THE CONSCIENCE

OF THE

STATE.

BY

ALEXANDER VINET.

LONDON:

SOCIETY FOR THE LIBERATION OF RELIGION FROM STATE PATRONAGE AND CONTROL, 2, SERJEANTS' INN, FLEET STREET,

AND

ARTHUR MIALL, 18, BOUVERIE STREET, FLEET STREET.

ADVERTISEMENT.

The following is taken from Professor VINET's Essay on Personal Religious Conviction and on the Separation of Church and State.

THE CONSCIENCE OF THE STATE.

Can the State, as a State possess a religion?

The consequence of each of the previous replies presents itself spontaneously. If we find that the State can possess a religion, the individual will have none; but the converse is also true, and let us take heed to it,—if the individual has a religion, then the State can have none.

Religion wherever it is real, comprises three distinct facts or elements: conviction, affection, and a desire to search for absolute truth.

Conviction, and affection, are distinguishable by their very names, and analysis clearly discerns them, in every truly religious faith. It is less easy to discover them in particular cases. However, we always recognise the presence of both : conviction without affection, is no more religion, than affection without conviction.

But it is not necessary in discussing the present question, that we should consider these two elements seperately. The complex fact of religion, when reduced to its simplicity, is resolvable into feeling, differing only from what is generally called religious feeling, in the fact, that it is applicable to a known and certain object, with which we have thenceforward a determinate relation; this is the subjective aspect of religious faith. Its objective character implies absolute truth. Let us first consider religious belief as a feeling.

Religion is feeling. Nothing less can be said of it, and nothing more. For although religion regulating the whole man and his whole conduct, of necessity expresses itself by actions, still these actions are not religion. The very same

actions may spring from different and even from opposite motives, and change with the motives their worth and signification. A man is not completely and essentially known by his actions, but by the motives which instigate his conduct; they constitute his reality.

True religion seeks in the heart, the heart alone; the man is known, and his destiny ascertained, by his inward life; every other consideration is foreign to it, and would change its very nature; it would cease to be religion, if not found within the most secret and hidden recesses of the soul. Religion is concentrated in feeling; it has reference to no interests but those which relate to the invisible; all else, we mean all external conduct, is only a means of acting upon the inward life, or of bearing a testimony to it.

In a religious point of view, the external world has only been created for the spiritual world, the only real, the only important one. A body has been given to us, a world surrounds us, a sensible life has been bestowed upon us, only as means, as objects, or perhaps as obstacles, to stimulate that part of our being of which religion constitutes the life.* It is not permitted to a spiritual being, who in accepting religion has accepted his true condition of existence, to

* If the visible world should wholly disappear, we admit that religion would disappear also; but, observe, it would only disappear; nothing more. Just in the same way the soul would disappear with the perceptible universe. We cannot define, no one can define, what would be the mode of its existence, because no one can conceive of a pure virtuality; but no one can say that the soul would not exist, without at the same time affirming that the soul is merely a compound of sensible impressions, and further, they must imagine a something to receive those impressions. Like a plant to which a certain soil is necessary; the plant, however, is not the soil. Every being, according

to its nature, must have relations by which to manifest its existence, and primarily to obtain a consciousness of it; no being but the Supreme can dispense with them. If these relations did not exist for the human soul, if God had not made this provision by giving it a body and senses, it would not have been conscious of its own existence; and not having opportunity to know itself, and to distinguish between its sensible and spiritual existence, it could not have re-united itself

transform the end into a means, and the means into an end.

Let us endeavour to apply all this to the State; and first let us ascertain what the State is. The State is either a being or a fact there is no medium; and it must be granted that if the State be a being, the man is not one; if the State be a man, the man is a man no longer; he is but the shadow of one. They must remain distinct; the one necessarily becomes all that the other is not; the one ceases to be all that the other becomes. If the State be a being, it is everything; if it be not everything, it is only a fact; and the man remains complete in the man: there is no alternative.

For observe, that in making the State a being, you do not simply make it an individual, with respect to whom the individual, properly so called, is on an equality, and against whom he can maintain his individual rights. Were this the case, the system would be as fruitless in its results as it is ill-founded in principle. In matters of religion, one individual is equal to another, neither more nor less. Thus the State would be equal to each one of its members, and, to carry out the consequence, the State would have its religion, and the individual his: what could be more absurd? No, if the State be a man, it is the only man; if the State possess a conscience, there is no other conscience; if the State have its religion, there is no other religion. Again we say, there is no alternative.

But all this ratiocination falls at once; the State is not a being. A metaphor has not changed its nature, and it has not become a person, because it has been personified in ar

to the divine Being by a voluntary act, subordinating its transitory and contingent relations to that which is essential and eternal; choosing voluntarily between the world and God; separating itself from the one in order to re-unite itself with the other; in a word, substituting for a union of necessity one entirely voluntary in its nature. The material exists only, that the spiritual may be conscious of its existence.