having been developed from the patriarchal, and modelled from
the family or tribe, as they do still in all the non-Christian world.
Religion itself, before the Incarnation, bore traces of the same
organization. Even with the Jews, religion was transmitted and
disused, not as under Christianity by conversion, but by natural
generation or family adoption. With all the Gentile tribes or nations,
it was the same. At first the father was both priest and king, an when
the two offices were separated, the priests formed a distinct and
hereditary class or caste, rejected by Christianity, which, as we have
seen, admits priests only after the order of Melchisedech. The Jews had
the synagogue, and preserved the primitive revelation in its purity and
integrity; but the Greeks and Romans, more fully than any other ancient
nations, preserved or developed the political order that best conforms
to the Christian religion; and Christianity, it is worthy of remark,
followed in the track of the Roman armies, and it gains a permanent
establishment only where was planted, or where it is able to plant, the
Graeco-Roman civilization. The Graeco-Roman republics were hardly less
a schoolmaster to bring the world to Christ in the civil order, than
the Jewish nation was to bring it to Him in the spiritual order, or in
faith and worship. In the Christian order nothing is by hereditary
descent, but every thing is by election of grace. The Christian
dispensation is teleological, palingenesiac, and the whole order, prior
to the Incarnation, was initial, genesiac, and continued by natural
generation, as it is still in all nations and tribes outside of
Christendom. No non-Christian people is a civilized people, and,
indeed, the human race seems not anywhere, prior to the Incarnation, to
have attained to its majority: and it is, perhaps, because the race
were not prepared for it, that the Word was not sooner incarnated. He
came only in the fulness of time, when the world was ready to receive
him.

The providential constitution is, in fact, that with which the nation
is born, and is, as long as the nation exists, the real living and
efficient constitution of the state. It is the source of the vitality
of the state, that which controls or governs its action, and determines
its destiny. The constitution which a nation is said to give itself,
is never the constitution of the state, but is the law ordained by the
state for the government instituted un