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
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 followed; 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 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 but a parallel to this to say that a creative hand impressing itself
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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