Political Science Of The State

INSTITUTIONS, LOCAL AND SELF GOVERNMENTS. 353
a few sacred traditions, by its aim at church-unity it was able
to grow into a power all-embracing and superior to all poli-
tical institutions whatsoever.
Religious institutions thus seem to spread more easily than
political ones, the reason for the difference being that the
former take hold of the religious nature by presenting objects
of worship conceived to be real, and to be able to do good
or harm as they are neglected or honored. They are also
connected with social life by festivals, public sacrifices, pro-
cessions, and the like. Hence, heathen religions^ within
certain limits, spread from nation to nation, so that it maybe
hard to say what gods are indigenous and what imported.
The Christian religion has difficulties in establishing itself
arising from its severe morality and spirituality, although it
has in itself an eminent power of organization.
We have mentioned two types of institutions, one that
appears in the older primeval period of national life, and an-
other that appears in the period when the political habits are
already established. The first are political habits which have
no positive origin in expressed public will, which grow and
unite themselves with other political habits, until they reach
their full stature ; which may then be modified by law, so as
to become better expressions of the new political state of a
people. The others are copied after them, or borrow sug-
gestions from them, or carry out further certain principles
which they contain, or are brought in from a foreign birth-
place. The first Dr. Lieber calls crescive, a bad word which
may be endured, as it can denote that which not only first
comes up in the soil of national life, but grows up afterward;
the other he calls enacted, and when the first are modified by
law, he gives them the name of mixed. Dr. Arnold confines
the term institutions to those only that grow. " By institu-
tions," says he, " I wish to understand such officers, orders of
men, public bodies, settlements of property, customs or
regulations concerning matters of general usage, as do not
owe their existence to any general law or laws, but, having
originated in various ways at a period of remote antiquity,
VOL. II.—23