l that
the life of the State is their own life. Now, the most important effect
of the Protestant movement was just this, that it awakened in each
individual the consciousness of his universal nature, in other words the
consciousness that there is no external power or sovereignty, divine or
human, to which he has absolutely and permanently to submit, but that
every outward claim of authority must ultimately be justified by the
inner witness of the spirit. The freedom of man is that his obedience to
the State, to the Church, even to God, is the obedience of his natural
to his spiritual self. The essential truth of the Reformation lay in its
republication of the doctrine that the voice of God speaks within and
not only without us, and indeed that "it is only by the God within that
we can comprehend the God without." And the nations, which had learned
that lesson in religion, soon hastened to apply it to the social and
political order of life. It is undoubtedly a dangerous lesson, as may be
seen, not only in the tendency of many Protestant sects to put the inner
life in opposition to the outer, and so to deprive the former of all
wider contents and interests; but also in the ultimate substitution, by
Rousseau and others, of the assertion of the natural, for the assertion
of the spiritual, man. In such extreme cases we find the mere _capacity_
of man for a higher life treated as if it were the higher life itself;
forgetting that the capacity is nothing unless it be realized, and that
its realization requires the surrender of individual liberty and private
judgment to the guidance and teaching of those, in whom that realization
has already taken place. But it is not the less true that the
consciousness of the capacity, and the consequent sense of the duty of
becoming, not merely a slave or instrument, but an organ, of the
intellectual and moral life of mankind, is the essential basis of modern
life. "Henceforth, I call you not servants, for the servant knoweth not
what his lord doeth; but I have called you friends," is a word of Christ
which scarcely began to be verified till the Reformation. And while its
verification cannot mean the negation of that division of labour upon
which society rests,--cannot mean that each one should _know_ and
_judge_, any more than that each one should _do_, everything for
himself,--it at least means that every power and authority should
henceforth be, in the true sense of the word, spiritual, and