the kingdom, and be copied in every other land. For, as another so truthfully expresses it, "every workman must be constantly reminded of the fact that, while numbers are unable to obtain a sufficiency of the necessaries of life, others have so much superfluous wealth that they are able to squander it in useless and mischievous luxuries, and never devote themselves to one hour's useful employment."

After all I have said on this subject of property, I have to admit that there is nothing new about these doctrines. For they are as old as history itself, and were, in my opinion, as clear to the mind of the writer of Genesis as they could be to any mind to-day. The first people to discover and to proclaim to the world, so far as I am aware, the true conception of the origin and the nature of the right to property were the ancient Hebrews. From the first of Genesis to Revelation the ground of the ownership of property is always labor, and the order of ownership is always first God, then the race, then the individual. Neither Moses nor Jesus ever put the individual before the race, or in any way called this order in question. That "The earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof," for the reason that "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth," was the starting point of all Hebrew thought.

And their next great central idea was that the first pair, who were the first representatives of the race and historically the first state, being children of God and endowed with divine powers, got their right to the possession of the earth and its contents by obedience to the divine command to "subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the face of the earth." Individual ownership they always

regarded as secondary to race ownership, and to be allowed only as it contributed to the good of the community as a whole.

Every man should be taught to have a reverence for property, but it should not be a superstitious or irrational reverence. If his notion of the right to the possession and use of property harmonizes with the biblical conception, it harmonizes, in my opinion, with the best economic philosophy and the highest interests of man. The only fitting watchword for the treatment of property in our day is,-Back to Moses, Back to Christ.

The circumstances of our age have brought the subject vitally to the front, and the great mass of the people will not long give their allegiance to any church that puts it in the background. We do not have in this country a state church, but what we can and ought to have is a church state,—a state in which the members of our churches actually show by their conduct that they love their neighbors as themselves. For the churches are ultimately responsible for the character of our laws, and what they will unite in demanding, they can have.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE CHURCH AND THE MODERN STATE.'

In a book written nearly two thousand years ago by a heathen of Boeotia, in ancient Greece, we read these words : “Go over the world and you may find cities without walls, without theatres, without money, without art; but a city without a temple, or an altar, or some order of worship, no man ever saw."

This statement is as true in the first quarter of the twentieth century of the Christian era as when it was first uttered, and no one at all familiar with the results of modern investigation and research can reasonably call it in question. Even the cannibals of Southern Africa, the most degraded, perhaps, of all the races of men, carry their fetishes with them in all their undertakings, and hide them in their waist-cloth whenever they are about to do anything of which they feel ashamed. "There is no need," writes Dr. Livingstone in his Journals, "for beginning to tell the most degraded of these people of the existence of God or of a future state-the facts being universally admitted."

All observation and experience justify the assertion that every man is born a worshipper. He is so made that in the very act of coming to a knowledge of his own existence he intuitively knows himself as related to a higher Power. He instinctively believes that he is indebted for his existence to this Power,

1 Reprinted from the author's The Sphere of the State.

and that he owes to him the worship and service of his life. It is difficult to overestimate the influence of this religious element in human nature upon the course of history. It is hardly too much to say that it is now, and always has been, the most important single factor in determining the progress of mankind. "As an historical fact," says another, "nations and governments and religions have everywhere a connection, not only most intimate, but which has thus far shown itself indissoluble. If we look more closely into this historical fact, we find that the controlling element in their connection has ever been the religious one. Nations and governments have not formed their religion, but their religion has formed them." In other words, the more fully men realize their relation to God as their common Father, the more clearly will they recognize their rights and duties to one another as brethren and thus discover the only secure foundation upon which to ground the state.

In one sense of the term every human being is as truly a member of the church as of the family or state. For every person is by nature related to God, as well as to his parents and his fellows. In this sense the church is one and indivisible and includes every human being. Like the family and the state it cannot be created to-day and destroyed to-morrow, and like them it is of divine origin. For man is so made by his Creator that whether he will or no he must be a subject of the divine government as well as of the human.

In another sense of the term the church is manifold. There may rightly exist in the world as many individual churches as the good of the universal church requires. A true church is found in human history whenever a community of human beings join together

to worship and serve their Maker. Each church approaches perfection as a church just in proportion as the idea of a common divine sonship is realized in its members both in themselves and in all their mutual relations. In this sense of the term no church is permanent. Old churches should be dissolved and new ones formed whenever the religious needs of man require it.

No civil government can justly ignore the church, any more than it can justly fail to acknowledge its relation to the family. To attempt to treat the church and the state as utterly distinct is as unreasonable as to succeed in such an undertaking is impossible. For "no civil government can stand in the neglect of all religion, and no community can maintain its freedom without a government in some way acknowledging a religion." The chief question before every state is not whether it has any relation to the church within its borders, but how to determine what that relation ought to be.

Four different answers have been given to this question in the course of history and still have their respective advocates:

1. Some hold that the state should be subordinate to the church and should act simply as the agent of the church, getting all the authority and power it possesses from the church and not from itself. "All nations without exception have commenced with this régime. There are none which have not been governed at first by a religious power." As an historical fact, religion has been the only power that could check the wanderings of nomadic tribes and so fix them to the soil as to make them accessible to the demands of a civilized life. That all primitive governments were