the
accumulation of myths. Hence came respectively, Law and Morality: the
one growing ever more concrete, the other more abstract; the authority
of the one ever on the decrease, that of the other ever on the increase;
originally the same, but now placed daily in more marked antagonism.

Simultaneously there has been going on a separation of the institutions
administering these two codes of conduct. While they were yet one, of
course Church and State were one: the king was arch-priest, not
nominally, but really--alike the giver of new commands and the chief
interpreter of the old commands; and the deputy-priests coming out of
his family were thus simply expounders of the dictates of their
ancestry: at first as recollected, and afterwards as ascertained by
professed interviews with them. This union--which still existed
practically during the middle ages, when the authority of kings was
mixed up with the authority of the pope, when there were bishop-rulers
having all the powers of feudal lords, and when priests punished by
penances--has been, step by step, becoming less close. Though monarchs
are still "defenders of the faith," and ecclesiastical chiefs, they are
but nominally such. Though bishops still have civil power, it is not
what they once had. Protestantism shook loose the bonds of union;
Dissent has long been busy in organising a mechanism for the exercise of
religious control, wholly independent of law; in America, a separate
organisation for that purpose already exists; and if anything is to be
hoped from the Anti-State-Church Association--or, as it has been newly
named, "The Society for the Liberation of Religion from State Patronage
and Control"--we shall presently have a separate organisation here also.

Thus alike in authority, in essence, and in form, political and
spiritual rule have been ever more widely diverging from the same root.
That increasing division of labour which marks the progress of society
in other things, marks it also in this separation of government into
civil and religious; and if we observe how the morality which forms the
substance of religions in general, is beginning to be purified from the
associated creeds, we may anticipate that this division will be
ultimately carried much further.

Passing now to the third species of control--that of Manners--we shall
find that this, too, while it had a common genesis with the others, has
gradually come to have a distinct sphere and a special e