Church and State as Seen in the Formation of Christendom. Allies Thomas William
in the sovereign degree; that is, in a degree not liable to revision and reversal in the respective subject-matter. If we apply these three acts to the full domain of grace and truth, which is the domain of the Incarnate Son (John i. 14), set up in the world, we express that royalty which is the third attribute of the priesthood. It comprehends supreme pastorship in all its range; legislation in the kingdom of truth; and judgment, whether external or internal, in the spiritual tribunal.
This was the Power, one and indivisible in itself, triple in its direction, which Christ took from His own Person as part of the all-power given to Him, and delegated to the Ruler of His Church, that in the exercise of it He might fulfil all prophecy concerning Himself, and be at once Priest, Prophet, and King: and out of this He made and makes His people.
In the transmission of that Power to the persons to whom He gave it He observed two principles: that of unity, and that of hierarchical subordination. To maintain the first, He made the Primacy; to maintain the second, the College of Apostles. For the whole of this triple power, the keys of the kingdom of heaven in the priesthood, the guardianship of faith in the office of teacher, and the supreme pastorship of rule He promised to one and bestowed on one, Peter. Thus He made Peter the Primate, and by the centering this triple authority in his sole person set him as the Rock on which the Church is built. At the same time He associated with Peter the eleven, to exercise this same authority in conjunction with Him. Thus at the very founding of the Church we find the two forces which are to continue throughout, and from the union of which the whole hierarchy with its graduated subordination springs. From the Apostolic College descends the Episcopate, the everliving source of which is in Peter the head, by union with whom it is “one Episcopate, of which a part is held by each without division of the whole.” Only on this condition is the Episcopate one, without which, in all places and in all time, it would be a principle of rivalry and division, using the triple power of priesthood, teaching, and rule against itself. With this condition we have exactly realised the image of the Rock on which the Church is founded, and against which the gates of hell shall not prevail, in the establishment of the Episcopate, as one indivisible power, having its fountain and fulness in one person, a part of whose solicitude is shared by a body of bishops spread through the whole world, speaking with one voice the faith of Peter, because they are united with the person of Peter.
All that we have hitherto said as to the emanation of power from the Person of Christ is comprehended by St. Peter when he calls our Lord, “the Shepherd and Bishop of our souls,” and by St. Paul when he calls Him “a High Priest over the house of God,” “the Apostle and High Priest of our confession,” “called of God High Priest after the order of Melchisedek.” And by Himself when He bade His disciples to have no other Master, that is, Teacher, “for one is your Master, Christ;” and when, treating on the eve of His passion this very subject, He said to His Apostles, “I dispose to you, as my Father disposed to me, a kingdom;” and after His resurrection, saying to them collectively, “As my Father sent me, even so send I you;” and “Behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world;” and when He said to Peter on the shore of the Lake of Galilee, after He had drawn in the unbroken net full of great fishes, “Lovest thou me more than these? Feed my sheep.”21 For is He not in priesthood, teaching, and government the prolific Father of the age to come? He remains not solitary in His triple dignity, but is the Adam of His race, and rules in it from His resurrection by those whom He appoints.
It may further be observed that in the supernatural regimen thus established by our Lord, viewed as the one indivisible power which constitutes it, there is an image traced upon His spiritual kingdom of the ever-blessed Trinity, its royalty representing God the Father as the source: its priesthood, wherein lies the whole economy of human redemption, God the Son, who carries it out; its teaching, God the Holy Ghost, the Spirit of Truth, whose ever-abiding presence guides its subjects, as by the hand, into all truth. The regimen is the generative power in His kingdom; and this image, wrought indelibly upon its society in all lands and times, is as distinctly Christ’s work upon the Christian commonwealth as the image traced upon individual man in the soul’s triple constitution of memory, understanding, and will, when it has been sanctified by His grace, is His work upon the individual.
That in the Episcopate there should be a triple power: of priesthood, comprehending the whole divine worship, and the imparting of grace through the sacraments; of teaching, which contains the communication of the whole divine truth; and of ruling, that is, over the whole region of action comprised by the priesthood and the teaching, the prototype of which exists in the eternal relations of the Blessed Trinity, while itself is that one undivided power which represents the divine unity, seems to shadow out the very citadel in which the Divine Wisdom set up His kingdom.
Who could have imagined beforehand such a constitution of government? Who, placing himself at the time of Christ and contemplating as a fact the actual relations of the Two Powers then in existence before him, could ever have devised such a kingdom? Is not this in very deed the kingdom of grace and truth? Have we not here visible to the eye of faith the Priest, the Prophet, and the King, who has set up Altar, Chair, and Throne together in the midst of the nations?
That man, who was originally made after the image and likeness of God, is sent into this life in order that he may in a future life attain the end of his being, that is, the enjoyment of God, is the primary fundamental truth which is presupposed in that whole work of Christ just described. The supernatural society exists for a supernatural end. The total denial of this end would be the complete and perfect heathenism of which the original heathenism was but a shadow; for that state of man in which the whole of his public and private life was encircled by the ties and consecrated by the rites of religion, even though those rites were prostituted by being offered to false gods, was not a denial of this end. In such a state man acknowledged a power beyond himself – beyond visible nature: his mind, his heart, his imagination were filled with the sense of that power. This is true of the great mass of the heathen before the coming of Christ, and is true in a large degree of those nations remaining still outside the Christian faith in their traditional religion, which descends in however fragmentary, however perverted a form, from the religion of Noah, and the primal and universal covenant for all his family struck with him. It is only the apostasy of a few from the Christian faith itself which has readied that final and absolute impiety – the greatest which the human mind can reach – of entirely denying this end of man.
Now, in considering the relation between the Civil and the Spiritual Power in all its bearings, we assume as a postulate this supernatural end of man. As it is the kernel of our belief, so it is the absolute basis of our argument. It cannot be put in a terser form than that in which our Lord stated it to those about Him when He asked the question, “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” Those only who have come to such a negation of reason as to suppose that they have no souls can disregard it. And as it is of absolute necessity, so it is all that is required for a full consideration of the subject.
“There is then a certain good beyond the natural society of man in this his condition of mortal life, which is that ultimate beatitude which is looked for after death in the enjoyment of God. And so the Christian, who has acquired a right to that beatitude by the blood of Christ, and has received the earnest of the Holy Spirit in order to attain it, requires, beyond the aid which temporal government gives him for the concerns of this life, a spiritual care which is given to the faithful by the ministers of Christ’s Church. Now, as to the ultimate end which they are to seek, the same must be said of the whole mass of men as of one man. If, then, the one man’s end lay in any good existing in himself, the ultimate end of government for the mass of men would be similarly that it should reach such good and secure its possession. But all the goods of this present life offer no such end, whether it be health, or riches, or knowledge, or even virtue. For the virtuous life, whether of the individual or the mass, is subordinate to a further end, which is the future enjoyment of God. If that end could be obtained by a power of human nature, it would belong to the office of temporal government to direct men to it, since that is supreme in things purely human. But since man does not attain the end of enjoying God by any merely human power but by divine power, according to St. Paul’s word, that ‘the grace of God is eternal life,’ it requires not a
1 Peter ii. 25; Heb. x. 21, iii. 1, v. 10; Matt. xxiii. 8; Luke xxii. 29; John xx. 21; Matt. xxviii. 20; John xxi. 15.