Synopses & Reviews
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: masters of political science, from Plato to Hegel, that to the perfection of the social organism, as of the individuals composing it, religion is necessary. Among English writers no one has more strongly protested against the repudiation of this doctrine than Mr. Gladstone. Thus, in his once famous treatise on The State in its Relations with the Church, he denounces the separation of religion from government, Firstly, because it asserts practical atheism, that is a great and moral human agency, knowingly, deliberately, and permanently divested of regard to God. Secondly, because it asserts that atheism in its most authentic form, namely, by casting out its antagonist, religion, from what are most permanent and authoritative among men, their public politics. Thirdly, because the assertion is made, not by individuals alone, but by masses, invested with political power, and, under the most wretched infatuation, claiming it as a right of freedom thus to banish themselves from the Divine protection and regard. No doubt this view no longer dominates either the general mind, or the mind of the distinguished person who thus expressed it with the copious and vehement rhetoric of which he is a master. But that fact raises no presumption whatever against its validity. And those of us who decline to recognize in ballot-boxes the sole organ of political truth, and in majorities told by head the one test of right and wrong in the public b chapter{Section 4order, are assuredly bound to bear witness to truer conceptions of the social organism than such as now find popular favour. Things are what they are. Their nature is not in the least changed by the fond wishes of an age which sets up expedience as the unique rule of legislation, and material well-being as the only end of the State...
Synopsis
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