Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/521

Rh functions that had hitherto been in the hands of the church.

Before all, came the work of education; next followed the assumption of various benevolent activities; and to an increasing extent the new state became supreme administrator for the society that had been trained by the church.

In the Protestant lands of the west there thus came into existence territorial churches (national churches, the system of territorial supremacy, and so on), and caesaropapism of a kind, the main distinction between this caesaropapism and the eastern variety being that in the west the church was no longer sacerdotal. The theologian Rothe carries this development to its logical conclusion by insisting that the churches are disappearing, are surrendering their socio-political functions to the state; but before Rothe, Schleiermacher, the founder of modern Protestant theology, had accepted the separation of church and state. Such is the development actually going on in the Protestant world.

But in Catholic countries we see a similar evolution. Since the French revolution, a separation of state and church has been effected almost everywhere, notably in Catholic lands, and above all in France. The rationalist trend of modern thought and feeling and the aspiration to make the whole of life as natural as possible (§ 42) have favoured the spread of radicalism in Catholic countries. As early as the eighteenth century, French liberalism was tinged with radicalism; socialism and anarchism, with their anti-ecclesiastical doctrines and policy, were first organised in France and the Catholic lands. It is where Catholicism is still enthroned that the movement for disestablishment has become antireligious as well as anti-ecclesiastical; in the regions where Protestantism prevails, this movement, though anti-ecclesiastical, is on the whole friendly to religion.

In the eastern empire there was not for many centuries anything corresponding to the decay and ultimate disappearance of secular emperordom in the west. The great reforms tending to promote the consolidation of the empire issued from the eastern capital. Owing to the power of the secular state and owing to the stationarism of the eastern church, that church remained far more dependent upon the state. The church accepted the traditional Roman emperor-worship, as it accepted and incorporated so many other ancient and