But in the early growth of society, considerations like the above have been little attended to, compared with the obvious advantages of the division of labor.  As ordinarily each handicraft is best exercised by those earliest and steadiest in their devotion to the trade; so it is argued, universally, that the several departments of the public service will be best attended to, by being left to their respective trades, guilds, faculties, orders, or corporations, each strictly guarded from unhallowed intrusion.  So religion has been left to its official functionaries, prescribing articles of belief and terms of salvation by a divine right,—­legislation to princes and nobles, equally claiming by the same right to give law in temporals; and so of other general interests.

Now a movement has been slowly going on, through some centuries, for working society into conformity with a rational rule; a rule not overlooking the advantages of the division of labor, but taking in too such qualifying considerations as the healthful stimulus of free competition, watchfulness over public functionaries, and the necessity of harmonizing private and corporate interests, with public duty.

The movement has been slow; for the actors have dimly apprehended the part they were acting, and the principles by themselves vindicated.  It has consisted of two principle acts.  The Reformation carried republicanism into religion:  our own Revolution into legislation.  The two movements were parts of one whole; and, to get at the principles at bottom, either will serve for both, as well as for what may remain for finishing the work begun.

The Reformation having been conducted by theologians, it was natural that disproportionate importance should have been attached to theological niceties.  So far as Luther was right in regarding the doctrine of justification by faith only as the great article at issue, it must have been, because the opposite doctrine favored the conceit of a mysterious mediating power vested in a priesthood—­a conceit so favorable to the aggrandizement of the order thus distinguished.  But considered as a politic movement—­as an advance in rightly adjusting the social relations—­the Reformation aimed principally at that ill arrangement, by which the authorized expounders of the law divine found their account, in involving that law in a glorious uncertainty, and entrapping people in a frequent violation thereof.  Considered as a politic institution, Protestantism differs essentially from Popery, in that it makes more of prevention than of remedy; gives the ministry its best flourish, in the best welfare of the whole body; and pays for spiritual health, rather than for spiritual sickness.  If all Protestants do not consistently so, the fact accords with the dim understanding, on both sides, of the essential points contested.

This dim understanding further appears, in that after all the political discussion which has been, the success of republican institutions is still appealed to, as vindicating the reign of justice and benevolence in the public mind; mankind have within so much of the divine, are so self-disposed to do right, that they do not need much control, but may pretty safely be left to their own guidance.  Nor is it left to the mere demagogue to talk thus.