The-papacy-its-history-dogmas-genius-and-prospects-wylie

CONSTITUTIONALISM SPRINGS FROM CHRISTIANITY. 455ment after the example of the Church, borrowing the ideawhich she had been the fii'st to promulgate in theory andexhibit in practice ; and ere this time of day the worldwould have been filled with free and constitutional states,had not the Church, abandoning her own idea, begun tocopy, in her government and organization, the order of thestate. The issue was the erection of the Papacy. Thepapal government is the very antipodes of constitutional government: it centres all power in one man : it does so onthe ground of divine right ; and is therefore essentially andeternally antagonistic to the constitutional element. Itslong dominancy in Europe formed the grand barrier to theprogress of the popular element in society, and the erectionof constitutional government in the world. With the Keformationthe popular element revived. " Geneva," saysone who is no friend to Christianity, " in submitting to Calvinism,became a popular state."* In the proportion inwhich the various states of Europe received the Reformationdid they become free ; and in the proportion in whichthey have retained the Reformation have they retained theirliberty. The cause of the dissolution of the old empires wastheir slavery.Society was divided into two classes,—noblesand slaves. Wealth and luxury in process of time exhaustedthe aristocracy ; and as they could receive no infusionof fresh blood from the other classes, the state was atan end. But Christianity, by teaching that all men areimmortal, and that there reigns among them an essentialequality, has abolished slavery, has effected a free circulationamong the variousclasses of the state, like that whichmaintains the salubrity of the air and ocean, and has thusconferred upon kingdoms the gift of terrestrial immortality .f• Voltaire's Age of Louis XIV. vol. ii. p. 179 ; Glasgow, 1753.+ We may lay it down as an axiom, from the principles we have statedin this chapter, that despotism cannot consist with Protestantism, and thata free government and Popery cannot co-exist.