departments of life; that it is the duty of the State to enforce conformity; and that resistance is unjustifiable. The State may therefore compel the propagation of heresy, and stamp out completely the true faith, for the notion is unfounded, that persecution always fails'. If the rights of conscience and the claims of truth are to be respected at all, the Church must make herself the guardian of them and claim supremacy over the State. So long of course as persecution is a recognised principle, truth cannot be secure. But it is at least a step in the right direction that the power which has physical force on its side, shall submit to take its views of truth and error from the power whose force is moral and spiritual only. It is better that the Church should direct the State, as to what forms of faith to enforce or to persecute, than that the State should prescribe religion proprio motu. Even this imperfect condition of things is a tribute to the rights of conscience, to the claims of truth, and to the existence of human interests other than those which are merely material and earthly. Toleration involves the principle, that religion is a department of life which the State has no moral right to control, that opinion may not be coerced. Persecution by the State at the bidding of the Church contains the germ of this principle; for it arises from the notion that the State as such cannot meddle with opinion, but must take its views from those who know. It forms the necessary transition between the State-religion of the Roman Empire and the modern ideal of freedom of opinion. In the first stage, the State prescribes 1 Mill, On Liberty, 16.

a religion of its own and compels all men to worship the Emperor. In the second, the State recognizes that it is incompetent to decide upon questions of religious belief, and must go to the spiritual authority to find truth; but it still regards the enforcement of truth as a duty, and persecution as its proper function. The third stage is that of complete toleration of all forms of belief, when the State has given up its claim to meddle with opinion, and regards religious questions as beyond its competence. Now the third stage was not reached at the period which is here being discussed. It will therefore be readily seen that in order to secure the principle which is characteristic of the second stage, and to prevent a relapse into the first, the Church must ever be proclaiming its supremacy in matters of faith and denying the right of the State to meddle therein save at its bidding. This must inevitably lead to some such claim of political authority as was put forward under the Papal or Presbyterian system. If the State admits the right of the Church to dictate to it the true faith to be enforced and to prescribe forms of ecclesiastical organization and discipline, the Church will be found continually encroaching upon the State; many matters, which are of civil import, will be treated as constructively ecclesiastical; and, in the last resort, all freedom will be denied to the State, whose unspiritual character will be made the basis of a claim for its enslavement. The State must then assert its independence; and the form of the assertion is the subject of this essay. Nor is there any means, whereby the conflict conflict in can be brought to a close, until the principle of

The

toleration be generally accepted. Only when the evitably lasts, until State has resigned the claim to make religion toleration coextensive with its authority, can the Church with becomes a recognized safety withdraw from its pretensions to make politics principle. subservient to ecclesiasticism. When that be the case, the State by giving up the claim to enforce truth at the point of the bayonet will have freed the Church from the risk of destruction. The claims of the State to omnipotence may henceforward be admitted. The Church will no longer be in danger with every chance current of thought, that may sway the sovereign one or number. There is no longer any need for the Church to proclaim its supremacy over the State, for its activity is recognised as free from State interference. The State is sovereign. It may legally do what it pleases. No co-equal jurisdiction exists. No clerical organization may dictate to it. That is the principle underlying the sophistical reasoning and obsolete philosophy of the supporters of the Divine Right of Kings. science must be respected. Beliefs are free. Men's forms of ecclesiastical organization must be of their own choosing. The State must not force their faith or practice. Religious toleration is to be a practical limit upon the exercise of the sovereign power. This is the principle, which out of numberless impossible claims and anarchical opinions has been won for modern citizens by those who assert the Divine Right of Pope or Presbyter. Neither side saw clearly or completely what was the essence of its claim. Neither side realized that toleration alone could set the conflicting claims at rest, and

Con

permit of both Church and State developing without injuring one another. Both sides argue with passion, with sophistry, with an uncritical assumption of God's being on their side, which must seem to us Pharisaical. Yet each side was right in its main contention. The State has a right to exist apart from the favour of the clergy; and politics should not be governed by ecclesiastical considerations. On the other hand there are departments of thought and action with which the State may not interfere without the gravest injury to the highest interests of humanity. Both sides were fighting for principles which have long been admitted to be rooted in right reason and utility. To throw ridicule upon the antiquated forms in which these principles found expression and did their work, to blame the royalist for servility or the Papalist for bigotry is to blame men for defending a just cause with the only weapons that were available. That there was too much of passion and prejudice on either side may be admitted. Even modern controversies are not quite without them. But they are frequently wanting in those solid results, which give such cause for gratitude to the controversialists of the middle ages and the Reformation. The more closely the subject is studied the greater will be the debt of gratitude acknowledged to those who by supporting the Divine Right of Kings have ministered to the stability and independence of the English State, and to their opponents to whose labours we owe it that liberty of thought has become a recognized principle of modern life.

CHAPTER IX.

NON-RESISTANCE AND THE THEORY OF

SOVEREIGNTY.

aspect of

It is as a phase in the conflict of Church and Political State that the theory of the Divine Right of Kings the theory. possessed its greatest significance and produced its most memorable results. Yet it has a place also in the history of the developement of the theory of government, and must be considered in relation to those political problems which occupied men's minds in the seventeenth century. It is true, that with the possible exception of Hobbes, all the political theorists up to the end of the seventeenth century either have religion for the basis of their system, or regard the defence or supremacy of some one form of faith as their main object. Hardly any political idea of the time but had its origin in theological controversy. To Roman writers in the main are due the theories of the State of nature and of the original compact1. Popular rights and ecclesiastical supremacy are bound up with one another. Yet since all these theological controversies have a political aspect, it is possible to isolate this aspect

1 See especially Suarez, De Legibus, 111, 4; Mariana, Del Rey, 1. 1, 2, 8. In the last-mentioned chapter the question discussed is '¿Es mayor el poder del rey, ó el de la republica?' The course of the