experience has proved that the State is not fit for the office of promoting religious truth, and repressing religious error; that these functions are not successfully discharged by the civil magistrate, and that they are better performed when left to the exclusive care of spiritual and ecclesiastical teachers.* There is nothing in the constitution or essence of a State which is inconsistent with its being a judge of religious truth, but it discharges this duty ill. It is capable of doing the work of the church; but the work is better done by the church without its assistance. The State ought to abstain from the assumption of a sectarian character, and from undertaking to decide on disputed questions of religious truth, for the same reason that it ought to abstain from carrying on trade or manufactures. It is capable of trading, but it makes a bad trader; it is capable of manufacturing, but it makes a bad manufacturer. So the State is capable

* Warburton, in his Alliance of Church and State, b. II. c. 1, lays it down, that "the care of civil society extends only to the body and its concerns, and the care of religious society only to the soul." His whole theory is accurately summed up in Mr. Gladstone's treatise, On the Relations of Church and State, ch. I. §§ 16, 17. Mr. Gladstone remarks upon it: "It is a very low theory of government which teaches, that it has only the care of the body and bodily goods, and might almost seem to imply that all physicians are more peculiarly statesmen." Warburton, however, probably never meant to teach that the mind, considered with reference to its temporal and secular relations, was not within the legitimate province of the State.

Warburton's doctrine is borrowed from Locke, who, in his Letters on Toleration, lays it down, that a commonwealth is instituted for civil interests, and that its care does not extend to the salvation of souls.-Works, vol. VI. pp. 10 and 120. Compare pp. 211-18, where he answers the objection that the State comprehends spiritual ends. Locke here resorts to his favourite resource of a fiction, by which the ends of the State are limited.

of acting the part of a theologian, but it makes a bad theologian. Hence, it is a manifest sophism to infer that, because a person does not wish to see the State undertake to promote religious truth, he is indifferent or hostile to religion. As well might it be inferred that, because he does not wish to see the State engage in trade, he is hostile to trade. If he thinks the promotion of religious truth a function unsuited to the State, and suited exclusively to the church-if he thinks that it ought to be performed by an ecclesiastical, and not by a political agency, he cannot, supposing him to be friendly both to Church and State, desire to see it assumed by the latter.

There is a constant tendency, not only among the contrivers of political Utopias and ideal commonwealths, but also among practical politicians, to over-estimate the capabilities of a government; to assume that it can exercise a greater influence over the community than it really possesses; and to forget that it can only act within a sphere determined by certain conditions, and is endowed with legal omnipotence in no other sense, than that its powers have no legal limit. If the practical province of a State, in matters involving truth, had been considered with greater attention—if facts, and not ideas, had been consulted, it would not have been invested with a character which is unsuited to it, and been loaded with so many moral obligations to which it is not properly subject.

The error of those politicians who exaggerate and misapprehend the powers of a government over the people may be compared, as to its results, with the error of those speculators who, in the middle ages, exaggerated their command over external nature. While the alchemists, the astrologers, and the practisers of occult

sciences, undertook to transmute metals, to cure all diseases, to reanimate the dead, and to predict the course of the weather and the fates of men and empires, they overlooked, while engaged in the pursuit of these unattainable objects, the discovery of such processes of nature as lie within the reach of our faculties, and can be made available for our service. So political theorizers and statesmen, who, from an ignorance of the true limits to the practical powers of a government, extend its action beyond its proper province, not only waste its resources in vain efforts, but withdraw its effective powers from the subjects to which they are properly applicable, and thus diminish its efficiency in its own field.

The aversion to the neutrality of the State in controverted questions of religion-the belief that it is bound to assume a religious character, and to promote religious truth, may perhaps be founded on the assumption, that the State ought to use its powers for furthering all the good ends to which its powers are applicable, whether its attempt is likely to be successful or not.* The promo

* Speaking of the speculators on a perfect or ideal pattern of civil government, Warburton says: "The end of government coming first under consideration, and the general practice of society seeming to declare this end to be only, (what, in truth, it is,) security to our temporal liberty and property; the simplicity of it displeased, and the plan appeared defective. They imagined that, by enlarging the bottom, they should ennoble the structure, and therefore formed a romantic project of making civil society serve for all the good purposes it was even accidentally capable of producing. And thus, instead of giving us a true picture of government, they jumbled together all sorts of societies into one, and confounded the religious, the literary, the mercantile, the convivial, with the civil." -Alliance of Church and State, b. I. ch. 3.

The speculators to whom Warburton alludes were, however, right in supposing, that the State potentially includes all these objects.

tion of religious truth is a good end; the State is capable of applying its powers to the promotion of that end; therefore, if it neglects so to apply them, it is guilty of a sinful omission, and of practical unbelief. Such is the simple argument on which many minds seem to rely; but if they will extend the same mode of reasoning to other subjects, they will soon be startled by the consequences to which it will lead them, and will thus be brought to doubt of the soundness of their premises. If we only leave out of our calculation the probability of success, and require the State to undertake the promotion of all objects which are intrinsically good, whether they be attainable by it or not, we shall soon find it engaged in a multiplicity of impracticable pursuits, which might fill an academy of Laputa with envy. The State, like subordinate societies, and like individuals, is dispensed from the pursuit of unattainable goods. There is no moral obligation which binds a ruler to make an attempt, where success cannot reasonably be expected, A forlorn hope may be sometimes necessary in war; but it forms no part of the functions of a State, in the ordinary administration of its affairs.

Writers who dwell on the religious functions of the State-who (like Dr. Arnold) almost identify the State and the Church, and merge the one in the other, are considered on that account as friends to religion; while those who take a different view of the province of the State, are treated as hostile to religion and the Church. But all experience shows that, where this intimate union of the Church and State exists, instead of the Church spiritualizing the State, the State secularizes the Church. Where the political and ecclesiastical powers are exercised by the same hands, the former are sure to prevail over the latter. Practically, the religious theory of

government will end in perfect Hobbism; and therefore no enlightened friend to religion will seek to confound the province of the State with that of the Church,* or to confer upon the State spiritual, and upon the Church political, functions.

§ 12. Having arrived at the conclusion, that it is not the province of the State to diffuse religious truth and to discourage religious error, we need not dwell at equal length upon its duty in diffusing truth and discouraging error as to matters other than religion. Even those who have attached the greatest importance to the enforcement of religious truth by the State, have not, in general, thought that it was the office of the State to diffuse truth on secular matters. It has rarely been maintained that, in questions of science, history, literature, art, &c., it is incumbent on the State to establish a standard of sound opinions, and to use its power for the purpose of maintaining and diffusing the truth.† By founding univer

* "Articles of faith, as well as all other spiritual matters, it is evident enough, are not within the proper department of a temporal sovereign, who, though he may be very well qualified for protecting, is seldom supposed to be so for instructing the people."-SMITH, Wealth of Nations, b. V. ch. 1, art. 3.

+ The Ptolemaic system of the world was taught till a few years ago in the university of Salamanca; but the prohibition of the Newtonian system was doubtless made on religious grounds—in the same manner that the Jesuit editors of Newton's Principia found it necessary to declare that, in illustrating the propositions relative to the heliocentric theory, they treated it as a mere hypothesis, and they professed, with a grave irony, their submission to the decrees of the church against the motion of the earth: "Cæterum latis a summis Pontificibus contra telluris motum decretis nos obsequi profitemur." The works of Galileo and Copernicus were inserted in the index of prohibited books; and to this day the Ptolemaic system is the official doctrine of the Church of Rome.