“The Parliament of England,” he protests, had turned “regal bondage into a free commonwealth.” “All Protestants,” he proceeds, “hold that Christ in His Church hath left no vicegerent of his power, but Himself without deputy is the only head thereof, governing it from heaven.” So far Milton announces pure Theocracy; but the leaven of his classical republicanism is disclosed in the next sentence: he cannot divorce religion from politics. “How, then, can any Christian man derive his kingship from Christ? I doubt not but all ingenuous and knowing men will easily agree with me that a free commonwealth, without a single person or House of Lords, is by far the best Government, if it can be had.” And then he propounds grand councils of a perpetual senate, safe-guarded against “any dogeship of Venice,”[92] as the means to save the State. “The whole freedom of man,” he says, “consists either in spiritual or civil liberty.” No rule for the first is admitted by him but the Scriptures; for the second he takes the Dutch model of the United Provinces. But he neglects to consider how liberty can be settled without order, or order without discipline, or discipline without authority, or authority without creed. Even the loftiest Puritan ideal of Theocracy, therefore, was no less political than that of the Church. A very few years witnessed the complete breakdown of a system which sought to blend the early Latin and the early Semitic ideals together in unnatural alliance, and disregarded the native bias of Great Britain. The ensuing reaction rendered the English Church more political than ever. She was split into contending partisanship for contending dynasties. She repudiated James the Second, but not the Stuarts. Under William of Orange latitudinarianism, even her latitudinarianism, was militant. But under the two first Georges she grew torpid and time-serving. The rash and rabid Sunderland, the astute Walpole, parodied the old Miltonic ideals in their zeal for indifferentism, and in self-defence the Church tended temporarily to seem the mere stipendiary of the State, like an excise officer. But Wesley in England, and Whitefield both here and in America, re-aroused the Church to the higher and holier ideals of a _national_ Theocracy. Some century later the Tractarian movement spurred her energies afresh, and they have since been once more quickened in the battle with mechanical materialism. But all along it has been a sheer necessity in England--a necessity for spiritual as well as civil _freedom_--that the State should lend its earthly sanction of _order_ to the Church. A _national_ Church so uncontrolled is impossible in England, where politics tinge every form of aspiration. For international Theocracy, for that “millenary year” which is the magnificent ideal of Romanism, the times are unripe. It must remain a remote goal so long as the competitive egoism of nations, transfiguring the baser egotism of individuals and of mere races, is paramount.