ir respective trades,
guilds, faculties, orders, or corporations, each strictly guarded from
unhallowed intrusion. So religion has been left to its official
functionaries, prescribing articles of belief and terms of salvation by
a divine right,--legislation to princes and nobles, equally claiming by
the same right to give law in temporals; and so of other general
interests.

Now a movement has been slowly going on, through some centuries, for
working society into conformity with a rational rule; a rule not
overlooking the advantages of the division of labor, but taking in too
such qualifying considerations as the healthful stimulus of free
competition, watchfulness over public functionaries, and the necessity
of harmonizing private and corporate interests, with public duty.

The movement has been slow; for the actors have dimly apprehended the
part they were acting, and the principles by themselves vindicated.
It has consisted of two principle acts. The Reformation carried
republicanism into religion: our own Revolution into legislation.
The two movements were parts of one whole; and, to get at the
principles at bottom, either will serve for both, as well as for what
may remain for finishing the work begun.

The Reformation having been conducted by theologians, it was natural
that disproportionate importance should have been attached to
theological niceties. So far as Luther was right in regarding the
doctrine of justification by faith only as the great article at issue,
it must have been, because the opposite doctrine favored the conceit of
a mysterious mediating power vested in a priesthood--a conceit so
favorable to the aggrandizement of the order thus distinguished. But
considered as a _politic_ movement--as an advance in rightly adjusting
the social relations--the Reformation aimed principally at that ill
arrangement, by which the authorized expounders of the law divine found
their account, in involving that law in a glorious uncertainty, and
entrapping people in a frequent violation thereof. Considered as a
politic institution, Protestantism differs essentially from Popery, in
that it makes more of prevention than of remedy; gives the ministry its
best flourish, in the best welfare of the whole body; and pays for
spiritual health, rather than for spiritual sickness. If all
Protestants do not consistently so, the fact accords with the dim
understanding, on both sides, of the essential points contested.