Polytheistic piety, whatever its defects, was always ready to add a grace to every innocent enjoyment; monotheistic religiousness, as we see its severe features in some modern churches, contents itself with adding a solemn sanction to the moral law--a severity which here and there has not been able to keep itself free from the unlovely phase of regarding the innocent enjoyments and the graceful pleasantries of life as a sin. So much for the soul of the business; the body is what we call the Church. And here the very word is significant. In one sense, as a separate ethical corporation, the ancients had no Church. Why? Because Church and State were one; or, if they were two, they were too like the famous Siamese twins that used to be carried about the country as a show, two so closely connected that they could no more be torn from one another and live than the limpet can be separated from the rock to which it clings. With the peoples of the ancient world the State was the Church and the Church was the State; the priest was a magistrate and the magistrate was a priest. This identity of two things, or loose intercommunion and fusion of two things in modern association so instinctively kept apart, arose from the common germ out of which both Church and State grew--viz., as we saw in the previous lecture, the FAMILY. Every father of a family, in the normal and healthy state of society, is his own priest as well as his own king. In religion and morals, as well as in all domestic ordinances, he is absolute and supreme; and the functions which necessarily belonged to him as supreme administrator in his own family would, under the influence of family feelings, naturally be conceded to him when the family grew to a clan, and the clan to a kingdom. And this is the state of things which we meet with in the Book of Genesis, long before the promulgation of the Mosaic law, where we read (xiv. 18) that Melchizedek, _king_ of Salem, went out to bless Abraham, and he was _priest_ of the Most High God; the distinction between priest and layman, to which our ears are so familiar, being in this, as in a thousand other well-known instances, altogether ignored. Not only in Homer, where we find Agamemnon, the king of men, performing sacrificial functions without even the presence of a priest,[14] but in the sober historical age we find the King of Sparta performing all the public sacrifices--being, in fact, in virtue of his office, high priest of Jove.[15] So closely indeed was the State religion identified with the person of the supreme magistrate that, when the kingship was abolished in Greece, and three principal archons and seven secondary ones shared his functions, one still retained the title of βασιλεύς, _king_, and had the supervision, or, as we would say, supreme episcopacy and overseership of all matters pertaining to religion.[16] The same thing took place in Rome, where the name of king was even more odious than in Greece; but nevertheless a _rex