624 HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH 



Congregational churches. But do not they, too, correspond to the 

 political ideal which prevailed in the land of their birth at the time 

 when they arose, and still prevails? And all the different forms of 

 churches which lie between these two extreme limits are they 

 riot all of them ecclesiastical imitations of the political constitutions 

 in and among which they exist? Everywhere the constitution of 

 the church has followed the pattern set for the time being by the 

 state, or anticipated the constitution which the state was to take. 



But by tending to copy the constitution of the state in which it 

 lives, the church comes into a double relation to the state a 

 friendly and a hostile relation. Up to a certain point this tendency 

 helps the state to carry out its necessary aims. Yet on the other 

 hand, as a result of this same tendency, the church becomes the rival 

 of the state. The state must inevitably desire that everything devel- 

 oped within its borders shall be homogeneous with it, so far as law, 

 authority, and the relations of the various classes are concerned. In 

 this sense it is very glad to extend its toleration, nay, even to give 

 privileges, to a community formed in accordance with its regulations. 

 But the church, as a religious community, also possesses rights of its 

 own, and as soon as it extends these over the whole field of its political 

 organization, it enters into secret or open opposition to the state: it 

 becomes its rival. 



The conflicts, however, which in these circumstances were inevit- 

 able, led to complications of a still greater kind. For, in the first 

 place, the church claimed to be the legitimate successor of the theo- 

 cratic Jewish State, however much it also emphasized the fact that 

 it itself was something new and of a different nature. In making this 

 claim it at once, protest as it might to the contrary, advanced polit- 

 ical pretensions of the most comprehensive character, even if at first 

 it asserted them only negatively. In the second place, the church 

 was not content with simply copying within itself elements in the 

 organization of the state. It refused to allow anything that it copied 

 to have any value outside its own pale. By its own marriage-law 

 it depreciated the civil marriage-law. By the development of its 

 official hierarchy it lowered the authority of the state officials. By 

 its Papacy it lowered the Imperial dignity. Finally, in the third 

 place, after compelling the state to accept the Christian creed, it put 

 the state into a position of the greatest difficulty. By accepting the 

 creed, the state placed itself on the ground taken by the church, 

 and declared the ideals of the church to be the right and the highest 

 ideals. If it was now driven to defend itself against the claims of the 

 church to be master, it was compelled to fight with broken weapons, 

 because it dared not attack the ultimate principles of the church 

 from which its own power was derived. The " Christian " state, then, 

 when confronted by the church, was bound to come off worst; for 



