POLITICAL THOUGHTS ON THE CHURCH 205
liberty and religion, and are all liable to diverge into tyranny by the exclusive exaggeration of their principle. I t is this exaggeration that has ever been the great danger to religion and to liberty, and the object of constant resistance, the source of constant suffering for the Church. Christianity introduced no ne\v forms of government, but a new spirit, which totally transformed the old ones, The difference between a Christian and a pagan monarchy, or between a Christian and a rationalist democracy, is as great, politically, as that behveen a monarchy and a republic. The Government of Athens more nearly resembled that of Persia than that of any Christian republic, however democratic. If political theorists had attended more to the experience of the Christian Ages, the Church and the State would have been spared many calamities. Unfortunately, it has long been the COmlTIOn practice to recur to the authority of the Greeks and the Jews. The example of both was equally dangerous; for in the Jewish as in the Gentile \vorld, political and religious obligations were made to coincide; in both, therefore,-in the theocracy of the Jews as in the 7rOX"rrlLa of the Greeks,-the State \vas absolute. Now it is the great object of the Church, by keeping the two spheres permanently distinct,-by rendering to Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's, and to God the things that are God's- to make all absolutism, of whatever kind, impossible. As no form of government is in itself incompatible with tyranny, either of a person or a principle, nor necessarily inconsistent with liberty, there is no natural hostility or alliance behveen the Church and anyone of them. The same Church which, in the confusion and tumult of the great migrations, rpstored authority by raising up and anointing kings, held in later times with the aristocracy of the empire, and called into existence the democracies of Italy. In the eighth century she looked to Charlemagne for the reorganisation of society; in the eleventh she relied on the people to carry out the reformation of the clergy. During the first period of the Middle Ages, \V"hen social and political order had to
