nerate nature, whatever
their supernatural privileges might be, greater or less, according to
their form of religion. This view of the relation of the Church to
the world as taken apart from questions of ecclesiastical politics,
as they may be called, is often brought out in my sermons. Two occur
to me at once; No. 3 of my Plain Sermons, which was written in 1829,
and No. 15 of my third volume, written in 1835. Then, on the other
hand, by Church I meant--in common with all writers connected with
the Tract Movement, whatever their shades of opinion, and with
the whole body of English divines, except those of the Puritan or
Evangelical School--the whole of Christendom, from the apostles' time
till now, whatever their later divisions into Latin, Greek, and
Anglican. I have explained this view of the subject above at pp.
83-85 of this Volume. When then I speak, in the particular sermon
before us, of the members, or the rulers, or the action of "the
Church," I mean neither the Latin, nor the Greek, nor the English,
taken by itself, but of the whole Church as one body: of Italy as one
with England, of the Saxon or Norman as one with the Caroline Church.
_This_ was specially the one Church, and the points in which one
branch or one period differed from another were not and could not be
notes of the Church, because notes necessarily belonged to the whole
of the Church everywhere and always.

This being my doctrine as to the relation of the Church to the world,
I laid down in the sermon three principles concerning it, and there
left the matter. The first is, that Divine Wisdom had framed for its
action, laws which man, if left to himself, would have antecedently
pronounced to be the worst possible for its success, and which in all
ages have been called by the world, as they were in the apostles'
days, "foolishness;" that man ever relies on physical and material
force, and on carnal inducements--as Mahomet with his sword and his
houris, or indeed almost as that theory of religion, called, since
the sermon was written, "muscular Christianity;" but that our
Lord, on the contrary, has substituted meekness for haughtiness,
passiveness for violence, and innocence for craft: and that the event
has shown the high wisdom of such an economy, for it has brought to
light a set of natural laws, unknown before, by which the seeming
paradox that weakness should be stronger than might, and simplicity
than worldly policy, is readily explained.