In his celebrated lecture on the Confessions of St. Augustine the late Professor Adolf von Harnack declared: “Between St. Paul the Apostle and Luther the Reformer, the Christian Church has possessed no one who could measure him- self with Augustine; and in comprehensive influence no other is to be compared with him.” Not only was this North African bishop the chief luminary of Western Christendom in his own generation, but through his writings he fairly dominated the philosophy, the theology, and the ethics of the Middle Ages; he stimulated the medieval mystics, alike those who accepted and many of those who rejected the traditional dogmas; he inspired both the so-called forerunners of the Reformation and the leading humanists of the Renaissance; and in large measure he moulded the evangelical faith and piety of the Lutheran and especially of the Reformed churches from the days of their founders down to our own times. But in no realm of thought or life was his influence more potent or historically more significant than in that characteristic development of the relations of church and state that marked the millenial period beginning, less than half a century after his death, with the fall of the Western Empire in the year 476. He was the weightiest authority to whom emperors and popes could and did appeal for support in their age-long contest for the supreme power: the former to vindicate their independence in secular affairs, and the latter to prove their lordship over all other earthly potentates, whether temporal or spiritual.

There is nothing inherent in Christianity itself which calls for a close relationship with the state. Primitive Christianity “demanded the complete separation of church and state,” asserting that each must be recognized as having its own distinct and independent mission to perform. For the first three hundred years of Christian history the church existed entirely apart from the state, and indeed had not even a legal status. Then came a time during which the church became little more than a branch of the state, and in this period it lost practically all independence of development, and was largely diverted from its proper work to serve political ends. It was as a result of this danger that the church developed, during the next period in its history, the doctrine of its independence of state control, and in the great investiture struggle, maintained it with success, against Roman emperors and German kings. Then the church having secured its independence of state control, and having perfected its organization to a high degree, and having grown strong and aggressive, it went a long step further and asserted the right of the church to control the state. But it needs no argument to prove that both the control of the church by the state and the control of the state by the church are equally foreign to the teaching of Christianity as such.

While endeavouring to formulate these remarks I have come to suspect that there may possibly lurk in the title of my paper a misleading implication. The word “contribution” would seem to connote on the part of the Protestant churches a deliberate and concerted effort toward the triumph of religious liberty. Those of us who today prize ecclesiastical freedom would like to feel that our colonial ancestors of their own free will and choice undertook the march to liberty. Liberal-minded historians in particular are prone to sing the praises of this individual or that church for furthering this advance; they are inclined to gloss over or to apologize for the men and the institutions that hindered it.