t an aggregation of human beings, with all the
passions, as well as all the virtues of our race--soon, necessarily,
abandons the purity of its early time, and grows into a vast hierarchy,
which, founding its claims to authority on divine institution, sways the
world, sometimes for good and sometimes for evil, with a power suited to
the asserted omnipotence of its origin.

But the idea of honest union between church and state was naturally
destroyed, in the minds of all right thinking persons, from the moment
that there was a secession from the Church of Rome. The very idea, I
assert, was destroyed; for the Catholic Princes and the sects into which
Protestants divided themselves, began an internecine war, which, in
effect, not only forever obliterated supremacy from the vocabulary of
ecclesiastical power, but almost destroyed, by disgracing, the religion
in whose name it perpetrated its remorseless cruelties.

The social as well as religious anarchy consequent upon the Reformation,
was soon discerned by the statesmen of England, who took council with
prudent ecclesiastics, and, under the authority of law, erected the
Church of England. In this new establishment they endeavored to
substitute for Romanism, a new ecclesiastical system, which, by its
concessions to the ancient faith, its adoption of novel liberalities,
its compromises and its purity, might contain within itself, sufficient
elements upon which the adherents of Rome might gracefully retreat, and
to which the Reformers might either advance or become reconciled. This
scheme of legislative compromise for a national religion, was doubtless,
not merely designed as an amiable neutral ground for the spiritual wants
of the people, but as the nucleus of an institution which would
gradually, if not at once, transfer to the Royalty of England, that
spiritual authority which its sovereigns had found it irksome to bear or
to control when wielded by the Pope.

The architects of this modern faith were not wrong in their estimate of
the English people, for, perhaps, the great body of the nation willingly
adopted the new scheme. Yet there were bitter opponents both among the
Catholics and Calvinists, whose extreme violence admitted no compromise,
either with each other, or with the Church of England. For them there
was no resource but in dumbness or rebellion; and, as many a lip opened
in complaint or attempted seduction, the legislature originated that
charitable and reconc