Churches; alongside as well as outside of itself, these are the great
powers of the nation; not only does their domain differ from its own
but, again it is vaster and lies deeper. Beyond the temporal patrimony
and the small fragment of human history which the eyes of the flesh
perceive, they embrace and present to mental vision the whole world
and its first cause, the total ordinance of things, the infinite
perspective of a past eternity and that of an eternity to come.
Underneath the corporeal and intermittent actions which civil power
prescribes and regulates, they govern the imagination, the conscience
and the affections, the whole inward being, that mute, persistent
effort of which our visible acts are simply the incomplete expressions
and rare outbursts. Indeed, even when they set limits to these,
voluntarily, conscientiously, there is no limit; in vain do they
proclaim, if Christian, that their kingdom is not of this world;
nevertheless, it is, since they belong to it; masters of dogma and of
morals, they teach and command in it. In their all-embracing
conception of divine and human things, the State, like a chapter in a
book, has its place and their teachings in this chapter are for it of
capital importance. For, here do they write out its rights and duties,
the rights and duties of its subjects, a more or less perfect plan of
civil order. This plan, avowed or dissimulated, towards which they
incline the preferences of the faithful, issues at length,
spontaneously and invincible from their doctrine, like a plant from
its seed, to vegetate in temporal society, flower and fructify therein
and send its roots deeper down for the purpose of shattering or of
consolidating civil and political institutions. The influence of a
Church on the family and on education, on the use of wealth or of
authority, on the spirit of obedience or of revolt, on habits of
initiation or of inertia, of enjoyment or of abstention, of charity or
of egoism, on the entire current train of daily practice and of