the Armenian Church, and in the Nestorian, celibacy is required only of bishops, who are therefore selected generally, not from among the parochial clergy, but from among the monks in convents. But in the Latin Church of the Middle Ages, an unmarried life became at last, after many conflicts, the indispensable rule for all orders of the hierarchy. The priests of that great organization which, in the name of Christ, aspired to universal dominion, were excluded from the most important and sacred of human relations, and were to be an isolated class incapable of the sympathies, so tender and so powerful, which live in the atmosphere of home and of household love and duty.

Yet the parochial clergy, dwelling in their own parishes, watching over their own flocks, serving their neighbors in the ministrations of religion, and responsible each to his own bishop, were thought to be not sufficiently cut off from human relations and sympathies. Though doomed to ignorance of parental and conjugal affections, though exempt from all ordinary duties in society and from responsibility to civil government, they were, after all, citizens in some sort, and capable of patriotic sympathies. As being in the world, they were called the secular clergy. The monastic orders, those great fraternities organized under vows of obedience as well as of celibacy, were the regular clergy-exempted from the jurisdiction of the bishops, withdrawn from the world, generally secluded in monasteries, governed by their own officers like a military organization-the standing army of the great High-Priest at Rome.

Into those bodies many of the best men, in those ages of ignorance and violence, were attracted, by whose withdrawal from their natural relations to society, the world, which might have been the better for their example and their direct beneficence, was really made worse. Doubtless the monasteries and the monastic orders were instituted, originally, with the best intentions. Doubtless they served some good purpose under that divine Providence which makes all things in

some way subservient to itself. It may be that, without them, learning, in those ages of barbarism, would have perished. It may be that, without them, Christianity, finding no place of refuge, would have degenerated into a religion of ferocity, or into a superstition as besotted as that which exists in Abyssinia. But we know that human nature in those ages was just what human nature is to-day. We know that neither human passions nor human infirmities can be laid down at the gate of a monastery, and that the community within, which receives the neophyte into its bosom and subjects him to its ascetic rules, is only a community of men in a most unnatural and unmanly condition. We know, too, that a sentimental Christianity, shirking all natural duties, retreating from conflict with the world's temptations, and shutting itself up in a cell for communion with God, is Christianity misguided, morbid, and deformed, and that it can not recover its vigor or its divine beauty but by going forth to walk and to work in the sunshine. Nor can we forget that as the idea of monastic life had its origin partly in the exaggeration, but still more in the perversion of Christian sentiments, so the monastic orders, instead of having any tendency or fitness to restore the true ideal of the Christian life, were the foremost supporters of superstition and the most efficient instruments of spiritual despotism.

CHAPTER III.

WHAT THE REFORMATION IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY DID FOR CHURCH POLITY.

THE great Reformation in the sixteenth century was an attempt to recover the primitive Gospel. Its success, so far as it was successful, resulted from a concurrence of various forces adverse to that huge system, compacted of superstition, scholastic theology, and spiritual despotism, the growth of fourteen hundred years, which had usurped the name and place of Christianity. The revival of learning, the invention of printing, and the general movement toward a new stage of civilization, were among the influences which contributed to the result. What was, at first, the experience of individual souls struggling with the great question, "How shall man be just with God," driven back from tradition to the Scriptures, and finding rest in Christ the one mediator between God and men, became, at that juncture, a new announcement of the primitive Gospel. As in the first century, so in the sixteenth, the Gospel, "to wit, that God is in Christ reconciling the world to himself," was the power that took hold of human souls to bring them out of darkness into light, and out of bondage into the liberty of the sons of God. Agitation ensued, opposition, conflict, papal excommunication, and at last a permanent revolt of Protestant nations against the power enthroned at Rome.1

In what ecclesiastical forms did Protestantism organize itself? When we ask this question, we meet the fact that every where a political element was combined with the simply religious element in effecting the Reformation.

See "History of the Reformation," by Prof. George P. Fisher.
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The Roman Catholic religion, or, more properly, the church under the hierarchy centralized at Rome, was every where a political institution. For ages the pope and the bishops under him were often, not to say habitually, in conflict with civil governments; for the church, professing to wield the power of Him to whom is given all power on earth and in heaven, was every where—whether in Spain or in England, in Sicily or in Sweden-one corporation, claiming its exemptions and its privileges, not under the law of the land, but under a superior law of which it was itself the sole expositor. The ecclesiastical theory of those ages was not "a free church in a free state," but one œcumenical church dominant over subject states, and executing its decrees by the ministry of the secular power. If there were to be a church reformation, the movement could not but be political as well as religious. In the relations then existing between church and state, if the institution known as the church were to be reformed in its doctrines, worship, and polity, that reformation must take place either under the protection of the civil power, and in some sort of co-operation with it, or in the form of a political revolution.

Earlier attempts at reformation failed and were suppressed because they came to be regarded by the civil power, sooner or later, as dangerous and revolutionary. But when Luther in Northern Germany, and Zwingli in German Switzerland, began simultaneously to recall men's minds from superstitious reliance on priestly intercessions and manipulations, and to exhibit the freeness of God's grace and the simplicity of the way to be saved, the political condition of Europe was such that they found protection and encouragement, and in some sense help, from secular powers. Under the Providence that rules the world, the success of the Reformation, wherever it was permanently successful, was brought about by that combination of political with religious forces. Luther would have been crushed but for the constant friendship of Frederick the Wise. Zwingli was sus

tained by the free spirit of Switzerland. The little republic of Geneva made itself illustrious by receiving Calvin as its religious leader.

It was an inevitable consequence of this combination that every where the political element of the Reformation predominated in determining the form of ecclesiastical institutions and arrangements. Already, in each state or kingdom, the church was inseparably complicated with the state. No reformation was possible but by asserting and maintaining liberty for the state or kingdom against the tyranny of Rome or of the ecclesiastico-political power. Acquiescence, on the part of the Reformers, in such arrangements for public worship and for the religious instruction of the people as could be obtained by consultation and agreement with the political power that protected them, was inevitable in the circumstances of the conflict. What they were contending for was the primitive Gospel rather than the primitive church polity. The ecclesiastical polity, therefore-especially in relation to the forms of public worship, the selection and designation of ministers, and the provision for their support -was determined, in each reformed state or kingdom, not so much by a reference to the primitive model as by considerations of temporary and local convenience.

It was in this way that national churches, independent of each other as well as of Rome, came into being. No doubt there had been long before some rudimentary notion of a national church; but in the Reformation, as wrought out by the co-operation of religious and political forces, that idea was developed, and became the basis of ecclesiastical organization. It was assumed, as a first principle, that the people of a Christian state or kingdom, being all baptized, were all Christians and members of Christ's church in that state or kingdom. It was also assumed that the Christian people were represented in their government, and that whatever rights and powers in matters ecclesiastical had originally belonged to the Christian laity, but had been usurped by the