and advocated a liberality worthy of
John Locke.

In the second tract he advocated a principle which had a prodigious
influence on the minds of his generation, and greatly contributed to
establish the polity of the Roman Catholic Church. He argued the
necessity of unity in government as well as unity in faith, like Cyprian
before him; and this has endeared him to the Roman Catholic Church, I
apprehend, even more than his glorious defence of the Pauline theology.
There are some who think that all governments arise out of the
circumstances and the necessities of the times, and that there are no
rules laid down in the Bible for any particular form or polity, since a
government which may be adapted to one age or people may not be fitted
for another;--even as a monarchy would not succeed in New England any
more than a democracy in China. But the most powerful sects among
Protestants, as well as among the Catholics themselves, insist on the
divine authority for their several forms of government, and all would
have insisted, at different periods, on producing conformity with their
notions. The high-church Episcopalian and the high-church Presbyterian
equally insist on the divine authority for their respective
institutions. The Catholics simply do the same, when they make Saint
Peter the rock on which the supremacy of their Church is based. In the
time of Augustine there was only one form of the visible Church,--there
were no Protestants; and he naturally wished, like any bishop, to
strengthen and establish its unity,--a government of bishops, of which
the bishop of Rome was the acknowledged head. But he did not
anticipate--and I believe he would not have indorsed--their future
encroachments and their ambitious schemes for enthralling the mind of
the world, to say nothing of personal aggrandizement and the usurpation
of temporal authority. And yet the central power they established on the
banks of the Tiber was, with all its corruptions, fitted to conserve the
interests of Christendom in rude ages of barbarism and ignorance; and
possibly Augustine, with his profound intuitions, and in view of the
approaching desolations of the Christian world, wished to give to the
clergy and to their head all the moral power and prestige possible, to
awe and control the barbaric chieftains, for in his day the Empire was
crumbling to pieces, and the old civilization was being trampled under
foot. If there was a man in the whole Empire capable