Under this name I comprehend various sets of men differing from each other in many respects, but all distinguished by a certain Jewish spirit, the spirit most directly opposed to that of the Quakers. The Scotch Covenanter is one, perhaps the most remarkable, specimen of the class. The Fifth-Monarchy Man exhibits a very different modification of it. Some of its more general features may be traced even in the Nonjurors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who regarded the Puritan factions with so much contempt and horror. It has reappeared under at least two different forms in our own day. On the whole it may be pronounced rather characteristic of Great Britain, on which account I shall be the more brief in my notice of it here.
The Theocratist believes, as I do, that the Old Testament is the great key to the meaning of national society. He believes, as I do, that the Lord is the King of every nation as much as He was of the Jewish nation. He thinks, as I do, that a nation is to undertake wars, to administer oaths, to inflict punishments, in the name and under the authority of its unseen Ruler. From these premises he proceeds to deduce certain inferences, which are various, according to his other feelings and tempers and beliefs, but which are all apparently sustained by the same scriptural authority.
The Covenanter says that the Jew existed to witness against idolatry; for the putting down of idolatry he was to unsheathe his sword. The modern nation exists for the same object, and is to use the same means for effecting it. By its obligation and oath to God it is bound to extirpate all forms of faith, which are either idolatrous or tend to idolatry.
The Fifth-Monarchy Man does not see in any existing nation the pattern of a theocracy. But one is on the point of being established, one which shall fulfil the prophecies respecting that kingdom which was cut out of the mountain without hands. He is not very clear whether this society is to be universal or national, a Catholic Church, or an Ancient Israel. He finds some of the features of both in the Bible, and he strives to unite them.
The Nonjuror recognises the Church and the nation as distinct, but the nation exists in the person of its king, for the purpose of supporting and propagating the Church and putting down heresy. This was the function of the old Jewish king, this should be the function of the king now. For this purpose he is anointed with oil, his person is sacred; he may not be deposed or set aside for any offences.
After what I have said in my remarks upon the Sermon on the Mount, the reader may perhaps understand my main point of difference with all these classes. But it will be well to bring it out in reference to each side of the doctrine. The Covenanter has surely the strongest warrant for his assertion, that the Jewish Commonwealth was in all its parts a protest against idolatry, that the moment it forgot that protest it virtually ceased to exist. And I think he is right in saying that every nation exists under the condition of its bearing this protest. Sensual worship is its destruction. The acknowledgment of an absolute unseen Being, a rigid exclusion of every thing which tends to confound Him with the works of His hands, are implied in the very nature of law, and are the only terms upon which law can be enforced.
A nation, then, must by all means strive against idolatry; but how must it strive? Under a national, legal dispensation, where law is the first thing, and spiritual principles are looked upon as the support of law, the ordinary means which a nation resorts to for the punishment of other offences must be resorted to for the punishment of this. Idolatry and all forms of false worship must be crimes to be punished by the State. There are manifest inconveniences in such a course; but it is inevitable, the existence of the nation depends upon it. Under a spiritual dispensation we escape from this necessity; idolatry is raised from the circle of outward crimes to the circle of inward sins; the sword of the Lawgiver is felt to be inadequate to reach it; the sword of the Spirit is known to be more effectual; it claims this as part of its province; it leaves to the legislature only outward crimes, of which idolatry, if not extirpated out of the heart, must be the cause. The Covenanting doctrine, therefore, that because the Lord is our King, our National King, we are bound to treat offences directly against Him as offences against the law, is applicable only to a State existing without a Church. Neither the honour of God nor the safety of the Nation binds us to take any particular method for avenging the one or preserving the other; and if we believe, as those who believe in a Church must, that spiritual methods are the most Divine, and as readers of history must, that they are the most effectual, we have no excuse for following Jewish precedent at the cost of sacrificing principles which are implied in the Old Testament and expounded in the New.
It will be evident, I think, from these considerations that the Scotch Covenanter was seeking to establish a Jewish and not a Christian nation; that is to say, a Nation professing Religion, and not a Nation which recognizes a Church as the ground and vital principle of its own existence.
Of the Millennarians I will only say, that the records of their thoughts are by no means unworthy of study. Their confusions respecting that which is distinct and that which is universal, that which is spiritual and that which is legal, are only the same confusions concentrated into a small compass, and divested of restraining and correcting influences, which we find scattered through all ecclesiastical history. And in the writings of Sir Harry Vane, if he is to be considered one of them, we may detect very deep principles and remarkable distinctions indeed, which need only the acknowledgment that they were embodied ages before in the Catholic Church, to make them as practically important as they are profound.
It will seem most strange that I should impute to the Nonjuror, who is usually spoken of in England as the highest of High Churchmen, the same legal, anti-ecclesiastical spirit which we noticed in the Covenanter. But the fact seems to be this: he conceived the Church to be little more than the Canon Law embodied in a set of persons and institutions. This law he set very much above the national law, and resisted as Erastian any attempt to bring one under the yoke of the other. But of the Church as a spiritual, sacramental body, constituted not in laws but in a Person, exhibiting the principles and essence of laws, and therefore not to be circumscribed by their formalities, he seems to have had little idea. How, therefore, the Nation could serve the Church, except by propagating its opinions and putting down its enemies, how both might be employed to fulfil the purposes of Him who is the absolute Love and the absolute Righteousness, towards a spiritual creature who is dwelling here under visible and earthly conditions, he did not much consider. And it would seem that the same habit of mind which must have so much obscured the New Testament to him, did not help him greatly in his interpretation of the Old; otherwise he must surely have perceived that, however unlawful it may be for subjects to depose kings, the King of kings is often said in Scripture to exercise His own prerogative in deposing them. And if we are living under His government, as the Jews were (which is their own doctrine), we must have a right to inquire whether He has, on any occasion, exhibited His displeasure against any monarch who has broken a national covenant, by setting him aside, and by appointing another. For it may be, that in refusing our allegiance to that other ruler, or in denying that he is rightful as well as actual king, we are making light not of the privileges of subjects but of the authority of God.
Section III. The Separatist
By this name I designate those who say that the Nation and Church ought to be separate bodies, while yet they do not, with the Quaker, look upon national life as an evil thing. They state the reasons for their opinion thus: ‘The State is secular; the Church, if it be a true Church, is anti-secular; to unite a secular and anti-secular body is monstrous. The effects of it are an invasion of the rights of conscience, continual disputes between the two societies, an impossibility of reformation.’ These are the doctrines generally maintained by the successors of those English Puritans, who were themselves such vehement assertors of the religious character of the State.
It is not necessary to reply to them at any length. I have admitted their premises as fully as they can desire. A secular and an anti-secular society can exist together only as deadly enemies. If the State be secular, the Church must desire the extinction of the State, for she lives that she may destroy that which is secular. Our difficulty is to understand how Christian men can speak with so much toleration of that which they describe by an epithet so purely evil. For, if they do not use the word secular in an evil sense, where lies the point of their antithesis? How is the Church anti-secular except as she is opposed to something wrong, something ungodly? If by the word anti-secular is understood merely spiritual as opposed to legal, then the whole phrase is a cheating one. For we deny that there is any contradiction between that which is legal and that which is spiritual; and those who use this language will join us in the denial. They say continually, that the Law and the Gospel are not contrary to each other, though the Gospel is able to do that which the Law, being weak through the flesh, cannot do. They resist, as we do, the doctrine that what is evangelical is antilegal, while they assert, just as we do, that it is something entirely different from that which is legal, because it has an inward and not merely a literal power. What I have been endeavouring to maintain is, that a nation just so far as it is a nation, is antisecular in one way, just as much as the Church is anti-secular in another. Both are God’s appointed instruments for resisting the evil, rebellious, disorderly principles, which make up the scriptural notion of ‘this world.’ Both are liable to invasions of that principle, which they are appointed to resist; both have been infected with it. The Church has become secular when she has attempted to realise herself as a separate body; the Nation has become secular when it has tried to realise itself as a separate body. But each does so, by violating the law of its existence, by refusing to be that which the Scriptures affirm and history proves that it was meant to be.
After what I said under the last head, it is scarcely necessary that I should say much about the charge of this union being unfavourable to the rights of conscience. How such a notion has gained prevalency I think I have explained. A nation, I said, if it is to preserve its own existence, must put down that which is undermining it. It finds that principles lead to acts, that notions about the Supreme Being lead to evil conduct towards men; therefore it must extirpate those principles if it can. Nations in union with the Church have used their swords for this purpose; Churchmen may have encouraged them in such acts: but the act was not necessary for the nation, the Churchman ought to have known that he had powers more adequate to the repression of such evil. He ought to have warned the statesman not to meddle with his province, and to have told him how very impotent his arms would prove, when he tried them against spiritual enemies. But whether he has done this or not, the incorporation of his spiritual power with the national power is the great, the only witness for this truth. Separate it from the State, and the State ruler, let his notions be as liberal as they may, must and will use his power for keeping down opinion. You may preach to him about the sin and folly of the attempt, but you will preach in vain. He cannot shut his eyes to the fact, that opinions do divide his subjects, do make them rebellious, do lead to the most open mischiefs. He cares nothing about them in themselves, but if he is an honest man, he cannot be stopped in dealing with them by such means as he has, when the interests which are committed to him are at stake. You say he should leave them to spiritual influences. What influences? You denied that the spiritual influence had anything to do with the nation. You said that the statesman was to treat it as something entirely unconnected with him.
I have spoken in this instance, as I wish to speak in all others, to what I believe to be the real feeling of those who raise the objection. They feel that there is a Conscience in man, to be reverenced as the witness of God in His creature. There is no truth I am more anxious to assert than this. If there were no conscience, no ear within to receive the voice without, I do not know what the Law would address by its terrors, or the Gospel by its promises of life. Without it, I do not know what a Nation could mean, or a Church could mean. But is it not curious that those in our day and in our country, who talk most about the rights of conscience in their speeches, are least willing, in their more learned discourses, to admit the fact of a conscience; nay, actually denounce the idea of a conscience, as inconsistent with the doctrine of human depravity? And to this point I believe all must come who do not think that there is a constitution for man, and that his depravity is shewn in his refusing to abide in that constitution; in his choosing to be a separate self-willed creature. We say that his Conscience is continually protesting against his selfwill; that the office of the Nation is by stern and righteous punishment to restrain that self-will when it breaks out into acts; that the office of the Church is, by gracious and loving methods, to bring out the true free-will of which it is the base counterfeit. In like manner we say, that the office of the nation is to punish those overt acts of folly, proceeding from man’s private judgment, which disturb the order of the commonwealth; that the office of the Church is to teach men how they may rise above their private judgments, and attain that clear manly judgment which is one of the best qualifications of a good citizen. Sad is it when men are taught to indulge their self-will and their selfish judgments, and when these qualities of the evil nature are invested with the awful name of conscience. Sad is it for national order and for spiritual life.
The complaint that the relations between the Church and the Nation have always been productive of conflicts, I have considered sufficiently in a former part of this chapter. The fact is undoubted; the Nation has tried to usurp the prerogatives of the Church, the Church has tried to usurp the prerogatives of the Nation. All history is full of such records; so also it is full of disputes between parents and children, brothers and sisters, kings and subjects. Undoubtedly, if we could get rid of relationships, we should not have to read continual accounts of their being violated. But can you get rid of them unless you unmake God’s world, and turn it into a wilderness? Can you cause that that which speaks to man’s inner life should not stand in some connexion with that which speaks to him as an inhabitant of this earth? Has he not both a spirit and a body? Does the fact that they are continually at variance, prove that there is no law of fellowship between them?
But the union of the Church with the Nation is a hindrance to the reformation of the Church when it becomes corrupt. The evidence of this fact from history is particularly weak. There have been great attempts at reformation in the Church, conducted in opposition to the civil power. Such, for instance, was the reformation attempted by Hildebrand in the eleventh century; such were many of the reforms attempted by the religious orders. There have been other reformations carried on in conjunction with civil rulers. Such was the Lutheran reformation, in Saxony; the Zwinglian and Calvinistic reformation, in Switzerland; the reformation in Sweden, in Holland, in England. In all these last cases, the civil rulers were the patrons and promoters of reformation. I can see evils in all these changes; those carried on by the Church against the civil power, and those carried on by the civil power. But is the English dissenter prepared to say that the first were in their conduct and results very much better than the last? If he is not, he must abandon his principle, that the Church has no chance of being purified from her irregularities except when she stands wholly aloof from the State. If he is, he must defend himself as well as he can from the charge of Popery. To me it seems clear, from experience as well as reason, that the State is an excellent admonisher to the Church respecting her inward corruptions, because it comes in contact with those outward evils which are the fruits of them, even as the Church is a most excellent admonisher to the State respecting its sins, because their effects in destroying the Nation’s heart are most evident to the spiritual man; but that each will do mischief if it attempts, according to its own maxims, to set the other right.