when he suffered for this, he was honoured by the Church as a martyr. Such was the original relation of Church and State in the Roman Empire.

When the two were united, the laws of the Church, in virtue of being her laws, were acknowledged as laws of the empire. The Church courts continued to judge of very many subjects, as they had done before. The only change was that now their decisions were recognized by the State, so that what they had decided was held to have been decided by authority. This state of things, which existed in all Christian nations until the Reformation, now exists no longer. The disputes now going on concern such matters as the civil dignity attached by the State to the rulers of the Church, and the influence and power in ecclesiastical matters which the State not unnaturally drew to itself under the new order of things. These things are often spoken of by men to whom worldly matters seem more important than anything else, as if in them primarily consisted the union of Church and State. But, alas! those civil prerogatives of the Church in which that union primarily consisted no longer de facto exist. Civil governments, on one ground or another, have assumed an independence of all spiritual authorities in their mode of dealing with social and moral questions which has practically put an end to those prerogatives. The disputes which from day to day arise between the civil and ecclesiastical authorities, now in one part of the world now in another (at this moment, for instance, in the Austrian empire), are, in fact, much like the questions which arise whenever a long-existing partnership is dissolved. The conditions on which they are now settled will regulate the relations of the two co-ordinate powers in the new state of society which is before us. What those relations may be, can, as yet, be only imperfectly conjectured. As far as man can foresee, they will be very different from those which existed either before the union, or while that union was still preserved in vigour and completeness.

This state of things could hardly be more strikingly illustrated than by the fact that in convening the nineteenth General Council the Holy Father has not felt himself able to follow the example of his predecessors by inviting the sovereigns of Christendom to attend it either by themselves or their ambassadors. Instead of this, he exhorts them (in the Apostolic Letter "Eterni Patris ") to "throw no impediment in the way of the attendance of the bishops, and to co-operate in whatever may conduce to the welfare of the Council." We have no means of predicting what the Vatican Council will decree; but that its decrees will be specially adapted to a state of things

so different from that which existed during the sitting of any former General Council, it needs no prophet to anticipate.

It might, perhaps, seem that nations which have thus made up their minds to arrange all moral and social questions not in accordance with the teaching of the Church, but upon mere worldly principles, would of necessity fall back upon the moral standard of heathens, to whom its teaching was never known. No doubt, individuals who have rejected the truth are in many respects worse than those who never knew it. But experience teaches, what reflection would perhaps have suggested, that upon most subjects, the moral teaching of the Church is so manifestly consistent with the soundest reason, that a community which has for centuries been subject to its educating sway, even in professedly rejecting its authority, can hardly help retaining for the most part the moral rules it has taught. What such a community does is to claim principles and rules which as a matter of fact reason and philosophy, even under the most favourable circumstances and in ages of the highest culture, never originated, as discoveries of human reason, on the ground that reason accepts and approves them-nay, can demonstrate their truth-when once fully established. Thus the French Positivists declare that reason condemns slavery, "denounces war, and maintains the just position of woman as the equal, not the slave, of man, and (except in one rare case) the indissoluble character of marriage. Yet nothing is more certain than that reason never did discover any of these principles; it has borrowed them from the Catholic Church. We believe, therefore, that there is good reason to hope that the governments of nations which have long been Christian, even while rejecting the teaching and authority of the Church (whatever their conduct may be), will upon most subjects retain, as their avowed principles, the rules of Christian morality, and that there is little reason to fear that we shall see Christendom fall back, as to most moral and social questions, upon what we may call the uninspired system.

But to this there is one important exception. There is one subject upon which we may be sure that any nation which rejects the teaching of the Church, will before very long be irresistibly tempted to tamper with the first principles of Christian morality. That subject is the law of marriage. For not only is that law a sharp curb upon human passion and a defence of the weak against the strong,—in addition to this, it adds very materially to the restrictions of what we may call the natural law on this subject, and moreover, from its very nature, it cannot be fully carried out by any mere code, but requires the perpetual superintendence of a living

authority. For the New Testament contains no code of laws upon this subject, and that which we have received from God through the medium of His Church not only lays down precise rules, but for the general good, gives, within certain limits, a power of dispensing with them to the Vicar of Christ. This salutary and divinely authorized system could not in the nature of things be retained in any country in which the legislative, executive, judicial, and teaching authority of the Church is, unhappily, denied. Hence it could not but have happened, as we see it, that the whole history of Protestantism has been that of a gradual relaxation of the Christian law of marriage. The permission given by the leading German Reformers to the Landgrave of Hesse, by which polygamy was permitted, was the first-but only the first-example of a relaxation which has ever since been growing worse and worse. That, scandalous as it was, had been only an individual outrage, and he had been most strictly charged to keep it secret. But we have now before our eyes the practical working of Protestantism during three centuries, and can therefore see for ourselves what the necessary results of its principles are, by seeing what they have actually effected. Deferring for a moment to notice the British Isles, what is marriage in Continental Protestant countries? The evidence printed by Parliament sufficiently shows. There are two subjects in particular upon which the Christian law is stringent. First, in its prohibition of marriages between certain persons; next, in the Divine enactment that a marriage once validly contracted and completed between Christians can never be dissolved except by death. There is no Protestant country in Continental Europe or in America in which both of these laws have not, by the Reformation, been wholly swept away. Throughout Protestant Germany practice allows marriages between all persons except parents and their children, and brothers and sisters. The same, we believe, is now the case in the United States of America, except that marriages between uncles and nieces are there still forbidden. Thus, to speak generally, all the restrictions imposed by religion to prevent marriage between any man and any woman are taken away. It is very remarkable to observe how this was done. Immediately after the Reformation the Levitical law on this subject was declared to be binding on Christians. Before very long men desired greater liberty than that law, as interpreted by Lutheran authorities, allowed. They wished. for dispensations. But who was to give them? Protestantism had made the civil governor the chief authority in matters ecclesiastical. To him therefore belonged the power of dis

pensation. A German lawyer giving evidence on this subject in England, says: "Since the Reformation, the judicial rights of the "Summus Episcopus" have been assumed by, and conferred by the Church Evangelical upon, the Sovereign. The Sovereigns, or those bodies exercising sovereign power, in all the Protestant parts of Germany, instituted their own consistorial courts, which are composed partly of divines called consistorial councillors and partly of secular judges, and which courts have jurisdiction in all matters relating to marriage and divorce. They grant dispensations in the name of the Sovereign." But in answer to the question, "Must there be a dispensation in every case from some ecclesiastical authority?" The same witness says:-"Not always either from our consistorial courts, or from the judicial department of the ministry of justice, which grants a dispensation in the name of the Sovereign." So much did it become a fixed principle with the Continental Protestants, that the king was to exercise the supreme authority in such matters, that they applied it even to countries like France, where the king and the government were Catholics, and where Protestantism was only tolerated. Thus Louis XIII. was recognized by the French Protestants as their "Summus Episcopus."

The

The practical effect has been that everywhere the notion of any restriction upon marriages between persons "near of kin," with the exception of parents, brothers, and sisters, has been lost. As to divorce, the process has been the same. principle was everywhere laid down from the very time of the Reformation, that divorces dissolving marriage and allowing remarriage were possible. Very soon it came to be fixed, that it belonged to the civil ruler to settle for what causes such dissolutions of marriage should be allowed, and to grant them in each case. The supreme direction of the most delicate moral subjects was thus put into the hands of Sovereigns, taught from childhood that they were responsible to no one on earth, and who, if in rare and exceptional instances they were told that any law existed higher than their own caprice, were at the very best told that that law was to be found in their own private interpretation of Scripture. It would indeed be a happy accident, which we have no reason to expect, if such a ruler continued to act under any serious sense of his responsibility to Almighty God. Even when not guided, like Henry VIII. and too many Protestant kings, by his own lusts and tyranny, he has been influenced at best by a good-natured desire to make things easy.

* Pusey, page lxxxviii.

VOL. XIV.—NO. XXVII. [New Series.]

F

His installation as "Summus Episcopus" has, in fact, made the world, with its wishes, passions, and maxims, the supreme authority in matters of morals. The result of his rule has already been that among Continental Protestants, what is still called marriage has practically been changed into an authorized agreement between a man and woman to live together as long as shall be agreeable to both of them; and into this temporary partnership any man may enter with any woman, so that they are not related as parent and child or as brother and sister. Every one has heard anecdotes of the practical working of this system in Protestant Germany-how a gentleman at a party finds himself, quite accidentally, sitting down to whist with three ladies, every one of whom has, at one time or another, been his wife-and how another, referring at table to an event, the date of which he wished to recall, said, looking towards the lady, at the head of the table, "it happened when I had the honour to be husband to our amiable hostess." Instances, no doubt, there are of couples remaining together honourably and with mutual love during their lives. But this is not because they feel themselves bound to do so by any law, human or divine, recognized and admitted by them, but from natural amiability of temper, strengthened by the traditionary feeling remaining in all lands which have been long Christian, and by seeing the standard of the Christian law maintained before their eyes by the Catholic populations with which they are intermingled. Making, however, full allowance for all this, the result is that among Continental Protestants Christian marriage can hardly be said to exist.

And the evil results to be anticipated from this, except so far as they are counteracted by the reaction, which in Germany, as well as here, is strongly setting in towards the Catholic Church, can hardly be estimated, even by saying that it threatens to bring back, with regard to marriage, the moral standard of heathenism; for heathenism has usually been controlled in practice by principles which do not exist in a civilized European society of our age. Its chief hold has been upon nations in a rough, hard, and violent state of society, and one in which, as a general rule, women have been regarded by the law as little more than chattels. In such nations, one half of the human race are shielded from the temptation to license by being kept under a very strict and stern rule. The despotic power of the head of the family in a great measure enforces upon women at least, many of those restraints which in Catholic countries are secured by the general reverence for the Divine law. Besides, as regards both sexes, the characteristic of such times is that law and national feeling strictly enforce whatever