Church and State as Seen in the Formation of ChristendomAllies, T. W. (Thomas William)
Religion
Church and State as Seen in the Formation of Christendom
Allies, T. W. (Thomas William)
Church and state; Church history -- Primitive and early church, ca. 30-600; Religion and state
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 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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