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-Project Gutenberg's What Does History Teach?, by John Stuart Blackie
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
-other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
-the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
-www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
-to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
-
-
-
-Title: What Does History Teach?
-       Two Edinburgh Lectures
-
-Author: John Stuart Blackie
-
-Release Date: August 14, 2017 [EBook #55354]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by David Thomas
-
-
-
-
-
-WHAT DOES HISTORY
-TEACH?
-
-TWO EDINBURGH LECTURES
-
-BY
-JOHN STUART BLACKIE
-
-London
-MACMILLAN AND CO.
-1886
-
-
-
-TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES.
-
-This book was originally digitized by Google and is intended for
-personal, non-commercial use only.
-
-Footnotes have been relocated to the end of the book.
-
-Passages originally rendered in small-caps have been changed to all-caps
-in the text version of this work.
-
-
-
-CONTENTS.
-
-  PREFATORY NOTE.
-  I. THE STATE.
-  II. THE CHURCH.
-
-
-
-PREFATORY NOTE.
-
-THE following Lectures were prepared for the Philosophical Institution
-of Edinburgh, and were delivered, with the exception of a few passages,
-before audiences consisting of Members of that Institution on the
-evenings of 8th and 11th December in the present year.
-
-EDINBURGH, _December_ 1885.
-
-
-
-I.
-THE STATE.
-
-Ὥσπερ τελεωθὲν βέλτιστον τῶν ζῴων ἄνθρωπος οὕτω καὶ χωρισθὲν νόμου
-καὶ δίκης χείριστον πάντων.--ARISTOTLE.
-
-HISTORY, whether founded on reliable record, or on monuments, or on
-the scientific analysis of the great fossil tradition called language,
-knows nothing of the earliest beginnings. The seed of human society,
-like the seed of the vegetable growth, lies under ground in darkness,
-and its earliest processes are invisible to the outward eye.
-Speculations about the descent of the primeval man from a monkey, of the
-primeval monkey from an ascidian, and of the primeval ascidian from a
-protoplastic bubble, though they may act as a potent stimulus to the
-biological research of the hour, certainly never can form the
-starting-point of a profitable philosophy of history.
-
-As revealed in history, man is an animal, not only generically different
-from, but characteristically antagonistic to the brute. That which makes
-him a man is precisely that which no brute possesses, or can by any
-process of training be made to possess. The man can no more be developed
-out of the brute than the purple heather out of the granite rock which
-it clothes. The relation of the one to the other is a relation of mere
-outward attachment or dependency--like the relation which exists
-between the painter's easel and the picture which is painted on
-it. The easel is essential to the picture, but it did not make the
-picture, nor give even the smallest hint towards the making of it. So
-the monkey, as a basis, may be essential to the man without being in any
-way participant of the divine indwelling λόγος which makes a man a
-man. The two are related only as all things are related, inasmuch as
-they are all shot forth from the great fountain-head of all vital
-forces, whom we justly call GOD.
-
-The distinctive character of man as revealed in history is threefold.
-Man is an inventive animal, and he does not invent from a compulsion of
-nature, as bees make cells or as swallows build nests. These are all
-prescribed operations which the animal must perform; but the inventive
-faculty in man is free, in such a manner that the course of its action
-cannot be foreseen or calculated. It revels in variety, and, above all
-things, shuns that uniformity which is the servile province of brute
-activity. A man may live in a hole like a fox, but his proper humanity
-is shown by building a house and inventing a style of architecture. A
-man can sing like a bird, but--what the bird cannot do--he can
-make a harp or an organ. He can scrape with his nails like a terrier,
-but, as a man manifesting his proper manhood, he prefers to make a
-shovel of wood and a hatchet of stone or iron. The other animals,
-however cunning, and often wonderfully adaptable in their instincts, are
-mere machines. Man makes machines. In this respect he is justly entitled
-to look upon himself as the God to the lower animals, just as the
-sheriff in the counties by delegated right represents the supreme
-authority of the Crown. But, above all things, man is a progressive
-animal,--not merely progressive as the grass grows from root to
-blade and from blade to blossom to perfect its individual type of
-vegetable life, but advancing from stage to stage and mounting from
-platform to platform for the perfectionation of the race; nor even
-progressive as plants and fruits are improved by culture and favourable
-surroundings, and what is called forcing, or as the breed of sheep and
-cattle is improved by selection. No doubt progress of this kind is made
-by man as well as by plants and brutes; but his most distinctive human
-progress is made, not by imposition from without, but by projection from
-within. These projections from within are what in philosophical language
-is called the idea; they proceed from the essential nature of mind,
-whose imperial function it is to dictate forms, as it is the servile
-function of the senses to receive impressions. These intelligent forms,
-coming directly from the divine source of all excellence, and projected
-from within with sovereign authority to shape for themselves an outward
-embodiment, constitute what in art, in literature, in religion, and in
-social organisms, is called the ideal; and man may accordingly be
-defined as an animal that lives by the conception of ideals, and whose
-destiny it is to spend his strength, and, if need be, to lay down his
-life, for the realisation of such ideals. The steps of this realisation,
-often slow and painful, and always difficult, are what we mean by human
-progress; and it is the dominant characteristic of man, of which amongst
-the lower animals there is not a vestige, neither indeed could be; for
-so long as they have no ideas, neither reason nor the outward expression
-of reason in language--two things so closely bound together that
-the wise Greeks expressed them both by one word, λόγος--so
-long must it be ridiculous to think of them shaping their career
-according to an inborn type of progressive excellence. To do so is
-exclusively human. Hence our poems, our high art, our churches, our
-legislations, our apostleships, our philosophies, our social
-arrangements and devices, our speculations and schemes of all kinds,
-which, though they are sometimes foolish, and always more or less
-inadequate, deliver the strongest possible proof that man is an animal
-who will rather die and embrace martyrdom than be content to live as the
-brutes do, neither spurred with the hope of progress nor borne aloft on
-the wings of the ideal.
-
-Of the very earliest state of human society, as we have already said,
-history teaches nothing; but, as man is a progressive animal, and the
-plan of Providence with regard to him seems plain to let him shift for
-itself and learn to do right by blundering, as children learn to walk by
-tumbling, we may safely say that the easier, more obvious, and more rude
-forms of living together must have preceded the more difficult, the more
-complex, and the more polished. And in perfect consistency with this
-presumption, we find three social platforms rising one above the other
-in human value, duly accredited either by monuments, by popular
-tradition, or by the evidence of comparative philology. These three
-are--(1) The prehistoric or stone period, from which such a rich
-store of monuments has been set up in the Copenhagen Museum, and the
-existence of which is indicated in Gen. iv. 22 as antecedent to Tubal
-Cain, the instructor of every artificer in brass and iron. (2) The
-shepherd or pastoral stage, represented by Abel (Gen. iv. 2), in which
-men subsisted from the easy dominance which they asserted over wild
-animals, and from fruits of the earth requiring no culture. (3) The
-agricultural stage, when cereal crops were systematically and
-scientifically cultivated, which, of course, implied the limitation of
-particular districts of ground to particular proprietors, and those
-agrarian laws which caused the Greek Demeter to be honoured with the
-title of θεσμοφόρος, or lawgiver--a step of marked and decided advance,
-insomuch that we may justly attribute to it the redemption of society
-from the _vagus concubitus_ of the earliest times, and the firm
-establishment of the family, with all its sanctities and all its binding
-power, as the prime social monad. To the priestess of this goddess
-accordingly, amongst the Greeks, was assigned the function of ushering
-in the newly-married pair to the peculiar duties of their new social
-relation.[1]
-
-The fact that the family is the great social monad, as it is undoubtedly
-one of the oldest and most accredited facts in human tradition, so it
-presents to us perhaps the most important of all the lessons that
-history teaches--a lesson as necessary to be inculcated at the
-present hour as at the earliest stages of social advance; and Aristotle
-certainly was never more in the right than when he emphasised this truth
-strongly in traversing Plato's fancy of making the state the
-universal family, to the utter absorption of all subordinated family
-monads. Here, as in one or two other matters, the great idealist would
-be wiser than God; and so his philosophy, so far as that point was
-concerned, became only a more sublime attitude of folly. The importance
-of the family, as the divinely instituted social monad, depends
-manifestly on the happy combination and harmonious blending of authority
-and love which grow out of its constitution--two elements with the
-full development and true balance of which the well-being and happiness
-of all societies is intimately bound up. The fine moral training which
-the family relation alone can inspire we find not only at our own door,
-in the fidelity and self-sacrificing devotion of our noble Highlanders,
-who derived their inspiration from the clan system, of which the family
-love and respect is the binding element,[2] as contrasted with the
-slavish system of vassalage, the badge of feudalism; but in the habits
-and institutions of the three great ancient peoples to whom modern
-Europe owes its higher civilisation, Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans,
-specially the last,[3] the great masters of the difficult art of
-government, who, to use Mommsen's phrase, carried out the unity of
-the family through the virtue of paternal authority "with an
-inexorable consistency," the beneficial effect of which could not
-fail to display itself in social life far beyond the sphere from which
-it originally emanated; for obedience to authority is the fundamental
-postulate of all possibie societies. With the family, if not absolutely,
-certainly with the best and normal state of it, most closely connected
-is monogamy; for, though instances of bigamy and polygamy, from Lamech
-downwards (Gen. iv. 19) to King David and Solomon in the Old Testament
-history, crop up here and there in the oldest times, and even in the
-post-Babylonian period, without any formal mark of disapprobation, yet
-it is quite certain that the Greeks and Romans were guided by a sound
-social instinct when they held the practice of bigamy to be inconsistent
-with the proper constitution of a family. What troubles are apt to arise
-from a multiplication of contending wives and ambitious mothers the
-latter story of King David tells in more unhappy episodes than one; and
-generally it may be laid down as one of the great lessons of history
-that polygamy, in every shape, is one of those acts of Oriental
-self-indulgence which may be sweet in the mouth but has a very strong
-tendency to be bitter in the belly, and therefore ought by all means to
-be avoided.
-
-By the instinct of aggregation, which belongs to an essentially social
-animal, families will club together into townships or villages, and
-townships will be centralised into states. Humanity without townships
-would degenerate into tigerhood, or whatever type of animal existence
-might express an essentially self-contained, solitary, and selfish
-creature; townships without that sort of headship which the word State
-implies, would make society cry halt at a stage of loosely-connected
-aggregates which would render common action for any high human purpose
-extremely difficult, and, in the general case, as human beings are,
-impossible. Hence the centralisation of the Attic townships at Athens in
-the legendary traditions of the Athenians attributed to Theseus;[4]
-hence also the lax confederation of the earliest Latin states under the
-headship of Albalonga; and, after the humiliation of that old
-stronghold, the more closely cemented union of those states under the
-hegemony of Rome.[5] Whatever may be the evils connected with the growth
-of large towns, especially when, as in modern times, they have been
-allowed to swell to enormous magnitude without regulation or control, it
-is one of the undoubted lessons of universal history that the social
-stimulus necessary for the creation of vigorous thought, no less than
-the centralised force indispensable to great achievement, is found only
-in the large towns. The Christians were called Christian first at
-Antioch; and, had there been no Rome to unify a little Latium, there
-would have been no great Roman Empire to amalgamate the rude barbarians
-of the North with the smooth civilisation of the South by the force of a
-common law and common language.[6]
-
-The form of government natural to such infant states as the expansion of
-the original social monad, the FAMILY, is a loose but not unkindly
-mixture of monarchy, democracy, and aristocracy--the aristocracy
-being always the preponderating element. In the single family, of
-course, we have only the monarchical element in the father, and the
-democratic element in the children; but, as families expand into
-townships, it could not be but that the heads of the families composing
-it, partly from their age and experience, partly from the force of
-individual character, should form a sort of natural aristocracy, while
-the less notable and less prominent members would form the δῆμος,
-or great body of the constantly increasing multitude of the associated
-families. Below these three dominant elements of the body social, there
-would always be found a loose company of dependents and
-onhangers--the class called Θῆτες in Homer (Od., iv. 644),
-and in the Solonian constitution--who had no civic rights any more
-than the serfs and vassals of our medieval feudalism. The weakness of
-the monarchical and the strength of the aristocratic elements in the
-early societies arose from the original equality of the heads of
-families, and from the jealousy with which they would naturally look on
-any functions of superiority exercised by any of their order naturally
-no better than themselves. The king, accordingly, like Agamemnon in
-Homer, would claim the homage which the title implies only for purposes
-of common action; and even in such cases would always be kept in check
-by a βουλή, or council of the aristocracy, of whose will properly
-he was only the executive hand; while the great mass of the people,
-occupied with the labours that belong to an agricultural and pastoral
-population, and unaccustomed to the large views which statesmanship and
-generalship require, would come together only on rare occasions of
-peculiar urgency.
-
-The element in that loose triad of social forces that was first
-formulated into a more distinct type, and endowed with more imperative
-efficiency, was the kingship. The power of the king was increased, which
-of course implies that the power of the people, and specially of the
-aristocracy, was diminished. And here let it be observed generally that
-the progress of civilisation in its natural and healthy career is the
-progress of limitation and the curtailment in various ways of that
-freedom which originally belonged to every member of the community. The
-tanned savage of the backwoods is the freest man in existence; next to
-him, the nomad or the wandering gipsy, such as may still be seen in
-their glory at St. James' fair in Kelso, whose house is at once
-his dwelling-place, his manufactory or place of business, and his
-travelling car; least free is the civilised citizen hemmed in on all
-sides by police-officers, soldiers, sentinels, door-keepers, and
-game-keepers, and the whole fraternity of dignified but unpopular
-officials of various kinds whose business it is to the general public to
-say No! This accretion of strength to the king proceeded first from his
-mere personal influence and the general deference paid to him during the
-continuance of a prolonged and easily-exercised sovereignty; all
-classes, even the aristocracy, whose ambition is thus kept in check and
-their perilous enmities softened, feel the benefit of a wise head and a
-firm hand; but the party specially benefited by the kingship is the
-demos; for this body, from its position peculiarly liable to be trampled
-on by an insolent aristocracy, naturally looks up to the king as the
-father of the whole family, who, on his part, feels his position
-strengthened and his respect increased by performing with tact and
-firmness the delicate functions of a mediator. But the great social
-force which operates in giving prominence and predominance to the
-monarchy is WAR; and, though war is unquestionably an evil, it is an
-evil only as death is, and a form of dying accompanied not seldom with
-an exhibition of more manhood than the experience of many a peaceful
-deathbed can show. In fact, as stout old Balmerino said on the scaffold
-in 1746, "The man who is not ready to die is not fit to
-live;" that is, we hold our life under the condition that we may
-at any time be called on to sacrifice it, whether for the preservation
-of our own self-respect, or for the integrity of the community of which
-we are a member. All great nations, in fact, have been cradled in war,
-the Hebrews no less than the Greeks and Romans; and it is only an
-amiable sentimentalism, pardonable in women, but inexcusable in men,
-that, in contemplation of the hard blows, red wounds, and gashed bodies
-with which war is accompanied, will allow itself to forget the
-hardihood, endurance, courage, self-sacrifice, and devotion to public
-duty, of which, under Providence, it has always been the great training
-school.[7] There is no profession that I know more favourable to the
-growth of noble sentiment and manly action than that of the soldier; and
-to its beneficial action in the formation of States every page of
-history bears flaming testimony. War, in fact, is the principal agent in
-producing that unification so absolutely necessary to social existence,
-but which is lost so soon as the headship of the common father of the
-expanded clan ceases to be recognised. Thus it was under the compulsion
-of war from their Lombardian neighbours on the west and Sclavonians on
-the east that the petty democratic communities, which after the
-disruption of the Roman Empire occupied the Venetian isles, found
-themselves, in the year 697, obliged to elect a king for life, wisely
-masking his absolute authority under the name of Doge or Duke. And in a
-similar fashion the situation of the Piedmontese, constantly forced to
-defend themselves against Gallican and Teutonic ambition, begot in them
-a stoutness of self-assertion and a general manhood of character which
-up to the present hour has placed them in favourable contrast to the
-inhabitants of the southern half of the peninsula; and the manhood
-displayed by the Counts of Savoy in asserting their independence against
-great odds was no doubt the cause why, in the Peace of Utrecht in 1713,
-their lords were allowed to assume and maintain the title of
-kings--a circumstance which gave rise to the saying of Frederick
-the Great of Prussia, that the lords of Savoy were kings by virtue of
-their locality.[8] This is certainly true, not only of Sardinia, but of
-all States that ever rose above the loose aggregation of the original
-townships. It was the necessity of adjusting matters with troublesome
-neighbours that caused a perpetual succession of petty wars; and these
-could not be conducted without a prolongation of the power of the
-successful general, which acted practically as a kingship. The
-successful general in such times did not require to usurp a title which
-the people were forward to force upon him; and only a few, we may
-imagine, like Gideon (Judges viii. 22), had virtue enough to remain
-contented with the distinction belonging to a private station when the
-grace of the crown and the authority of the sceptre were formally
-pressed upon them by a grateful people. So in Greece we find an early
-kingship signalised by the names of Ægeus, Theseus, and Codrus; so in
-Rome a succession of seven kings, more or less distinctly outlined, the
-last of whom, Tarquin the Proud, stands forward as the head of the great
-Latin league, and entering in this capacity into a formal treaty with
-Carthage, the great commercial State of the Mediterranean. Closely
-connected with war, or, more properly, as the natural development of it
-in its more advanced stages, we must mention CONQUEST; that is, the
-violent imposition of the results of a foreign civilisation on the
-native social foundations of any country. Here, no doubt, there may
-often be on the conquering side something very different from a manly
-self-assertion--viz. self-aggrandisement at the expense of an
-innocent neighbour, greed of territory, lust of power, and the vanity of
-mere military glory, which our brilliant neighbours the French were so
-fond to have in their mouth. The virtue of war as a training school of
-civic manhood does by no means exclude the operation of many forces far
-from admirable in their motive; and it is the presence of these unholy
-influences, no doubt piously brooded over, that has generated in the
-breasts of our mild friends the Quakers that anti-bellicose gospel which
-they preach with such lovable persistency. But whatever the motives of
-famous conquerors have been, the results of their achievements in the
-great history of society have been most important. The imposition of a
-foreign type on the peoples of Western Asia by the brilliant conquests
-of Alexander the Great, gave to the whole of that valuable part of the
-world, along with the rich coast of Northern Africa, a common medium of
-culture of the utmost importance to the future civilisation of the race.
-The imposition of the Norman yoke 900 years ago on this island gave to
-the contentious Saxon kingdoms, by a single vigorous stroke from
-without, that social consistency which the bloody strife of five
-centuries of petty kings and kinglets among themselves had failed to
-produce; while in India the imposition of the most highly advanced
-mercantile and Christian civilisation of the West on crude masses of an
-altogether diverse type of Asiatic society, presents to the thoughtful
-student of history a problem of assimilation of an altogether unique
-character, the final solution of which, under the action of many complex
-forces, no most sagacious human intellect at the present moment can
-divine. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that the blessings which
-conquest brings with it, when vigorously managed and wisely used, are
-lightly turned into a bane whenever the power which has the force to
-conquer has not the wisdom to administer; of which unblissful lack of
-administrative capacity and assimilating genius the conquests of the
-Turks in Europe, and of the English in Ireland, present a most
-instructive example.
-
-The monarchies created in the above fashion, by the combination of old
-patriarchal habits with military necessities, however firmly rooted they
-may appear at the start, carry with them a certain germ of
-dissatisfaction, which, under the influence of popular irritability,
-seriously endangers their permanence, and may at any time break up their
-consistency. The causes of such dissatisfaction are chiefly the
-following:--(1) The original motive for creating a king, the
-pressure of foreign war, as war cannot last for ever, in time of peace
-will cease to operate, and the instinct of individual liberty, which
-belongs to all men, unless when violently stamped out, will revive, and
-cause the subjection of all men to the will of one to be looked on with
-disfavour. (2) This feeling will be specially strong with the
-ἄριστοι, or natural aristocracy, whose individual importance
-must diminish as the power of the king increases. (3) A great danger
-will arise from the fixation of the order of succession to the throne.
-The natural tendency will be to follow the example of succession in
-private families, and recognise the right of the son to walk into the
-public heritage of his father; but the additional influence thus given
-to the king will have a tendency to sharpen the jealousy of the nobles.
-And, again, the son may be a weakling or a fool, and utterly unfit to
-play the part of a supreme ruler with that mixture of intelligence,
-firmness, and tact which the royal function for its fair and full action
-requires. (4) And if, in order to avoid these evils, the elective
-principle is maintained, either absolutely or within certain limits, the
-tendency to faction inherent in all aristocracies, stimulated by the
-potent spur of a competition for power, will be increased; and this
-factious yeast will work so potently in the blood of the nobles that
-they will either reduce the power of the king to a mere name, and change
-the government into an exclusive oligarchy, as in Venice, or they will
-even go the length of calling in foreign arbiters to heal their
-dissensions, which, as in the case of Poland, will naturally end in
-subjection to some foreign power; or, lastly, they will dispense with
-the kingship altogether, and return to their original mixture of
-aristocracy and democracy with more firmly-defined functions and more
-reliable guarantees. (5) This result may be precipitated by some
-outbreak of that insolence which is so naturally fostered by the
-possession of absolute power; the sacredness of personal property and
-the reverence of ancestral possession will not be respected by some Ahab
-of the day; some young Tarquin or Hipparchus may cast his lustful eye on
-the fair daughter of an humble citizen; and then will be unsheathed the
-sword of a Brutus, and then uprise the song of a Harmodius and
-Aristogeiton, which will sound a long knell to monarchy, during the
-manhood of a free, an independent, a self-reliant, and a self-governing
-people.
-
-The system of self-government thus introduced, as the natural fruit of
-the elements out of which it arose, would be a mixture of aristocracy
-and democracy, with a decided predominance of the former element at
-starting, but with a gradually increasing momentum on the side of the
-inferior factor in proportion as the mass of the people excluded from
-aristocratic privileges by a necessary law of social growth advanced in
-numbers and in social importance. Greece and Rome, or rather Athens and
-Rome, present to us here two types from which important lessons may be
-learned. In both the discarding of the kings was the work of the
-aristocracy; but, while the germ of the democratic element was equally
-strong in both, in Athens, partly from the genius of the people, partly
-from peculiar circumstances, this germ blossomed into an earlier, a more
-marked, and a more characteristic manhood; whereas in Rome, in the most
-brilliant period of its political action, the form of government might
-rather be defined as a strong aristocracy limited by a strong democracy
-than a pure democracy, to which category Athens undoubtedly belongs. In
-both States the aristocratic element did not submit to the necessary
-curtailment of its power without a struggle; but in Athens the names of
-Solon (600 B.C.), Clisthenes, Aristides, and Pericles distinctly marked
-the early formation of a democracy almost totally purged from any
-remnant of aristocratic influence, at an epoch in its development
-corresponding to which we find Rome pursuing her system of worldwide
-conquest under a system of compromise between the patrician and the
-plebeian element, similar in some sort to what we see before our eyes at
-the present moment in our own country. To Athens, therefore, we look, in
-the first place, for an answer to the question, What does history teach
-in regard to the virtue of a purely democratic government? And here we
-may safely say that, under favourable circumstances, there is no form of
-government which, while it lasts, has such a virtue to give scope to a
-vigorous growth and luxuriant fruitage of various manhood as a pure
-democracy. Instead of choking and strangling, or at least depressing,
-the free self-assertion of the individual, by which alone he feels the
-full dignity of manhood, such a democracy gives a free career to talent
-and civic efficiency in the greatest number of capable individuals; but
-it does not follow that, though in this regard it has not been surpassed
-by any other form of government, it is therefore absolutely the best of
-all forms of government. All that we are warranted to say is, as
-Cornewall Lewis does,[9] that without a strong admixture of the
-democratic spirit humanity in its social form cannot achieve its highest
-results; of which truth, indeed, we have the most striking proof before
-our eyes in our own happy island, where, even before the time which Mr.
-Green happily designates as Puritan England, powerful kings had received
-a lesson that as they had been elected so they might be dismissed from
-office by the voice of London burghers. Neither, on the other hand, does
-it follow from the shortness of the bright reign of Athenian
-democracy--not more than 200 years from Clisthenes to the
-Macedonians--that all democracies are short-lived, and must pay,
-like dissipated young gentlemen, with premature decay for the feverish
-abuse of their vital force. Possible no doubt it is that, if the power
-of what we may call a sort of Athenian Second Chamber, the Areiopagus,
-instead of being weakened as it was by Aristides and Pericles, had been
-built up according to the idea of Æschylus and the intelligent
-aristocrats of his day, such a body, armed, like our House of Lords,
-with an effective negative on all outbursts of popular rashness, might
-have prevented the ambition of the Athenians from launching on that
-famous Syracusan expedition which exhausted their force and maimed their
-action for the future. But the lesson taught by the short-lived glory of
-Athens, and its subjugation under the rough foot of the astute
-Macedonian, is not that democracies, under the influence of faction,
-and, it may be, not free from venality, will sell their liberties to a
-strong neighbour--for aristocratic Poland did this in a much more
-blushless way than democratic Greece--but that any loose aggregate
-of independent States, given more to quarrel amongst themselves than to
-unite against a common enemy, whether democratic, or aristocratic, or
-monarchical in their form of government, cannot in the long run maintain
-their ground against the firm policy and the well-massed force of a
-strong monarchy. Athens was blotted out from the map of free peoples at
-Chæronea, not because the Athenian people had too much freedom, but
-because the Greek States had too little unity. They were used by Philip
-exactly in the same way that Napoleon used the German States at the
-commencement of the present century. DIVIDE ET INFERA is the
-politician's most familiar maxim, which, when wisely and
-persistently applied, whether by an ancient Macedonia or a modern
-Russia, will always give a strong monarchy a decided advantage over
-every other form of government. Surround me with a belt of petty
-principalities, says the despot, however highly civilised and however
-well governed, and I shall know to make them play my game and work
-themselves into confusion, till the hour comes when I may appear as a
-god to allay by my intervention the troubles which I have fostered by my
-intrigues.
-
-So much for Athens. Let us now see what lessons are to be learned from
-ROME. And here, on the threshold, it is quite plain that the abolition
-of kingship goes in the first place to strengthen the aristocracy, on
-whom as a body the supreme functions exercised by the monarch naturally
-devolve. The highly aristocratic type of the early Roman republic,
-unlimited from above by any superior power, and with only a slight
-occasional check from a plebeian citizenship in the tender bud, is
-universally admitted. Plainly enough also it stands written on the face
-of the early history of the Commonwealth that the administration of the
-aristocracy was marked in no ordinary degree by all that exclusiveness,
-insolence, selfishness, and rapacity, which are the besetting sins of an
-order of men cradled in hereditary conceit, and eating the bread not of
-labour, but of privilege, "_das unverbesserliche Junkerthum_,"
-as Mommsen calls them. To such an extent did they abuse the natural
-vantage ground of their social position that, while the great body of
-the substantial yeomanry, who shed their blood in a constant succession
-of petty wars for the safety of the State, were stinted of their natural
-reward and degraded from their rightful position, the insolent
-monopolisers of all dignities and privileges did not blush to take from
-the people their natural heritage in the public land, and, for the
-enlargement of their own order, to deprive the State of its stoutest
-citizens, and the army of its most effective soldiers. The irritation
-produced by this insolent and anti-social procedure of the old Roman
-landlords, by the law of reaction common to all forces, produced as its
-natural consequence a revolt; for, as it has been truly said that the
-blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church, no less true is it in
-all history that the insolence of the aristocracy is the cradle of the
-democracy. That happened accordingly in ancient Rome which Sismondi
-prophesied might happen in modern Scotland: "If the mighty thanes who
-rule in those trans-Grampian regions begin to think that they can do
-without the people, the people may begin to think they can do without
-them."[10] So at least the Roman plebs thought when, in the year of the
-city 259, they marched in a body out to the Sacred Mount on the banks of
-the Anio, and refused to return to the city till their just claims had
-been conceded and their wrongs redressed. Their wrongs were redressed:
-conferences, concessions, and compromises, in a hurried and blundering
-sort of way, were made; tribunes of the plebs were appointed, with the
-absolute power of stopping the whole machinery of the State with a
-single negation; and thus was sown the seed of a democracy destined to
-grow into monstrous proportions, and ripen into the bloody blossom of a
-military despotism by the hands of the very class of persons who were
-chiefly interested in preventing it.
-
-The different stages of the battle between plebeians and patricians, or,
-as we term it, Whig and Tory, as they evolved themselves by a social
-necessity from time to time, belong to the special history of Rome, not
-to the general philosophy of history with which we are here concerned.
-The seed of democracy sown at the Sacred Mount went on from one stage of
-expansion to another, breaking down every barrier of hereditary
-privilege between the mass of the people and the old aristocracy, till
-it ended in the _Lex Hortensia_, passed B.C. 288, which gave to all
-ordinances passed by the _Comitia Tributa_--that is, the
-people assembled in local tribes and voting independently of all
-aristocratic check or co-operation--the full validity of law. And
-in this progress of equalisation between class and class in a community,
-the Muse of history sees only a special illustration of a general law
-that every aristocracy contending for the maintenance of exclusive
-privilege against natural right fights a losing battle. But the
-necessity of the adjustment of the opposing claims of a conservative and
-a progressive body in the State is a very different thing from the
-fashion in which the adjustment may be made, and from the consequences
-that may grow out of the adjustment. Here there is room for any amount
-of wisdom, and unfortunately also for a large amount of blundering. No
-man can say that the Roman constitution as it stood, after the plebeians
-had broken through all aristocratic barriers, was a cunningly compacted
-machine, or that it afforded any strong guarantee against that
-degeneracy into licence towards which all unreined democracies naturally
-tend. But one thing certainly was achieved. Out of the plebeian and
-patrician elements of the body social, no longer arrayed in hostile
-attitude, but fronting one another with equal rights before the law, and
-adjusting their forces in a fairly-balanced equilibrium, there was
-formed a great political corporation, deliberative and administrative,
-which for independence, dignity, patriotism, and sagacity, used its
-authority in such a masterly style and to such world-wide issues that it
-has earned from Mommsen the complimentary acknowledgment of having been
-"the first political corporation of all times."[11] This
-corporation was the Roman Senate, which ruled the policy of Rome for a
-period of 200 years, from the passing of the Hortensian Law through a
-long period of African and Asiatic wars down to the civil war of Sulla
-and Marius, 88 B.C.--a body of which we may perhaps best easily
-understand the composition and the virtue if we imagine the best
-elements of our House of Commons and the best elements of the House of
-Lords merged in one Supreme Assembly of practical wisdom, to the
-exclusion at once of the feverish factiousness and multitudinous babble
-of the one assembly, and the brainless obstructiveness and incurable
-blindness of hereditary class interests in the other. But there was
-something else in the mixed constitution of Rome besides the tried
-wisdom and the great practical weight of the Senate. What was that?
-There was, in the first place, the evil of an elective kingship--for
-the Consul was really an annual king under a different name, as the
-President of the United States is a quadriennial king, with greatly more
-power while his kingship lasts than the Queen of Great Britain; and this
-implied an annual fit of social fever, and the annual sowing of a germ
-of faction ready to shoot into luxuriance under the strong stimulant of
-the love of power. Then, as in the natural growth of society, a new
-aristocracy grew up, formed by the addition of the wealthy plebeian
-families to the old family aristocracy, and along with it a new and
-numerous plebeian body, practically though not legally excluded from the
-privilege of the _optimates_, the old antagonism of patrician and
-plebeian would revive, and the question arose, What machinery had the
-legislation of the previous centuries provided to prevent a collision
-and a rupture between the antagonistic tendencies of the democratic and
-oligarchic elements in the State? The answer is, None. The authority of
-the Senate, great as it was both morally and numerically, was
-antagonised by the co-equal legislative authority of the _Comitia
-Tributa_--an assembly as open to any agitator for factious or
-revolutionary purposes as a meeting of a London mob in Hyde Park, and
-composed of elements of the most motley and loose description, ready at
-any moment to give the solemn sanction of a national ordinance to any
-act of hasty violence or calculated party move which might flatter the
-vanity or feed the craving of the masses. But this was not all. The
-tribunate, originally appointed simply for the protection of the
-commonalty against the rude exercise of patrician power, had now grown
-to such formidable dimensions that the popular tribune of the day might
-become the most powerful man in the State, and only require re-election
-to constitute him into a king whose decrees the consuls and the senators
-must humiliate themselves to register. Here was a machinery cunningly,
-one might think, constructed for the purpose of working out its own
-disruption, even supposing both the popular and aristocratic elements
-had been composed of average good materials. But they were not so. In
-the age of the Gracchi, 133 B.C., the high sense of honour, the proud
-inheritance of an uncorrupted patrician body, and the shrewd sense and
-sobriety of a sound-hearted yeomanry, had equally disappeared. The
-aristocracy were corrupted by the wealth which flowed in from the spoils
-of conquest; they had become lovers of power rather than lovers of Rome;
-lords of the soil, not fathers of the people; banded together for the
-narrow interests of their own order rather than for the general
-well-being of the community. The sturdy yeomanry again, of which the
-mass of the original popular assemblies had been composed, had partly
-dwindled away under maladministration of the public lands, and partly
-were mixed up with motley groups of citizens of no fixed residence, and
-of a town rabble who could be induced to vote for anything by any man
-who knew to win their favour by a large distribution of Sicilian corn or
-the exciting luxury of gladiatorial shows; in a word, the _populus_ had
-become a _plebsy_ or, in our language, the people a populace.
-Furthermore, let it be noted that this people or populace, tied down to
-meet only in Rome, as the high seat of Government, was called upon to
-deal with the administration of countries as far apart and as diverse in
-character as Madrid and Cairo, or Bagdad and Moscow are from London.
-Think of a mob of London artisans, on the motion of a Henry George, or
-even a rational Radical like Mr. Chamberlain, drummed together to pass
-laws on landed property and taxation through all that vast domain! But
-so it was; and most unfortunately also the original fathers of the
-agitation which, at the time of the Gracchi, ranged the great rulers of
-the world into two hostile factions, stabbing one another in the back
-and cutting one another's throats, and plotting and counter-plotting in
-every conceivable style of baseness, after the fashion which is now
-being exemplified before us in Ireland,--the authors of this agitation
-were not the demagogues, but the aristocracy; as indeed in all cases of
-general discontent, social fret, and illegal violence, the parties who
-are accused of stirring class against class are not the agitators who
-appear on the scene, but the maladministrators who made their appearance
-necessary. Man is an animal naturally inclined to obey and to take
-things quietly; insurrection is too expensive an affair to be indulged
-in by way of recreation; and there is no truth in the philosophy of
-history more certain than that whenever the multitude of the ruled rebel
-against their rulers, the original fault--I do not say the whole blame,
-for as things go on from bad to worse there may be blame and blunders on
-both sides--but the original fault and germinative cause of discontent
-and revolt unquestionably lies with the rulers. Whatever may be said
-about Ireland and the Scottish Highlands, there can be no doubt that in
-the case of Rome the original cause of the democratising of the old
-constitution and the over-riding of senatorial authority by tribunician
-ordinances was the senators themselves, who, in direct contravention of
-the public law of the State, with that greed for more land which is the
-besetting sin of every aristocracy, had quartered themselves, after the
-fashion of colonial squatters, on the public lands, and refused to
-surrender them to the State till compelled by the cry of popular right
-against might, raised by such patriotic and self-sacrificing agitators
-as the Gracchi--patriotic men who attained their object at last by the
-only means in their power, but means so drastic that, like doctor's
-drugs, they drave out one devil by bringing in a score, and paid for the
-partial healing of an incurable disease by destroying for ever the
-balance of the constitution, and inaugurating with their own martyr
-blood one of the most woeful epochs in human history--an epoch varied by
-periodical assassinations and consummated by wholesale butcheries.
-
-I said the Gracchi attained their object, and that by appointing a
-Commission for a distribution of the public lands, such as the friends
-of the crofters in the Highlands now propose for the repeopling of the
-old depopulated homes of the clan. But I said also that the disease
-under which Rome laboured was incurable. How was this? Simply because,
-whatever might have been the merits of the special Agrarian Law carried
-by the Gracchi, the violent steam by which the State machine was moved
-remained the same, the clumsy machine itself remained, and the materials
-with which it had to deal in a long and critical course of foreign
-conquest became every year larger and more unmanageable. It was not to
-be expected either, on the one hand, that a strong and influential
-aristocracy should die with a single kick, or, on the other, that a
-democracy, which had once learned the power of a popular flood to break
-down aristocratic dams, would cease to exercise that power when a
-convenient occasion offered. And so the strife of oligarchic and
-plebeian factions continued. The political struggle, as always happens
-in such cases, became a struggle for personal supremacy; the sanguinary
-street battle between the younger Gracchus and the Consul Opimius,
-though followed by a lull for a season, was renewed after a few years in
-more startling form and much bloodier issues, first between Marius and
-Sulla, and finally between Cæsar and Pompey. Such a succession of
-embittered civil wars could end only in exhaustion and submission; and
-this is the last emphatic lesson which the history of Rome has taught to
-the governors of the people. Every constitution of mixed aristocratic
-and democratic elements which fails by kindly control on the one side,
-and reasonable demand on the other, to achieve that balance of those
-antagonising forces which means good government, must end in a military
-despotism. That which will not bridle itself must be bridled; and when
-constant irritation, fretful jars, and cruel collisions are the bloody
-fruit of unchastened liberty, slavery and stagnation seem not too high a
-price to pay for peace.
-
-I have enlarged on the development and decay of the Roman republic, not
-only because in point of political achievement Rome is by far the most
-notable of the great States of the world, but because in the struggle
-between aristocracy and democracy which was the salient feature of its
-history from the expulsion of the kings to the battle of Actium, it
-presents a very close and instructive parallel to what has been going on
-amongst ourselves from the revolution settlement of 1688 to the present
-hour. If for annual kings with large power we put hereditary kings with
-small power, the parallel is complete.[12] Let us now cast a glance, for
-time and space allow us no more, over some modern developments. The
-modern States of Europe have good reason, upon the whole, to think
-themselves fortunate in their having retained the kingship, which the
-Greeks and Romans rejected, either as their original type, or elevated
-and glorified from the dukedoms, margravates, and electorates with which
-they started. There cannot be much doubt, I imagine, that, if the Romans
-had retained their king in a hereditary or nearly hereditary form, he
-might have exercised a mediatorial function between the contending
-parties that would have prevented those bloody strifes and those ugly
-civic wounds with which the record of their political career stands now
-so sorrowfully defaced. In the experience of their own earliest story,
-Servius Tullius had already shown them how a king in the strife of
-classes might step in by a peaceful new model to open the ranks of a
-close aristocracy with dignity and safety to a rising democracy; and in
-modern times the case of Leopold II. of Tuscany does not stand alone as
-an example of what good service a wise king may do in the adjustment of
-contending claims and smoothing the march of necessary social
-transitions. In fact, the most democratic people amongst the ancients,
-in order to effect such an adjustment in a peaceful way, had been
-obliged to make Solon a king for the nonce; and the Romans, urged by a
-like social pressure, named their dictator, or re-elected their consuls
-and their tribunes, in order to secure for the need of the moment that
-unity of counsel, energy of conduct, and moral authority which is the
-grand recommendation of the kingship. No doubt kings in modern as in
-ancient times have erred; they have not been able always to keep
-themselves sober under the intoxicating influence of absolute power, and
-they have paid dearly for their errors; but we were wise in this
-country, while beheading one despot and banishing another, to punish the
-offender without abolishing the office. True, a thorough-going and
-sternly-consistent republican may ask, with an indignant sneer, What is
-the use of a king, when we have shorn him of all honours save the grace
-of a crown and the bauble of a sceptre--reduced him, in fact, to a
-mere machine to register the decrees of a democratic assembly? But such
-persons require to be reminded that there is nothing more dangerous, not
-only in political, but in all practical matters, than logical
-consistency; that the most narrow-minded people are always the most
-consistent, and this for the very obvious reason that they have only
-room for one idea in their small brain chambers, whereas God's
-world contains many ideas, stiff ideas too, and given to battle, which
-must be brought into some friendly balance or compromise, or set about
-throat-cutting on a large scale--a process to which consistent
-republicans have never shown a less bloody inclination than consistent
-monarchists. They must be reminded also that the person of the monarch
-is an incarnated, visible, and tangible symbol of the unity of the
-nation, of which parties and factions are so apt to be forgetful; and if
-our logically-consistent republican may look on this as a matter of
-association and sentiment which he will not acknowledge, he must simply
-be told that the man who does not acknowledge the important place played
-by associations and sentiments in all matters of Church and State knows
-nothing of human nature, and is altogether unfit for meddling with the
-difficult and dangerous art of politics. He may write books, and lecture
-to coteries, and harangue electoral meetings, and delight himself
-largely in the reverberation of his own wisdom, but by all means let him
-not be a prime minister. To what ends logical consistency can lead a
-politician in high places Charles I. and Archbishop Laud learned when it
-was too late; and the fate of these two high-perched worthies stands as
-a speaking lesson to all politicians, whether of the democratic or the
-monarchical type, how easy a thing it is for a man to be a good
-Christian and a consistent thinker, and yet on all political matters a
-perfect fool.
-
-Among the notable modern States three stand before us with
-an exceptional preference for the democratic form of
-government--Switzerland, France, and the great trans-Atlantic
-Republic. These must be regarded with curious interest and kindly human
-sympathy as great social experiments, by no means to be prejudged and
-denounced by any sweeping conclusions made from the unfortunate
-breakdown of the two celebrated ancient republics. The experiment in
-these cases, as made in altogether different circumstances and under
-different conditions, cannot warrant any such denunciations. The
-representative system which now universally prevails, and which enables
-a most widely-scattered and diverse-minded population to vote with a
-coolness and a precision and a large survey of which the urban system of
-Greece and Rome never dreamed; the general growth of intelligence among
-all classes through the action of cheap education and the large
-circulation of cheap books; the rapid and ever more rapid travelling of
-contagious thought from the centre to the extreme limbs and flourishes
-of social unities; and, above all, let us hope the improved tone of
-social feeling in all the relations of man to man, which we owe to the
-great Christian principle of living as brother with brother, and sister
-with sister, under a common heavenly fatherhood,--these are all
-forces largely operating in the present day which justify us in hoping
-that many a social experiment which signally failed with the ancients
-may be crowned in the centuries which are now being inaugurated with
-encouraging success. Of the three which we have named, Switzerland is
-the country in which, from topographical peculiarities, the interests of
-jealous, neighbours, and the traditional habits of a peasant population
-well trained to provincial self-government, the permanence of a
-democratic federation may be prophesied with the greatest safety, but at
-the same time with the least interest to the general march of humanity.
-Ancient Rome, had it continued as compact and as little disturbed by
-external forces and internal fermentations as modern Switzerland, might
-have remained during the whole course of its career as sober-minded and
-as stable as in the days of Cincinnatus, and the yeomanry which were
-displaced by huge absentee landlords, and Syrian or Sicilian slaves. The
-case of France is altogether different. A republic in an over-civilised,
-highly-centralised, bureaucratically-governed country, with a
-religiously hollow, hasty, violent, excitable, and explosive people,
-seems of all social experiments the least hopeful: and that is all that
-can wisely be said of it at present. But the social conditions in
-America are altogether different; and the experiment of a great
-democratic republic for the first time in the history of the
-world--for Rome in its best times, as we have seen, was an
-aristocracy--will be looked on by all lovers of their species with
-the most kindly curiosity and the most hopeful sympathy. Here we have
-the stout, self-reliant, sober-minded Anglo-Saxon stock, well trained in
-the process of the ages to the difficult art of self-government; here we
-have a constitution framed with the most cautious consideration, and
-with the most effective checks against the dangers of an over-riding
-democracy; here also a people as free from any imminent external danger
-as they have unlimited scope for internal progress. Under no
-circumstances could the experiment of self-government, on a great scale,
-have been made with a more promising start. No doubt they have a
-difficult and slippery problem to perform. The frequent recurrence of
-elections to the supreme magistracy has always been, and ever must be,
-the breeder of faction, the nurse of venality, and the spur of ambition.
-Once already has this Titanic confederacy, though only a hundred years
-old, by going through a process of a long, bitter, and bloody civil war,
-shown that the unifying machinery so cunningly put together by the
-conservative genius of a Washington, an Adams, and a Madison, was
-insufficient to hold in check the rebellious forces at war within its
-womb. No doubt also it were in vain to speak America free from those
-acts of gigantic jobbing, blushless venality, and over-riding of the
-masses in various ways, which were working the ruin of Rome in the days
-of Jugurtha. The aristocracy of gold and the tyranny of capitalists in
-Christian New York has shown itself no less able to usurp the public
-land and defraud the people of their share in the soil than the lordly
-aristocracy and the slave-dealing magnates of heathen Rome. Nevertheless
-we need not despair. The sins of American democracy may serve as a
-useful hint to us not rashly to tinker our own mixed constitution
-without waiting for a verdict on issues, which, as Socrates wisely says,
-lie with the gods; nor, on the other hand, is there any wisdom in
-ascribing to the American form of government evils which, as belonging
-to human nature, crop up with more or less abundance under all forms of
-government, and which may be specially rife among ourselves. We also
-have our Glasgow banks, our bubble companies of all kinds, our heady
-speculations, our hot competitions, our over-productions, our haste to
-be rich, our idol worship of mere material magnificence,--these are
-evils, and the root of all evil, with the production of which no form of
-government has anything to do, and against which every form of
-government will be in vain invoked to contend.
-
-In conclusion, we must bear in mind that democracy or social
-self-government is the most difficult of all human problems, and must be
-approached, not with inflated hopes and rosy imaginations, but with
-sobriety and caution and a sound mind, and at critical moments not
-without prayer and fasting. Before entering on any scheme for rebuilding
-our social edifice on a democratic model, we should consider seriously
-what a democracy really implies, and what we may reasonably promise
-ourselves from its possible success. Of the two rallying cries which
-have made it a favourite with persons given to change, equality and
-liberty, the one is no more true than that all the mountains in the
-Highlands are as high as Ben Nevis, and can only mean at the best that
-all men have an equal right to be called men and to be treated as men,
-while the other is only true so far as concerns the removal of all
-artificial barriers to the free exercise of each man's function,
-according to his capacity and opportunities. But this is a mere
-starting-point in the social life of a great people. When the bird is
-out of the cage, which it must be in order to be a perfect bird, the
-more serious question emerges, what use it shall make of its
-newly-acquired liberty. Here certainly to men, as to birds, there are
-great dangers to be faced; and with nations the progress of society, as
-already remarked, is measured to a much larger extent by the increase of
-limitations than by the extension of liberties. Then, again, the
-fundamental postulate of extreme democracy that the majority have
-everywhere a right to govern is manifestly false. No man as a member of
-society has a natural right to govern: he has a right to be governed,
-and well governed; and that can only be when the government is conducted
-by the wisest and best men who compose the society. If the numerical
-majority is composed of sober-minded, sensible, and intelligent persons
-who will either govern wisely themselves or choose persons who will do
-so, then democracy is justified by its deeds; but if it is otherwise,
-and if, when an appeal is made to the multitude, they will choose the
-most daring, the most ambitious, and the most unscrupulous, rather than
-the most sensible, the most moderate, and the most conscientious, then
-democracy is a bad thing, at least nothing better than the other
-_ocracies_ which it supplants. It is manifest, therefore, that of
-all forms of government democracy is that which imperatively requires
-the greatest amount of intelligence and moderation among the great mass
-of the people, especially amongst the lower classes, who have always
-been the most numerous; and, as history can point to no quarter of the
-world where such a happy condition of the numerical intelligence has
-been realised, it cannot look with any favour on schemes of universal
-suffrage, even when qualified with a stout array of effective checks.
-The system, indeed, of representing every man individually, and giving
-every member of a society a capitation vote, as they have a capitation
-tax in Turkey, however popular with the advocates of extreme democracy,
-seems quite unreasonable. What requires to be represented in a
-reasonable representative system is not so much individuals as
-qualities, capacities, interests, and types. Every class should be
-represented, rather than every man in a class. Besides, the equality of
-votes which democracy demands, on the principle that I am as good as you
-and perhaps a little better, is utterly false, and tends to nourish
-conceit and impertinence, to banish all reverence, and to ignore all
-distinctions in society. Anyhow, there can be no doubt that great masses
-of men acting together on exciting occasions are peculiarly liable to
-hasty resolutions and violent opinions; all democracies, therefore, are
-unsafe which are unprovided with checks in the form of an upper chamber
-composed of more cool materials, and planted firmly in a position that
-makes them independent of the fever and faction of the hour. A strong
-democracy stands as much in need of an aristocratic rein as a strong
-aristocracy does of a democratic spur. And let it never be
-forgotten--what democracies are far too apt to forget--that
-minorities have rights as well as majorities; nay, that one of the great
-ends to be achieved by a good government is to protect the few against
-the natural insolence of a majority glorying in its numbers, and hurried
-on by the spring-tide of a popular contagion. A state of society is not
-at all inconceivable in which the many shall make all the laws and
-monopolise all the offices of a fussy bureaucracy, while the few are
-burdened with all the taxes. Never too frequently can we repeat, in
-reference to all public acts, no less than to the conduct of individuals
-in private life, the great Aristotelian maxim that ALL EXTREMES ARE
-WRONG; that every force when in full action tends to an excess which
-for its own salvation must be met by a counterpoising force; that all
-good government, as all healthy existence, is the balance of opposites
-and the marriage of contraries; and that the more mettlesome the charger
-the more need of a firm rein and a cautious rider. He who overlooks this
-prime postulate of all sane action in this complex world may pile his
-democratic house tier above tier and enjoy his green conceit for a
-season; but the day of sore trial and civic storm is not far, when the
-rain shall descend, and the floods come, and the winds blow and beat
-upon that house, and it will fall, because it was founded upon a dream.
-
-
-
-II.
-THE CHURCH.
-
-Οὐ πᾶς ὁ λέγων μοι Κύριε, Κύριε, εἰσελεύσεται εἰς
-τὴν βασιλείαν τῶν οὐρανῶν· ἀλλ᾽ ὁ ποιῶν τὸ θέλημα τοῦ
-πατρός μου τοῦ ἐν τοῖς οῦρανοῖς.--Ὁ ΣΩΤΗΡ.
-
-MAN is characteristically a religious animal; in fact, as Socrates
-teaches, the only religious animal;[13] for, though a dog has no doubt
-reverential emotions, it cannot be said with any propriety that he has
-religious ideas or ecclesiastical institutions, for a very good reason,
-because he has no ideas at all: observation he has very keen, and memory
-also wonderfully retentive; instincts also, like all primal vital
-forces, divine and miraculous; but ideas certainly none, for ideas mean
-knowledge; and brutes that have no language properly so called that is a
-system of significant vocal signs expressive of ideas, but only cries,
-gesticulations, and visible or audible signs expressive of sensations
-and feelings, can by no law of natural analogy be credited with the
-possession of a faculty of which they give no manifestation. Language is
-the outward body and form of which thought and reason and knowledge and
-ideas are the inward soul and force; and hence the wise Greeks, unlike
-our modern scientists, who delight in confounding man with the monkey,
-expressed language and reason with one word λόγος, while what we
-dignify with the name of language in birds and other animals was simply
-φωνή, or significant voice. If, therefore, there is any thing most
-human that history has to teach, it must be about religion. All the
-great nations whose names mark the march of human fates have been
-religious nations. A people without religion does not exist, or, if it
-does exist, it exists only as an abnormal and deficient specimen of the
-genus to which it belongs, which is of no more account in the just
-estimate of the type than a fox without a tail, or a lawyer without a
-tongue; and as for individual atheists, who have been talked about in
-ancient times, and specially in these latter days, they are either
-philosophers like Spinoza, the most pious of men, falsely baptized with
-an odious title from the stupidity, prejudice, or malice of the
-community, or, if they really are atheists, they are monsters which a
-man may stare at as at an ass with three heads or with no head at all in
-a show.
-
-The form in which religion generally presents itself in early history is
-what we commonly call Polytheism, though it is quite possible--a
-matter about which I am not careful curiously to dogmatise--that
-there may have been in some places an original Dualism, like the ancient
-Persian, or even a Monotheism, out of which the Polytheism was
-developed. For there cannot be the slightest doubt that, whatever may
-have been the starting-point, there lay in the popular theology a
-tendency to multiply and to reproduce itself in kindred but not always
-easily recognisable forms, like the children of a family or the
-cousinship of a clan. But, taking Polytheism as the type under which
-history presents the objects of religious faith in the earliest times,
-we have to remark that under this common name, as in the case of
-Christianity, the greatest contrasts, both in speculative idea and in
-social efficiency, stare us everywhere in the face. In the eye of the
-Christian or the monotheistic devotee the worships of Aphrodite and of
-Pallas Athene are equally idolatrous; but, allowing that these
-anthropomorphic forms of divine forces and functions of the universe are
-equally destitute of a foundation in fact or reason, the reverence paid
-to them by a devout people might be as different as passion is from
-thought, and sense from spirit. As the ideal of wisdom in counsel and in
-action, the Athenian Pallas no doubt exercised as beneficent a sway over
-her Hellenic worshippers as the ideal of Christian womanhood, in the
-person of the Virgin Mary, does at the present day over millions of
-Christian worshippers. It is only when the cosmic function impersonated
-in the polytheistic god, being of an inferior order, leaps from its
-proper position of subordination and usurps the controlling and
-regulating action belonging to the superior function, that polytheistic
-idolatry becomes immoral; though, of course, the very facility of this
-usurpation, and the stamp of a pseudo divinity that may thereby be given
-to beastly vice, is a sufficient reason for the denunciations of the
-heathen idolatries so frequent in the Old Testament, which ultimately
-ripened into the spiritual apostleship and monotheistic aggression of
-St. Paul. One other striking feature of all polytheistic religions may
-not be omitted. They are naturally complete--more catholic, more
-sympathetic with universal nature and universal life than monotheistic
-religions; if they make a philosophical mistake in worshipping many
-gods, they do not make a moral mistake in excluding any of his
-attributes. With the polytheistic worshipper everything is sacred: the
-sun and the sea and the sky, dark earth and awful night, excite in him
-an emotion of reverence. If the Greek polytheist was devout at all, he
-was devout everywhere; whereas, under monotheistic influences, there is
-a danger that devout feelings may respond exclusively to the stern
-decrees of an absolute lawgiver and the awful threatenings of a violated
-law. Polytheistic piety, whatever its defects, was always ready to add a
-grace to every innocent enjoyment; monotheistic religiousness, as we see
-its severe features in some modern churches, contents itself with adding
-a solemn sanction to the moral law--a severity which here and there
-has not been able to keep itself free from the unlovely phase of
-regarding the innocent enjoyments and the graceful pleasantries of life
-as a sin.
-
-So much for the soul of the business; the body is what we call the
-Church. And here the very word is significant. In one sense, as a
-separate ethical corporation, the ancients had no Church. Why? Because
-Church and State were one; or, if they were two, they were too like the
-famous Siamese twins that used to be carried about the country as a
-show, two so closely connected that they could no more be torn from one
-another and live than the limpet can be separated from the rock to which
-it clings. With the peoples of the ancient world the State was the
-Church and the Church was the State; the priest was a magistrate and the
-magistrate was a priest. This identity of two things, or loose
-intercommunion and fusion of two things in modern association so
-instinctively kept apart, arose from the common germ out of which both
-Church and State grew--viz., as we saw in the previous lecture, the
-FAMILY. Every father of a family, in the normal and healthy state of
-society, is his own priest as well as his own king. In religion and
-morals, as well as in all domestic ordinances, he is absolute and
-supreme; and the functions which necessarily belonged to him as supreme
-administrator in his own family would, under the influence of family
-feelings, naturally be conceded to him when the family grew to a clan,
-and the clan to a kingdom. And this is the state of things which we meet
-with in the Book of Genesis, long before the promulgation of the Mosaic
-law, where we read (xiv. 18) that Melchizedek, _king_ of Salem,
-went out to bless Abraham, and he was _priest_ of the Most High
-God; the distinction between priest and layman, to which our ears are so
-familiar, being in this, as in a thousand other well-known instances,
-altogether ignored. Not only in Homer, where we find Agamemnon, the king
-of men, performing sacrificial functions without even the presence of a
-priest,[14] but in the sober historical age we find the King of Sparta
-performing all the public sacrifices--being, in fact, in virtue of
-his office, high priest of Jove.[15] So closely indeed was the State
-religion identified with the person of the supreme magistrate that, when
-the kingship was abolished in Greece, and three principal archons and
-seven secondary ones shared his functions, one still retained the title
-of βασιλεύς, _king_, and had the supervision, or, as we
-would say, supreme episcopacy and overseership of all matters pertaining
-to religion.[16] The same thing took place in Rome, where the name of
-king was even more odious than in Greece; but nevertheless a _rex
-sacrificulus_, or _king-sacrificer_, with his _regina_ or
-_queen_, took rank in all the public pontifical dinners above the
-_pontifex maximus_ himself. The college of pontiffs in Rome, which
-had the supreme direction of all religious matters, was not a board of
-priests, but of laymen--or at least of laymen who, without any
-qualification but some inaugurating ceremony, might be assumed into the
-pontifical college; whence the title of _pontifex maximus_, which
-the emperors assumed, was no more of the nature of a usurpation than the
-title of _imperator_, which belonged to them as supreme commanders
-of the army. Who, then, were the priests, and what need of them, at all
-if the laity might legally perform all their functions? The answer is
-simple. Both in Greece and Rome there were priests and priestly
-families, as the _Eumolpidæ_ in Eleusis, specially dedicated to
-the service of certain local gods; but there was no order, class, or
-body of persons having the exclusive right to officiate in sacred
-matters over the whole community. No doubt the social position of
-priests in democratic Greece and monarchical Egypt was extremely
-different, but in one respect they were identical: in Athens Church and
-State were one as much as in Memphis. In Egypt there was a remarkably
-strong body or clan of priests enjoying the highest dignities and
-immunities; but there is no proof that they were a caste, in the strict
-sense of the word; and their virtues were so far from being
-incommunicable that, when the Pharaoh did not happen to be a born
-priest, but of the military class, he was obliged to be made a priest
-before he could be a king; and when once king he became _ipso
-facto_ the high priest of the nation, and took precedence of all
-priests in all great public acts of religious ceremonial. It must not be
-supposed, however, that, though he was supreme in all sacred matters and
-the actual head of the Church, to use our language, he could set
-himself, like our Henry VIII., to carve creeds for the people, and
-imprison or burn devout persons for refusing to acknowledge his
-arbitrary decrees. The exercise of sacred functions in the hands of the
-masterful Tudor and his Machiavelian minister was a usurpation tolerated
-by a loyal people as their readiest and most effective way of getting
-rid of the masterdom of the Roman Pope, which in those days pressed like
-an incubus on the European conscience; it was invoking one devil to turn
-out another, and was successful, as such operations are wont to be, in a
-blundering sort of way. But the worshipful "Sons of the
-Sun"--for so they were betitled--on the banks of the
-sweet-watered Nile, had no monstrous pretension of this kind, and could
-not even have dreamt of it. They did not sit on the throne to reform
-religion, but to maintain it. Neither in Egypt nor in Greece in those
-days was any such thing known as the rights of the individual
-conscience; but both kings and people received religious laws and
-consuetudes as we do _Magna Charta_; reasonable people, in the long
-course of the centuries before Christ, would no more dream of disturbing
-the ancestral belief about the gods than they would think of influencing
-the settled courses of the stars. It was their very deep-rooted
-permanency, in the midst of the startling mutabilities to which human
-affairs are liable, that made the fundamental truths of religion so
-valuable to their souls; and as to the particular forms under which
-these fundamental truths might have been symbolised by venerable
-tradition, the people were not given to form themselves into hostile
-camps on the ground of any local difference, as we do in Scotland about
-ecclesiastical conceits and crotchets; and every devout Egyptian allowed
-his neighbour without offence to pay sacred honours to a crocodile or a
-cat, convinced that these honours were equally legitimate and equally
-beneficial whenever the sacred symbolism peculiar to the worship was
-wisely understood. Collisions, therefore, between Church and State, or
-between priesthood and kingship, such as signalised the medieval
-struggles of the Popes and Emperors, and the convulsions of our infant
-Protestant freedom in England, could not take place amongst the ancient
-polytheists. A wise Socrates was equally willing with the most
-superstitious devotee, when pious gratitude called, to sacrifice a cock
-to Æsculapius; and the νόμῳ πόλεως, by the custom of the
-State, was the direction which he gave to all who inquired of him by
-what rites they ought to worship the gods.[17] Only amongst the Hebrews,
-as a people in whose religious habitude polytheistic and monotheistic
-tendencies had never come to any decisive settlement of their inherent
-antagonism, do I find a record of a very serious collision between
-Church and State, after the fashion of our German Henries and
-Transalpine Hildebrands in the days of Papal aggression. Scotsmen
-familiar with their Bibles will easily see that I allude to the case of
-Uzziah, as recorded in 2 Chron. xxvi. 16-20:--"But when he
-was strong, his heart was lifted up to his destruction: for he
-transgressed against the Lord his God, and went into the temple of the
-Lord to burn incense upon the altar of incense. And Azariah the priest
-went in after him, and with him fourscore priests of the Lord, that were
-valiant men: And they withstood Uzziah the king, and said unto him, It
-appertaineth not unto thee, Uzziah, to burn incense unto the Lord, but
-to the priests the sons of Aaron, that are consecrated to burn incense:
-go out of the sanctuary; for thou hast trespassed; neither shall it be
-for thine honour from the Lord God. Then Uzziah was wroth, and had a
-censer in his hand to burn incense: and while he was wroth with the
-priests, the leprosy even rose up in his forehead before the priests in
-the house of the Lord, from beside the incense altar. And Azariah the
-chief priest, and all the priests, looked upon him, and, behold, he was
-leprous in his forehead, and they thrust him out from thence; yea,
-himself hasted also to go out, because the Lord had smitten him."
-
-So much for Polytheism. That it should have served the spiritual needs
-of the human heart so long--five thousand years at least, from the
-first Pharaoh that looked down from his Memphian pyramid on the mystic
-form of the Sphinx, to the last Roman Emperor that sacrificed white
-bulls from Clitumnus at the altar of the Capitoline Jove--is proof
-sufficient that, with all its faults, it was made of very serviceable
-stuff; but creeds and kingdoms, like individuals, must die. At the
-commencement of the eighth century of the Roman Republic heathenism was
-doomed in all Romanised Europe, in all Northern Africa, and in Western
-Asia, and that for four reasons. The polytheistic religions of the Old
-World, created as they were in the infancy of society, no doubt under
-the guidance of a healthy instinct of dependence on the ruling power of
-the universe, but in the main inspired by the emotions and formulated by
-the imagination, without the regulating control of reason, could not
-hope to hold their ground permanently in the face of that rich growth of
-individual speculation which, from the sixth century before Christ,
-spread with such ample ramification from Asiatic and European Greece
-over the greater part of the civilised world. If it was a necessity of
-human beings at all times to have a religion, it was a no less urgent
-problem, as the range of vision enlarged with the process of the ages,
-to harmonise their theology with their thinking. And if, on the
-intellectual side, the polytheistic religions of that cultivated age
-were threatened with a collapse, the sensuous element, always strongly
-represented in emotional faiths, was in constant danger of being dragged
-down into a disturbing and degrading sensuality. Then, again, when the
-Roman Republic, in the age of Augustus Cæsar, had completed the range
-of its world-wide conquests, two social forces, unknown in the best ages
-of Greece and Rome, viz., wealth and luxury, added their perilous
-momentum to the corrupting elements which were already at work in the
-bosom of the polytheistic system. And in what a hot-bed of fermenting
-putridity these evil leavens had resulted at this period, the pages of
-Suetonius and many chapters in St. Paul are witnesses equally credible
-and equally tragic. Add to all this the fact that the motley
-intermixture of ideas and the inorganic confusion and forced
-assimilation of creeds which, accompanied the universal march of Roman
-polity, brought about a vague desire for some sort of religious unity
-which might run parallel with the political unity under which men lived;
-and this desire could be gratified only by placing in the foreground the
-great truth of the unity of the Supreme Being, which to vindicate in
-pre-Christian ages had been the special mission of the Hebrew race, and
-which the Greeks themselves had not indistinctly indicated by placing
-the moral government of the world and the issues of peace and war in the
-hands of an omnipotent, all-wise, all-beneficent, and absolute Jove.
-These and the like considerations will lead the thoughtful student of
-history easily to understand how the appearance of such an extraordinary
-moral force as Christianity was imperatively called for at the period
-when our Saviour, with His divine mission to a fallen race, began His
-preaching on the shores of a lonely Galilean lake; and the most
-superficial glance at the contents of His preaching, as contrasted with
-the heathenism which it replaced, will show how wonderful was the new
-start which it gave to the moral life of the world, and how effective
-the spur which it applied to the march of the ages--a spur so
-potent that we may, without the slightest exaggeration, say that to
-Christianity we owe almost exclusively whatever mild agencies tempered
-the harshness and sweetened the sourness of crude government in the
-Middle Ages; and no less, whatever hopeful elements are at the present
-moment working among ourselves to save the British people, at a critical
-stage of their social development, from the decadence and the
-degradation that overtook the Romans after their great military mission
-had been fulfilled. Let us look articulately at the main constituents of
-that new leaven wherewith Christianity was equipped to regenerate the
-world. These I find to be--
-
-(1.) By asserting in the strongest way the unity of God, it at once cut
-the root of the tendency in human nature to create arbitrary objects of
-worship according to the lust or fancy of the worshipper, and accustomed
-the popular intelligence to a harmonised view of the various forces at
-work in the constitution of a world so various and so complex as to a
-superficial view readily to appear contradictory and irreconcilable.
-
-(2.) By preaching the unity of God, not as an abstract metaphysical
-idea, but as what it really is, a divine fatherhood, Christianity at one
-stroke bound all men together as brethren and members of a common
-family; and in this way, while in the relation of nation to nation it
-substituted apostleships of love for wars of subjugation, in the
-relation of class to class it established a sort of spiritual democracy,
-in which the implied equality of all men as men gradually led to the
-abolition of the abnormal institution of slavery, on which all ancient
-society rested.
-
-(3.) Christianity, by starting religion as an independent moral
-association altogether separate from the State, at once purified the
-sphere of the Church from corrupting elements, and confined the State
-within those bounds which the nature of a civic administration
-furnishes. Religion in this way was purified and elevated, because in
-its nicely segregated sphere no secular considerations of any kind could
-interfere to tone down its ideal, direct its current, or lame its
-efficiency; while the State, on the other hand, was saved from the folly
-of intermeddling with matters which it did not understand, and
-professing principles which it did not believe.
-
-(4.) Christianity, by planting itself emphatically at the very first
-start, as one may see in the Sermon on the Mount, in direct antagonism
-to ritualism, ceremonialism, and every variety of externalism, and
-placing the essence of all true religion in regeneration, or, as St.
-Paul has it, a new creature--_i.e._ the legitimate practical
-dominance of the spiritual and ethical above the sensual and carnal part
-of our nature--broke down the middle wall of partition which had so
-often divided piety from morality; so that now a man of culture might
-consistently give his right hand to religion and his left hand to
-philosophy, an attitude which, so long as Homer was all that the Greeks
-had for a bible, no devout Hellenist could assume.
-
-(5.) By placing a firm belief in a future life as a guiding prospect in
-the foreground, the religion of Christ gave the highest possible value
-to human life, and the strongest possible spur to perseverance in a
-virtuous career.
-
-(6.) By appealing directly to the individual conscience, and making
-religion a matter of personal concern and of moral conviction, it raised
-the value of each individual as a responsible moral agent, and placed
-the dignity of every man as a social monad on the firmest possible
-pedestal.
-
-(7.) By making love its chief motive power, it supplied both the steam
-and the oil of the social machine with a continuity of moral force never
-dreamt of in any of the ancient societies--a force which no mere
-socialistic schemes for organising labour, no boards of health, no
-political economy, no mathematical abstractions, no curiosities of
-physical science, no democratic suffrages, and no school inspectorships,
-though multiplied a thousand times, apart from this divine agency, can
-ever hope to achieve.
-
-Thus equipped with a moral armature such as the world had never yet
-seen, it might have been expected that the triumph of Christianity over
-the ruins of heathenism would have been as complete and as pure from all
-admixture of evil as it appears in the great evangelical manifesto
-commonly called the Sermon on the Mount. But it was not to be so; nor,
-indeed, created as human nature is, could possibly be. The miraculous
-virtue of the seed could not change the nature of the soil, and the
-sweet new wine put into old bottles could not fail to catch a taint from
-the acid incrustations of the original liquor. _Corruptia optimi
-pessima_ is the great lesson which history everywhere teaches, and
-nowhere with a more tragic impressiveness than in the history of the
-Christian Church. What a rank crop of old wives' fables, endless
-genealogies, ceremonial observances, worship of the letter, voluntary
-humilities, and disputations of science, falsely so called, started into
-fretful array before the spiritual swordsmanship of St. Paul, no reader
-of the grandest correspondence in the world need be told; but it was not
-so much from Jewish drivel, Attic subtlety, or Corinthian sensualism,
-that the corrupting forces were to proceed which in the post-Apostolic
-age insinuated themselves like a poison into the pure blood of the
-Church. It is from within that, in moral matters, our great danger
-flows: if the kingdom of heaven is there, the kingdom of hell is there
-no less distinctly. The doctrine of Aristotle, and the teaching of
-history that ALL EXTREMES ARE WRONG, is ever and ever repeated to
-passion-spurred mortals, and ever and ever forgotten. In the green
-ardour of our worship we make an idol of our virtue; the strong lines of
-the particular excellence which we admire are stretched into a
-caricature; our sublime, severed from all root of soundness, reels over
-into the ridiculous; we revel and riot and get into an intoxicated
-excitement with the fruit of our own fancy; and work ourselves from one
-stage of inflammation to another, till, as our great dramatist says,
-
-  "Goodness, grown to a pleurisy,
-  Dies of its own too much."
-
-The excess into which Christianity at its first start most naturally
-fell was ultra-spiritualism, asceticism, or by whatever name we may
-choose to characterise that high-flying system in morals which, not
-content with the regulation and subordination, aims at the violent
-subjugation and, as much as may be, the total suppression of the
-physical element in man. How near this abuse lay is evident, not only
-from the general tendency of every man to make an idol of his
-distinctive virtue, and of every sect to delight in the exaggeration of
-its most characteristic feature, but there are not a few passages of the
-New Testament which plainly show that the masculine Christianity of St.
-Paul had not more occasion to protest against those Greek libertines who
-turned the grace of God into licentiousness, than against those
-offshoots of the Jewish Essenes who professed a self-imposed arbitrary
-religiosity (Col. ii. 18, 23), even forbidding to marry and commanding
-to abstain from meats (I Tim. iv. 3).[18] There is, indeed, something
-very seductive in these attempts to acquire a superhuman virtue, whether
-they be made by a poet casting off the vulgar bonds that bind him to his
-fellows, like Percy Bysshe Shelley, that he may feed upon sun-dews and
-get drunk on transcendental imaginations, or by a religious person, that
-he may devote himself to spiritual exercises, free from the disturbing
-influence of earthly passions. Such a renunciation of the flesh
-gratifies his pride, and has, in fact, the aspect of a heroic virtue in
-a special line; while, at the same time, it is with some persons more
-convenient, inasmuch as when the resolution is once formed and a decided
-start made, it is always easier to abstain than to be moderate.
-Nevertheless, all such ambitious schemes to ignore the body and to cut
-short the natural rights of our physical nature must fail. It never can
-be the virtue of a man to wish to be more than man; and every religion
-which sets a stamp of special approval on superhuman, and therefore
-unhuman, virtue, erects a wall of separation between the gospel which it
-preaches and the world which it should convert. In fact, it rather gives
-up the world in despair, and institutes an artificial school for the
-practice of certain select virtues, which only a few will practise, and
-which, when practised, can only make those few unfit for the social
-position which Providence meant them to occupy.
-
-The second excess into which Christianity, under the action of frail
-human nature, easily ran was intolerance. This intolerance, as in the
-previous case, is only a virtue run to seed; for, as all asceticism is
-merely a misapplication or an exaggeration of the virtue of self-denial
-and self-control, so all intolerance, or defect of kindly regard to the
-contrary in opinion or conduct, is merely a crude or an impolitic
-extension of the imperative ought which lies at the root of all moral
-truth, and specially of all monotheistic religions. There is, indeed, a
-certain intolerance in truth which will not allow it to hold parley with
-error; and every new religion with a lofty inspiration, conscious of a
-divine mission, is necessarily aggressive: it delights to pluck the
-beard of ancestral authority, and marches right into the presence of
-hoary absurdity and consecrated stupidity. No doubt there is a boundary
-here which the divine wisdom of the Son of God pointed at emphatically
-enough when he was asked to bring down fire from heaven on those who
-taught or did otherwise; but the evil spirit of self-importance which
-prompted this request was too deeply engrained in human nature to be
-eradicated by a single warning of the great teacher. This spirit of
-arrogant individualism asserted itself at an early period in the
-disorderly Corinthian Church very much in the same way as it does
-amongst ourselves, specially in Scotland, at the present moment--viz.
-by the multiplication of sects, the exaggeration of petty distinctions,
-and the fomenting of petty rivalries,--"Now this I say, that every one
-of you saith, I am of Paul; and I of Apollos; and I of Cephas; and I
-of Christ" (I Cor. i. 12),--a spirit which the apostle most strongly
-denounces as proceeding manifestly from the overrated importance of
-some secondary specialty, or some accessory condition, of the body of
-believers, who thus clubbed themselves into a denomination, and
-resulting in an unkindly divergence from the common highway of
-evangelic life, and an intolerant desire to override one Christian
-brother with the private shibboleth of another, and to stamp him with
-the seal of their own conceit. The field in which this intolerant Spirit
-displayed itself was of course different, according to the influences at
-work at the time; but there is one field which, if church history is to
-teach us anything, we are bound to emphasise strongly, that is the field
-of dogma; for, if there be any influence that has worked more powerfully
-to discredit Christianity than even the immoral lives and selfish maxims
-of professing Christians, it is the fixation and glorification and
-idol-worship of the dogma. No doubt Christianity is far from being that
-system, or rather no system, of vague and cloudy sentiment to which some
-persons would reduce it: it has bones, and a firm framework; it stands
-upon facts, and is not without doctrines, but it does not make a parade
-of doctrines; and the faith which it enjoins, as is manifest from the
-definition and historical examples in Hebrews xi., is not an
-intellectual faith in the doctrines of a metaphysical theology, but a
-living faith in the moral government of the world and a heroic conduct
-in life, as the necessary expression of such faith. The mere
-intellectual orthodoxy on which the Christian Church has, by the
-tradition of centuries, placed such a high value, is, in the apostolical
-estimate, plainly worth nothing; for the devils also believe and
-tremble, as St. James has it, or as our Lord himself said in the
-striking summation to the Sermon on the Mount, "Not they who call me
-_Lord, Lord_, shall enter into the kingdom, but they who do the will of
-my Father who is in heaven. By their works, not by their creed, ye shall
-know them."[19] Nevertheless, the exaltation of the dogma has always
-been a favourite tendency of the Church, and the besetting sin of the
-clergy. With the mass of the people, to swear to a curious creed is
-always more easy than to lead a noble life; while to the clerical
-intellect it must always give a secret satisfaction to think that the
-science of theology, which is the furthest removed from the handling of
-the great mass of men, has in their hands assumed a well-defined shape,
-of which the articulations are as subtle and as necessary as the steps
-of solution in a difficult algebraic problem. The late Baron Bunsen, for
-many years Prussian ambassador in London, one of the most large-minded
-and large-hearted of Christian men, in the preface to his great _Bibel
-werk_, devotes a special chapter to Dogmatism as a vice of the clerical
-mind leading to false views of Scripture; over and above what he calls
-the modern revival of scholastic theology in Germany, he enumerates four
-dominant epochs of ecclesiastical life in which this anti-evangelical
-tendency has prominently asserted itself. These are--(1) the dogmatism
-of the great Church councils in the reigns of Constantine, Theodosius,
-and Justinian; (2) the medieval scholasticism of the Western Church; (3)
-the Protestant scholasticism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries;
-(4) the dogmatism of the Jesuits, Perron, Bossuet, and others. Had this
-dogmatic tendency of the Church contented itself with tabulating a
-curious scheme of divine mysteries, though it might justly have been
-deemed impertinent, and here and there a little presumptuous, yet it
-might have been condoned lightly as a sort of clerical recreation in
-hours which might have been worse employed; but it could not be content
-with this: it passed at once into action, and in this guise prevailed to
-deface the fair front of the Church with gashes of more bloody and
-barbarous inhumanity than ever marked the altars of the Baals and
-Molochs of the most savage heathen superstitions.
-
-Another monstrous abuse born out of the bosom of the Church, though not
-so directly, is Sacerdotalism. I say not so directly, because the genius
-of Christianity is so distinctly negative of all priesthood that, had
-there been even an express prohibition of it, its contradiction to the
-whole tone of the New Testament could not have been more apparent. Not
-more certainly are the sacrifices of the Jewish law abolished in the
-sacrifice of Christ, according to the Pauline theology, than the
-Levitical priesthood stands abolished in the priesthood of Christ and in
-the priesthood of the individual members of his spiritual body (2 Peter
-v. 9).[20] Whence, then, came our Christian priesthood? Partly, I
-suspect, as the Jewish Sabbath was interpolated into the Christian
-Lord's Day, from the nearness and external similitude of the two
-things--the presbyter being to the outward eye pretty much the same
-as the priest was to the Jewish worshippers; partly from the
-self-importance which is the besetting sin of all bodies of men
-prominently planted in the social platform, and which induces them to
-magnify their vocation, and in doing so stilt their professional pride
-up into the attitude of a very stately and a very reputable virtue. The
-proper functions of the office-bearers of the early Christian Church,
-call them overseers, bishops, or what you will, were so honourable and
-so beneficent that, especially with an unlearned and unthinking people,
-the reverential respect due to the actors might easily pass into a
-superstitious belief in the mystical virtue of the operations of which
-they were the conductors; and this ready submission on the part of the
-people, holding out a willing hand to the natural self-importance and
-potentiated self-estimate of the clerical body, resulted in a
-four-square system of sacerdotal control, sacerdotal virtue, and
-sacerdotal influence, to which we shall search for a parallel in vain
-through all the annals of Asiatic and African heathenism. Nay, I can
-readily believe that those who can find a priesthood in the genius of
-the gospel and the apostolic institution of the Christian Church, will
-naturally be inclined to maintain that the superior power of the
-Gregories, Bonifaces, and Innocents of the medieval Church, as
-contrasted with anything that we read or know of the Egyptian, Hebrew,
-and Roman pontiffs, is the natural and necessary outcome of the superior
-excellence of the Christian religion; and this, no doubt, is the only
-comfortable belief on which all forms of Christian sacerdotalism can
-repose.
-
-So much for the corruptions of the Christian religion proceeding from
-what, in theological language, might be called the indwelling sin of the
-Church, unstimulated by any strong external seduction. But this
-seduction came. After three centuries of hardship, manfully endured in
-the school of adversity, the more severe trial of prosperity had to be
-gone through. The Church, which had been declared to be not of this
-world, and had stood face to face with the greatest political power the
-world ever knew in a position of sublime moral isolation, was now
-adopted by the State, and formed a bond of the most intimate connection
-with its hereditary persecutors. The starting-point of the oldest
-heathen social attitude, the identity of Church and State, seemed to be
-recalled; and a Justinian on the shores of the Bosphorus seemed as
-really a head of the Church as a Menes or an Amenophis on the banks of
-the Nile. But under the outward likeness a radical difference lay
-concealed. As an essentially ethical society, with its own special
-credentials, its separate history, and its independent triumph, the
-Christian Church might form an alliance with a purely secular
-institution like the State, but it could not be absorbed or identified
-with it. That alliance might be made beneficially in various ways and on
-various terms; the civil magistrate might be proud to be called the
-friend and the brother of the Christian bishop, or he might humble
-himself to be its servant, but he never could be its master. The
-alliance therefore was, as it ought to be, all in favour of the
-spiritual body; the Church gained the civil power to execute its decrees
-and to patronise its missions; but a Christian State could never gain
-the right to dictate the creed or perform the functions of the Church.
-The idea that there is anything absolutely sinful, or necessarily
-pernicious, in the conception of an alliance between the Church and the
-State, is one of those hyperconscientious crotchets of modern British
-sectarianism at which the Muse of history can only smile. There can be
-no greater sin in an Established Church than in an Established
-University or an Established Royal Academy. Religion and Science and Art
-have their separate and well-marked provinces, in the administration of
-which they may wisely seek for the co-operation, though they will always
-jealously avoid the dictation, of the State. But, though there could be
-no sin in the Church receiving the right hand of fellowship from the
-State, there might be danger, and that of a very serious description.
-Nothing strikes a man so much in the reading of the New Testament as the
-little respect which it pays to riches and the pomp and pride of life,
-and worldly honours and dignities of all kinds. "_How can ye
-believe who receive honour one from another?_" is a sentence
-that cuts very deep into the connection between the Church and State,
-which might readily mean the alliance of a secular institution,
-delighting in pomp and parade and glittering show, with a religion of
-which, like the philosophy of the porch, the most prominent feature was
-unworldliness, humility, and spirituality. Here unquestionably was
-danger: an alliance in which, as in an ill-consorted marriage, the lower
-element was as likely to drag down the higher as the higher to lift up
-the lower. And so it actually happened. The Church was secularised.
-Alongside of the hundred and one monkeries of stolid asceticism and the
-hundred and one mummeries of sacerdotal ceremonialism, there grew up in
-the process of the ages a consolidated hierarchy of such concentrated,
-secular, and sacred potency that the loftiest crowned heads of Europe
-ducked beneath its shadow and quailed beneath its ban. To understand
-this, we must take note of the change by which the scattered presbyters
-of the primitive Church were gradually massed into a strong aristocracy,
-which in due season, after the fashion of the State, found its key-stone
-in an ecclesiastical monarch. It was the wisdom of the founders of the
-Christian Church not to lay down any fixed norm of official
-administration, but to leave all the external machinery of a purely
-spiritual institution free to adapt itself to the existing forms of
-society as time and circumstance and national genius might demand. The
-form of government natural to the Church in its earliest stages was
-democratic, with a certain loose, ill-defined element of presidential
-aristocracy. But in an age which had bidden a long farewell both to the
-spirit and the form of democracy in civil administration, such a form of
-government in the Church could not hope to maintain itself. Under the
-influence of the magnificent autocracy of Rome in its decadence, the
-simple overseer or superintendent (ἐπίσκοπος) of a remote
-provincial congregation of believers gradually grew into a metropolitan
-dignitary, and culminated in the wielder of a secular sovereignty
-sitting in council with the most influential monarchs of Europe. The
-epiphany of an absolute monarch with a triple tiara on his head when
-contrasted with the simplicity and unworldliness of the primitive
-bishops wears such a strange look that it has been judged, especially in
-Protestant countries, with a more sweeping severity than it deserved. As
-a mere form of government, no man can give any good reason why the
-Church should not be governed by a monarch as well as the State; the
-bishop of Rome, as supreme head of the body of bishops all over
-Christendom, and guided by them as his habitual advisers, was at least
-as natural and as reasonable a guide for the direction of the conscience
-of Christendom in the Middle Ages as the Council of Protestants who at
-Dort, in the year 1618, condemned the greatest theologian and jurist of
-the day to pine in a Dutch prison, or the Assembly of Divines in
-Westminster who empowered the supreme magistrate to suppress the right
-of free thought in the breasts of all persons who were not prepared to
-set their seal to the damnatory dogmas of extreme Calvinism. Nay, so far
-from there being anything anti-Christian or anti-social in the Popedom
-as a form of Church government, we may safely say that in ages of
-general turmoil, confusion, and violence, the admitted supremacy of the
-visible head of a church founded on principles of peace and conciliation
-could not act otherwise than beneficially. But when the person in whom
-this moral supremacy was vested became the acknowledged head of a
-secular princedom, the case was altered. It was an unhappy day for the
-Christian Church, the most unhappy day perhaps in its whole eventful
-history, when Pepin, the ambitious minister of the last of the
-Merovingian kings, in the year 751, contrived to get out of Pope Zachary
-a spiritual sanction for his usurption of his master's throne.
-From that moment the Church was doomed to a blazing and brilliant, but a
-sure career of downfall. The spiritual abetter of a secular crime had to
-be rewarded for his pious subserviency: he received the exarchate of
-Ravenna, and became a temporal prince. From that time forward the head
-of the Christian Church, who ought to have stood before the world as a
-model of all purity, truthfulness, peacefulness, and ethical nobility,
-was condemned to serve two masters, God and Mammon, unworldly morality
-and worldly power, which was impossible. From this time forward there
-was not a single court intrigue in Europe, nor a single plot of any knot
-of conspirators, into whose counsels the supreme bishop of the gospel of
-peace might not be dragged, or, what is worse, into whose lawless and
-ungodly machinations he might not be officially thrusting himself, in
-order to preserve some accessory interest or gain some paltry advantage
-altogether unconnected with his spiritual function. If there is any one
-element, always of course excepting the element of gross sensuality and
-absolute villainy, which more than another is adverse to the spirit of
-Evangelical Christianity, it is the element of court intrigue, political
-contention, and party feuds. In this region love, which is the life of
-the regenerate soul, cannot breathe; truth is put under ban; lies
-flourish; conscience is smothered; and low expediency everywhere takes
-the place of lofty principle. So it fared not seldom with the Popes; and
-much worse in the last degree; for wickedness, like everything that
-lives, must live by growing, and the seed of secular ambition which was
-sown in lies, will grow to robbery, blossom in lust, and ripen into
-murder. This anywhere, but specially in Italy, where from the time of
-the patrician Scipio, who suppressed the elder Gracchus, the hot
-contenders for absolute power, in the eager pursuit of their object,
-have never shrank from the free use of the assassin's dagger and
-the poisoner's bowl. In fact, if the love of mere animal pleasure
-makes a man a beast, it is the love of power that translates him into a
-fiend; and of this sort of human fiends Italian history presents as
-appalling a register as can be found anywhere in the annals of our race;
-and at the top of this register stand some of the Popes, whose names are
-as prominent in the story of ecclesiastical Rome as those of Nero,
-Domitianus, and Heliogabalus are in the story of the imperial decadence.
-When we cast a rapid glance--for it deserves nothing more--on
-the revolting record of the Roman Popes in the age immediately preceding
-the Reformation, we hear the solemn voice of history repeating again the
-maxim above quoted--_corruptio optimi pessima_: when priests
-are bad, they are very bad; when the salt of the gospel, which was meant
-to preserve the moral life of society from putrescence, has lost its
-savour, if not cast out, it is worse than useless--it becomes a
-poison.
-
-Before proceeding to the modern history of the Church, we ought to
-emphasise in a special paragraph the fact that one unfortunate result of
-the incorporation of the Church with the State was that the Church was
-now in a position to request the State to lend its potent aid in
-establishing the true doctrine of the gospel and suppressing all
-heresies. That the State had a right to do so no man doubted; even in
-democratic Greece free-thinking philosophers, such as Anaxagoras,
-Diogenes, and Socrates, were banished or suffered death on charges of
-impiety; and though, no doubt, political elements, as in the case of the
-Arminians in Holland, worked along with the strictly religious feeling
-to set the brand of atheism on those men, there cannot be any doubt that
-where the State and the Church were so essentially one, persecutions for
-unauthorised religious observances were perfectly legitimate, as indeed
-the memorable case of the forcible suppression of the Dionysiac
-mysteries, more than two hundred years before the earliest of the
-Christian martyrdoms in Rome, abundantly testifies. But there was a
-double horror in the religious persecution, after the establishment of
-Christianity, now inaugurated for the first time--the horror of a
-conduct so diametrically opposed to the spirit and the express
-injunction of the Founder of the Gospel, in whose defence it was
-practised, and the horror also that what was now violently suppressed
-was not, as in the case of the Dionysiac mysteries, rather immoral
-practices than erroneous beliefs, but simply and nakedly metaphysical
-objections against metaphysical propositions in theology, which, whether
-true or false, could not be made the subject of State action, or, in my
-opinion at least, of ecclesiastical censure, without a flagrant
-violation of that law of charity which a large philosophy and a catholic
-Christianity equally enjoin. The banishment of Arius to Illyria, as the
-civil consequence of the formal signature of the Trinitarian creed by
-the decision of the Council of Nice in the year 325, though it made no
-small noise in the world in those days, was a very innocent overture to
-the barbarous dramas of fire and blood that were in after ages to be
-enacted on this evil precedent. There are many grand places rich with
-historical lessons in London, and not a few sad ones; but the saddest of
-all is Smithfield. I can never pace the stones of this memorable site,
-where our noblest Scot, Sir William Wallace, was disembowelled and
-quartered to gratify the vengeance of an imperious Norman, without
-thinking of the sad fate of the young and beautiful Anne Askew. This
-lady, the daughter of a knight of good family in Lincolnshire, under
-some of those stimulants of thought which were stirring up the stagnant
-traditions of medieval piety, had been led to conceive serious doubts
-with regard to the Scripture authority for some of the most universally
-received doctrines of the Roman Church. This pious scepticism coming to
-the ears of certain leading persons in Church and State, who, after the
-example of the Nicean doctors, considered it a sacred duty in matters
-pertaining to religion to tolerate no contradiction, first brought this
-lady before the Lord Chancellor, who tore her limb from limb on the
-rack, because she would not say that she believed what she could not
-believe without denying her senses, and then dragged her to the
-blood-stained pavement of Smithfield, where she was girt with gunpowder
-bags and fenced with faggots, to be burnt to death, as if the God of
-Christians were a second and enlarged edition of the old Moloch of
-Palestine. And what was her offence--beautiful, young, pure, and
-truthful woman, not more than twenty-five years of age--that she
-should be treated in this worse than cannibalic style in the name of the
-gospel of Jesus Christ? Simply that Henry VIII., in that style of
-insolent masterdom which he showed so royally, and conceiting himself,
-like a Scotch fool who came after him, to be a considerable theologian,
-assumed the right to put the stamp of absolute kingship on the doctrine
-of the Church that a piece of bread, over which a priestly benediction
-had been pronounced by a priest, was by the mystical virtue of this
-benediction changed into flesh, while the fair young lady persisted in
-seeing nothing but bread. Let it be granted that the lady was in the
-wrong and the churchly tradition right, it never could be right to tear
-her flesh to shreds and to burn her bones to ashes because she held an
-opinion which, to say the least of it, looked as like the truth as its
-opposite. How sad, how sorrowfully sad, and what a commentary on what we
-are ever and anon tempted to call poor, pitiful, prideful, and
-presumptuous human nature, that Christianity had at that time been more
-than fifteen hundred years in the world, sitting in high places, and
-walking with triumphal banners over the earth, and yet neither the
-princes of the earth nor the rulers of the Church should have retained
-even a slight echo of that reproof from a mild Master to a zealous
-disciple, to the effect that no man who knew the spirit of the divine
-religion which He taught, would ever propose to bring fire down from
-heaven or up from hell to consume the unbeliever.
-
-Such enormities in the doctrine and practice of the Church, as we have
-indicated rather than described, could lead to only one of two
-issues--Reform or Revolution. The change brought about, though
-contenting itself with the milder name, was in fact the more drastic
-procedure. The European reformation of Martin Luther in 1517 was a
-revolution in the Church, much more radical and much more worthy of so
-strong a designation than the political revolution of 1688 in Great
-Britain. It is needless to recapitulate the causes of offence; they were
-only too patent--insolence, secularity, sensuality, venality,
-idleness, vice, and worthlessness of every kind in the Church; but there
-were two causes which, in addition to corruption from within, tended to
-open the ears of Christendom largely to the cry for Church reform. These
-were the stir in the intellectual movement from the days of the author
-of the Divine Comedy downwards, enforced by the invention of printing in
-the middle of the fifteenth century, which was amply sufficient to
-become a danger to even a much less vulnerable creed than that which had
-satisfied the crude demands of medieval intelligence; and, in the second
-place, the hostility which the insolence and ambition of Churchmen had
-roused in the secular magistracy--that is, not only the monarch and
-his official ministers, but the great body of the higher nobility who
-found themselves ousted from their place in the familiar counsels of the
-monarch by the advocates and ambassadors of a foreign potentate. Thus
-the two best friends of every Established Church in its normal state
-were converted into enemies; and the natural indignation of the common
-people at the licentious lives and gross venality of the clergy was
-stimulated into an explosion by the desire of the secular dignities to
-curb the pride of the clergy, and, it might lightly happen also, to rob
-them of part of their overgrown wealth, nominally for the public good,
-really for the aggrandisement of the Crown and the nobility. The
-shameless nepotism of Pope Sixtus IV., the flagitious lives and
-abhorrent practices of the Borgias, more fit for a sensational melodrama
-in the lowest Parisian theatre than for the home of a Christian bishop;
-the military rage of a Julius, who turned the Church of Christ into a
-travelling camp and the bishop's crozier into a soldier's
-sword; the literary dilettantism of the Court of Leo X., more eager to
-distinguish itself by the elegant trimming of Latin versicles than by
-apostolic zeal and Christian purity,--all this, so long as it
-disported itself on Italian ground, the aristocracy of England and
-Scotland might have continued to look on with indifference; but that the
-son of anybody or nobody, in a county of unvalued clodhoppers, should
-jostle them in the antechamber of the monarch, and claim precedence in
-the hall of audience, simply because he was the supple instrument of an
-insolent Italian priest, this was not to be borne; and so the
-Reformation came, with the mob of the lowest classes, the mass of the
-respectable middle classes, the most influential of the nobility, and
-the power of the Crown, all in full cry against the ecclesiastical fox.
-The revolution thus volcanically effected, and known in history under
-the name of Protestantism, meant simply the right of every individual
-member of the Christian Church to take the principles and the practice
-of his Church directly from the original records of the Church, without
-the intervention of any body of authorised interpreters; and the
-necessary product of this right when exercised was first to declare
-certain practices and doctrines that had grown up in the Church through
-long centuries to be unauthorised departures from the original
-simplicity and purity of the gospel; and, further, to deny that there
-existed in the Christian Church, as originally constituted, any class or
-caste of men enjoying the exclusive privilege to perform sacred
-functions, and endowed with a divine virtue to perform sacramental
-miracles by their consecrating touch,--in a word, that there was no
-priesthood, properly so called, in the Reformed Christian Church. Nor is
-this doctrine, as some may think, the teaching only of the Helvetic
-confession, what certain persons have been fond to call extreme
-Protestantism; for, though the word priest has been retained in the
-English prayerbook as a minister in sacred things of a particular grade
-and exercising a particular function, the attempt made by Archbishop
-Laud and the Romanising party in the Reformed Church of England to
-retain in the bosom of the Anglican Church the ideas which the ancient
-Jews and the Romish Christians attached to the word _priest_,
-proved a signal failure; and for the sacerdotal despotism which it
-implied, as well as for the secular despotism which the priest advised
-and encouraged the unfortunate king to assert, the adviser and the
-advised justly lost their heads. Of all the teachings of Church history,
-from the Waldenses in the twelfth century down to the present hour,
-there is nothing more certain than this, that between Popery and
-Protestantism there is no middle term possible. They may agree, in fact
-they do agree, in many essential things, and in a few accidental; but in
-the fundamental principle of Church administration they are
-diametrically opposed. The principle of the one is sacerdotal authority,
-absolute and unqualified; the principle of the other is individual and
-congregational liberty. The one form of polity is a close oligarchy, the
-other either a free democracy or an aristocracy more or less penetrated
-by a democratic spirit.
-
-The practical outcome of this great Protestant movement, in the midst of
-which we live, cannot fail to a reasonable eye to appear in the highest
-degree satisfactory. Never was the life of the Christian Church at once
-more intensely earnest and more expansively distributive than at the
-present moment. On the one hand, the Roman Church, wisely taught by the
-experience of the past, though obstinately cleaving to that stout
-conservatism of doctrine and ritual inherent in the very bones of all
-sacerdotal religions, has been, in the main, studious to avoid those
-causes of offence from which the great rupture proceeded. On the other
-hand, the Protestant Churches, shaken free from the distracting
-influence of sacerdotal assumption and secular ambition, have found
-themselves in a condition to permeate all classes of society with a
-moral virtue, of whose regenerative action Plato and Socrates, in their
-best hours, could not have dreamed. Some people, while gladly admitting
-the immense amount of social good that is done by the various sections
-of the Protestant Church, never cease to sigh for a lost ecclesiastical
-unity, and to lament the unseemly strifes that arise among those that
-should be possessed by one spirit and strive together for a common end.
-But the persons who speak thus are either sentimental weaklings, being
-Protestants, or are Romanists and sacerdotalists in their heart. Variety
-is the law of nature in the moral no less than in the physical world;
-and the absorption of all sects into one results in a stagnation which
-will never be found amongst moral beings, unless when produced by
-weakness of vital force from within, or unnatural suppression from
-above. The two dominant types of church polity recognised in this
-country since the Reformation--the Episcopal and the Presbyterian--of
-which the one boasts a more aristocratic intellectual culture, and the
-other a more fervid and forcible popular action, may well be allowed to
-exist together on a mutual understanding of giving and taking whatever
-is best in each, and thus, in apostolic language, provoking one another
-to love and to good works. Competition is for the public benefit as much
-in churches as in trades. Dissent from any dominant body, even though it
-may proceed from the exaggerated importance given to a secondary matter,
-will always produce the good result that the dominant body will thereby
-be stirred to greater activity and greater watchfulness; so that, in
-this view, we may lay it down as one of the great lessons of history
-that the best form of church government is a strong establishment
-qualified by a strong dissent. As to the proposals which have in recent
-times been made for the formal separation of Church and State, they bear
-on their face more of a political than of a religious significance.
-Impartial history offers no countenance to the notion that Established
-Churches, when well flanked by dissent, and in an age when the spiritual
-ruler has ceased to make the arm of the State the tool of intolerance,
-are contrary either to piety or to policy; and in the desire so loudly
-expressed at election contests to lay violent hands on the valuable
-organism of church agency existing in this country, the venerated
-inheritance of many ages of patriotic struggle, the student of history,
-with a charitable allowance for the best motives in not a few, feels
-himself constrained to suspect in all such movements no small admixture
-of sectarian jealousy, fussy religiosity, and domineering democracy.
-Christianity, of course, stands in no need of an Established Church;
-religion existed for three hundred years in the church without any State
-connection, and may exist again; but Christianity does, above all
-things, abhor the stirring up of strife betwixt Church and Church from
-motives of jealousy, envy, or greed; and, along with the highest
-philosophy and the most far-sighted political wisdom, must protest in
-the strongest terms against the abolishing of a useful ethical
-institution to gratify the insane lust of levelling in a mere numerical
-majority.
-
-The Church of the future, whether established or disestablished, or, as
-I think best, both together, provoking one another to love and to good
-works, has a great mission before it, if it keep sharply in view the two
-lessons which the teaching of eighteen centuries so eloquently enforces.
-Our evangelists must remove from the van of their evangelic force all
-that sharp fence of metaphysical subtlety and scholastic dogma, which,
-being ostentatiously paraded in creeds and catechisms, has given more
-just offence to those without than edification to those within the
-Church; the gospel must be presented to the world with all that catholic
-breadth, kindly humanity, and popular directness which were its boast
-before it was laced and screwed into artificial shapes by the decrees of
-intolerent councils, and the subtleties of ingenious schoolmen. And,
-again, they must not allow the gospel to be handled, what is too often
-the case, as a mere message of hope and comfort in view of a future
-world; but they must make it walk directly into the complex relations of
-modern society, and think that it has done nothing till the ideal of
-sentiment and conduct which it preached on Sunday has been more or less
-practised on Monday. In fact, there ought to be less vague preaching on
-Sunday, and more specific and direct application through the week of
-gospel principle in various spheres of the intellectual and moral life
-of the community. If, in addition to this, our prophets of the pulpit
-take care to keep abreast of the intellectual movement of the age, so as
-not only to stir the world in sermons, but to guide them in the wisdom
-of daily life, they have nothing to fear from all the windy artillery
-that the speculations of a soulless physical science, the imaginations
-of a dreamy socialism, or the dogmatism of a cold philosophical
-formalism, can bring to bear upon them. Let them grapple bravely with
-all social problems, and prove whether Christianity, which has done so
-much to purify the motives of individuals, may not be able also to put a
-more effective steam into the machinery of society. If they shall fail
-here, they will fail gloriously, having done their best. It is not given
-to any people, however great, to solve all problems. When Great Britain
-shall have played out her part, there will be scope enough in the
-process of the ages for another stout social worker to place the cornice
-on the edifice of which she was privileged to raise the pillars.
-
-The End
-
-
-
-FOOTNOTES.
-
-[Footnote 1]
-
-Plutarch conjugalia præcepta init.
-
-
-[Footnote 2]
-
-The word _clan_ is the familiar, well-known Celtic word for _children_.
-
-
-[Footnote 3]
-
-"Nulli alii sunt homines qui talem in liberos habeant potestatem qualem
-nos habemus." _Institut_. i. 9, 2.
-
-
-[Footnote 4]
-
-Thucyd. ii. 15. The Athenians went further, and attributed to the son
-of Ægeus the creation of their democracy (Pausan., _Att_. iii.); but
-this, of course, was only the popular instinct, everywhere active, which
-loves to heap all graces upon the head of a favourite hero.
-
-
-[Footnote 5]
-
-See the words of the Latin league, Dionys. Hal. vi. 95, contrasting
-strongly with the original collection of autonomous villages described
-by Strabo, v. 229, κατἁ κώμας αὐτονομεῖσθαι.
-
-
-[Footnote 6]
-
-The influence of the great city in centralising the villages and making
-a state possible was in Greece philologically stereotyped by the fact
-that for _city_ and _state_ the language had only one word, πόλις. The
-_city_ was the _state_ in the same sense that the head is the body, for
-without the head no living body could be.
-
-
-[Footnote 7]
-
-ὁ στρατιωτικὸς βίος πολλὰ ἒχει μέρη τῶς ἀρετῆς.--Aristot. Pol. ii. 9.
-St. Paul also frequently in the Epistles, and Clemens Romanus (Oxon.
-1633, p. 48) refers to the military profession as a great school of
-manly virtue.
-
-
-[Footnote 8]
-
-Spalding's _Italy_, ii. p. 284.
-
-
-[Footnote 9]
-
-_On Method in Political Science_.
-
-
-[Footnote 10]
-
-Sismondi, _Etudes sur l'economie politique_, Essai iv.
-
-
-[Footnote 11]
-
-With which sentence Mr. Freeman agrees. _Comparative Politics_,
-Lecture iii. p. 78.
-
-
-[Footnote 12]
-
-This parallel has been noticed by the thoughtful Germans; see
-particularly Zacharia Sulla, i. 40.
-
-
-[Footnote 13]
-
-τίνος γὰρ ἂλλου ζῴου ψυχὴ πρῶτα μὲν θεῶν τῶν τὰ μέγιστα καὶ
-κάλλιστα συνταξάντων ᾔσθηται ὃτι εἰσι: τί δὲ φῦλον ἄλλο ἢ
-ἄνθρωποι θεοὺς θεραπεύουσι.--Xen. _Mem_. i. 4.
-
-
-[Footnote 14]
-
-_Iliad_, iii. 271; and compare Virgil, _Æneid_, iii. 80.
-
-
-[Footnote 15]
-
-Xen., _Rep. Lac._, i. 15; Herod, vi. 56.
-
-
-[Footnote 16]
-
-Pollux, viii. 90.
-
-
-[Footnote 17]
-
-Xen., _Mem_. i. 3.
-
-
-[Footnote 18]
-
-From the διδαχή τῶν ἀποστόλων, or _Early Teaching of the Apostles_,
-lately discovered, ch. viii., we learn that it was the custom of
-the early Christians to observe two days of fasting in the
-week--Wednesday and Friday.--Edit. Oxford Parker, 1885.
-
-
-[Footnote 19]
-
-In the διδαχή τῶν ἀποστόλων there is absolutely no dogma. It is all
-practice, and this is quite in harmony with the use of διδαχή by Paul
-(I Tim. i. 10), and indeed with the whole tone of these two admirable
-epistles.
-
-
-[Footnote 20]
-
-In the διδαχή τῶν ἀποστόλων, c. xiii., the "_prophets_" are said to be
-to Christians what the "_high priests_" were to the Jews,--a
-phraseology which could not possibly have been used had any priesthood,
-in the Hebrew sense, existed in the early Church.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-End of Project Gutenberg's What Does History Teach?, by John Stuart Blackie
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