Note RETURN — FOOTNOTES.

So much for the soul of the business; the body is what we call the Church. And here the very word is significant. In one sense, as a separate ethical corporation, the ancients had no Church. Why? Because Church and State were one; or, if they were two, they were too like the famous Siamese twins that used to be carried about the country as a show, two so closely connected that they could no more be torn from one another and live than the limpet can be separated from the rock to which it clings. With the peoples of the ancient world the State was the Church and the Church was the State; the priest was a magistrate and the magistrate was a priest. This identity of two things, or loose intercommunion and fusion of two things in modern association so instinctively kept apart, arose from the common germ out of which both Church and State grew—viz., as we saw in the previous lecture, the Family. Every father of a family, in the normal and healthy state of society, is his own priest as well as his own king. In religion and morals, as well as in all domestic ordinances, he is absolute and supreme; and the functions which necessarily belonged to him as supreme administrator in his own family would, under the influence of family feelings, naturally be conceded to him when the family grew to a clan, and the clan to a kingdom. And this is the state of things which we meet with in the Book of Genesis, long before the promulgation of the Mosaic law, where we read (xiv. 18) that Melchizedek, king of Salem, went out to bless Abraham, and he was priest of the Most High God; the distinction between priest and layman, to which our ears are so familiar, being in this, as in a thousand other well-known instances, altogether ignored. Not only in Homer, where we find Agamemnon, the king of men, performing sacrificial functions without even the presence of a priest,14 but in the sober historical age we find the King of Sparta performing all the public sacrifices—being, in fact, in virtue of his office, high priest of Jove.15 So closely indeed was the State religion identified with the person of the supreme magistrate that, when the kingship was abolished in Greece, and three principal archons and seven secondary ones shared his functions, one still retained the title of βασιλεύς, king, and had the supervision, or, as we would say, supreme episcopacy and overseership of all matters pertaining to religion.16 The same thing took place in Rome, where the name of king was even more odious than in Greece; but nevertheless a rex sacrificulus, or king-sacrificer, with his regina or queen, took rank in all the public pontifical dinners above the pontifex maximus himself. The college of pontiffs in Rome, which had the supreme direction of all religious matters, was not a board of priests, but of laymen—or at least of laymen who, without any qualification but some inaugurating ceremony, might be assumed into the pontifical college; whence the title of pontifex maximus, which the emperors assumed, was no more of the nature of a usurpation than the title of imperator, which belonged to them as supreme commanders of the army. Who, then, were the priests, and what need of them, at all if the laity might legally perform all their functions? The answer is simple. Both in Greece and Rome there were priests and priestly families, as the Eumolpidæ in Eleusis, specially dedicated to the service of certain local gods; but there was no order, class, or body of persons having the exclusive right to officiate in sacred matters over the whole community. No doubt the social position of priests in democratic Greece and monarchical Egypt was extremely different, but in one respect they were identical: in Athens Church and State were one as much as in Memphis. In Egypt there was a remarkably strong body or clan of priests enjoying the highest dignities and immunities; but there is no proof that they were a caste, in the strict sense of the word; and their virtues were so far from being incommunicable that, when the Pharaoh did not happen to be a born priest, but of the military class, he was obliged to be made a priest before he could be a king; and when once king he became ipso facto the high priest of the nation, and took precedence of all priests in all great public acts of religious ceremonial. It must not be supposed, however, that, though he was supreme in all sacred matters and the actual head of the Church, to use our language, he could set himself, like our Henry VIII., to carve creeds for the people, and imprison or burn devout persons for refusing to acknowledge his arbitrary decrees. The exercise of sacred functions in the hands of the masterful Tudor and his Machiavelian minister was a usurpation tolerated by a loyal people as their readiest and most effective way of getting rid of the masterdom of the Roman Pope, which in those days pressed like an incubus on the European conscience; it was invoking one devil to turn out another, and was successful, as such operations are wont to be, in a blundering sort of way. But the worshipful “Sons of the Sun”—for so they were betitled—on the banks of the sweet-watered Nile, had no monstrous pretension of this kind, and could not even have dreamt of it. They did not sit on the throne to reform religion, but to maintain it. Neither in Egypt nor in Greece in those days was any such thing known as the rights of the individual conscience; but both kings and people received religious laws and consuetudes as we do Magna Charta; reasonable people, in the long course of the centuries before Christ, would no more dream of disturbing the ancestral belief about the gods than they would think of influencing the settled courses of the stars. It was their very deep-rooted permanency, in the midst of the startling mutabilities to which human affairs are liable, that made the fundamental truths of religion so valuable to their souls; and as to the particular forms under which these fundamental truths might have been symbolised by venerable tradition, the people were not given to form themselves into hostile camps on the ground of any local difference, as we do in Scotland about ecclesiastical conceits and crotchets; and every devout Egyptian allowed his neighbour without offence to pay sacred honours to a crocodile or a cat, convinced that these honours were equally legitimate and equally beneficial whenever the sacred symbolism peculiar to the worship was wisely understood. Collisions, therefore, between Church and State, or between priesthood and kingship, such as signalised the medieval struggles of the Popes and Emperors, and the convulsions of our infant Protestant freedom in England, could not take place amongst the ancient polytheists. A wise Socrates was equally willing with the most superstitious devotee, when pious gratitude called, to sacrifice a cock to Æsculapius; and the νόμῳ πόλεως, by the custom of the State, was the direction which he gave to all who inquired of him by what rites they ought to worship the gods.17 Only amongst the Hebrews, as a people in whose religious habitude polytheistic and monotheistic tendencies had never come to any decisive settlement of their inherent antagonism, do I find a record of a very serious collision between Church and State, after the fashion of our German Henries and Transalpine Hildebrands in the days of Papal aggression. Scotsmen familiar with their Bibles will easily see that I allude to the case of Uzziah, as recorded in 2 Chron. xxvi. 16-20:—“But when he was strong, his heart was lifted up to his destruction: for he transgressed against the Lord his God, and went into the temple of the Lord to burn incense upon the altar of incense. And Azariah the priest went in after him, and with him fourscore priests of the Lord, that were valiant men: And they withstood Uzziah the king, and said unto him, It appertaineth not unto thee, Uzziah, to burn incense unto the Lord, but to the priests the sons of Aaron, that are consecrated to burn incense: go out of the sanctuary; for thou hast trespassed; neither shall it be for thine honour from the Lord God. Then Uzziah was wroth, and had a censer in his hand to burn incense: and while he was wroth with the priests, the leprosy even rose up in his forehead before the priests in the house of the Lord, from beside the incense altar. And Azariah the chief priest, and all the priests, looked upon him, and, behold, he was leprous in his forehead, and they thrust him out from thence; yea, himself hasted also to go out, because the Lord had smitten him.”