before it had any pretence of alliance with the civil, or any establishment in the Roman empire; and it is astonishing to consider, though we meet with the examples and proofs almost in every page of history, ecclesiastical and civil, how an order of men, instituted to teach a religion of so much purity, sanctity, and detachment from all worldly interests, could convert this very institution into a sordid trade, and make other men believe, that the best of good works was to enrich this order, and the greatest of sins to take any thing from it. This continued to be the case, however, near fifteen centuries, without any considerable interruption. During so long a course of time, the principles of the Gospel were so forgotten, and so perverted, that salvation was a merchandise bought and sold in every ecclesiastical shop, in that of Rome above all. This shop had so much custom, that a pope of the fourteenth century, John the twenty-second, the inventor of annates and many other exactions, left behind him, by Villani's account, which father Paul quotes in the History of Benefices, eighteen millions in specie, and seven millions in plate and ingots. An immense sum in any age, especially in that, when the West Indies had not been yet discovered.

The abuse grew to be most exorbitant in the devout ages of the church; that is, in the ages of greatest ignorance and superstition; for then the clergy had persuaded men, and the more corrupt they were, the more easily were they per

suaded

suaded, that all sorts of crimes might be committed safely by those who submitted to the slight penances and pecuniary mulcts, which the church imposed, either arbitrarily, or according to a book of rates.

When I say, that crimes might be committed safely on these terms, I mean safely from divine vengeance; for the man whom the church pretended to screen from this, would have been condemned at any human tribunal, and was so, I doubt not, often, to the gallows and the rack. Thus the great sanction of revealed religion was taken away by artificial theology and ecclesiastical fraud; and a great part of the objections that infidels urge against it receive a colour from the doctrine and practice of that religious society, whose independency and divine institution are pleaded for so strenuously.

. The religious society was so far from being, by any right, independent on the civil, or from treating with it in form, and being incorporated with it on specific terms of alliance, when christianity became, in a fortunate conjuncture, the established religion of the empire, that this society grew into power, and into riches, as it has been said already, by degrees, by indulgence and concessions on one hand, by art and management on the other. Claims precede acquisitions in the natural and ordinary course of things. But in this case acquisitions preceded claims. The church, indeed, made a claim to power when she was first established; but it was to spiritual power. Nothing else was avowed; nothing else was suspected,

The

The civil society did not see, that spiritual power was power over opinion, and that this was power over conscience, or seeing it, did not enough consider how this power might extend and increase, how it might rival and subdue their own. But as soon as the church had drawn a great part of the affairs of civil government into her own tribunal, under the notion of spirituals, or of things appertaining to spirituals; as soon as she had acquired a prescriptive right of employing the civil power in spiritual quarrels, and the spiritual power in civil, she claimed a sovereign and universal authority, seized the two swords into her hands, and sharpened the edge of both.

SECT. XXIII.

THE good effects of maintaining, and the bad effects of neglecting religion, had been extremely visible, in the whole course of the Roman government. Numa, the second founder of Rome, contributed more to the prosperity and grandeur of that empire, than the first founder of it, Romulus, and all the warrior kings who succeeded him; for Numa established a religion, directed it, as others, both kings and consuls, did, after his example, to the support of civil government, and made it the principle of all the glorious expectations that were raised in the minds of that people. This religion was very absurd, and yet by keeping up an awe of superior powers, and the belief of a Providence, that ordered the

course

course of events, it produced all the marvellous effects which Machiavel, and writers more able to judge of them and of their causes than he was, Polybius, Cicero, Plutarch, and others, ascribe to it. The inward peace of that government was often broke by seditions: Rome was in distress at home while she triumphed abroad, and at last the dissolution of the commonwealth followed a long and bloody series of civil war. glect of religion, not religion, was a principal cause of these evils. Religion decayed; and the state decayed with her. She might have preserved it; but even in her decay, she gave it no wounds, nor festered like a poison in any.

But the ne

This example, many others, and the reason of things, were sufficient to make such a man as Constantine see the necessity of reviving and reforming the ancient religion of Rome, or of establishing a new one; in short, of taking in the assistance of some religion or other, to pursue more effectually the great designs of his ambition. His rivals in the empire were pagans; and paganism did more than begin to be no longer a proper bond of society. The superstitious opinions and practices of it were as much in vogue in his time, as they had been in the best ages of Rome; but they were not directed, as they had been in those ages, to the support of civil government. The virtue of old Rome, and the spirit of her religion, fainted, when her liberty expired: and they were wholly extinguished in the time of Constantine, by a long course of tyrannical dominion, seldom interrupted; by the venality of the senate

now

now and long before inured to slavery, by the ferocity of the armies, by the licentiousness of the provinces, and by that independency on the authority, as well as disregard to the majesty of the empire, which prevailed in both.

On the other hand, christianity, born, if I may say so, in a desert, and educated in a little province of the empire, had spread through the whole in the course of three centuries. The progress of it was not so immense, perhaps, as Tertullian represents it in his hyperbolical style. But it was great, and Christians, under one denomination or another, were numerous in every part of the East and West. Paganism was worn out in one sense, in theory, if not in practice; the impostures of it were detected; the absurd doctrines and rites were exposed to ridicule. The priests could not defend it, and the philosophers explained it away. It lay exposed, like an unfortified country, and as the empire did soon afterward, to every incursion. Christianity was fresh and vigorous. The apparent sanctity of those who professed this religion, the courage of those who died for it, and the zeal of those philosophers and rhetors who were converted to it and writ for it, were more than sufficient to defeat the calumny raised against it. They were more than sufficient, I mean, to defeat it among all such, as finding it to be calumny in some instances, looked no farther, but deemed it to be the same in all. Among others, and in general, the very name of Christian continued to be odious long. A spirit of enthusiasm prompted many on

one