ECCLESIASTICAL HIERARCHIES. 751 



maintain simplicity of the ecclesiastical structure, as of the 

 political. Witness the Greeks, of whom Mr. Gladstone, 

 remarking that the priest was never &quot; a significant personage 

 in Greece,&quot; adds &quot;nor had the priest of any one place or 

 deity, so far as we know, any organic connection with the 

 priest of any other ; so that if there were priests, yet there 

 was not a priesthood.&quot; 



Conversely, along with that development of civil govern 

 ment which accompanies social integration, there usually 

 goes a development of ecclesiastical government. From 

 Polynesia we may take, as an instance, Tahiti. Here, along 

 with the ranks of king, nobility, land-owners, and common 

 people, there went such distinctions among the priests that 

 each officiated in that rank only to which he belonged; 

 and &quot;the priests of the national temples were a distinct 

 class.&quot; In Dahomey and Ashantee, along with a despotic 

 government and a civil organization having many grades 

 there go orders of priests and priestesses divided into several 

 classes. The ancient American states, too, exhibited a like 

 union of traits. Their centralized and graduated political 

 systems were accompanied by ecclesiastical systems which 

 were analogous in complexity and subordination. And that in 

 more advanced societies there has been something approach 

 ing to parallelism between the developments of the agencies 

 for civil rule and religious rule, needs not to be shown 

 in detail. 



To exclude misapprehension it may be as well to add that 

 establishment of an ecclesiastical organization separate from 

 the political organization, but akin to it in structure, appears 

 to be largely determined by the rise of a decided distinction 

 in thought between the affairs of this world and those of a 

 supposed other world. Where the two are conceived as 

 existing in continuity, or as intimately related, the organiza 

 tions appropriate to their respective administrations remain 

 either identical or imperfectly distinguished. In ancient 

 Egypt, where the imagined ties between dead and living were 



