State Churches.

It may be said that in a country when the power the people increases, and they become numerous, national churches and other specially supported institutions fall. They are not required as teachers and the people in some cases may be unable to afford them. Endowments are thus in many European and American countries against the spirit of the age. Books are very cheap, and the printed page is everywhere preaching the gospel. In the natural history of nations, those rule first who can read and write first; and they learn to read and write in the following order—the clergy, the king, the nobility, the people.

A State Church may be needed among an ignorant and sparsely-settled population, as well as a State School; but when a society is not under these conditions, it becomes a State evil. For with the spread of knowledge people think for themselves, and liberty of thought produces dissent. If the State page 193 Church continue, the dissenters must support both their own ministers and those of the State. Though the church be endowed and not supported by tithes or taxation, direct or indirect, they still assist to support it. Those lands or property set apart add to the burdens of the people, since the other taxes can be raised only from the remainder of the national wealth. A State Church, moreover, is but a weak support and teacher of religion. It is prone to become a mere machine, stately in appearance, but powerless to raise the masses, or indeed move them in any way. It is itself too much bolstered up by the world to condemn the world. Leaning on the civil magistrate, and in need of his money, it wants the liberty to rebuke him. The Roman Catholic Church, when a national one, may be called a political machine (it was once the most formidable in the world), whose wheels are kept from creaking and becoming intolerable to those concerned by a quantity of very dirty religious grease.

The Church of England maybe called a religious machine, which would tumble to pieces as such were the political craftsmen to leave it for an hour. The Church of Scotland is rightly believed by many to be on its last legs. The Church of Ireland is now the late Church of Ireland, and will long remain so.

There are not a few who think and talk thus; page 194 but the question is not so easily settled. Religion is the life of a people. Without it, their return to the level of the brute creation would be certain and fast. The civil magistrate may then be excused for hesitating to disestablish a national church. It may, and does, cost a good deal to preach the gospel, but the money is perhaps as well spent herein as in whiskey, ribbons, or ships of war. Besides, if the Bible be the best teacher of politics and religion, and a standard and guide very much needed in both, it follows that a national church is a most desirable institution in this view. For the dissenter it is a standard by which he may constantly compare himself, and if he is "holier" than it, then so much the more pleased he should be with himself. Again, the printed page, education and enlightenment, are by no means convertible terms with religion. An enlightened age has often been an irreligious and declining one. Among the classical authors of the Augustan age, you find lamentations innumerable about the pass things had come to, when they could neither bear their vices nor their remedies."