It will be my endeavour in speaking of the short life of English republicanism to avoid these opposite partialities, and to treat it as the last act in a conflict beginning with the Reformation, in which the several parties had each its justification in reason, and which ended, not simply, as might seem, in a catastrophe, but was preliminary to a reconciliation of the forces at issue of another kind than could to an actor in the conflict be apparent. If I seem to begin far back, I must trust to the sequel for vindication. {279} The Reformation, we know, opened a breach in the substantial unity of Christendom, or rather brought to view in a new form one as old as the conflict between the spirit and the flesh. Such a breach lies deep down in the constitution of man, as a spirit self-determined and self-contained, yet related to a world which it regards as external and its opposite, and so related that from this world it receives its character, nay, in the proper sense, its reality. Outward ordinances were in St. Paul’s eyes fleshly and alien to the spirit. Yet had they been the spirit’s schoolmaster, and in outward ordinances it was fain in turn to embody itself when it went forth to recast the world in a Christian society. The Christianity of the west remained till the Reformation essentially a Christianity of ordinances. The opposition of church and empire, of ecclesiastical and secular jurisdiction, was not in any proper sense an opposition of the spirit and the world. The church and its law had not yet been questioned by the reason, and hence their authority had not been recognised as rational. The obedience rendered to them was that of the servant rather than of the son. The Christ who ruled through them was still a ‘Christ after the flesh.’ The two swords which Peter showed to Jesus were taken by medieval fancy as emblematic of the double sovereignty of church and state, and indeed fitly represented the sameness in kind of the two powers. Each was a carnal weapon, nor was there any essential distinction between the objects to which each was applied. Neither touched the spirit, or rather the spirit was not in a state to be conscious of the wound. To the higher intellects of the time, like Dante, the co-ordination of the two seemed an evil, for under the name of a separation between the spiritual and temporal was covered an antagonism of sovereignties equally temporal. The one thwarted, supplemented, combined with the other in the same sphere of outward relations. Together they built up the firmament of custom and ordinance, which the boundless spirit had not yet learned to feel as a limitation.