816 ECCLESIASTICAL INSTITUTIONS. 



chief concern of a sacerdotal system is to maintain formal 

 subordination to a deity, as well as to itself as his agency, and 

 that the ordering of life according to the precepts of the 

 professed religion is quite a secondary matter; but we aie 

 shown that such a right ordering of life is little insisted on 

 even where insistence does not conflict with ecclesiastical 

 supremacy. Through all these centuries Christian priests 

 have so little emphasized the virtue of forgiveness, that alike 

 in wars and in duels, revenge has continued to be thought an 

 imperative duty. The clergy were not the men who 

 urged the abolition of slavery, nor the men who condemned 

 regulations which raised the price of bread to maintain 

 rents. Ministers of religion do not as a body denounce the 

 unjust aggressions we continually commit on weak societies ; 

 nor do they make their voices loudly heard in reprobating 

 such atrocities as those of the labour-traffic in the Pacific, 

 recently disclosed by a Eoyal Commission (see Times, June 

 18th, 1885). Even where they are solely in charge, we see 

 not a higher, but rather a lower, standard of justice and mercy 

 than in the community at large. Under clerical management, 

 public schools have in past times been the scenes of atrocities 

 not tolerated in the world outside of them ; and if we ask 

 for a recent instance of juvenile savagery, we find it at King s 

 College School, where the death of a small boy was caused by 

 the unprovoked blows given in sheer brutality by cowardly 

 bigger boys : King s College being an institution established 

 by churchmen, and clerically governed, in opposition to 

 University College, which is non-clerical in its government 

 and secular in its teaching. 



651. Contemplating Ecclesiastical Institutions at large, 

 apart from the particular cults associated with them, we have, 

 then, to recognize the fact that their presence in all societies 

 which have made considerable progress, and their im 

 mense predominance in those early societies which reached 

 relatively high stages of civilization, verify inductively the 



