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
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 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 resisted 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
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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