rom them at a tangent. For it is this very interpretation of the Church that, according to my conviction, constituted the first and fundamental apostasy." Such was the motto from Coleridge's Remains which he selected as the full expression of his own views, and it was as realizing this idea that he turned eagerly to all institutions which seemed likely to impress on all Christians the moral, as distinct from the ceremonial, character of their religion, the equal responsibility and power which they possessed, not "as friends or honorary members" of the Church, but as its most essential parts.

Such (to make intelligible, by a few instances, what in general language must be obscure) was his desire to revive the order of deacons, as a link between the clergy and laity, his defence of the union of laymen with clerical synods, of clergy with the civil legislature, his belief that an authoritative permission to administer the Eucharist, as well as Baptism, might be beneficially granted to civil or military officers, in congregations where it was impossible to procure the presence of clergy, his wish for the restoration of Church discipline, “which never can and never ought to be restored, till the Church puts an end to the usurpation of her powers by the clergy; and which, though it must be vain when opposed to public opinion, yet, when it is the expression of that opinion, can achieve anything." (Serm. vol. iv. pp. liii. 416.) Such was his suggestion of the revival of many "good practices, which belong to the true Church no less than to the corrupt Church, and would there be purely beneficial; daily church services, frequent communions, memorials of our Christian calling, presented to our notice in crosses and wayside oratories; commemorations to holy men of all times and countries; the doctrine of the communion of saints practically taught; religious orders, especially of women, of different kinds, and under different rules, delivered only from the snare and sin of perpetual vows." (Serm. vol. iv. Pref. p lvi.)

A society organized on these principles, and with such or similar institutions, was, in his judgment, the "true sign from heaven" meant to be "the living witness of the reality of Christ's salvation, which should remind us daily of God, and work upon the habits of our life as insensibly as the air we breathe," (Serm. vol. iv. p. 307,) which would not "rest satisfied with the lesser and imperfect good, which strikes thrice and stays," (ibid. Pref. p. liv.,) which would be "something truer and deeper than satisfied not only the last century, but the last seventeen centuries." (Ibid. Pref. p. liii.)

But it was almost impossible for his speculations to have stopped short of the most tangible shape which they assumed, viz. his idea, not of an alliance or union, but of the absolute identity of the Church with the State. In other words, his belief that the object of the State and the Church was alike the highest welfare of man, and that, as the State could not accomplish this, unless it acted with the wisdom and goodness of the Church, nor the Church, unless it was invested with the sovereign power of the State, the State and the Church in their ideal form were not two societies, but one; and that it is only in proportion as this identity is realized in each particular country that man's perfection and God's glory can be established on earth. This theory had, indeed, already been sanctioned by some of the greatest names in English theology and philosophy, by Hooker in his Ecclesiastical Polity, and in later times by Burke, and in part by Coleridge. But (if a negative may be universally asserted on such a subject) it had never before, at least in England, been so completely the expression of a man's whole mind, or the basis of a whole system, political as well as religious, positive as well as negative.

The peculiar line of his historical studies, the admiration which he felt for the Greek and Roman commonwealths,—his intensely political and national turn of mind, - - his reverence for the authority of law,

his abhorrence of what he used to consider the anarchical spirit of dissent on the one hand, and the sectarianism of a clerical government on the other — all tended to the same result. His detestation, on the one hand, of what he used to call the secular or Jacobinical notion of a State, as providing only for physical ends, on the other hand, of what he used to call the superstitious or antichristian view of the Church, as claiming to be ruled, not by national laws, but by a divinely-appointed succession of priests or governors,both combined to make him look to the nation or commonwealth as the fit sphere for the full realization of Christianity; to the perfect identification of Christian with political society, as the only mode of harmonizing the truths which, in the opposite systems of Archbishop Whately and Mr. Gladstone, he lamented to see "each divorced from its proper mate."

Accordingly, no full development of the Church, no full Christianization of the State, could in his judgment take place, until the Church should have become, not a subordinate, but a sovereign society; not acting indirectly on the world, through inferior instruments, but directly through its own government, the supreme legislature. Then at last all public officers of the State, feeling themselves to be necessarily officers of the Church, would endeavor "each in his vocation and ministry," to serve its great cause "not with a subject's indifference, but with a citizen's zeal." Then the jealousy, with which the clergy and laity at present regard each other's interference, would, as he hoped, be lost in the sense that their spheres were in fact the same; that nothing was too secular to claim exemption from the enforcement of Christian duty, nothing too spiritual to claim exemption from the control of the government of a Christian State. Then the whole nation, amidst much variety of form, ceremonial, and opinion, would at last feel that the great ends of Christian and national society, now for the first time realized to their view, were a far stronger bond of union between Chris

t

tians, and a far deeper division from those who were not Christians, than any subordinate principle either of agreement or separation.

It was thus only, that he figured to himself the perfect consummation of earthly things, -the triumph of what he used emphatically to call the Kingdom of God. Other good institutions, indeed, he regarded as so many steps towards this end. The establishment of a parochial clergy, even in its present state, seemed to him one of the highest national blessings, - much more the revival of the Church, as he would have wished to see it revived. Still the work of Christianity itself was not accomplished, so long as political and social institutions were exempt from its influence, so long as the highest power of human society professed to act on other principles than those declared in the Gospel. But, whenever it should come to pass that the strongest earthly bond should be identical with the bond of Christian fellowship, that the highest earthly power should avowedly minister to the advancement of Christian holiness that crimes should be regarded as sins that Christianity should be the acknowledged basis of citizenship, that the region of political and national questions, war and peace, oaths and punishments, economy and education, so long considered by good and bad alike as worldly and profane, should be looked upon as the very sphere to which Christian principles are most applicable, - then he felt that Christianity would at last have gained a position, where it could cope for the first time, front to front, with the power of evil; that the unfulfilled promises of the older prophecies, so long delayed, would have received their accomplishment; that the kingdoms of this world would have indeed become the kingdoms of the Lord and of his Christ.

No one felt more keenly than himself how impossible it was to apply this view directly to existing circumstances; how the whole framework of society must be reconstructed before it could be brought into action;

how far in the remote future its accomplishment must necessarily lie. "So deeply," he said, "is the distinction between the Church and the State seated in our laws, our language, and our very notions, that nothing less than a miraculous interposition of God's Providence seems capable within any definite time of eradicating it." *

Still, it was not in his nature to postpone, even in thought, the fulfilment of his desires to a remote MilTennium or Utopia, such as in the minds of many men acts rather as a reason for acquiescence in the existing order of the world, than as a motive for rising above it. The wisdom of Hesiod's famous paradox, "He is a fool who does not know how much the half is better than the whole," was often in his mouth; in answer to the frequent allegation that because the complete fulfilment of the theory was impracticable, therefore no part of it could be made available. "I cannot answer all your objections fully," he writes to Archbishop Whately, "because if I could, it were to suppose that the hardest of all human questions contained no great difficulties; but I think on the whole, that the objections to my scheme are less than to any other, and that on the positive side it is in theory perfect: and though it never will be wholly realized, yet if men can be brought to look at it as the true theory, the practical approximations to it may in the course of time be indefinitely great."

It was still the thought which animated all his exertions in behalf of his country, where he felt that "the means were still in our hands, which it seems far better to use even at the eleventh hour, than desperately to throw them away."† And, convinced as he was, that the founders of our present constitution in Church and State did "truly consider them to be identical, the Christian nation of England to be the Church of England, the head of that nation to be for

*Pref. to Hist. of Rome, vol. i. p. ix.

† Serm. vol. ii. Pref. p. vi.