er with equal fury and
devotion. The hard necessity of censuring either a pope, or a saint and
martyr, distresses the modern Catholics whenever they are obliged to
relate the particulars of a dispute in which the champions of religion
indulged such passions as seem much more adapted to the senate or to the
camp.

The progress of the ecclesiastical authority gave birth to the memorable
distinction of the laity and of the clergy, which had been unknown to
the Greeks and Romans. The former of these appellations comprehended the
body of the Christian people; the latter, according to the signification
of the word, was appropriated to the chosen portion that had been set
apart for the service of religion; a celebrated order of men, which
has furnished the most important, though not always the most edifying,
subjects for modern history. Their mutual hostilities sometimes
disturbed the peace of the infant church, but their zeal and activity
were united in the common cause, and the love of power, which (under
the most artful disguises) could insinuate itself into the breasts
of bishops and martyrs, animated them to increase the number of their
subjects, and to enlarge the limits of the Christian empire. They
were destitute of any temporal force, and they were for a long
time discouraged and oppressed, rather than assisted, by the civil
magistrate; but they had acquired, and they employed within their own
society, the two most efficacious instruments of government, rewards and
punishments; the former derived from the pious liberality, the latter
from the devout apprehensions, of the faithful.

Chapter XV: Progress Of The Christian Religion.--Part VII

I. The community of goods, which had so agreeably amused the imagination
of Plato, and which subsisted in some degree among the austere sect of
the Essenians, was adopted for a short time in the primitive church.
The fervor of the first proselytes prompted them to sell those worldly
possessions, which they despised, to lay the price of them at the feet
of the apostles, and to content themselves with receiving an equal share
out of the general distribution. The progress of the Christian religion
relaxed, and gradually abolished, this generous institution, which, in
hands less pure than those of the apostles, would too soon have been
corrupted and abused by the returning selfishness of human nature; and
the converts who embraced the new religion were permitted to retain the
pos