The Graeco-Roman republics
were hardly less a schoolmaster to bring the world to Christ in
the civil order, than the Jewish nation was to bring it to Him in
the spiritual order, or in faith and worship. In the Christian
order nothing is by hereditary descent, but every thing is by
election of grace. The Christian dispensation is teleological,
palingenesiac, and the whole order, prior to the Incarnation, was
initial, genesiac, and continued by natural generation, as it is
still in all nations and tribes outside of Christendom. No
non-Christian people is a civilized people, and, indeed, the
human race seems not anywhere, prior to the Incarnation, to have
attained to its majority: and it is, perhaps, because the race
were not prepared for it, that the Word was not sooner incarnated.
He came only in the fulness of time, when the world was ready to
receive him.
The providential constitution is, in fact, that with which the
nation is born, and is, as long as the nation exists, the real
living and efficient constitution of the state. It is the source
of the vitality of the state, that which controls or governs its
action, and determines its destiny. The constitution which a
nation is said to give itself, is never the constitution of the
state, but is the law ordained by the state for the government
instituted under it. Thomas Paine would admit nothing to be the
constitution but a written document which he could fold up and
put in his pocket, or file away in a pigeon-hole.
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