On the constitution of the church and state

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ON THE CONSTITUTION OF THE

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Preface > ix

Church and State, Part 1 7

Preface To The Church And State

A recollection of the value set upon the following little work by its Author,* combined with a deep sense of the wisdom and importance of the positions laid down in it, will, it is hoped, be thought to justify the publication of a few preliminary remarks, designed principally to remove formal difficulties out of the path of a reader not previously acquainted with Mr. Coleridge's writings, nor conversant with the principles of his philosophy. The truth is that, although the Author's plan is well defined and the treatment strictly progressive, there is in some parts a want of detailed illustration and express connexion, which weakens the impression of the entire work on the generality of readers. " If," says Mr. Maurice, *' I were addressing a student who was seeking to make up his mind on the question, without being previously biassed by the views of any particular party, I could save myself this trouble by merely referring him to the work of Mr. Coleridge, on the Idea of Church and State, published shortly

* See Table Talk, 2nd edit. p. 5, note.

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after the passing of the Roman Catholic Bill. The hints respecting the nature of the Christian Church which are thrown out in that work are only sufficient to make us wish that the Author had developed his views more fully ; but the portion of it which refers to the State seems to me in the highest degree satisfactory. When I use the word satisfactory, I do not mean that it will satisfy the wishes of any person who thinks that the epithets teres atque rotundus are the highest that can be applied to a scientific work ; who expects an author to furnish him with a complete system which he can carry away in his memory, and, after it has received a few improvements from himself, can hawk it about to the public or to a set of admiring disciples. Men of this description would regard Mr. Coleridge's book as disorderly and fragmentary ; but those who have some notion of what Butler meant when he said, that the best writer would be he who merely stated his premisses, and left his readers to work out the conclusions for themselves ; — those who feel that they want just the assistance which Socrates offered to his scholars — assistance, not in providing them with thoughts, but in bringing forth into the light thoughts which they had within them before; — these will acknowledge that Mr. Coleridge has only deserted the common high way of exposition, that he might follow more closely the turnings and windings which the mind of an earnest thinker makes when it is groping after the truth to which

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he wishes to conduct it. To them, therefore, the book is satisfactory by reason of those very qualities which make it alike unpleasant to the formal schoolman and to the man of the world. And, accordingly, scarcely any book, published so recently and producing so little apparent effect, has really exercised a more decided influence over the thoughts and feelings of men who ultimately rule the mass of their countrymen. "*

Under these circumstances, the following argument or summary of the fundamental and more complicated portion of the work may be serviceable to the ingenuous but less experienced reader.

I. The constitution of the State and the Church is treated according to the Idea of each. By the Idea of the State or Church is here meant that conception, which is not abstracted from any particular form or mode in which either may happen to exist at any given time, nor yet generalized from any number or succession of such forms or modes, but which is produced by a knowledge or sense of the ultimate aim of each. This idea, or sense of the ultimate aim, may exist, and powerfully influence a man's thoughts and actions, without his being able to express it in definite words, and even without his being distinctly conscious of its indwelling. A few may possess ideas in this

* Kingdom of Christ, vol. iii. p. 2. A work of singular originality and power.

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meaning; — the generality of mankind are possessed by them. In either case an idea, so understood, is in order of thought always and of necessity contemplated as antecedent,— a mere conception, strictly defined as an abstraction or generalization from one or more particular forms or modes, is necessarily posterior, — in order of thought to the thing thus conceived. And though the idea is in its nature a prophecy, yet it must be carefully remembered that the particular form, construction, or model, best fitted to render the idea intelligible to a third person, is not necessarily — perhaps, not l^ost commonly — the mode or form in which it actually arrives at realization. For in consequence of the imperfection of means and materials in all the works of man, a law of compensation and a principle of compromise are perpetually active ; and it is the first condition of a sound philosophy of State to recognize the wide extent of the one, the necessity of the other, and the frequent occurrence of both.

II. The word State is used in two senses, — p larger, in which it comprises, and a narrower, in which it is opposed to, the National Church. A Constitution is the ideal attribute of a State in the larger sense, as a body politic having the principle of its unity within itself; and it is the law or principle which prescribes the means and conditions by and under which that unity is established and preserved. The Constitution, therefore, of this Nation comprises the idea of a Church and a

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State in the narrower sense, placed in simple antithesis one to another. The unity of the State, in this latter sense, results from the equipoise and interdependence of th<j two great opposite interests of every such State, its Permanence and its Progression. The permanence of a State is connected with the land ; its progression with the mercantile, manufacturing, distributive, and professional classes. The first class is subdivided into w r hat our law books have called Major and Minor Barons ; — both of these subdivisions, as such, being opposed to the representatives of the progressive interest of the nation, yet the latter of them drawing more nearly to the antagonist order than the former. Upon these facts the principle of the Constitution of the State, in its narrower sense, was established. The balance of permanence and progression was secured by a legislature of two Houses ; the first, consisting wholly of the Major Barons or landholders ; the second, of the Minor Barons or ^knights, as the representatives of the remaining Janded community, together with the Burgesses, as representing the commercial, manufacturing, distributive, and professional classes — the latter constituting the effectual majority in number. The King, in whom the executive power was vested, was in regard to the interests of the State, in its antithetic sense, the beam of the scales.

This is the Idea of that State, not its history ; it has been the standard or aim, the Lex Legum, which, in the very first law of State ever promul-

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gated in the land, was pre-supposed as the ground of that first law.

III. But the English Constitution results from the harmonious opposition of two institutions, the State, in the narrower sense, and the Church. For as by the composition of the one provision was alike made for permanence, and progression in wealth and personal freedom ; to the other was committed the only remaining interest of the State in its larger sense, that of maintaining and advancing the moral cultivation of the people themselves, without which neither of the former could continue to exist.

IV. It was common, at least to the Scandinavian, Keltic, and Gothic, with the Semitic tribes, if not universal in all the primitive races, that in taking possession of a new country, and in the division of the land into heritable estates among the individual warriors or heads of families, a Reserve should be made for the Nation itself. The sum total of these heritable portions is called the Propriety, the Reserve the Nationalty. These were constituent factors of the commonwealth ; the existence of the one being the condition of the rightfulness of the other. But the wealth appropriated was not so entirely a property as not to remain, to a certain extent, national ; nor was the wealth reserved so exclusively national as not to admit an individual tenure. The settlement of the Nationalty in one tribe only of the Hebrew confederacy, subservient as it was to a higher purpose,

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was in itself a deviation from the idea, and a main cause of the comparatively little effect which the Levitical establishment produced on the moral and intellectual character of the Jewish people during the whole period of their existence as an independent state.

V. The National ty was reserved for the maintenance of a permanent class or order, the Clerisy, Clerks, Clergy, or Church of the Nation. This class comprised the learned of all denominations, the professors of all those arts and sciences, the possession and application of which constitute the civilization of a country. Theology formed only a part of the objects of the National Church. The theologians took the lead, indeed, and deservedly so ; — not because they were priests, but because under the name of theology were contained the study of languages, history, logic, ethics, and a philosophy of ideas ; because the science of theology itself was the root of the knowledges that civilize man, and gave unity and the circulating sap of life to all other sciences ; and because, under the same name were comprised all the main aids, instruments, and materials of National Education. Accordingly, a certain smaller portion of the functionaries of the Clerisy were to remain at the fountain heads of the humanities, cultivating and enlarging the knowledge already possessed, watching over the interests of physical and moral science, and the instructors of all the remaining more numerous classes of the order. These last were to

XVI PREFACE TO THE be distributed throughout the country, so as not to leave even the smallest integral division without a resident guide, guardian, and teacher, diffusing through the whole community the knowledge indispensable for the understanding of its rights, and for the performance of the correspondent duties. But neither Christianity, nor a fortiori, any particular scheme of theology supposed to be deduced from it, forms any essential part of the being of a National Church, however conducive it may be to its well being. A National Church may exist, and has existed, without, because before, the institution of the Christian Church, as the Levitical Church in the Hebrew, and the Druidical in the Keltic, constitutions may prove.

VI. But two distinct functions do not necessarily imply or require two different functionaries : on the contrary, the perfection of each may require the union of both in the same person. And in the instance now in question, as great and grievous errors have arisen from confounding the functions of the National Church with those of the Church of Christ, so fearfully great and grievous will be the evils from the success of an attempt to separate them.

VII. In process of time, however, and as a natural consequence of the expansion of the mercantile and commercial order, the students and professors of those sciences and sorts of learning, the use and necessity of which were perpetual to the Nation, but only occasional to the Individuals, gra-

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dually detached themselves from the National Clerisy, and passed over, as it were, to that order, with the growth and thriving condition of which their particular emoluments were found to increase in equal proportion. And hence by slow degrees the learned in the several departments of law, medicine, architecture and the like, contributed to form under the common name of Professional, an intermediate link between the national clerisy and the simple burgesses.

VIII. But this circumstance cannot alter the tenure, or annul the rights, of those who remained, and who, as members of the permanent learned class, were planted throughout the realm as the immediate agents and instruments in the work of increasing and perpetuating the civilization of the nation ; and who, thus fulfilling the purposes for which the Nationalty was reserved, are entitled to remain its usufructuary trustees. The proceeds of the Nationalty might, indeed, in strictness, if it could ever be expedient, be rightfully transferred to functionaries other than such as are also ministers of the Church of Christ. But the Nationalty itself cannot, without foul wrong to the nation, be alienated from its original purposes ; and those who being duly appointed thereto, exercise the functions and perform the duties attached to the Nationalty, possess a right to the same by a title to which the thunders from Mount Sinai might give greater authority, but not additional evidence.

IX. Previously to the sixteenth century, large

b

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masses were alienated from the heritable proprieties of the realm, and confounded with the National ty under the common name of Church property. At the period of the Reformation a re-transfer of these took place, and rightfully so : but together with, and under pretext of, this restoration to the State of what properly belonged to it, a wholesale usurpation took place of a very large portion of that which belonged to the Church. This was a sacrilegious robbery on the Nation, and a deadly wound on the constitution of the State at large. The balance of the reserved and appropriated wealth of the Nation was deranged, and thus the former became unequal to the support of the entire burthen of popular civilization originally intended to be borne by it.* Barely enough — indeed, less than enough — was left for the effectual maintenance of that primary class of the Clerisy, which had not fallen off into separate professions, but continued to be the proper servants of the public in producing

* " Give back to the Church what the Nation originally consecrated to its use, and it ought then to be charged with the education of the people ; but half of the original revenue has been already taken by force from her, or lost to her through desuetude, legal decision, or public opinion : and are those whose very houses and parks are part and parcel of what the Nation designed for the general purposes of the Clergy, to be heard, when they argue for making the Church support, out of her diminished revenues, institutions, the intended means for maintaining which they themselves hold under the sanction of legal robbery 1" Table Talk, Pref. p. xvi. 2nd edit.

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and reproducing 1 , in preserving, promoting and perfecting all the necessary sources and conditions of the civilization of the Nation itself.*

X. Though many things may detract from the comparative fitness of individuals, or of particular classes, for the trust and functions of the Nationalty, there are only two absolute disqualifications ; — allegiance to a foreign power, or the acknowledgment of any other visible head of the National Church but the King ; — and compulsory celibacy, in connection with, and dependence on, a foreign and extra-national head.

XI. The legitimate objects of the power of the King and the two Houses of Parliament, as constituting the State, in its special and antithetic sense, comprise, according to the idea, all the interests and concerns of the Propriety, and rightfully those alone.

XII. The King, again, is the Head of the National Clerisy, and the supreme trustee of the Nationalty ; the power of which in relation to its proper objects is rightfully exercised, according to the idea, by the King and the two Houses of Convocation, and by them alone. The proper objects of this power are mentioned in No. V.

XIII. The Coronation Oath neither does, nor can, bind the conscience of the Kino- in matters of

* See an approach to an expression of the Author's idea of the National Church thus regarded, in the Bishop of London's late Charge, Oct. 1838, p. 2, &c.

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faith. But it binds him to refuse his consent (without which no change in the existing law can be effected) to any measure subverting or tending to subvert the safety and independence of the National Church, or which may expose the realm to the danger of a return of that foreign Usurper, misnamed spiritual, from which it has with so many sacrifices emancipated itself. And previously to the ceremonial act which announces the King the only lawful and sovereign head of both the Church and the State, this oath is administered to him religiously as the representative person and crowned majesty of the Nation ;- — religiously ; — for the mind of the Nation, existing only as an idea, can act distinguishably on the ideal powers alone, — that is, on the reason and conscience.

The several other points comprised in the remainder of this work, though of great interest and importance, require neither analysis nor comment for their perfect comprehension. But it will naturally occur to the reader to consider how far the idea of the Church and of its relation to the State presented in these pages coincides with either of the two celebrated systems, those of Hooker and War burton, which, under one shape or another, have divided the opinions of thinking persons up to the present day.

According to Hooker, the Church is one body, —the essential unity of which consists in, and

CHURCH AND STATE. XXI is known by, an external profession of Christianity ? without regard in any respect had to the moral virtues or spiritual graces of any member of that body. " If by external profession they be Christians, then are they of the visible Church of Christ : and Christians by external profession they are all, whose mark of recognizance hath in it those things which we have mentioned, yea, although they be impious idolaters, wicked heretics, persons excommunicable, yea, and cast out for notorious improbity. Such withal we deny not to be the imps and limbs of Satan, even as long as they continue such." (E. P. III. c. i. s. 7. Kebles edit. vol. i. p. 431.)

With this Warburton and Coleridge in general terms agree. {Alliance, &c. II. c. ii. s. 2. — Church and State, p. 139.) And the words of the nineteenth Article, though apparently of a more restricted import, may be presumed not to mean less.

But, further, Hooker insists that the Church, existing in any particular country, and the State are one and the same society, contemplated in two different relations, u A Commonwealth we name it simply in regard of some regiment or policy under which men live ; a Church for the truth of that religion which they profess. * * * When we oppose the Church, therefore, and the Commonwealth in a Christian society, we mean by the Commonwealth that society with relation unto all the public affairs thereof, only the matter of true religion excepted ; by the Church, the same society

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with only reference unto the matter of true religion, without any other affairs besides : when that society, which is both a Church and a Commonwealth, doth flourish in those things which belong unto it as a Commonwealth, we then say, * the Commonwealth doth flourish ;' when in those things which concern it as a Church, ' the Church doth flourish ;' when in both, then ' the Church and Commonwealth flourish together.' " (E. P. VIII. C. i. s. 5. vol. iii. p. 420 — 1.)

To this view Warburton, as is well known, is directly opposed. He argues that, although two societies may be so closely related to each other as to have one common supposition, — that is, the same natural persons being exclusively members of each, — the societies themselves, as such, are factitious bodies, and each of them must therefore of necessity be distinct in personality and will from the other. " The artificial man, society, is much unlike the natural ; who being created for several ends hath several interests to pursue, and several relations to consult, and may therefore be considered under several capacities, as a religious, a civil, and a rational animal ; and yet they all make but one and the same man. But one and the same political society cannot be considered in one view, as a religious — in another, as a civil — and in another, as a literary — community. One society can be precisely but one of these communities." (Alliance, &c. ii. c. v.) Accordingly Warburton insists, in opposition to Hooker, that the Puritan

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premiss, — that the Church and the State are distinct and originally independent societies, — was and is the truth ; but he denies the Puritan inference, that such independency must therefore be perpetual ; — affirming the existence of an alliance between these two societies upon certain terms ; andaresultingmutual inter-dependency of one on the other; whereby the consequence from the position of the Puritans — an imperium in imperio, or subjugation of the State to the Church, — and the consequence from the position of Hooker — the enslavement of the Church by the State — are equally precluded. The Church subordinates itself to the State upon faith of certain stipulations for support by the latter ; and if the State violates, or withdraws from the fulfillment of, those stipulations, the Church is thereby remitted to her original independence.*

Now so far as the distinct inter-dependency of the State and the Church is in question, Coleridge agrees with Warburton. But the peculiarity of his system, as expressly laid down in this work and incidentally mentioned in many of his other writings, — a peculiarity fruitful in the most im-

* It is worthy of remark that, if Warburton had lived in these days, and had adhered to the principles advocated by him in this treatise, he must several years ago have declared the terms of convention between the Church and State in this country violated by the latter, and the alliance of the two at an end, See his third book, and especially the second chapter. It is to be observed, also, that Warburton confounds the Christian with the Established Church as much as Hooker. See B. II. c. iii. 3.

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portant consequences — is grounded on a distinction taken between the visible Church of Christ, as localized in any Christian country, and the National or Established Church of that country. Distinction, be it observed, not separation, — for the two ideas

" they not only may co-exist in the same suppositum, but may require an identity of subject in order to the complete development of the perfections of either. According to Coleridge, then, the Christian Church is not a kingdom or realm of this world, nor a member of any such kingdom or realm ; it is not opposed to any particular State in the large or narrow sense of the word ; it is in no land national, and the national Reserve is not entrusted to its charge. It is, on the contrary, the opposite to the World only ; the counterforce to the evils and defects of States, as such, in the abstract, — asking of any particular State neither wages nor dignities, but demanding protection, that is, to be let alone.

With so much therefore of the preceding and all other theories as considers any branch of the Church of Christ, as such, in the character of a National Establishment, and arrogates to it, as such, upon any ground, worldly riches, rank or power — Coleridge is directly at variance. But we have already seen (v. vi. vn. vjii.) that there is, nevertheless, in this and in almost every other

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country raised above the level of barbarism a Church, which is strictly and indefeasibly National; and in the ideal history herein presented of its origin and primary elements, its endowment, its uses, duties, ends, and objects, its relation to the State, and its present representatives, a solemn warningis recorded of the fatal consequences of either confounding it with, or separating it from, the visible Church of Christ.

The Christian Church is a public and visible community, having ministers of its own, whom the State can neither constitute nor degrade, and whose maintenance amongst Christians is as secure as the command of Christ can make it : for so hath the Lord ordained that they which preach the Gospel should live of the Gospel. (1. Cor. ix. 14.) The National Church is a public and visible community, having ministers whom the Nation, through the agency of a Constitution, hath created trustees of a reserved national fund, upon fixed terms and with defined duties, and whom, in case of breach of those terms or dereliction of those duties, the Nation, through the same agency, may discharge. " If the former be Ecclesia, the communion of such as are called out of the World, that is, in reference to the especial ends and purposes of that communion ; the latter might more expressively have been called Enclesia, or an order of men chosen in and of the realm, and constituting an estate of the realm/'

Now there is no reason why the ministers of the

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one Church may not also be ministers of the other : there are many reasons why they should be.

When therefore it is objected that Christ's kingdom is not of this world, it is admitted to be true ; but the text is shown to have no application in the way of impeachment of the titles, emoluments or authorities, of an institution which rightfully is of this world, and would not answer the end of its constitution if it ceased to belong to, and in a certain sense to sympathize with, the world. When again it is alleged that " the best service which men of power can do to Christ is without any more ceremony to sweep all and leave the Church as bare as in the day it was first born" — " that if we give God our hearts and affections, our goods are better bestowed otherwise," * the spirit and reason of that allegation are humbly submitted to God's own judgment ; but it is at the same time confidently charged in reply, that the notion of the Church, as the established instructress of the people, being improved in efficiency by the reduction of its ministers to a state bordering on mendicancy — can in its flagrant folly be alone attributed to that meanness of thought, which is at once the fruit and the punishment of minds enslaved to party and the world, and rendered indifferent to all truth by an affected toleration of every form of error. When further it is said that the Bishops of the Church of Christ have no vocation to interfere in the legisla-

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tion of the country, it is granted ; but with this parallel assertion, that the Prelates of a National Establishment, charged with the vast and awful task of preserving, increasing and perpetuating the moral culture of the people, have a call to be present, advise, and vote in the National Council, which can only cease to be a right when the representatives of the dearest national interest are denied a voice in the national assembly; and which is no more impaired by the fact of those Prelates sustaining in their individual persons another and still more sacred character than by their being members of a literary club or a botanical society. When, finally, it is insisted to be contrary to justice to compel those who dissent from a religious system either as to its doctrines or its forms of worship, to contribute to the maintenance of its priests and ministers, it is not denied ; but it is withal maintained, that a national dedication of funds for the support of a determinate class of men, with the duty of national civilization to perform, can no more be vacated or qualified by reason of the voluntary secession of such dissenters from that religious system, because the seceders understand the character and obligation of that duty in a way of their own, than the rights of Parliament to levy taxes for the protection of our independence from foreign aggression can be affected by the dogma of rich philanthropists that war is unlawful, and to pay a shilling towards its support an offence against God.

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But after all, it is urged, the funds set apart by the Nation for the support of the National Church are now in fact received by the ministers of the Church of Christ in this country ! True ; but, according to the idea, — and that idea involves a history and a prophecy of the truth — it is not because they are such ministers that they receive those funds, but because, being now the only representatives, as formerly the principal constituents, of the National Clerisy or Church, they alone have a commission to carry on the work of national cultivation on national grounds — transmuting and integrating all that the separate professions have achieved in science or art — but, with a range transcending the limits of professional views, or local or temporary interests, applying the product simple and defecated, to the strengthening and subliming of the moral life of the Nation itself.