ECCLESIASTICAL AND GENERAL HISTORY 623 



connections, the better we shall understand it. There are four large 

 departments of history with which we are here specially concerned : 



I. Political history. 

 II. The history of religion in general. 



III. The history of philosophy and of knowledge as a whole. 



IV. Economic history. 



I have purposely refrained from speaking of the history of civiliza- 

 tion in particular, because it cannot be treated scientifically without 

 being divided into various sections. 



i; 



Political history, in the widest sense of the word, is history proper; 

 for on the way in which men are formed into communities, every- 

 thing else that happens and all development depend. We may say, 

 then, that the history of the state is the backbone of general history. 

 If we fail to recognize this we reduce history to a series of romances 

 or a sort of clever argument. For the scientific study of ecclesiastical 

 history, therefore, we must insist, first, that the political or social 

 character of the church shall be kept well in mind; and secondly, 

 that its relation to the state in which it grew up, and to the states 

 and communities in and among which it lives, shall be carefully 

 examined. 



That the church is a political organization has, of course, in some 

 form or other, always been recognized. Even Eusebius spoke of it as 

 a "polity." But it was only with the historian Mosheim that the 

 first serious attempt was made to present this point of view. Up to 

 his time people shrank from doing so, because they feared, not 

 without reason, that the " divine " nature of the church would suffer 

 .if its political character were placed in the foreground. The clue 

 which Mosheim gave was not sufficiently attended to by the philo- 

 sophical historians in the Romantic movement during the first half 

 of the nineteenth century, unless I except Richard Rothe; nay, even 

 now the correct view has yet to make its way. 



The results which it gives us I may state at once : In every age the 

 first thing to consider is the constitution of the church. But in every 

 period of the history of the church its constitution has been dependent 

 on the general political conditions and ideas of the time; or, to put the 

 matter more accurately, the church has at all times shown a tendency to 

 copy within itself the constitution of the state in which it lived, or to 

 prescribe to the state the constitution which the state was to have. 



The truth of this proposition may be proved at every point in the 

 history of the church. Consider the Roman Catholic Church what 

 else is it but the old Roman Empire reproduced in the ecclesiastical 

 domain? At the opposite pole to the Roman Church stand the Free 



