When, therefore, we are enjoined to "render to Cæsar what is Cæsar's, and to God what is God's," we answer that we do so in perfect strictness, when we assign to the ruler the duty of supporting and advancing God's church, as a visible society within his dominions; and to assume the contrary, as has sometimes been done by the highest dissenting authorities, in their anxiety to press this text into the cause of hostility to establishments, is to assume the whole question at issue between us, and decide on the case without any reference to the evidence on which alone a just judgment can be formed. The like may be said of other passages in which our Saviour guards his disciples against the coveting of earthly distinctions, as inconsistent with the kingdom he was about to set up. Their conceptions, even to the time of his ascension, were lamentably obscure, as to the spiritual character of the dispensation of which they were to be the harbingers. They dreamed of temporal rule, when his purpose was that persecution and affliction should be their lot in attestation to the truth that it was not in this life only they had hope, and that the religion they taught stood not in the excellency of man's wisdom, but in the power of God. Still, there is need that these lessons be continually repeated-that we mistake not the means either for the origin or the end of our faith—that when human agency is put forth to the utmost, we ascribe the power to God-that whatever countenance we receive from human laws, it be regarded as given for the furtherance of the gospel, and not for our personal indulgence-that when

religion stands highest in public estimation, its real, its noblest triumphs, be always placed in the renovation of the soul, the readiness of its professed disciples to use wealth, wisdom, time, influence, all that God has given them, to the glory of their Lord and Master; but surely it would be a strained interpretation of these passages, inconsistent with the whole tenor of God's word, the whole course of his dispensations, to conclude that because Christ's kingdom is not of this world, the ordinary exercise of worldly prudence is needless, nay, hurtful to its progress.

But on a wider view of New Testament authority, we are sometimes told that from its very nature, the church of Christ cannot be nationally established, without a deviation from its original purity; that "the fact itself of an establishment embodies and teaches a falsehood, communicating a wrong impression to the minds of the entire community;" that "what is called the national creed may be correct and scriptural, but when we speak of the state and character of the church as composed of persons, it is impossible that what is national should ever be pure, the very idea of nationality in religion precluding the possibility of spirituality and selection."

In support of this assertion it is assumed, first, that when we speak of the church of a nation, we mean that every individual in that nation is, by the very circumstance of his birth or abode, a member of Christ's church, the claim to Christian fellowship

1 Dr. Wardlaw's Sermon on Establishments. Glasgow.

being thus determined by language, or civil rights, or geographical boundaries, instead of the scriptural standard of faith and holiness;-and secondly, that the passages of scripture which apply to the inward and spiritual reign of Christ in the hearts of true believers, are all transferable to the condition of his church, as a visible society amongst men; while not only its general form, but all the minutia of arrangement for its subsistence as a visible society, are marked out in the New Testament as precisely and authoritatively as were the ordinances of the old dispensation.

On the former assumption it is easy to indulge in warm invective on the utter inconsistency of establishments with the design of Christ's kingdom, the character of his subjects, their bond of union, their present government, their final distinctions. But though the identity of Christian profession with national boundary may have been incautiously asserted by an advocate of Establishments, at a time when scarcely any member of the commonwealth was not also a professed member of the Christian church, and endless subdivision of sentiment was only beginning to be a characteristic feature of Christian society amongst us, from what acknowledged rule of sentiment or practice, in any establishment upon earth, is this appalling spectre summoned forth to be so easily put to flight? Certainly not from the institutes of the church of England, of which no one is acknowledged a member who has not been admitted so by the sacrament of baptism which Christ ordained for the purpose; no one allowed to

be a communicant who has not made personal profession of faith and resolutions of obedience; no one who is not most solemnly warned before he approaches the table of the Lord of the spiritual requisites for that holy service; no one who may not be restrained from approaching, if proof be presented by his conduct that these requisites are wanting. Nominal Christianity may indeed, as we are told it does, "operate with a latitude of ruin in a country like ours," from the neglect of the most wise and scriptural regulations: but this evil is not more inseparable from a national system than from any other, and certainly countenanced amongst us by no such absurdity as the substitution of geographical definitions for the scriptural boundaries of right and wrong. When we speak of the national church of England, we speak of the Christians in England united in a profession of doctrine and discipline which they conceive to be scriptural, and for the propagation of which the state has made provision, as the best mode of securing the regular instruction of the people at large. Its degree of accordance with scripture is a question totally distinct from that of its national establishment. It is very conceivable that Independency itself, which is generally supposed by the opponents of establishments to be an exact imitation of the scripture model, might be established, retaining all its distinctive features of jealous selfgovernment, popular election of officers, and every minute regulation for the most exclusive selection of members, could it but sacrifice its one grand principle of pure and spiritual vitality-the payment of

the minister by the people-the liberty of the people at their pleasure, to extinguish in any neighbourhood all opportunity of access to the means of grace by the discontinuance of their voluntary supplies.

If, however, we be disposed for a moment to doubt whether voluntary payment and self-regulated labour be indeed the essential preservatives of apostolic purity, and not rather the mere subjects of prudential arrangement in which the altered circumstances of the church in different ages and countries may suggest a corresponding alteration of system; the second assumption is brought forward against us-that which confounds Christ's inward reign in the soul with the outward condition of his church on earth, its very nature and essence with its mere accidents and modes of subsistence.

We are accused of profanely interfering with the divine prerogative, and required to bring warrant for a right we have never claimed,-that of altering the constitution which Christ has established for the ingathering and guidance of his flock: as if the substitution under any change of circumstances of an endowment for a collection,' a defined for an indefinite field of labour, a system of combined for one of individual operation were as manifestly forbidden by scripture rule, as manifestly an act of sacrilegious presumption as the addition or curtailment of a command in the Decalogue, the intro

1 Yet surely it would be as hard to find precise scripture warrant for pew rents or even quarterly collections as for any mode of more permanent endowment.