of bloody sacrifice; this was expressed in the rites which accompanied it; and besides this particular notion of expiation, which is the correlative of sin, the most solemn duties of man, that is, Adoration, Thanksgiving, and Petition, the whole expression of his obedience to God, and dependence on God, were bound up with this rite, and formed part of it. And we find this rite of sacrifice existing from the earliest timesin these various nations; continued through the whole of their history, solemnised at first by their kings and chief men, and then
by an [Pg 38] order of men created for that special purpose, and in every nation themselves holding a high rank in virtue of their performing this function. What, again, are the chances of a rite so peculiar being chosen spontaneously by so many various nations, and chosen precisely to express their homage for their own creation and continuance in being, to make their prayers acceptable, and above all, to cover their sin, to serve as an expiation, and to turn away punishment. This is the testimony which Assyria and Egypt, which Greece and Rome, which India and China bear to their original unity. If God instituted this rite, at the fall itself, as a record and token of the promise then made, its existence through the many changes of the race becomes intelligible; on any other supposition it remains a contradiction both to reason and feeling, which is like nothing else in human history.
The institution of sacrifice comprehends with its accompaniments the whole of religion. It suffered the most grievous corruption
in that it was offered to false gods, to deified men, to powers of nature, to those who were not gods but demons. Again, its meaning was obscured, and the priests who offered it were not pure in their lives. But whatever abominations were at any time or in any place connected with it, its peculiarity, its testimony to the unity of the race, to the power which established it, remain without diminution.
3. Thirdly, let us take the great good of civil government. The human race is scattered over all countries, in divisions which range as to amount of population [Pg 39] from the smallest independent tribe to the largest empire. God suffered them to pursue their own course, to engage in numberless wars, and to pass through a succession of the most opposite circumstances, but He implanted in them from the beginning, and preserved in them throughout, the instinct of society, which develops in government. And He established that government in possession by the patriarchal constitution of life, which each portion of the race at its first start in independence took with it. By this He maintained order and peace, as a rule, in the bosom of each community; the smallest and the greatest alike possessed the commonwealth in the midst of them, which was thus, independent of walls and forts, a citadel of safety. Not even the most savage tribe in the most desolate northern wilderness, barren shore, or inland lake, was left in its self-wrought degradation without this support. In cultured nations, such as the Egyptians, Assyrians, Persians, Indians, Chinese, the State attained a high degree of perfection; while from the practice of the Hellenic cities Plato and Aristotle could draw principles of government which are of value for all time; and Rome, the queen-mother of cities, has been the teacher of state-wisdom to mankind. But what
I wish to note here is that civil government was everywhere throughout the dispersion of the nations a dam, constructed by Divine Providence, sufficiently strong to resist the inundation of evils brought about by man's abuse of his moral freedom. It was the moon in heaven which shone as a stable ordinance of God amid the storms and darkness [Pg 40] of human life in the fall of heathendom. It belonged to man as man and never departed from him; because as conscience was given to the individual, the witness and mark
of God, sovereignty was given to the community, a delegation of the divine kingship. "It is entirely by the providence of God that
the kingdoms of men are set up," says a great father.[11] "He gave to every one of them, said the Son of Sirach, commandment
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concerning his neighbour. Their ways are always before him, they are not hidden from his eyes. Over every nation he set a ruler, and
Israel was made the manifest portion of God" (Ecclus. xvii. 12-15).
The human race, from its beginning and through all its dispersion, was never in any of its parts without civil government. The headship of Adam, repeated in Noah, itself a vicarious exercise of divine authority, rested, amid its dispersion and partial degradation, upon each portion of the race, so that it might never be kingless and lawless: never a herd, always a society.
This great good had also its corruption, into which it very frequently fell; the corruption of tyranny. Against this the Book of Wisdom (vi. 2-5) warned: "Hear therefore ye kings and understand: learn ye that are judges of the ends of the earth. Give ear, you that rule the people, and that please yourselves in multitudes of nations. For power is given you by the Lord, and strength by the most High, who will examine your works, and search out your thoughts: because being ministers of his kingdom, you have not [Pg
41] judged rightly, nor kept the law of justice, nor walked according to the will of God." But this corruption of tyranny no more
destroys the good of government or its testimony as the mark of the Creator, than the corruption of marriage by concubinage, or
the offering of sacrifice to false gods, impairs the testimony of those institutions.
4. The fourth good which I shall note as running through all the nations of the dispersion, is the alliance between government and religion. Distance of place, diversity of language, division of the idea of God into separate divinities, which become the guardians of their several peoples, these causes all co-operate to sever from each other the various peoples and to make them enemies. But observe, at the same time, with this hardening and estrangement of the peoples from each other, the enlacement of all human life, public and private, by the rites and ties of religion in each society. At the head of the new race we have seen Noah offering sacrifice for his family, and a covenant with the whole earth struck in that sacrifice between God and man. That aspect of the public society towards religion was not altered during the whole course of heathendom, and in all its parts. It is a relation of the strictest alliance. No nation, no tribe of man, up to the coming of Christ, conceived any condition of society in which the Two Powers should not
co-operate with each other. "If it be asked," says Bossuet,[12] "what should be said of a State in which public authority should be es-
tablished [Pg 42] without any religion, it is plain at once that there is no need to answer chimerical questions. There never were such States. Peoples, where there is no religion, are at the same time without policy, without real subordination, and entirely savage." It is a fact which we see stretching through all the times and all the nations of the dispersion, that however tyrannical the government, and however corrupt the belief, still the separation of government from religion was never for a moment contemplated. A Greek or a Roman, and no less an Egyptian or an Assyrian, an Indian or a Chinese, must have renounced every habit of his life, every principle in which he had been nurtured, to accept such a divorce. For all of them alike, "ancestral laws" and "ancestral gods," went together. He who was traitor to the city's worship was considered to overthrow its foundation. In this point of view heathendom in all its
parts continued to be profoundly religious. It risked the life of a favourite of the people when the statues of a god at Athens were mutilated, as it was supposed, with the connivance of Alcibiades; and Marcus Aurelius, stoic philosopher as he was, offered countless sacrifices for the Roman people, as Noah offered sacrifice for his family; and the Chinese Son of Heaven is to this day the father of his family who unites religious and civil power in his sacred person, and calls upon his people for the obedience of children.
The corruption of this relation between civil government and religion, which was an original good of the race, was the forcible maintenance of the polytheistic [Pg 43] idolatry with all the moral abominations which it had introduced. But the corruption does not belong to the relation itself;
