For the ideal of the early Christian Church was undoubtedly an _international Theocracy_. On this very account it disgusted the Roman patriotism which despised it. But directly it became acclimatised in the West, and prevailed, it also underwent that modification of theocratic ideals which the West always entails. It threw itself into the mould of the _State_. It assumed the purple of the Cæsars; it “sent forth its dogmas like legions into the Provinces.” This only happens in Europe; in the East religions are never politicised. The West seeks the tangible and turns to myth the wonders that are literal to the Eastern mind. In so far as the old Egyptian belief was in the priestly power, it may perhaps be termed oligarchical, but not in the Western sense. The Church of Buddha is a spiritual brotherhood, never a _State_. Islam, like that from which it sprang, is a Theocracy without any inherent organisation. Like it, it eventually chose a monarchical headship; and, like it too, its monarchy came to be cleft in twain. It is, I repeat, only in the West that creeds are politicised. As the earthly sanctions for Christianity coarsened through the centuries, it became at once Cæsarian and cosmopolitan. But the warfare between the so-called secular and spiritual powers, which, indeed, forms the history of the earliest Middle Ages, soon began to impair its birthright of cosmopolitanism. The invincible bias towards nationality of the Northern races asserted itself. Dante, it is true, dreamed of a real Theocracy. But he was a strong champion of a monarchical State. He staked his hopes on that great Emperor--that “patriot king”--whose premature death dashed his vision to the ground. And after Dante, Savonarola craved a real Theocracy; but it again assumed that Republican shape which, two centuries later, was to play a greater, though as futile, a part in England. The Church one way or another throughout Europe perpetually tended towards becoming “a State within the State,” a “King of kings;” and in this regard it is not a little curious that the present Oratorians still obey the antique Florentine Constitution which St. Philip of Neri transcribed and embalmed as the rule of his order. In the same way the early American Episcopalians brought with them, in their three-yearly Conventions, that Triennial Parliament which William of Orange grudgingly granted to the Tories, and which Walpole was afterwards to repeal for the Whigs. Once more, the Pilgrim Fathers brought the ideal of Republican forms to America; but Republican forms soon passed into democratic facts. From Jemima Wilkinson to Mormonism and Christian science, sects and sectaries have abounded. No religious vagary has lacked its audience and its franchise. America exemplifies the disadvantage of lacking a national comprehensive Church in a country whose aspirations are national. Early in the seventeenth century the Presbyterians persecuted