all these in the sovereign degree; that is, in a degree not liable to revision and reversal in the respective subject-matter. If we apply these three acts to the full domain of grace and truth, which is the domain of the Incarnate Son (John i. 14), [Pg

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90] set up in the world, we express that royalty which is the third attribute of the priesthood. It comprehends supreme pastorship in all its range; legislation in the kingdom of truth; and judgment, whether external or internal, in the spiritual tribunal.

This was the Power, one and indivisible in itself, triple in its direction, which Christ took from His own Person as part of the all-power given to Him, and delegated to the Ruler of His Church, that in the exercise of it He might fulfil all prophecy concerning Himself, and be at once Priest, Prophet, and King: and out of this He made and makes His people.

In the transmission of that Power to the persons to whom He gave it He observed two principles: that of unity, and that of hierarchical subordination. To maintain the first, He made the Primacy; to maintain the second, the College of Apostles. For the whole of this triple power, the keys of the kingdom of heaven in the priesthood, the guardianship of faith in the office of teacher, and the supreme pastorship of rule He promised to one and bestowed on one, Peter. Thus He made Peter the Primate, and by the centering this triple authority in his sole person set him as the Rock on which the Church is built. At the same time He associated with Peter the eleven, to exercise this same authority in conjunction with Him. Thus at the very founding of the Church we find the two forces which are to continue throughout, and from the union of which the whole hierarchy with its graduated subordination springs. From the Apostolic College descends [Pg 91] the Episcopate, the everliving source of which is in Peter the head, by union with whom it

is "one Episcopate, of which a part is held by each without division of the whole." Only on this condition is the Episcopate one, without which, in all places and in all time, it would be a principle of rivalry and division, using the triple power of priesthood, teaching, and rule against itself. With this condition we have exactly realised the image of the Rock on which the Church is founded, and against which the gates of hell shall not prevail, in the establishment of the Episcopate, as one indivisible power, having its fountain and fulness in one person, a part of whose solicitude is shared by a body of bishops spread through the whole world, speaking with one voice the faith of Peter, because they are united with the person of Peter.