he wishes to conduct it. To 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

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

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 contemplated 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 materials 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.

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II. The word State is used in two senses,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 two 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 Major 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 antagonist 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, 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 promul

gated 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 constituent 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 exclusively 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 theology 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 gave unity and the circulating sap of life to all other sciences; and because, under the same name were comprised all the main aids, instruments, and materials of National Education. Accordingly, a certain smaller portion of the functionaries of the Clerisy were to remain 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