Church and State as Seen in the Formation of Christendom. Allies Thomas William
own potentates its own excellence; the second says to the God of its choice, ‘I will love Thee, O Lord, my strength.’ And thus in the first its own wise men, living after human fashion, pursue the goods of their body or their mind, or both at once, or they who might have known God, have not ‘glorified him as God nor given thanks, but became vain in their thoughts, and their foolish heart was darkened; professing themselves to be wise,’ that is, extolling themselves in their own wisdom through the pride that mastered them, ‘they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness of the image of a corruptible man, and of birds, and of four-footed beasts, and of creeping things;’ for they either led their peoples or followed them in the adoration of such-like images; and ‘worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever.’ But in the second there is no wisdom of man save piety, by which the true God is rightly worshipped, awaiting its reward in the society of saints, not men only, but angels, that God may be all in all.”5
I put together these three facts of human history, the vision of the King of Babylon interpreted by Daniel six hundred years before Christ, the summary of its fulfilment down to his own age written by St Augustine four hundred years after the coming of Christ, and his delineation, a few years later, of the Two Cities, as set forth by him in a work on which the Christian mind has now been nurtured for fourteen hundred and fifty years. The simple juxtaposition of these shows how Babylon stretches to Rome, and Rome is heir of Babylon; and the heathen man thus formed illustrates “the Man who is born in Sion, the city of the great King.”6 It is true that the two great Powers of Civil and Spiritual government, the relation between which forms the subject of this volume, are not exactly represented as concerns that relation in the vision of Daniel; but only the heathen growth of the Civil Power, and the miraculous rise, permanent rule, and progressive growth of the Spiritual Power in the midst of it; yet the mighty promise is recorded that in presence of the Civil Power the Spiritual shall never pass away; rather that it shall last unchanged, while the other is shifting and transitory; and also the cognate truth, that the great and terrible Power represented by the Statue is, in the counsels of God, subordinate in its scope to the Power represented by the Stone.
It is true, again, that the vivid contrast of the Two Cities as drawn by St. Augustine does not represent the legitimate relation of the Two Powers to each other, but only the perversion of the one Power from its true end and object, and the perfect antagonism of the other to that perversion.
But the kingdom set up by the God of heaven in the vision interpreted by Daniel, and the connection of ages dwelt upon by St. Augustine, which leads up to the Person of Christ, and then starts afresh from Him, and the Divine City delineated by St. Augustine, fit exactly into each other, and so they seem to me to form together an appropriate introduction to that most remarkable period of history with which the present volume is occupied, when the Stone cut out without hands struck the Statue, and became a great mountain, in preparation for that further growth when it would fill the whole earth.
The Statue presented in vision to the heathen king has indeed been swept away, but in every country a reduced likeness of it, “the look whereof is terrible,” stands over against “the Man born in Sion.” And the Two Cities everywhere run on in their predestined course until the end contemplated by Augustine takes effect. But as he did not discern the second fulfilment of the divine kingdom which followed upon the wandering of the nations, so neither can we discern the third and yet grander fulfilment when the divine kingdom shall become to the whole world what once it was in the Roman Empire. For, to repeat St. Augustine’s words, “In all these things as we read their prediction, so we discern their fulfilment, and from so vast a portion which is fulfilled we rest assured of what is still to come.” And “the stone that struck the statue became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth.”
February 12, 1882.
CHAPTER I
In one of the most ancient books of the world, which, in addition to its antiquity, all Christians venerate as containing the original tradition of man’s creation, guaranteed in purity and accuracy by divine assistance given to the writer, we read the following words: – “God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds, and cattle, and everything that creepeth on the earth after its kind. And God saw that it was good. And he said: Let us make man to our image and likeness: and let him have dominion over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and the beasts, and the whole earth, and every creeping creature that moveth upon the earth. And God created man to his own image: to the image of God he created him: male and female he created them.” And further: “The Lord God formed man of the slime of the earth; and breathed into his face the breath of life, and man became a living soul… And the Lord God took man and put him into the paradise of pleasure, to dress it and to keep it. And he commanded him, saying, Of every tree of paradise thou shalt eat; but of the tree of knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat. For in what day soever thou shalt eat of it, thou shalt die the death. And the Lord God said, It is not good for man to be alone; let us make him a help like unto himself. And the Lord God having formed out of the ground all the beasts of the earth, and all the fowls of the air, brought them to Adam to see what he would call them: for whatsoever Adam called any living creature, the same is its name. And Adam called all the beasts by their names, and all the fowls of the air, and all the cattle of the field; but for Adam there was not found a helper like himself. Then the Lord God cast a deep sleep upon Adam: and when he was fast asleep he took one of his ribs and filled up flesh for it. And the Lord God built the rib which he took from Adam into a woman: and brought her to Adam. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of man. Wherefore a man shall leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they shall be two in one flesh. And they were both naked, Adam and his wife, and were not ashamed.”
Such is the account of the origin of man, of woman, of marriage, as the root of human society, and of that society itself, beginning in the absolute unity of one who was father and head of his race, created in full possession of reason and language, and exercising both by an intuitive knowledge of the qualities of living creatures as they are brought before him by his Maker. This account stands at the head of human history, and has been venerated as truth by more than a hundred generations of men since it was written down by Moses, not to speak of those many generations among whom it had been a living tradition before he had written it down. Human language scarcely possesses elsewhere such an assemblage of important truths in so few words. Perhaps the only parallel to it is contained in the fourteen verses which stand at the opening of St. John’s Gospel, wherein are recorded the Godhead and Incarnation of the Divine Word. The first creation has its counterpart only in the second; and the restoration of man by the personal action of God alone surpasses, or, perhaps, more truly may be said to complete, the Idea of his original formation by the same personal action of the same Divine Word, who, great as He is in creating, is yet greater in redeeming, but is one in both, and in both carries out one Idea.
For the creation of man as one individual, who is likewise the head and bearer of a race, is the key to all the divine government of the world. The fact rules its destinies through all their evolution. The world, as it concerns the actions, the lot, and the reciprocal effect of men upon each other, would have been quite a different world if it had not sprung out of this unity. If, for instance, mankind had been a collection of human beings in all things like to what they now are, except in one point, that they were independent of each other and unconnected in their origin. This unity further makes the race capable of that divine restoration which from the beginning was intended, and with a view to which man was made a race: which in restoring man likewise unspeakably exalts him, for He who made Adam the father and head of the race, made him also “the figure of One that was to come.”
Let us briefly enumerate the parts of the divine plan as disclosed to us in the narration just given.
In the council held by the Blessed Trinity it is said, “Let us make man to our image and likeness;” not, Let us make men, but man: the singular number used of the whole work indicates that
De Civ. Dei, xvi. 28.
Ps. lxxxvi. 5.