Now the Christian church did, or wished to do, directly the reverse. Human thought, human liberty, private manners, and individual opinions, were precisely what it endeavoured to rule over. It did not make a code like other powers, to define the actions at once morally culpable and socially dangerous, and to award them punishment in proportion only as they bore this double character; but it set out a catalogue of all actions morally culpable, and, under the name of sins, it punished and acted on the design of repressing them all; in a word, the government of the church was not applied, like modern governments, to the outward man, and to the purely civil relations of men amongst themselves; it was applied to the inward man, to the thought and the conscience--that is to say, to what is held by man as most intimately his own, to what is most free and restive to constraint. {99} The church, then, by the very nature of its enterprise, in combination with the tendency of some of the principles upon which its government was founded, was placed in peril of becoming tyrannical, and of using an illegitimate employment of force. But at the same time the force encountered an opposition which it could not vanquish. However little movement or scope may be left to them, human thought and love of liberty react energetically against every attempt to prostrate them, and repeatedly compel the very despotism which they endure to step down and abdicate its supremacy. This is what happened in the bosom of the Christian church. We have enumerated the proscription of heresy, the anathema upon the right of examination, the contempt for individual reason, and the principle of the imperative transmission of doctrines through those in authority. Yet scarcely a society is to be found in which individual reason has been more boldly developed than in the church. What are sects and heresies but the fruit of individual opinions? And these sects and heresies, and all this species of opposition encountered by the Christian church, afford incontestible proof of the moral life and activity which reigned in it; a troubled and painful life, strewed with dangers, errors, and crimes, yet noble and potential, and giving scope to the finest developments of intellect and opinion. But setting aside the opposition, and entering into the ecclesiastical government itself, we find it constituted and acting in a manner quite different to what some of its principles seem to have prescribed. It denied the right of examination, it wished to deprive individual reason of its liberty; yet it is to reason that it for ever addressed its appeals; liberty was actually its mainspring. What were its institutions and means of action? Provincial councils, national councils, œcumenical councils, a continual correspondence and an incessant publication of letters, admonitions, and other writings. Never did any government proceed to such an extent in the way of discussion and common deliberation.