There is no state
without God, any more than there is a church without Christ or
the Incarnation. An atheist may be a politician, but if there
were no God there could be no politics. theological principles
are the basis of political principles. The created universe is a
dialectic whole, distinct but inseparable from its Creator, and
all its parts cohere and are essential to one another. All has
its origin and prototype in the Triune God, and throughout
expresses unity in triplicity and triplicity in unity, without
which there is no real being and no actual or possible life.
Every thing has its principle, medium, and end. Natural society
is initial, civil government is medial, the church is
teleological, but the three are only distinctions in one
indissoluble whole.
Man, as we have seen, lives by communion with God through the
Divine creative act, and is perfected or completed only through
the Incarnation, in Christ, the Word made flesh. True, he
communes with God through his kind, and through external nature,
society in which he is born and reared, and property through
which he derives sustenance for his body; but these are only
media of his communion with God, the source of life--not either
the beginning or the end of his communion. They have no life in
themselves, since their being is in God, and, of themselves, can
impart none.
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