Church and State as Seen in the Formation of Christendom Part 2

It is most remarkable that the last end of man dominates the whole history; that is, all the temporal goods of man from the beginning depend on his fidelity to G.o.d. Disregard of this works the Fall; the same disregard works the Deluge. It remains to show how that compact and complete society inst.i.tuted under Noah depended, as to the maintenance in unimpaired co-operation of the great goods we have just enumerated, upon the free-will of man to preserve his fidelity to G.o.d; that is, to show how in the constant order of human things there is an inherent subordination of the temporal to the spiritual good, as for the individual so for the race.

2.-_The Divine and Human Society in the Dispersion._

The divine narrative of the beginning of human society ends with an event of which the consequences remain to the present day, and from which all the actual nations of the earth take their rise. The blessing and command given to Noah and his family were, "Increase and multiply and fill the earth." It would seem that the family of man continued in that highly privileged and guarded state which has just been described during five generations, comprehending perhaps the life of Noah and Shem. Of all this time it is said, "The earth was of one tongue and the same speech." The division of the earth among the families of a race by virtue of a natural growth, which was itself the effect of the divine blessing and command, did not carry with it as a condition of that growth the withdrawal of so great a privilege as the unity of language. G.o.d had formed the human family out of one; had built it up by marriage; cemented it by a religious rite of highest meaning; crowned it with His own delegated authority of government, and sanctified that government by its alliance with religion. Unity of language is as it were the expression of all these blessings. The possession of language by the first man, the outer vocalised word, corresponding to the inner spiritual word of reason, was a token of the complete intellectual nature inhabiting a corporeal frame-a fact expressed by the doctrine that the soul is the form of the body-which const.i.tuted his first endowment. And in a proportionate manner the possession of one language as the exponent of mind and heart by his race, was the most effective outward bond of inward unity which could tie the race together, whatever its numerical and local extension might be. It is to be noted that though the cause of the deluge was that "the earth was corrupted before G.o.d, and was filled with iniquity" (Gen. vii. 11), yet G.o.d had not withdrawn from man the unity of language, perhaps because the revolt of man had not hitherto reached to a corruption of his thought of the Divine Nature itself. But now ensued an act of human pride and rebellion which led G.o.d Himself to undo the bond of society, consisting in unity of language, in order to prevent a greater evil. The sin is darkly recorded, as if some peculiar abomination lay hid underneath the words; the punishment, on the contrary, is made conspicuous. "And the earth was of one tongue and the same speech. And when they removed from the east, they found a plain in the land of Sennaar and dwelt in it. And each one said to his neighbour, Come, let us make brick and bake them with fire. And they had brick instead of stones, and slime instead of mortar. And they said, Come and let us make a city and a tower, the top whereof may reach to heaven: and let us make our name famous before we be scattered abroad into all lands.

And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the children of Adam were building. And He said, Behold it is one people, and all have one tongue; and they have begun to do this, neither will they leave off from their designs till they accomplish them indeed. Come ye, therefore, let us go down and there confound their tongue, that they may not understand one another's speech. And so the Lord scattered them from that place into all lands, and they ceased to build the city. And therefore the name thereof was called Babel, confusion, because there the language of the whole earth was confounded; and from thence the Lord scattered them abroad upon the face of all countries."

It may be inferred that the city and the tower thus begun point at a society the bond of which was not to be the wors.h.i.+p of the one true G.o.d.

As a matter of fact, thenceforth and to all time the name of Babel has pa.s.sed into the languages of men as signifying the City of Confusion, the seat of false wors.h.i.+p, the heads.h.i.+p of the line of men who are the seed of the serpent, and of that antagonism which the primal prophecy announced as the issue of the fall.

But the severity of the punishment and its nature seem further to indicate that we are here in presence of the beginning of the third great sin of the human race, in which, as in the former, the free-will of man, his inalienable prerogative and the instrument of his trial, runs athwart the purpose of G.o.d. The first was the sin of Adam's disobedience resulting in the Fall; the second the universal iniquity of the race punished by the Deluge; the third is the corruption of the idea of G.o.d by setting up many G.o.ds instead of one, a desertion of G.o.d as the source of man's inward unity, which is punished by the loss of unity of language in man, the voice of the inward unity, as it is also the chief stay and bond of his outward unity. The multiplication of the race and its propagation in all lands was part of the original divine intention. When the bond of living together in one place and under one government was withdrawn, there remained unity of wors.h.i.+p and unity of language to continue and to support the unity of the race. Man was breaking his fealty to G.o.d not only by practical impiety, as in the time before the flood, but by denial of the Divine Nature itself as the One Infinite Creator and Father; G.o.d replied by withdrawing from rebellious va.s.sals that unity of language which was the mark and bond of their living together as children of one Parent. With the record of this event Moses closes his history of the human race as one family, which he had up to this point maintained. He had hitherto strongly marked its unity in its creation, in its fall through Adam, in its first growth after the fall, and in the common punishment which descended upon it in the flood, and again in its second growth and expansion from Noah. Language is the instrument of man's thought, and the possession of one common language the most striking token of his unity; and here, after recording the withdrawal of that token by a miraculous act of G.o.d in punishment of a great sin, Moses parts from all mention of the race as one. He proceeds at once to give the genealogy of Shem's family as the ancestor of Abraham, and then pa.s.ses to the call of Abraham as the foundation of the promised people.

He never reverts to the nations as a whole, whom he has conducted to the point of their dispersion and there leaves.

Through this great sin the division of the earth by the human family started not in blessing, but in punishment. "The Lord scattered them abroad upon the face of all countries." He who had made the unity of Noah's family, Himself untied it, and we may conceive that He did so because of that greatest of all crimes, the division of the Divine Nature by man in his conception of it, his setting up many G.o.ds instead of one.

Let us see how this sin impaired, and more and more broke down, that privileged civilisation brought by Noah from before the flood, and set up by him in his family.

If G.o.d be conceived as more than one, He ceases by that very conception to be self-existing from eternity, immense, infinite, and incomprehensible, he ceases also to have power, wisdom, and goodness in an infinite plenitude; and, further, He ceases to be the one Creator, Ruler, and Rewarder of men.

Thus the conception of more G.o.ds than one carries with it an infinite degradation of the G.o.dhead itself, as received in the mind and heart of man.

But it likewise unties the society of men with each other, and lays waste the main goods of human life. Thus it was in the case of Noah's family.

As it was planted by G.o.d after the deluge, it possessed a distinct knowledge and wors.h.i.+p of Him, as the one end and object of human life.

This knowledge and wors.h.i.+p were contained, as we have seen, in the rite of sacrifice and its accompaniments. Proceeding from this, it possessed the love of G.o.d, obliging men to mutual love, a precept the more easy because it was given to those who, as members of one family, were brethren. From these it followed that no man was stranger to another man; that every one was charged with the care of his brother; and that a unity of interest itself bound men to each other.[9]

But all these goods are dependent on the first. For if men do not wors.h.i.+p one and the same G.o.d, as the Creator, the Ruler, and the Rewarder of all, their life ceases at once to have one end and object; their love to each other is deprived of its root, for they suppose themselves to be the creatures of different makers, or not to be made at all, to spring out of the earth, or to come into the world no one knows how, whence, or wherefore. Again, the natural brotherhood of man depends on his origin from one family, which must be the creature of one maker. And if the root of this natural affection and brotherhood be withered, men become strange to each other, rivals in their compet.i.tion for the visible goods of life; they cease to care for others, and cease to be united in one interest.

When the family which had formed a patriarchal state became by natural growth too large to live together, the natural process for it was that it should swarm, and each successive swarm become a patriarchal state. Here was in each the germ of a nation, as they occupied various countries.

Naturally, they would have parted in friends.h.i.+p, and if the bond of belief and of language had continued unbroken, they would have become a family of nations; they would each have carried out and propagated the original society from which they sprang without alloy or deterioration.

What actually took place was this. The division of the race into separate stems, and the corruption of the conception of G.o.d into separate divinities, pursued a parallel course, until the deities became as national as the communities over which they presided. As there ceased to be in their thought one G.o.d of the whole earth, they ceased to believe in one race of man, nor does any good seem to have more utterly perished from the peoples who sprung out of this dispersion than the belief in the universal brotherhood of man; and the conduct which should spring out of that belief, the treatment of each other as brethren.

That their having lost the consciousness of such brotherhood is no proof that it never existed, has been established for us by the new science of comparative grammar in our own day in a very remarkable instance. The careful study of a single family of languages in the great race of j.a.phet has proved beyond question that those who came after their dispersion to speak the Sanscrit, the Persian, the Greek, the Latin, the Celtic, Slavic, and Teutonic tongues, all once dwelt as brethren beside a common hearth, in the possession of the same language. Yet, in ancient times, it never crossed the mind of the Greek that he was of the same family with the Persian, by whose mult.i.tudinous inroad he was threatened; to him the barbarian, that is the man who did not speak his tongue, was his enemy, not a brother. As little did the Saxon, when he displaced the Celt, and gave him, too, the name of barbarian,[10] as not understanding his tongue, conceive that he was of the same family. It was with no little wonder that the first French and English students of Sanscrit found in it uneffaced the proofs of its parentage with Greek and Latin.

The study of the comparative grammar of various languages, when carried out as fully in other directions, may have in reserve other surprises as great as this; but the proof of unity in this case, where yet the divergence has proceeded so far, of unity in a family from which the greatest nations of the earth have sprung, and whose descendants stretch over the world, tends to make the unity of the original language of man credible on principles of science, independently either of historical tradition or of revelation, while it shows into what complete and universal oblivion a real relations.h.i.+p may fall.

With the belief in one G.o.d, then, fell the belief in one human brotherhood as well as the existence of one human society. Each separated stem became detached from the trunk, and lived for itself. It is true that each state, as it began, was patriarchal; but ident.i.ty of interests was restricted to the single state; beyond its range there was war, and within it, in process of time, war led to conquest, and after conquest the conquering leader became head of the conquered. Thus the patriarchal state, in which the head of the family was its priest, pa.s.sed into kingdoms compacted by war and its results, in an ever-varying succession of victories and defeats.

But it is our special task to see what portion of the goods, which belonged to the race when undivided, pa.s.sed on to its several stems in the dispersion with which Moses closes his account of the one human family.

The universal society stops at Babel, and national existence begins; that is, a number of inferior local unities succeed to the one universal. It would be well if we had a Moses for guide through the long period which follows, but he restricts his narrative to Abraham and his family, and to such incidental notice of the nations with whom they come in contact as their history requires. When we reach the beginnings of history in the several peoples who took their rise at the dispersion, a long time has intervened. The bond of one society in a race seems to consist in unity of place, of language, of religion, and of government. Now for man in general the unity of place was taken away by the dispersion itself. As to language, the lapse of a thousand years was more than sufficient to make the inhabitants of various countries strange to each other and barbarians. Men of different lands had long utterly ceased to acknowledge each other as brethren. As to religion, the wors.h.i.+p of the one true G.o.d had pa.s.sed into the wors.h.i.+p of many false G.o.ds in almost every country each one of which had its own G.o.ds, generally both male and female, whom it considered as much belonging to itself as its kings or its cities.

This diversity of deities in each nation, and the appropriation of them by each to itself, was become a most fertile principle of division and enmity among men. But if man had lost the unity of religion he had created for himself in every land an inst.i.tution which might be said to be universal: the division of men into bond and free, the inst.i.tution of slavery. That condition of life whereby man ceased to be a member of a family invested with reciprocal obligations and rights, came in fine to be regarded, not as a person, but as the thing of another man, that is the inst.i.tution which man had made for himself in the interval between the dispersion of Babel and the commencement of authentic history in each nation. Man, who had divided the unity of the G.o.dhead, had not only ceased to recognise the one ineffaceable dignity of reason as the mark of brotherhood in all his race demanding equality of treatment, and the respect due to a creature who possesses moral freedom, but had come to deprive a vast portion of his kindred of the fruit of their labour, and to confiscate their toil for his own advantage.

There remains the fourth bond of unity, government, whether national, tribal, or munic.i.p.al, without which social existence is not possible; and this, as the nations emerge into the light of history, appears everywhere among them standing and in great vigour. In the vast majority of cases that government clothes itself in the form of royalty; the king is undoubtedly the most natural descendant of the patriarchal chief, the father pa.s.sing by insensible gradation into the sovereign. But whether monarchy or republic, whether the rule of the many or of the few, government, by which I mean the supreme dominion in each portion of the race over itself, of life and death over subjects, is everywhere found.

Nowhere is man found as a flock of sheep without a shepherd.

Over these unrecorded years of human life, which want their prophet and their bard, sounds yet the echo of perpetual strife. If mighty forms loom among their obscurity, and come out at length with fixed character and a strong and high civilisation, such as the a.s.syrian and Egyptian, the Indian and Chinese monarchies, and so many others of more or less extent and renown, we know that states have suffered change after change in a series of wars. The patriarchal ruler has given way to the conquering chief; conquest has humiliated some and exalted others. What remains intact in each country, and after all changes, is government itself. This carried on the human race.

But if we examine more closely this race which is thus scattered through all countries, which speaks innumerable tongues, has lost the sense of its own brotherhood, wors.h.i.+ps a mult.i.tude of local G.o.ds, is divided, cut up, formed again, and torn again with innumerable wars, and has degraded a large part of itself into servitude, so as to lose as it would seem all semblance of its original unity, we yet find running through it, existing from the beginning as const.i.tuent principles which the hand of the Creator has set in it, four great goods.

1. For what hand but that of the Creator could have impressed ineffaceably upon a race, misusing as we have seen to such a degree the faculty of free-will, such an inst.i.tution as marriage, in which the family, and all which descends from the family, is contained? The dedication of one man and one woman to each other for the term of their lives, for the nurture and education of the family which is to spring from them, is indeed the basis of human society, but a basis which none but its Maker could lay. It exists in perpetual contradiction to human pa.s.sion and selfishness, for purposes which wisdom or the pure reason of man entirely approves, but which human frailty is at any time ready to break through and elude. If we could so entirely abstract ourselves from habit as to imagine a company of men and women thrown together, without connection with each other, without any knowledge, any conception beforehand of such an inst.i.tution, and left to form their society for themselves, we should not, I think, imagine them one and all choosing to engage themselves in such a union, resigning, respectively, their liberty, and binding themselves to continue, whatever might happen to either party, however strength and vigour might decline on one side, or grace and attractiveness on the other, in this bondage for life. Yet this inst.i.tution of marriage is found established, not, as was just imagined, in a single company of human beings thrown together, but in a thousand societies of men separated by place, by language, by religion, and by government. The most highly policied among them are the strictest in maintaining its purity; and the higher you are enabled by existing records to ascend in their history, the stronger and clearer appears the conception of the duties of the married state. It is surrounded with all the veneration which laws can give it, and the blessing of religion consecrates it. Take marriage among the Romans as an instance. Their commonwealth seems to be built upon the sanct.i.ty of marriage and the power of the father. The like is the case with China, the most ancient of existing politics. There is not one nation which has gained renown or advanced in civilisation but shows, as far back as you can trace its history, this inst.i.tution honoured and supported. I leave to mathematicians the task of calculating what are the chances of such an inst.i.tution springing up in so great a mult.i.tude of nations according to an identical rule, guarded in all of them with whatever protection religion and law could afford, except by the fiat of a Creator in the manner described by Moses. The signet of G.o.d impressed on Adam at his origin could alone create such a mark on his race; the Maker alone lay such a foundation for it.

We find this inst.i.tution in the course of time and in various countries debased by polygamy, and corrupted by concubinage. These aberrations testify to the force of human pa.s.sion, and the wantonness of power and wealth ever warring against it, but they only enhance thereby the force of the inst.i.tution's universal existence from the point of view from which I have regarded it.

2. Take, secondly, the rite of b.l.o.o.d.y sacrifice. It would be hard to find anything more contrary to reason and feeling than the thought that taking away the life of innocent creatures by pouring out their blood could be not only acceptable to the Maker of those creatures, but could be accepted by Him in expiation of sin committed by man. Yet this is the conception of b.l.o.o.d.y sacrifice; this was expressed in the rites which accompanied it; and besides this particular notion of expiation, which is the correlative of sin, the most solemn duties of man, that is, Adoration, Thanksgiving, and Pet.i.tion, the whole expression of his obedience to G.o.d, and dependence on G.o.d, were bound up with this rite, and formed part of it. And we find this rite of sacrifice existing from the earliest times in these various nations; continued through the whole of their history, solemnised at first by their kings and chief men, and then by an order of men created for that special purpose, and in every nation themselves holding a high rank in virtue of their performing this function. What, again, are the chances of a rite so peculiar being chosen spontaneously by so many various nations, and chosen precisely to express their homage for their own creation and continuance in being, to make their prayers acceptable, and above all, to cover their sin, to serve as an expiation, and to turn away punishment. This is the testimony which a.s.syria and Egypt, which Greece and Rome, which India and China bear to their original unity. If G.o.d inst.i.tuted this rite, at the fall itself, as a record and token of the promise then made, its existence through the many changes of the race becomes intelligible; on any other supposition it remains a contradiction both to reason and feeling, which is like nothing else in human history.

The inst.i.tution of sacrifice comprehends with its accompaniments the whole of religion. It suffered the most grievous corruption in that it was offered to false G.o.ds, to deified men, to powers of nature, to those who were not G.o.ds but demons. Again, its meaning was obscured, and the priests who offered it were not pure in their lives. But whatever abominations were at any time or in any place connected with it, its peculiarity, its testimony to the unity of the race, to the power which established it, remain without diminution.

3. Thirdly, let us take the great good of civil government. The human race is scattered over all countries, in divisions which range as to amount of population from the smallest independent tribe to the largest empire. G.o.d suffered them to pursue their own course, to engage in numberless wars, and to pa.s.s through a succession of the most opposite circ.u.mstances, but He implanted in them from the beginning, and preserved in them throughout, the instinct of society, which develops in government. And He established that government in possession by the patriarchal const.i.tution of life, which each portion of the race at its first start in independence took with it. By this He maintained order and peace, as a rule, in the bosom of each community; the smallest and the greatest alike possessed the commonwealth in the midst of them, which was thus, independent of walls and forts, a citadel of safety. Not even the most savage tribe in the most desolate northern wilderness, barren sh.o.r.e, or inland lake, was left in its self-wrought degradation without this support. In cultured nations, such as the Egyptians, a.s.syrians, Persians, Indians, Chinese, the State attained a high degree of perfection; while from the practice of the h.e.l.lenic cities Plato and Aristotle could draw principles of government which are of value for all time; and Rome, the queen-mother of cities, has been the teacher of state-wisdom to mankind.

But what I wish to note here is that civil government was everywhere throughout the dispersion of the nations a dam, constructed by Divine Providence, sufficiently strong to resist the inundation of evils brought about by man's abuse of his moral freedom. It was the moon in heaven which shone as a stable ordinance of G.o.d amid the storms and darkness of human life in the fall of heathendom. It belonged to man as man and never departed from him; because as conscience was given to the individual, the witness and mark of G.o.d, sovereignty was given to the community, a delegation of the divine kings.h.i.+p. "It is entirely by the providence of G.o.d that the kingdoms of men are set up," says a great father.[11] "He gave to every one of them, said the Son of Sirach, commandment concerning his neighbour. Their ways are always before him, they are not hidden from his eyes. Over every nation he set a ruler, and Israel was made the manifest portion of G.o.d" (Ecclus. xvii. 12-15).

The human race, from its beginning and through all its dispersion, was never in any of its parts without civil government. The heads.h.i.+p of Adam, repeated in Noah, itself a vicarious exercise of divine authority, rested, amid its dispersion and partial degradation, upon each portion of the race, so that it might never be kingless and lawless: never a herd, always a society.

This great good had also its corruption, into which it very frequently fell; the corruption of tyranny. Against this the Book of Wisdom (vi.

2-5) warned: "Hear therefore ye kings and understand: learn ye that are judges of the ends of the earth. Give ear, you that rule the people, and that please yourselves in mult.i.tudes of nations. For power is given you by the Lord, and strength by the most High, who will examine your works, and search out your thoughts: because being ministers of his kingdom, you have not judged rightly, nor kept the law of justice, nor walked according to the will of G.o.d." But this corruption of tyranny no more destroys the good of government or its testimony as the mark of the Creator, than the corruption of marriage by concubinage, or the offering of sacrifice to false G.o.ds, impairs the testimony of those inst.i.tutions.

4. The fourth good which I shall note as running through all the nations of the dispersion, is the alliance between government and religion.

Distance of place, diversity of language, division of the idea of G.o.d into separate divinities, which become the guardians of their several peoples, these causes all co-operate to sever from each other the various peoples and to make them enemies. But observe, at the same time, with this hardening and estrangement of the peoples from each other, the enlacement of all human life, public and private, by the rites and ties of religion in each society. At the head of the new race we have seen Noah offering sacrifice for his family, and a covenant with the whole earth struck in that sacrifice between G.o.d and man. That aspect of the public society towards religion was not altered during the whole course of heathendom, and in all its parts. It is a relation of the strictest alliance. No nation, no tribe of man, up to the coming of Christ, conceived any condition of society in which the Two Powers should not co-operate with each other. "If it be asked," says Bossuet,[12] "what should be said of a State in which public authority should be established without any religion, it is plain at once that there is no need to answer chimerical questions. There never were such States.

Peoples, where there is no religion, are at the same time without policy, without real subordination, and entirely savage." It is a fact which we see stretching through all the times and all the nations of the dispersion, that however tyrannical the government, and however corrupt the belief, still the separation of government from religion was never for a moment contemplated. A Greek or a Roman, and no less an Egyptian or an a.s.syrian, an Indian or a Chinese, must have renounced every habit of his life, every principle in which he had been nurtured, to accept such a divorce. For all of them alike, "ancestral laws" and "ancestral G.o.ds,"

went together. He who was traitor to the city's wors.h.i.+p was considered to overthrow its foundation. In this point of view heathendom in all its parts continued to be profoundly religious. It risked the life of a favourite of the people when the statues of a G.o.d at Athens were mutilated, as it was supposed, with the connivance of Alcibiades; and Marcus Aurelius, stoic philosopher as he was, offered countless sacrifices for the Roman people, as Noah offered sacrifice for his family; and the Chinese Son of Heaven is to this day the father of his family who unites religious and civil power in his sacred person, and calls upon his people for the obedience of children.

The corruption of this relation between civil government and religion, which was an original good of the race, was the forcible maintenance of the polytheistic idolatry with all the moral abominations which it had introduced. But the corruption does not belong to the relation itself; it issues, as in the preceding cases, from the abuse of his free-will by man.

Here then are four goods, marriage, religion, as summed up in sacrifice, civil government, and alliance between civil government and religion, which we find embedded in the whole human society from the beginning, going with it through all its fractions, untouched by its wars, dissensions, and varieties of belief, suffering indeed each one of them by man's corruption, but lasting on. The force of any one of them as testimony to the unity of G.o.d who alone could have established it in the race, and so through Him to the unity of the race in which it is found established, and so, further, to the whole account of Moses, would be very great and not easily resisted by a candid mind seeking nothing but the truth. But how great is the c.u.mulative evidence of the four together to the exactness of the account of the race's origin, establishment, and education, which we receive through Moses.

How strangely also are these goods of the race contrasted each one of them and all together with a great evil, universal like them, but man's own invention, the result of his wars and of the destruction of the feeling of brotherhood, in the various portions into which the race divided. The hideous plague-spot of slavery, which yet is one inst.i.tution running through the race, attests also its unity, attests by its contrast with the four goods, by its practical denial of their beneficent action so far as the slave is concerned, the degradation of the race from that condition of a family having one end in the wors.h.i.+p of one G.o.d, one brotherhood, a common care and charge of its members, a common interest in which it started.

The sum then of the whole period which begins from the dispersion of mankind at Babel and runs on to the coming of Christ is the progressive moral degradation of a race founded in the unity of a family. That unity itself rested upon the fidelity of the race to the belief and wors.h.i.+p of the G.o.d who created it. The race voluntarily parted from this belief and wors.h.i.+p; its own division followed; mutual enmity supplanted brotherhood, and the end is to create two cla.s.ses of men, dividing society in each nation into the bond and the free. The nations themselves have lost all remembrance that they were once actually brothers by one hearth. Yet they still contain in themselves indisputable proof of that original unity.

There is not only the common nature which language, the token of reason, raises to a dignity utterly incommensurable with the condition of any other animal; but great divine inst.i.tutions planted at the beginning endure amid the corruption which has dimmed their original beauty, and testify to the providence which has preserved them amid the surging flood of heathenism for future restoration of the race.

3.-_Further Testimony of Law, Government, and Priesthood in the Dispersion._

The account of the human race in its origin and its dispersion thus presented allows for the existence of tribes in every part of the world, who, through their isolation, the effect of nomad life, war, and severities of climate, but most of all by that tendency to degrade itself-to fall from known truth to error-which is the characteristic of the race, and through the impairing of social life which thus ensues, have left records of their uncultivated or even savage condition, which an eager search is continually discovering. These records have been taken as aids to a theory which, rejecting the scriptural and traditional account of man's origin, would wish him to start from men of different races, or from universal savagery, or even from the ape as an ancestor.

But, while on the one hand the existence of such tribes is no difficulty in the scriptural record of the dispersion, where they may be fully accounted for by the causes above-mentioned, the universal existence of the four great goods in the most ancient nations, where they appear also purest at the most remote time, is quite incompatible with either of the three invented origins of the human race. Neither different races of men, originally distinct and separated, nor universal savagery, and far less fathers.h.i.+p of the ape, will develop into simultaneous existence four uniform inst.i.tutions found through the widest range of divided nations, such as marriage, a religion based on sacrifice, civil government, and the alliance between government and religion. An original language accounts for the proofs of unity embedded in the primary structure of the Aryan tongues, and science professes its full belief in such unity. It is but a parallel to this to say that a creative hand impressing itself on the plastic origin of the race accounts for the existence of these goods in the most-widely severed branches of it. But that scattered savages should emerge from savagery into cultivation of the same ideal, or different races in their dispersion pitch upon the same very marked peculiarities of social life, or the ape teach his offspring the highest requirements of human society, such imaginations are contrary to the collective testimony of reason, experience, and history. Perhaps one must go altogether beyond the bounds of true science to account for their arising, and attribute them to that pa.s.sionate dislike of a creating G.o.d, which is the recoil from the condition of a creature subject to responsibility for his actions.

On the contrary, pure historical inquiry, going back in the dry light of science to the archaic society of nations as they first appear to us at the beginning of written records, shows this remarkable chain of facts. A condition of things is found existing, of which the only explanation is that family was the nidus out of which sprung forth the House, then the Tribe, then the Commonwealth with its patriarchal government. When property is traced to its origin it seems to be first found in the family as joint-owners.h.i.+p; and further, its succession is blended inexplicably with the existence and state of the family. Again, the close union of government with religion finds its root in the family. No testimony can be more unsuspicious than that of the learned author of "Ancient Law,"

who observes (p. 4), that "the earliest notions connected with the conception of a law or rule of life are those contained in the Homeric words ?e?? and Themistes." "The divine agent, suggesting judicial awards to kings or to G.o.ds, the greatest of kings, was Themis." She is the a.s.sessor of Zeus, the human king on earth, not a law-maker, but a judge.

The Themistes are the judgments, in fact, of a patriarchal sovereign, "whose judgment, when he decided a dispute by a sentence, was a.s.sumed to be the result of direct inspiration." And Themis and Themistes were (p.

6) "linked with that persuasion which clung so long and so tenaciously to the human mind of a divine influence underlying and supporting every relation of life, every social inst.i.tution. In early law, and amid the rudiments of political thought, symptoms of this belief met us on all sides. A supernatural presidency is supposed to consecrate and keep together all the cardinal inst.i.tutions of those times, the State, the Race, and the Family. Men, grouped together in the different relations which these inst.i.tutions imply, are bound to celebrate periodically common rites and to offer common sacrifices; and every now and then the same duty is even more significantly recognised in the purifications and expiations which they perform, and which appear intended to deprecate punishment for involuntary or neglectful disrespect. Everybody acquainted with ordinary cla.s.sical literature will remember the _Sacra Gentilicia_ which exercised so important an influence on the early Roman law of adoption and of wills. And to this hour the Hindoo Customary Law, in which some of the most curious features of primitive society are stereotyped, makes almost all the rights of persons and all the rules of succession hinge on the due solemnisation of fixed ceremonies at the dead man's funeral, that is, at every point where a breach occurs in the continuity of the family."

Thus every king, as history begins, appears in a position which recalls the memory of Adam or of Noah, as the divinely appointed judge, whose office springs out of his fathers.h.i.+p. The original consecration, which rested on the government of the race when it begun, is seen not yet to have parted from its scattered members in their tribal or national insulation.[13]

It is observed of Homeric Greece that "the people in its orderly arrangement of family or clans, or tribal relations.h.i.+ps coming down from the patriarchal form of life, derives its unity from its king, whose power as little springs from the people as that of the father from his children." Thus he possesses this power not in virtue of compact or choice, but simply from Zeus.

?? ?? p?? p??te? as??e?s?e? ????d' ??a???.

??? ??a??? p???????a??? e?? ????a??? ?st?, e?? as??e??, ? d??e ?????? pa?? ???????te?

s??pt???t' ?d? ???sta?, ??a sf?s?? ?as?????.