with which it cherishes the life of the family; but in its attitude towards national life we must seek all its affinities in the more strongly marked phases of High Church Christianity. High Churchism ceaselessly tends to regard the Church and civil society as competing spheres of interest, and thus to erect an imperium in imperio, and to prefer of course the claims of the spiritual imperium to those of the secular. In an extreme form, such as Romanism, it enjoins at times war upon the institutions of civil society; in a much milder form, like Brethrenism, it proclaims a respectful and perfectly submissive neutrality towards them.
I am of course aware that the Brethren would have claimed to stand with the first in vindicating the spirituality of the secular; and their claim is good up to a certain point—but no further. To do the common things of life as under the lordship of Christ, and as so many acts of service to Him, was certainly the ideal of the Brethren, as it was of the Jansenists and of other excellent men whose High Churchism is not doubtful. But the Brethren, like the Jansenists, placed Christian perfection, and indeed Christian duty, in as total a seclusion as possible from the common pursuits of men, even in the case of pursuits that are lawful, and indeed necessary. To the Protestant this view suggests a dualistic theory, and seems hard to reconcile with the Divine origin and authority of civil government—in which, nevertheless, the Brethren very heartily believed. They believed, too, that the existing secular order—the administration of government, of justice, and so forth—was just as much divinely ordained as the Church itself. Christians ought, they said, to be very thankful for it, and to yield it a perfectly passive support; but they should remember that in its administration Christians, as a heavenly people,
