PREFACE TO THE CHURCH AND STATE.

A RECOLLECTION of the value set upon the following little work by its Author, combined with a deep sense of the wisdom and importance of the positions laid down in it, will, it is hoped, bu thought to justify the publication of a few preliminary remarks, designed principally to remove formal difficulties out of the path of a reader not previously acquainted with Mr. Coleridge's wri tings, nor conversant with the principles of his philosophy. The truth is that, although the Author's plan is well defined and the treatment strictly progressive, there is in some parts a want of detailed illustration and express connection, which weakens the impression of the entire work on the generality of readers. "It" says Mr. Maurice, “I were addressing a student who was seeking to make up his mind on the question, without being previously biased by the views of any particular party, I could save myself this trouble by merely referring him to the work of Mr. Coleridge, on the Idea of Church and State, published shortly after the passing of the Roman Catholic Bill. The hints respecting the nature of the Christian Church which are thrown out in that work are only sufficient to make us wish that the Author had developed his views more fully; but the portion of it which refers to the State seems to me in the highest degree satisfactory. When I use the word satisfactory, I do not mean that it will satisfy the wishes of any person who thinks that the epithets teres atque rotundus are the highest that can be applied to a scientific work; who expects an author to furnish him with a complete system which he can carry away in his memory, and after it has received a few improvements from himself, can hawk it about to the pub

* See Table Talk, P. 259, note.

lic or to a set of admiring disciples. Men of this description would regard Mr. Coleridge's book as disorderly, and fragmentary; but those who have some notion of what Butler meant when ho said, that the best writer would be he who merely stated his premisses, and left his readers to work out the conclusions for themselves; those who feel that they want just the assistance which Socrates offered to his scholars-assistance, not in providing them with thoughts, but in bringing forth into the light thoughts which they had within them before;-these will acknowledge that Mr. Coleridge has only deserted the common highway of exposition, that he might follow more closely the turnings and windings which the mind of an earnest thinker makes when it is groping after the truth to which he wishes to conduct it. Το them, therefore, the book is satisfactory by reason of those very qualities which make it alike unpleasant to the formal schoolman and to the man of the world. And, accordingly, scarcely any book, published so recently and producing so little apparent effect, has really exercised a more decided influence over the thoughts and feelings of men who ultimately rule the mass of their countrymen."*

Under these circumstances, the following argument or summary of the fundamental and more complicated portion of the work may be serviceable to the ingenuous but less experienced reader.

I. The constitution of the State and the Church is treated according to the Idea of each. By the Idea of the State or Church is here meant that conception, which is not abstracted from any particular form or mode in which either may happen to exist at any given time, nor yet generalized from any number or succession of such forms or modes, but which is produced by a knowledge or sense of the ultimate aim of each. This idea, or sense of the ultimate aim, may exist, and powerfully influence a man's thoughts and actions, without his being able to express it in definite words, and even without his being distinctly conscious of its indwelling. A few may possess ideas in this meaning;-the generality of mankind are possessed by them. In either case an idea, so understood, is in order of thought always and of necessity

*Kingdom of Christ, vol. iii. p. 2. A work of singular originality and

power.

conteinplated as antecedent,-a mere conception, strictly defined as an abstraction or generalization from one or more particular forms or modes, is necessarily posterior,-in order of thought to the thing thus conceived. And though the idea is in its nature a prophecy, yet it must be carefully remembered that the particular form, construction, or model, best fitted to render the idea intelligible to a third person, is not necessarily--perhaps, not most commonly-the mode or form in which it actually arrives at realization. For in consequence of the imperfection of means and mate rials in all the works of man, a law of compensation and a principle of compromise are perpetually active; and it is the first condition of a sound philosophy of State to recognize the wide extent of the one, the necessity of the other, and the frequent occurrence of both.

II. The word State is used in two senses, a larger, in which it comprises, and a narrower, in which it is opposed to, the National Church. A Constitution is the ideal attribute of a State in the larger sense, as a body politic having the principle of its unity. within itself; and it is the law or principle which prescribes the means and conditions by and under which that unity is established and preserved. The Constitution, therefore, of this Nation comprises the idea of a Church and a State in the narrower sense, placed in simple antithesis one to another. The unity of the State, in this latter sense, results from the equipoise and interdependence of the great opposite interests of every such State, its Permanence and its Progression. The permanence of a State is connected with the land; its progression with the mercantile, manufacturing, distributive, and professional classes. The first class is subdivided into what our law books have called Majɔr and Minor Barons ;-both of these subdivisions, as such, being opposed to the representatives of the progressive interest of the nation, yet the latter of them drawing more nearly to the antag onist order than the former. Upon these facts the principle of the Constitution of the State, in its narrower sense, was established. The balance of permanence and progression was secured by a legislature of two Houses; the first, consisting wholly of the Major Barons or landholders; the second, of the Minor Barons or knights, as the representatives of the remaining landed community, together with the Burgesses, as representing the commercial, manufacturing, distributive, and professional classes-the latter constituting the effectual majority in number. The King.

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in whom the executive power was vested, was in regard to the interests of the State, in its antithetic sense, the beam of the scales.

This is the Idea of that State, not its history; it has been the standard or aim, the Lex Legum, which, in the very first law of State ever promulgated in the land, was pre-supposed as the ground of that first law.

III. But the English Constitution results from the harmonious opposition of two institutions, the State, in the narrower sense, and the Church. For as by the composition of the one provision was alike made for permanence, and progression in wealth and personal freedom; to the other was committed the only remaining interest of the State in its larger sense, that of maintaining and advancing the moral cultivation of the people themselves, without which neither of the former could continue to exist.

IV. It was common, at least to the Scandinavian, Keltic, and Gothic, with the Semitic tribes, if not universal in all the primitive races, that in taking possession of a new country, and in the division of the land into heritable estates among the individual warriors or heads of families, a Reserve should be made for the Nation itself. The sum total of these heritable portions is called the Propriety, the Reserve the Nationalty. These were constit uent factors of the commonwealth; the existence of the one being the condition of the rightfulness of the other. But the wealth appropriated was not so entirely a property as not to remain, to a certain extent, national; nor was the wealth reserved so exclu sively national as not to admit an individual tenure. The settlement of the Nationalty in one tribe only of the Hebrew confederacy, subservient as it was to a higher purpose, was in itself a deviation from the idea, and a main cause of the comparatively little effect which the Levitical establishment produced on the moral and intellectual character of the Jewish people during the whole period of their existence as an independent state.

V. The Nationalty was reserved for the maintenance of a permanent class or order, the Clerisy, Clerks, Clergy, or Church of the Nation. This class comprised the learned of all denominations, the professors of all those arts and sciences, the possession and application of which constitute the civilization of a country. Theology formed only a part of the objects of the National Church. The theologians took the lead, indeed, and deservedly so ;—not

because they were priests, but because under the name of the ology were contained the study of languages, history, logic, ethics, and a philosophy of ideas; because the science of theology itself was the root of the knowledges that civilize man, and give unity and the circulating sap of life to all other sciences; and because, under the same name were comprised all the main aids, instru. ments, and materials of National Education. Accordingly, a cer ain smaller portion of the functions of the Clerisy were to reain at the fountain-heads of the humanities, cultivating and enlarging the knowledge already possessed, watching over the interests of physical and moral science, and the instructors of all the remaining more numerous classes of the order. These last were to be distributed throughout the country, so as not to leave even the smallest integral division without a resident guide, guardian, and teacher, diffusing through the whole community the knowledge indispensable for the understanding of its rights, and for the performance of the correspondent duties. But neither Christianity, nor à fortiori, any particular scheme of theology supposed to be deduced from it, forms any essential part of the being of a National Church, however conducive it may be to its well-being. A National Church may exist, and has existed, without, because before, the institution of the Christian Church, as the Levitical Church in the Hebrew, and the Druidical in the eltic, constitutions may prove.

VI. But two distinct functions do not necessarily imply or re quire two different functionaries: on the contrary, the perfection of each may require the union of both in the same person. And in the instance now in question, as great and grievous errors have arisen from confounding the functions of the National Church with those of the Church of Christ, so fearfully great and grievous will be the evils from the success of an attempt to separate them.

VII. In process of time, however, and as a natural consequence of the expansion of the mercantile and commercial order, the stulents and professors of those sciences and sorts of learning, the ise and necessity of which were perpetual to the Nation, but only occasional to the Individuals, gradually detached themselves from the National Clerisy, and passed over, as it were, to that order, with the growth and thriving condition of which their particular emoluments were found to increase in equal proportion. And hence by slow degrees the learned in the several depart