043. IDEAL OF THE DIVINE FOUNDER

IDEAL OF THE DIVINE FOUNDER With this view I have taken for my theme: State and Church in 1492 and in 1892; or, the progress of civil and religious liberty in four hundred years, with American Christianity as a factor in that progress. As we follow the march of the nations from the Tiber to the Thames, and from the Thames to the Mississippi, we shall find equal reason for rejoicing, whether we consider from what our American Israel has been brought out or to what our American Israel has been brought in. Fourteen hundred and ninety-two,—how looked the world in that year of our Lord? What were Church and State, and what the relations between them? As for the church, we may answer that it had utterly forgotten its spiritual vocation, and had become over all Europe the servile abettor and instrument of civil despotism. How low it had fallen and how far it had departed from the ideal of its divine Founder can be easily seen if we remember what that ideal was, and then trace the stages of the church’s history. The foundation of the church is the spiritual connection of the individual believer with the living Christ, his Saviour and his King. His rule is a rule over the human spirit; within the realm of faith and conscience he is the supreme and the only Lord. As his reign is a spiritual one, his laws are enforced solely by spiritual sanctions.

Side by side with the Church, but in entire independence of it, stands the State. It too is a divine institution and is clothed with a divine authority. But it has to do only with men’s outward and earthly and temporal affairs. While the Church visits spiritual offenses with purely spiritual pains and penalties, the State has only to do with civil offenses, and these it visits with civil pains and penalties. The Church is not to intrude into the sphere of the State, or wield its physical weapons; nor is the State to intrude into the sphere of the Church, or meddle with things spiritual. The State is to help the Church only by protecting it from external violence, and by securing to all its citizens the right to exercise and to propagate their faith so long as that faith does not involve violations of the rights of others. The Church on the other hand is to help the State by declaring that the powers that be are ordained by God, and that the citizen in all civil matters owes obedience to constituted authority. This entire separation, yet friendly co-operation, of Church and State is the scheme of the New Testament. Leopold von Ranke was a true statesman, as well as a true churchman, when he said that " Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s," was the most important utterance of Christ. For three centuries, or down to the time of Constantine in 325, the Church was true to Christ’s prescription, though the State was not. The one word that designates the period is the word persecution. Christianity was an illicit religion. Yet it prospered in spite of repression. The pruning knife only gave vigor to its growth. Ten converts rose to fill the place of every martyr. At last the heathen world stood awe-stricken before the spectacle of such self-forgetful constancy and yielded, at least outwardly, to the claims of Christ. Then began a second period, lasting from 325 to 1050, for which the word patronage is the only proper designation. The Emperor Constantine took the church under his protection. As his imperial predecessors had persecuted the Christians, so now his successors in the empire began to persecute the heathen. It became a matter of worldly advantage to profess Christianity. The civil power combined with a lax morality and with infant baptism to sweep the whole population into the church. The kingdom of God came to be identified with the visible church, and the visible church little by little came to mean the Roman hierarchy. The Church, thus nourished in the bosom of the State, repaid the kindness shown, by stinging to death its benefactor. Ecclesiastical arrogance and ambition outgrew all bounds. A third period followed, from 1050" to 1250, in which the Church usurped the functions of the State and brought the world to her feet. The Papacy lorded it over the bodies as well as over the souls of men. It calmly appropriated to itself the traditions and the prerogatives of the Roman Empire. As the first period was the period of persecution, and the second period was the period of patronage, so this third period was the period of power. In Hildebrand’s claim to jurisdiction over all civil governments, in Henry IV.’s purchasing his crown by penitential prayers as he waited barefoot during those cold January days at Canossa, and especially in the wresting from the emperors of the election of the popes and the giving of it to the cardinals as princes of the church, we see how near the Roman hierarchy came to absolute temporal dominion.

There followed a fourth period in the church’s history which may be designated as the period of policy.

Vaulting ambition had overleaped itself. Papal assumption provoked revolt. The Crusades, undertaken in the interest of the church, resulted in the weakening of the church and the transfer of her power to the rising kingdoms of Western Europe. Rome was no longer supreme. She was compelled to maintain her existence and to secure her ends by diplomacy and persuasion. As in the days of her power she had wrested from the empire the election of the popes, so now there was wrested from the popes the election of the emperors, and the seven electors chose their imperial head without asking whether the reigning pope said yea or nay. So from the year 1250 ¹ to the year 1517 the church became the slave of the temporal powers, depending upon them for support, and by most unworthy concessions in matters spiritual purchasing their help in the extermination of her foes.

Fourteen hundred ninety-two, when judged by moral or religious standards, was as dark a year as the world had seen since Christianity had begun to be. The church had run through its four stages of persecution, patronage, power, policy. It had apostatized from Christ, sold itself for worldly gain, become a false church instead of a true. Where in that dark time was the true Church of Christ? It was hiding in dens and caves of the earth, excommunicated, stretched upon the rack, burned at the stake. The Albigenses had been well-nigh exterminated; John Huss and Jerome of Prague had suffered martyrdom; Savonarola’s fiery appeals were preparing his doom. Between the years 1478 and 1498 thirty thousand persons were in various ways punished by the Inquisition, and more than eight thousand persons were burned alive.