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16
THE SCEPTICAL SPIRIT OF

seen in the birth of the Papacy, as it were, out of the rib of the Empire. The imperial and papal jurisdictions had many points of contact, but they were far from coinciding. The attempted revivals of a Judaic theocracy under Calvin, and of a Roman theocracy under Henry VIII. and the German Protestants, were in course of time diverted into purely political channels, and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the State came to insist on outward conformity in religious matters only for the sake of political and civic unity. The genuinely religious energies of the Reformation movement were ultimately absorbed in laying the foundations of modern democracy on the fundamental principle of the congregational unit in England, Scotland and France, and in exalting the authority of the magistrate at the expense of the priestly office in the North German and Scandinavian countries. The net result was that most of these States in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries emphasised the merely legal aspect of religious conformity, and endowed their churches with the idea of thus economising their expenditure on police. The establishment of a religious neutral commonwealth across the Atlantic by the Federation Act of 1783, and the subjection of the Church to the State in France by Napoleon I., marked a new era. In the English-speaking world of to-day (with the present