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CHURCHMAN'S POLITICS

IN DISTURBED TIMES.

EVERY nation under the sun contains within itself two societies, and two only-the world, as Holy Scripture calls it, and the Church: and two faiths, and two only-the faith of Baal, and the faith of Christ. It is difficult to bring this home to ourselves in these times; and yet, in the bringing it home to ourselves in little things, almost the whole of practical religion consists. It is difficult, educated as most of us have been, to discover these two societies; to trace the faint outlines which bound them; to feel with keen sense of touch the invisible fences which divide the one off

from the other; to detect the points where the one finally melts away and fades into the other; or to estimate the disorder and misrule which have arisen from the ties and mutual subjections of these societies to each other, in things where such ties and subjections ought not to be. The worshippers of Baal and of Christ are in one throng, travelling along the same road, and too much minding the same things. The world and the Church are entangled together; and religious living, difficult at all seasons, is now ten times more difficult from the entanglement. One advantage, however, springs out of this otherwise unhappy state of things. They, who are really and honestly striving after heaven, are forced to carry out their religion into things, and seasons, and places, where otherwise perhaps it would not have come. It strikes at the root of the notion that religion is a separate thing of itself, instead of being, as it is, simply the attitude into which a good man throws himself to do every thing, the natural shape which all his actions take, as naturally as the cloud takes shapes from the wind, which is a type of the Spirit. Thus the very confused state

of the world brings it about that in these days a man's politics and literature are not, if he be a thinking man, mere views or theories, constructed without fear or responsibility, and upon the shortest notice, views or theories, which he can hold or not hold, and yet be all the while as good or as bad a man as ever. They are parts of his practical religion : if he moves, they move; if they move, he moves; the whole man moves together. There are still men left here and there, in some places, whose politics and literature, are views, theories, and mere intellectual systems. But the time is most happily gone by when such men can be influential. The state of things, whether out in the open and active world, or among the retired and deeply practical thinkers of mankind, has got beyond them. They are left upon the shore, and the stream can return no more to such unrealities yet awhile. Disease has spread too widely among us, and is already too near the very fountains of our health and stability, for our imaginations to be successfully acted on by the coloured remedies of such men as these.

Neither on the other hand-and this too

we owe to our present difficulties can good and earnest men betake themselves, each in his little way and proper place, to the work of healing, by endeavouring to bring back the colour and the blood into systems or states of things, which, though beautiful in death, or skilfully embalmed, have yet been long since borne out to burial. They may borrow from chivalry, or the romantic days of English honour and loyalty, their stern enthusiasm, deep stedfastness, and calmest fidelity; these may serve them well for their present toil; but their way of working and the things for which they work, cannot and must not be the same. In a word, neither the churches nor the empires of the middle ages are to be rebuilt, however lovely many things about them were, nor the forms of that warlike Christianity to be wished back again in place of the better forms of a more primitive pattern. They were forms which primitive truths put on, and in which they then saved the world: forms which were real for awhile. And the present state of things must surely teach the ardent and the hopeful disciples of old times, that it is the primitive truths for which they have to strive,

and not to do battle for the chivalrous, middleage accessories of them, however gorgeous or picturesque.

Now of course it is a great thing in a country which, for whatever reason, is supposed to be free-that is, to be slave to none but its own passion, selfishness, or strange proneness to self-praise-that politics should be a matter of practical religion. It is a great thing among a people whose constitution is such as to allow, for the sake of other advantages, of excitement, party fierceness, perilous freedom of tongue, and divers malignant and unchristian feelings, that all, but especially the poor and unlearned, should have something above and beyond their opinions to guide, to inform, and to steady them, in the exercise of their political duties.

Let us dwell then on this matter more at length. We must have long seen the growing bewilderment of all simple men, in the attempt to arrange, if we may thus speak, their Christianity so as to meet the continual cases of conscience, arising out of the now manifold duties belonging to that station of life in which it has pleased God's Providence to place them: