PART I.

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SHORT STUDIES

ON

GREAT SUBJECTS.

LONDON

PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO.

NEW-STREET SQUARE

SHORT STUDIES

ON

GREAT SUBJECTS.

BY

JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE, M.A.

LATE FELLOW OF EXETER COLLEGE, OXFORD.

_SECOND EDITION._

LONDON:

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.

1867.

CONTENTS.

PAGE

THE SCIENCE OF HISTORY 1

TIMES OF ERASMUS AND LUTHER:

Lecture I 26

Lecture II 50

Lecture III 75

THE INFLUENCE OF THE REFORMATION ON THE SCOTTISH CHARACTER 102

THE PHILOSOPHY OF CATHOLICISM 124

A PLEA FOR THE FREE DISCUSSION OF THEOLOGICAL DIFFICULTIES 133

CRITICISM AND THE GOSPEL HISTORY 159

THE BOOK OF JOB 185

SPINOZA 223

THE DISSOLUTION OF THE MONASTERIES 265

ENGLAND'S FORGOTTEN WORTHIES 294

HOMER 334

THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS 363

REPRESENTATIVE MEN 384

REYNARD THE FOX 401

THE CAT'S PILGRIMAGE:

Part I 419

Part II 422

Part III 427

Part IV 430

FABLES:

I. The Lions and the Oxen 433

II. The Farmer and the Fox 434

PARABLE OF THE BREAD-FRUIT TREE 436

COMPENSATION 439

THE SCIENCE OF HISTORY:

A LECTURE DELIVERED AT THE ROYAL INSTITUTION

FEBRUARY 5, 1864.

Ladies and Gentlemen,--I have undertaken to speak to you this evening on

what is called the Science of History. I fear it is a dry subject; and

there seems, indeed, something incongruous in the very connection of

such words as Science and History. It is as if we were to talk of the

colour of sound, or the longitude of the rule-of-three. Where it is so

difficult to make out the truth on the commonest disputed fact in

matters passing under our very eyes, how can we talk of a science in

things long past, which come to us only through books? It often seems to

me as if History was like a child's box of letters, with which we can

spell any word we please. We have only to pick out such letters as we

want, arrange them as we like, and say nothing about those which do not

suit our purpose.

I will try to make the thing intelligible, and I will try not to weary

you; but I am doubtful of my success either way. First, however, I wish

to say a word or two about the eminent person whose name is connected

with this way of looking at History, and whose premature death struck us

all with such a sudden sorrow. Many of you, perhaps, recollect Mr.

Buckle as he stood not so long ago in this place. He spoke more than an

hour without a note--never repeating himself, never wasting words;

laying out his matter as easily and as pleasantly as if he had been

talking to us at his own fireside. We might think what we pleased of Mr.

Buckle's views, but it was plain enough that he was a man of uncommon

power; and he had qualities also--qualities to which he, perhaps,

himself attached little value, as rare as they were admirable.

Most of us, when we have hit on something which we are pleased to think

important and original, feel as if we should burst with it. We come out

into the book-market with our wares in hand, and ask for thanks and

recognition. Mr. Buckle, at an early age, conceived the thought which

made him famous, but he took the measure of his abilities. He knew that

whenever he pleased he could command personal distinction, but he cared

more for his subject than for himself. He was contented to work with

patient reticence, unknown and unheard of, for twenty years; and then,

at middle life, he produced a work which was translated at once into

French and German, and, of all places in the world, fluttered the

dovecotes of the Imperial Academy of St. Petersburg.

Goethe says somewhere, that as soon as a man has done anything

remarkable, there seems to be a general conspiracy to prevent him from

doing it again. He is feasted, fêted, caressed; his time is stolen from

him by breakfasts, dinners, societies, idle businesses of a thousand

kinds. Mr. Buckle had his share of all this; but there are also more

dangerous enemies that wait upon success like his. He had scarcely won

for himself the place which he deserved, than his health was found

shattered by his labours. He had but time to show us how large a man he

was--time just to sketch the outlines of his philosophy, and he passed

away as suddenly as he appeared. He went abroad to recover strength for

his work, but his work was done with and over. He died of a fever at

Damascus, vexed only that he was compelled to leave it uncompleted.

Almost his last conscious words were, 'My book, my book! I shall never

finish my book!' He went away as he had lived, nobly careless of

himself, and thinking only of the thing which he had undertaken to do.

But his labour had not been thrown away. Disagree with him as we might,

the effect which he had already produced was unmistakable, and it is not

likely to pass away. What he said was not essentially new. Some such

interpretation of human things is as early as the beginning of thought.

But Mr. Buckle, on the one hand, had the art which belongs to men of

genius; he could present his opinions with peculiar distinctness; and,

on the other hand, there is much in the mode of speculation at present

current among us for which those opinions have an unusual fascination.

They do not please us, but they excite and irritate us. We are angry

with them; and we betray, in being so, an uneasy misgiving that there

may be more truth in those opinions than we like to allow.

Mr. Buckle's general theory was something of this kind: When human

creatures began first to look about them in the world they lived in,

there seemed to be no order in anything. Days and nights were not the

same length. The air was sometimes hot and sometimes cold. Some of the

stars rose and set like the sun; some were almost motionless in the sky;

some described circles round a central star above the north horizon. The

planets went on principles of their own; and in the elements there

seemed nothing but caprice. Sun and moon would at times go out in

eclipse. Sometimes the earth itself would shake under men's feet; and

they could only suppose that earth and air and sky and water were

inhabited and managed by creatures as wayward as themselves.

Time went on, and the disorder began to arrange itself. Certain

influences seemed beneficent to men, others malignant and destructive,

and the world was supposed to be animated by good spirits and evil

spirits, who were continually fighting against each other, in outward

nature and in human creatures themselves. Finally, as men observed more

and imagined less, these interpretations gave way also. Phenomena the

most opposite in effect were seen to be the result of the same natural

law. The fire did not burn the house down if the owners of it were

careful, but remained on the hearth and boiled the pot; nor did it seem

more inclined to burn a bad man's house down than a good man's, provided

the badness did not take the form of negligence. The phenomena of nature

were found for the most part to proceed in an orderly, regular way, and

their variations to be such as could be counted upon. From observing the

order of things, the step was easy to cause and effect. An eclipse,

instead of being a sign of the anger of Heaven, was found to be the

necessary and innocent result of the relative position of sun, moon, and

earth. The comets became bodies in space, unrelated to the beings who

had imagined that all creation was watching them and their doings. By

degrees, caprice, volition, all symptoms of arbitrary action,

disappeared out of the universe; and almost every phenomenon in earth

or heaven was found attributable to some law, either understood or

perceived to exist. Thus nature was reclaimed from the imagination. The

first fantastic conception of things gave way before the moral; the

moral in turn gave way before the natural; and at last there was left

but one small tract of jungle where the theory of law had failed to

penetrate--the doings and characters of human creatures themselves.

There, and only there, amidst the conflicts of reason and emotion,

conscience and desire, spiritual forces were still conceived to exist.

Cause and effect were not traceable when there was a free volition to

disturb the connection. In all other things, from a given set of

conditions, the consequences necessarily followed. With man, the word

law changed its meaning; and instead of a fixed order, which he could

not choose but follow, it became a moral precept, which he might disobey

if he dared.

This it was which Mr. Buckle disbelieved. The economy which prevailed

throughout nature, he thought it very unlikely should admit of this

exception. He considered that human beings acted necessarily from the

impulse of outward circumstances upon their mental and bodily condition

at any given moment. Every man, he said, acted from a motive; and his

conduct was determined by the motive which affected him most powerfully.

Every man naturally desires what he supposes to be good for him; but to

do well, he must know well. He will eat poison, so long as he does not

know that it is poison. Let him see that it will kill him, and he will

not touch it. The question was not of moral right and wrong. Once let

him be thoroughly made to feel that the thing is destructive, and he

will leave it alone by the law of his nature. His virtues are the result

of knowledge; his faults, the necessary consequence of the want of it. A

boy desires to draw. He knows nothing about it: he draws men like trees

or houses, with their centre of gravity anywhere. He makes mistakes,

because he knows no better. We do not blame him. Till he is better

taught he cannot help it. But his instruction begins. He arrives at

straight lines; then at solids; then at curves. He learns perspective,

and light and shade. He observes more accurately the forms which he

wishes to represent. He perceives effects, and he perceives the means by

which they are produced. He has learned what to do; and, in part, he

has learned how to do it. His after-progress will depend on the amount

of force which his nature possesses; but all this is as natural as the

growth of an acorn. You do not preach to the acorn that it is its duty

to become a large tree; you do not preach to the art-pupil that it is

his duty to become a Holbein. You plant your acorn in favourable soil,

where it can have light and air, and be sheltered from the wind; you

remove the superfluous branches, you train the strength into the leading

shoots. The acorn will then become as fine a tree as it has vital force

to become. The difference between men and other things is only in the

largeness and variety of man's capacities; and in this special capacity,

that he alone has the power of observing the circumstances favourable to

his own growth, and can apply them for himself. Yet, again, with this

condition,--that he is not, as is commonly supposed, free to choose

whether he will make use of these appliances or not. When he knows what

is good for him, he will choose it; and he will judge what is good for

him by the circumstances which have made him what he is.

And what he would do, Mr. Buckle supposed that he always had done. His

history had been a natural growth as much as the growth of the acorn.

His improvement had followed the progress of his knowledge; and, by a

comparison of his outward circumstances with the condition of his mind,

his whole proceedings on this planet, his creeds and constitutions, his

good deeds and his bad, his arts and his sciences, his empires and his

revolutions, would be found all to arrange themselves into clear

relations of cause and effect.

If, when Mr. Buckle pressed his conclusions, we objected the difficulty

of finding what the truth about past times really was, he would admit it

candidly as far as concerned individuals; but there was not the same

difficulty, he said, with masses of men. We might disagree about the

characters of Julius or Tiberius Cæsar, but we could know well enough

the Romans of the Empire. We had their literature to tell us how they

thought; we had their laws to tell us how they governed; we had the

broad face of the world, the huge mountainous outline of their general

doings upon it, to tell us how they acted. He believed it was all

reducible to laws, and could be made as intelligible as the growth of

the chalk cliffs or the coal measures.

And thus consistently Mr. Buckle cared little for individuals. He did

not believe (as some one has said) that the history of mankind is the

history of its great men. Great men with him were but larger atoms,

obeying the same impulses with the rest, only perhaps a trifle more

erratic. With them or without them, the course of things would have been

much the same.

As an illustration of the truth of his view, he would point to the new

science of Political Economy. Here already was a large area of human

activity in which natural laws were found to act unerringly. Men had

gone on for centuries trying to regulate trade on moral principles. They

would fix wages according to some imaginary rule of fairness; they would

fix prices by what they considered things ought to cost; they encouraged

one trade or discouraged another, for moral reasons. They might as well

have tried to work a steam-engine on moral reasons. The great statesmen

whose names were connected with these enterprises might have as well

legislated that water should run up-hill. There were natural laws, fixed

in the conditions of things: and to contend against them was the old

battle of the Titans against the gods.

As it was with political economy, so it was with all other forms of

human activity; and as the true laws of political economy explained the

troubles which people fell into in old times, because they were ignorant

of them, so the true laws of human nature, as soon as we knew them,

would explain their mistakes in more serious matters, and enable us to

manage better for the future. Geographical position, climate, air, soil,

and the like, had their several influences. The northern nations are

hardy and industrious, because they must till the earth if they would

eat the fruits of it, and because the temperature is too low to make an

idle life enjoyable. In the south, the soil is more productive, while

less food is wanted and fewer clothes; and in the exquisite air,

exertion is not needed to make the sense of existence delightful.

Therefore, in the south we find men lazy and indolent.

True, there are difficulties in these views; the home of the languid

Italian was the home also of the sternest race of whom the story of

mankind retains a record. And again, when we are told that the Spaniards

are superstitious, because Spain is a country of earthquakes, we

remember Japan, the spot in all the world where earthquakes are most

frequent, and where at the same time there is the most serene disbelief

in any supernatural agency whatsoever.

Moreover, if men grow into what they are by natural laws, they cannot

help being what they are; and if they cannot help being what they are, a

good deal will have to be altered in our general view of human

obligations and responsibilities.

That, however, in these theories there is a great deal of truth is quite

certain; were there but a hope that those who maintain them would be

contented with that admission. A man born in a Mahometan country grows

up a Mahometan; in a Catholic country, a Catholic; in a Protestant

country, a Protestant. His opinions are like his language; he learns to

think as he learns to speak; and it is absurd to suppose him responsible

for being what nature makes him. We take pains to educate children.

There is a good education and a bad education; there are rules well

ascertained by which characters are influenced, and, clearly enough, it

is no mere matter for a boy's free will whether he turns out well or

ill. We try to train him into good habits; we keep him out of the way of

temptations; we see that he is well taught; we mix kindness and

strictness; we surround him with every good influence we can command.

These are what are termed the advantages of a good education: and if we

fail to provide those under our care with it, and if they go wrong, the

responsibility we feel is as much ours as theirs. This is at once an

admission of the power over us of outward circumstances.

In the same way, we allow for the strength of temptations, and the like.

In general, it is perfectly obvious that men do necessarily absorb, out

of the influences in which they grow up, something which gives a

complexion to their whole after-character.

When historians have to relate great social or speculative changes, the

overthrow of a monarchy or the establishment of a creed, they do but

half their duty if they merely relate the events. In an account, for

instance, of the rise of Mahometanism, it is not enough to describe the

character of the Prophet, the ends which he set before him, the means

which he made use of, and the effect which he produced; the historian

must show what there was in the condition of the Eastern races which

enabled Mahomet to act upon them so powerfully; their existing beliefs,

their existing moral and political condition.

In our estimate of the past, and in our calculations of the future--in

the judgments which we pass upon one another, we measure responsibility,

not by the thing done, but by the opportunities which people have had of

knowing better or worse. In the efforts which we make to keep our

children from bad associations or friends we admit that external

circumstances have a powerful effect in making men what they are.

But are circumstances everything? That is the whole question. A science

of history, if it is more than a misleading name, implies that the

relation between cause and effect holds in human things as completely as

in all others, that the origin of human actions is not to be looked for

in mysterious properties of the mind, but in influences which are

palpable and ponderable.

When natural causes are liable to be set aside and neutralised by what

is called volition, the word Science is out of place. If it is free to a

man to choose what he will do or not do, there is no adequate science of

him. If there is a science of him, there is no free choice, and the

praise or blame with which we regard one another are impertinent and out

of place.

I am trespassing upon these ethical grounds because, unless I do, the

subject cannot be made intelligible. Mankind are but an aggregate of

individuals--History is but the record of individual action; and what is

true of the part, is true of the whole.

We feel keenly about such things, and when the logic becomes perplexing,

we are apt to grow rhetorical about them. But rhetoric is only

misleading. Whatever the truth may be, it is best that we should know

it; and for truth of any kind we should keep our heads and hearts as

cool as we can.

I will say at once, that if we had the whole case before us--if we were

taken, like Leibnitz's Tarquin, into the council chamber of nature, and

were shown what we really were, where we came from, and where we were

going, however unpleasant it might be for some of us to find ourselves,

like Tarquin, made into villains, from the subtle necessities of 'the

best of all possible worlds;' nevertheless, some such theory as Mr.

Buckle's might possibly turn out to be true. Likely enough, there is

some great 'equation of the universe' where the value of the unknown

quantities can be determined. But we must treat things in relation to

our own powers and position; and the question is, whether the sweep of

those vast curves can be measured by the intellect of creatures of a day

like ourselves.

The 'Faust' of Goethe, tired of the barren round of earthly knowledge,

calls magic to his aid. He desires, first, to see the spirit of the

Macrocosmos, but his heart fails him before he ventures that tremendous

experiment, and he summons before him, instead, the spirit of his own

race. There he feels himself at home. The stream of life and the storm

of action, the everlasting ocean of existence, the web and the woof, and

the roaring loom of time--he gazes upon them all, and in passionate

exultation claims fellowship with the awful thing before him. But the

majestic vision fades, and a voice comes to him--'Thou art fellow with

the spirits which thy mind can grasp--not with me.'

Had Mr. Buckle tried to follow his principles into detail, it might have

fared no better with him than with 'Faust.'

What are the conditions of a science? and when may any subject be said

to enter the scientific stage? I suppose when the facts of it begin to

resolve themselves into groups; when phenomena are no longer isolated

experiences, but appear in connection and order; when, after certain

antecedents, certain consequences are uniformly seen to follow; when

facts enough have been collected to furnish a basis for conjectural

explanation, and when conjectures have so far ceased to be utterly

vague, that it is possible in some degree to foresee the future by the

help of them.

Till a subject has advanced as far as this, to speak of a science of it

is an abuse of language. It is not enough to say that there must be a

science of human things, because there is a science of all other things.

This is like saying the planets must be inhabited, because the only

planet of which we have any experience is inhabited. It may or may not

be true, but it is not a practical question; it does not affect the

practical treatment of the matter in hand.

Let us look at the history of Astronomy.

So long as sun, moon, and planets were supposed to be gods or angels; so

long as the sword of Orion was not a metaphor, but a fact, and the

groups of stars which inlaid the floor of heaven were the glittering

trophies of the loves and wars of the Pantheon, so long there was no

science of Astronomy. There was fancy, imagination, poetry, perhaps

reverence, but no science. As soon, however, as it was observed that the

stars retained their relative places--that the times of their rising and

setting varied with the seasons--that sun, moon, and planets moved among

them in a plane, and the belt of the Zodiac was marked out and divided,

then a new order of things began. Traces of the earlier stage remained

in the names of the signs and constellations, just as the Scandinavian

mythology survives now in the names of the days of the week: but for all

that, the understanding was now at work on the thing; Science had begun,

and the first triumph of it was the power of foretelling the future.

Eclipses were perceived to recur in cycles of nineteen years, and

philosophers were able to say when an eclipse was to be looked for. The

periods of the planets were determined. Theories were invented to

account for their eccentricities; and, false as those theories might be,

the position of the planets could be calculated with moderate certainty

by them. The very first result of the science, in its most imperfect

stage, was a power of foresight; and this was possible before any one

true astronomical law had been discovered.

We should not therefore question the possibility of a science of

history, because the explanations of its phenomena were rudimentary or

imperfect: that they might be, and might long continue to be, and yet

enough might be done to show that there was such a thing, and that it

was not entirely without use. But how was it that in those rude days,

with small knowledge of mathematics, and with no better instruments than

flat walls and dial plates, those first astronomers made progress so

considerable? Because, I suppose, the phenomena which they were

observing recurred, for the most part, within moderate intervals; so

that they could collect large experience within the compass of their

natural lives: because days and months and years were measurable

periods, and within them the more simple phenomena perpetually repeated

themselves.

But how would it have been if, instead of turning on its axis once in

twenty-four hours, the earth had taken a year about it; if the year had

been nearly four hundred years; if man's life had been no longer than it

is, and for the initial steps of astronomy there had been nothing to

depend upon except observations recorded in history? How many ages would

have passed, had this been our condition, before it would have occurred

to any one, that, in what they saw night after night, there was any kind

of order at all?

We can see to some extent how it would have been, by the present state

of those parts of the science which in fact depend on remote recorded

observations. The movements of the comets are still extremely uncertain.

The times of their return can be calculated only with the greatest

vagueness.

And yet such a hypothesis as I have suggested would but inadequately

express the position in which we are in fact placed towards history.

There the phenomena never repeat themselves. There we are dependent

wholly on the record of things said to have happened once, but which

never happen or can happen a second time. There no experiment is

possible; we can watch for no recurring fact to test the worth of our

conjectures. It has been suggested, fancifully, that if we consider the

universe to be infinite, time is the same as eternity, and the past is

perpetually present. Light takes nine years to come to us from Sirius;

those rays which we may see to-night when we leave this place, left

Sirius nine years ago; and could the inhabitants of Sirius see the earth

at this moment, they would see the English army in the trenches before

Sebastopol; Florence Nightingale watching at Scutari over the wounded at

Inkermann; and the peace of England undisturbed by 'Essays and Reviews.'

As the stars recede into distance, so time recedes with them, and there

may be, and probably are, stars from which Noah might be seen stepping

into the ark, Eve listening to the temptation of the serpent, or that

older race, eating the oysters and leaving the shell-heaps behind them,

when the Baltic was an open sea.

Could we but compare notes, something might be done; but of this there

is no present hope, and without it there will be no science of history.

Eclipses, recorded in ancient books, can be verified by calculation, and

lost dates can be recovered by them, and we can foresee by the laws

which they follow when there will be eclipses again. Will a time ever

be when the lost secret of the foundation of Rome can be recovered by

historic laws? If not, where is our science? It may be said that this is

a particular fact, that we can deal satisfactorily with general

phenomena affecting eras and cycles. Well, then, let us take some

general phenomenon. Mahometanism, for instance, or Buddhism. Those are

large enough. Can you imagine a science which would have[A] _foretold_

such movements as those? The state of things out of which they rose is

obscure; but suppose it not obscure, can you conceive that, with any

amount of historical insight into the old Oriental beliefs, you could

have seen that they were about to transform themselves into those

particular forms and no other?

It is not enough to say, that, after the fact, you can understand

partially how Mahometanism came to be. All historians worth the name

have told us something about that. But when we talk of science, we mean

something with more ambitious pretences, we mean something which can

foresee as well as explain; and, thus looked at, to state the problem is

to show its absurdity. As little could the wisest man have foreseen this

mighty revolution, as thirty years ago such a thing as Mormonism could

have been anticipated in America; as little as it could have been

foreseen that table-turning and spirit-rapping would have been an

outcome of the scientific culture of England in the nineteenth century.

The greatest of Roman thinkers, gazing mournfully at the seething mass

of moral putrefaction round him, detected and deigned to notice among

its elements a certain detestable superstition, so he called it, rising

up amidst the offscouring of the Jews, which was named Christianity.

Could Tacitus have looked forward nine centuries to the Rome of Gregory

VII., could he have beheld the representative of the majesty of the

Cæsars holding the stirrup of the Pontiff of that vile and execrated

sect, the spectacle would scarcely have appeared to him the fulfilment

of a rational expectation, or an intelligible result of the causes in

operation round him. Tacitus, indeed, was born before the science of

history; but would M. Comte have seen any more clearly?

Nor is the case much better if we are less hard upon our philosophy; if

we content ourselves with the past, and require only a scientific

explanation of that.

First, for the facts themselves. They come to us through the minds of

those who recorded them, neither machines nor angels, but fallible

creatures, with human passions and prejudices. Tacitus and Thucydides

were perhaps the ablest men who ever gave themselves to writing history;

the ablest, and also the most incapable of conscious falsehood. Yet even

now, after all these centuries, the truth of what they relate is called

in question. Good reasons can be given to show that neither of them can

be confidently trusted. If we doubt with these, whom are we to believe?

Or again, let the facts be granted. To revert to my simile of the box of

letters, you have but to select such facts as suit you, you have but to

leave alone those which do not suit you, and let your theory of history

be what it will, you can find no difficulty in providing facts to prove

it.

You may have your Hegel's philosophy of history, or you may have your

Schlegel's philosophy of history; you may prove from history that the

world is governed in detail by a special Providence; you may prove that

there is no sign of any moral agent in the universe, except man; you may

believe, if you like it, in the old theory of the wisdom of antiquity;

you may speak, as was the fashion in the fifteenth century, of 'our

fathers, who had more wit and wisdom than we;' or you may talk of 'our

barbarian ancestors,' and describe their wars as the scuffling of kites

and crows.

You may maintain that the evolution of humanity has been an unbroken

progress towards perfection; you may maintain that there has been no

progress at all, and that man remains the same poor creature that he

ever was; or, lastly, you may say with the author of the 'Contrat

Social,' that men were purest and best in primeval simplicity--

When wild in woods the noble savage ran.

In all, or any of these views, history will stand your friend. History,

in its passive irony, will make no objection. Like Jarno, in Goethe's

novel, it will not condescend to argue with you, and will provide you

with abundant illustrations of anything which you may wish to believe.

'What is history,' said Napoleon, 'but a fiction agreed upon?' 'My

friend,' said Faust to the student, who was growing enthusiastic about

the spirit of past ages; 'my friend, the times which are gone are a book

with seven seals; and what you call the spirit of past ages is but the

spirit of this or that worthy gentleman in whose mind those ages are

reflected.'

One lesson, and only one, history may be said to repeat with

distinctness; that the world is built somehow on moral foundations;

that, in the long run, it is well with the good; in the long run, it is

ill with the wicked. But this is no science; it is no more than the old

doctrine taught long ago by the Hebrew prophets. The theories of M.

Comte and his disciples advance us, after all, not a step beyond the

trodden and familiar ground. If men are not entirely animals, they are

at least half animals, and are subject in this aspect of them to the

conditions of animals. So far as those parts of man's doings are

concerned, which neither have, nor need have, anything moral about them,

so far the laws of him are calculable. There are laws for his digestion,

and laws of the means by which his digestive organs are supplied with

matter. But pass beyond them, and where are we? In a world where it

would be as easy to calculate men's actions by laws like those of

positive philosophy as to measure the orbit of Neptune with a foot-rule,

or weigh Sirius in a grocer's scale.

And it is not difficult to see why this should be. The first principle

on which the theory of a science of history can be plausibly argued, is

that all actions whatsoever arise from self-interest. It may be

enlightened self-interest; it may be unenlightened; but it is assumed as

an axiom, that every man, in whatever he does, is aiming at something

which he considers will promote his happiness. His conduct is not

determined by his will; it is determined by the object of his desire.

Adam Smith, in laying the foundations of political economy, expressly

eliminates every other motive. He does not say that men never act on

other motives; still less, that they never ought to act on other

motives. He asserts merely that, as far as the arts of production are

concerned, and of buying and selling, the action of self-interest may be

counted upon as uniform. What Adam Smith says of political economy, Mr.

Buckle would extend over the whole circle of human activity.

Now, that which especially distinguishes a high order of man from a low

order of man--that which constitutes human goodness, human greatness,

human nobleness--is surely not the degree of enlightenment with which

men pursue their own advantage; but it is self-forgetfulness--it is

self-sacrifice--it is the disregard of personal pleasure, personal

indulgence, personal advantages remote or present, because some other

line of conduct is more right.

We are sometimes told that this is but another way of expressing the

same thing; that when a man prefers doing what is right, it is only

because to do right gives him a higher satisfaction. It appears to me,

on the contrary, to be a difference in the very heart and nature of

things. The martyr goes to the stake, the patriot to the scaffold, not

with a view to any future reward to themselves, but because it is a

glory to fling away their lives for truth and freedom. And so through

all phases of existence, to the smallest details of common life, the

beautiful character is the unselfish character. Those whom we most love

and admire are those to whom the thought of self seems never to occur;

who do simply and with no ulterior aim--with no thought whether it will

be pleasant to themselves or unpleasant--that which is good, and right,

and generous.

Is this still selfishness, only more enlightened? I do not think so. The

essence of true nobility is neglect of self. Let the thought of self

pass in, and the beauty of a great action is gone--like the bloom from a

soiled flower. Surely it is a paradox to speak of the self-interest of a

martyr who dies for a cause, the triumph of which he will never enjoy;

and the greatest of that great company in all ages would have done what

they did, had their personal prospects closed with the grave. Nay, there

have been those so zealous for some glorious principle, as to wish

themselves blotted out of the book of Heaven if the cause of Heaven

could succeed.

And out of this mysterious quality, whatever it be, arise the higher

relations of human life, the higher modes of human obligation. Kant, the

philosopher, used to say that there were two things which overwhelmed

him with awe as he thought of them. One was the star-sown deep of space,

without limit and without end; the other was, right and wrong. Right,

the sacrifice of self to good; wrong, the sacrifice of good to

self;--not graduated objects of desire, to which we are determined by

the degrees of our knowledge, but wide asunder as pole and pole, as

light and darkness--one, the object of infinite love; the other, the

object of infinite detestation and scorn. It is in this marvellous power

in men to do wrong (it is an old story, but none the less true for

that)--it is in this power to do wrong--wrong or right, as it lies

somehow with ourselves to choose--that the impossibility stands of

forming scientific calculations of what men will do before the fact, or

scientific explanations of what they have done after the fact. If men

were consistently selfish, you might analyse their motives; if they were

consistently noble, they would express in their conduct the laws of the

highest perfection. But so long as two natures are mixed together, and

the strange creature which results from the combination is now under one

influence and now under another, so long you will make nothing of him

except from the old-fashioned moral--or, if you please,

imaginative--point of view.

Even the laws of political economy itself cease to guide us when they

touch moral government. So long as labour is a chattel to be bought and

sold, so long, like other commodities, it follows the condition of

supply and demand. But if, for his misfortune, an employer considers

that he stands in human relations towards his workmen; if he believes,

rightly or wrongly, that he is responsible for them; that in return for

their labour he is bound to see that their children are decently taught,

and they and their families decently fed and clothed and lodged; that he

ought to care for them in sickness and in old age; then political

economy will no longer direct him, and the relations between himself and

his dependents will have to be arranged on quite other principles.

So long as he considers only his own material profit, so long supply and

demand will settle every difficulty; but the introduction of a new

factor spoils the equation.

And it is precisely in this debatable ground of low motives and noble

emotions--in the struggle, ever failing, yet ever renewed, to carry

truth and justice into the administration of human society; in the

establishment of states and in the overthrow of tyrannies; in the rise

and fall of creeds; in the world of ideas; in the character and deeds of

the great actors in the drama of life; where good and evil fight out

their everlasting battle, now ranged in opposite camps, now and more

often in the heart, both of them, of each living man--that the true

human interest of history resides. The progress of industries, the

growth of material and mechanical civilisation, are interesting, but

they are not the most interesting. They have their reward in the

increase of material comforts; but, unless we are mistaken about our

nature, they do not highly concern us after all.

Once more; not only is there in men this baffling duality of principle,

but there is something else in us which still more defies scientific

analysis.

Mr. Buckle would deliver himself from the eccentricities of this and

that individual by a doctrine of averages. Though he cannot tell whether

A, B, or C will cut his throat, he may assure himself that one man in

every fifty thousand, or thereabout (I forget the exact proportion),

will cut his throat, and with this he consoles himself. No doubt it is a

comforting discovery. Unfortunately, the average of one generation need

not be the average of the next. We may be converted by the Japanese, for

all that we know, and the Japanese methods of taking leave of life may

become fashionable among us. Nay, did not Novalis suggest that the whole

race of men would at last become so disgusted with their impotence, that

they would extinguish themselves by a simultaneous act of suicide, and

make room for a better order of beings? Anyhow, the fountain out of

which the race is flowing perpetually changes--no two generations are

alike. Whether there is a change in the organisation itself, we cannot

tell; but this is certain, that as the planet varies with the atmosphere

which surrounds it, so each new generation varies from the last, because

it inhales as its atmosphere the accumulated experience and knowledge of

the whole past of the world. These things form the spiritual air which

we breathe as we grow; and in the infinite multiplicity of elements of

which that air is now composed, it is for ever matter of conjecture what

the minds will be like which expand under its influence.

From the England of Fielding and Richardson to the England of Miss

Austen--from the England of Miss Austen to the England of Railways and

Free-trade, how vast the change; yet perhaps Sir Charles Grandison would

not seem so strange to us now, as one of ourselves will seem to our

great-grandchildren. The world moves faster and faster; and the

difference will probably be considerably greater.

The temper of each new generation is a continual surprise. The fates

delight to contradict our most confident expectations. Gibbon believed

that the era of conquerors was at an end. Had he lived out the full life

of man, he would have seen Europe at the feet of Napoleon. But a few

years ago we believed the world had grown too civilised for war, and the

Crystal Palace in Hyde Park was to be the inauguration of a new era.

Battles, bloody as Napoleon's, are now the familiar tale of every day;

and the arts which have made greatest progress are the arts of

destruction. What next? We may strain our eyes into the future which

lies beyond this waning century; but never was conjecture more at fault.

It is blank darkness, which even the imagination fails to people.

What then is the use of History? and what are its lessons? If it can

tell us little of the past, and nothing of the future, why waste our

time over so barren a study?

First, it is a voice for ever sounding across the centuries the laws of

right and wrong. Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall,

but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity. For every false

word or unrighteous deed, for cruelty and oppression, for lust or

vanity, the price has to be paid at last: not always by the chief

offenders, but paid by some one. Justice and truth alone endure and

live. Injustice and falsehood may be long-lived, but doomsday comes at

last to them, in French revolutions and other terrible ways.

That is one lesson of History. Another is, that we should draw no

horoscopes; that we should expect little, for what we expect will not

come to pass. Revolutions, reformations--those vast movements into which

heroes and saints have flung themselves, in the belief that they were

the dawn of the millennium--have not borne the fruit which they looked

for. Millenniums are still far away. These great convulsions leave the

world changed--perhaps improved,--but not improved as the actors in them

hoped it would be. Luther would have gone to work with less heart, could

he have foreseen the Thirty Years' War, and in the distance the theology

of Tubingen. Washington might have hesitated to draw the sword against

England, could he have seen the country which he made as we see it

now.[B]

The most reasonable anticipations fail us--antecedents the most apposite

mislead us; because the conditions of human problems never repeat

themselves. Some new feature alters everything--some element which we

detect only in its after-operation.

But this, it may be said, is but a meagre outcome. Can the long records

of humanity, with all its joys and sorrows, its sufferings and its

conquests, teach us no more than this? Let us approach the subject from

another side.

If you were asked to point out the special features in which

Shakespeare's plays are so transcendently excellent, you would mention,

perhaps, among others, this, that his stories are not put together, and

his characters are not conceived, to illustrate any particular law or

principle. They teach many lessons, but not any one prominent above

another; and when we have drawn from them all the direct instruction

which they contain, there remains still something unresolved--something

which the artist gives, and which the philosopher cannot give.

It is in this characteristic that we are accustomed to say Shakespeare's

supreme _truth_ lies. He represents real life. His dramas teach as life

teaches--neither less nor more. He builds his fabrics as nature does, on

right and wrong; but he does not struggle to make nature more systematic

than she is. In the subtle interflow of good and evil--in the unmerited

sufferings of innocence--in the disproportion of penalties to desert--in

the seeming blindness with which justice, in attempting to assert

itself, overwhelms innocent and guilty in a common ruin--Shakespeare is

true to real experience. The mystery of life he leaves as he finds it;

and, in his most tremendous positions, he is addressing rather the

intellectual emotions than the understanding,--knowing well that the

understanding in such things is at fault, and the sage as ignorant as

the child.

Only the highest order of genius can represent nature thus. An inferior

artist produces either something entirely immoral, where good and evil

are names, and nobility of disposition is supposed to show itself in the

absolute disregard of them--or else, if he is a better kind of man, he

will force on nature a didactic purpose; he composes what are called

moral tales, which may edify the conscience, but only mislead the

intellect.

The finest work of this kind produced in modern times is Lessing's play

of 'Nathan the Wise.' The object of it is to teach religious toleration.

The doctrine is admirable--the mode in which it is enforced is

interesting; but it has the fatal fault, that it is not true. Nature

does not teach religious toleration by any such direct method; and the

result is--no one knew it better than Lessing himself--that the play is

not poetry, but only splendid manufacture. Shakespeare is eternal;

Lessing's 'Nathan' will pass away with the mode of thought which gave it

birth. One is based on fact; the other, on human theory about fact. The

theory seems at first sight to contain the most immediate instruction;

but it is not really so.

Cibber and others, as you know, wanted to alter Shakespeare. The French

king, in 'Lear,' was to be got rid of; Cordelia was to marry Edgar, and

Lear himself was to be rewarded for his sufferings by a golden old age.

They could not bear that Hamlet should suffer for the sins of Claudius.

The wicked king was to die, and the wicked mother; and Hamlet and

Ophelia were to make a match of it, and live happily ever after. A

common novelist would have arranged it thus; and you would have had your

comfortable moral that wickedness was fitly punished, and virtue had its

due reward, and all would have been well. But Shakespeare would not have

it so. Shakespeare knew that crime was not so simple in its

consequences, or Providence so paternal. He was contented to take the

truth from life; and the effect upon the mind of the most correct theory

of what life ought to be, compared to the effect of the life itself, is

infinitesimal in comparison.

Again, let us compare the popular historical treatment of remarkable

incidents with Shakespeare's treatment of them. Look at 'Macbeth.' You

may derive abundant instruction from it--instruction of many kinds.

There is a moral lesson of profound interest in the steps by which a

noble nature glides to perdition. In more modern fashion you may

speculate, if you like, on the political conditions represented there,

and the temptation presented in absolute monarchies to unscrupulous

ambition; you may say, like Dr. Slop, these things could not have

happened under a constitutional government; or, again, you may take up

your parable against superstition--you may dilate on the frightful

consequences of a belief in witches, and reflect on the superior

advantages of an age of schools and newspapers. If the bare facts of the

story had come down to us from a chronicler, and an ordinary writer of

the nineteenth century had undertaken to relate them, his account, we

may depend upon it, would have been put together upon one or other of

these principles. Yet, by the side of that unfolding of the secrets of

the prison-house of the soul, what lean and shrivelled anatomies the

best of such descriptions would seem!

Shakespeare himself, I suppose, could not have given us a theory of what

he meant--he gave us the thing itself, on which we might make whatever

theories we pleased.

Or again, look at Homer.

The 'Iliad' is from two to three thousand years older than 'Macbeth,'

and yet it is as fresh as if it had been written yesterday. We have

there no lessons save in the emotions which rise in us as we read. Homer

had no philosophy; he never struggles to impress upon us his views about

this or that; you can scarcely tell indeed whether his sympathies are

Greek or Trojan; but he represents to us faithfully the men and women

among whom he lived. He sang the Tale of Troy, he touched his lyre, he

drained the golden beaker in the halls of men like those on whom he was

conferring immortality. And thus, although no Agamemnon, king of men,

ever led a Grecian fleet to Ilium; though no Priam sought the midnight

tent of Achilles; though Ulysses and Diomed and Nestor were but names,

and Helen but a dream, yet, through Homer's power of representing men

and women, those old Greeks will still stand out from amidst the

darkness of the ancient world with a sharpness of outline which belongs

to no period of history except the most recent. For the mere hard

purposes of history, the 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey' are the most effective

books which ever were written. We see the Hall of Menelaus, we see the

garden of Alcinous, we see Nausicaa among her maidens on the shore, we

see the mellow monarch sitting with ivory sceptre in the Marketplace

dealing out genial justice. Or again, when the wild mood is on, we can

hear the crash of the spears, the rattle of the armour as the heroes

fall, and the plunging of the horses among the slain. Could we enter the

palace of an old Ionian lord, we know what we should see there; we know

the words in which he would address us. We could meet Hector as a

friend. If we could choose a companion to spend an evening with over a

fireside, it would be the man of many counsels, the husband of Penelope.

I am not going into the vexed question whether History or Poetry is the

more true. It has been sometimes said that Poetry is the more true,

because it can make things more like what our moral sense would prefer

they should be. We hear of poetic justice and the like, as if nature and

fact were not just enough.

I entirely dissent from that view. So far as Poetry attempts to improve

on truth in that way, so far it abandons truth, and is false to itself.

Even literal facts, exactly as they were, a great poet will prefer

whenever he can get them. Shakespeare in the historical plays is

studious, wherever possible, to give the very words which he finds to

have been used; and it shows how wisely he was guided in this, that

those magnificent speeches of Wolsey are taken exactly, with no more

change than the metre makes necessary, from Cavendish's Life.

Marlborough read Shakespeare for English history, and read nothing else.

The poet only is not bound, when it is inconvenient, to what may be

called the accidents of facts. It was enough for Shakespeare to know

that Prince Hal in his youth had lived among loose companions, and the

tavern in Eastcheap came in to fill out his picture; although Mrs.

Quickly and Falstaff, and Poins and Bardolph were more likely to have

been fallen in with by Shakespeare himself at the Mermaid, than to have

been comrades of the true Prince Henry. It was enough for Shakespeare to

draw real men, and the situation, whatever it might be, would sit easy

on them. In this sense only it is that Poetry is truer than History,

that it can make a picture more complete. It may take liberties with

time and space, and give the action distinctness by throwing it into

more manageable compass.

But it may not alter the real conditions of things, or represent life as

other than it is. The greatness of the poet depends on his being true to

nature, without insisting that nature shall theorise with him, without

making her more just, more philosophical, more moral than reality; and,

in difficult matters, leaving much to reflection which cannot be

explained.

And if this be true of Poetry--if Homer and Shakespeare are what they

are, from the absence of everything didactic about them--may we not

thus learn something of what History should be, and in what sense it

should aspire to teach?

If Poetry must not theorise, much less should the historian theorise,

whose obligations to be true to fact are even greater than the poet's.

If the drama is grandest when the action is least explicable by laws,

because then it best resembles life, then history will be grandest also

under the same conditions. 'Macbeth,' were it literally true, would be

perfect history; and so far as the historian can approach to that kind

of model, so far as he can let his story tell itself in the deeds and

words of those who act it out, so far is he most successful. His work is

no longer the vapour of his own brain, which a breath will scatter; it

is the thing itself, which will have interest for all time. A thousand

theories may be formed about it--spiritual theories, Pantheistic

theories, cause and effect theories; but each age will have its own

philosophy of history, and all these in turn will fail and die. Hegel

falls out of date, Schlegel falls out of date, and Comte in good time

will fall out of date; the thought about the thing must change as we

change; but the thing itself can never change; and a history is durable

or perishable as it contains more or least of the writer's own

speculations. The splendid intellect of Gibbon for the most part kept

him true to the right course in this; yet the philosophical chapters for

which he has been most admired or censured may hereafter be thought the

least interesting in his work. The time has been when they would not

have been comprehended: the time may come when they will seem

commonplace.

It may be said, that in requiring history to be written like a drama, we

require an impossibility.

For history to be written with the complete form of a drama, doubtless

is impossible; but there are periods, and these the periods, for the

most part, of greatest interest to mankind, the history of which may be

so written that the actors shall reveal their characters in their own

words; where mind can be seen matched against mind, and the great

passions of the epoch not simply be described as existing, but be

exhibited at their white heat in the souls and hearts possessed by them.

There are all the elements of drama--drama of the highest order--where

the huge forces of the times are as the Grecian destiny, and the power

of the man is seen either stemming the stream till it overwhelms him,

or ruling while he seems to yield to it.

It is Nature's drama--not Shakespeare's--but a drama none the less.

So at least it seems to me. Wherever possible, let us not be told

_about_ this man or that. Let us hear the man himself speak; let us see

him act, and let us be left to form our own opinions about him. The

historian, we are told, must not leave his readers to themselves. He

must not only lay the facts before them--he must tell them what he

himself thinks about those facts. In my opinion, this is precisely what

he ought not to do. Bishop Butler says somewhere, that the best book

which could be written would be a book consisting only of premises, from

which the readers should draw conclusions for themselves. The highest

poetry is the very thing which Butler requires, and the highest history

ought to be. We should no more ask for a theory of this or that period

of history, than we should ask for a theory of 'Macbeth' or 'Hamlet.'

Philosophies of history, sciences of history--all these, there will

continue to be; the fashions of them will change, as our habits of

thought will change; each new philosopher will find his chief employment

in showing that before him no one understood anything; but the drama of

history is imperishable, and, the lessons of it will be like what we

learn from Homer or Shakespeare--lessons for which we have no words.

The address of history is less to the understanding than to the higher

emotions. We learn in it to sympathise with what is great and good; we

learn to hate what is base. In the anomalies of fortune we feel the

mystery of our mortal existence, and in the companionship of the

illustrious natures who have shaped the fortunes of the world, we escape

from the littlenesses which cling to the round of common life, and our

minds are tuned in a higher and nobler key.

For the rest, and for those large questions which I touched in

connection with Mr. Buckle, we live in times of disintegration, and none

can tell what will be after us. What opinions--what convictions--the

infant of to-day will find prevailing on the earth, if he and it live

out together to the middle of another century, only a very bold man

would undertake to conjecture! 'The time will come,' said Lichtenberg,

in scorn at the materialising tendencies of modern thought; 'the time

will come when the belief in God will be as the tales with which old

women frighten children; when the world will be a machine, the ether a

gas, and God will be a force.' Mankind, if they last long enough on the

earth, may develope strange things out of themselves; and the growth of

what is called the Positive Philosophy is a curious commentary on

Lichtenberg's prophecy. But whether the end be seventy years hence, or

seven hundred--be the close of the mortal history of humanity as far

distant in the future as its shadowy beginnings seem now to lie behind

us--this only we may foretell with confidence--that the riddle of man's

nature will remain unsolved. There will be that in him yet which

physical laws will fail to explain--that something, whatever it be, in

himself and in the world, which science cannot fathom, and which

suggests the unknown possibilities of his origin and his destiny. There

will remain yet

Those obstinate questionings

Of sense and outward things;

Falling from us, vanishings--

Blank misgivings of a creature

Moving about in worlds not realised--

High instincts, before which our mortal nature

Doth tremble like a guilty thing surprised.

There will remain

Those first affections--

Those shadowy recollections--

Which, be they what they may,

Are yet the fountain-light of all our day--

Are yet the master-light of all our seeing--

Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make

Our noisy years seem moments in the being

Of the Eternal Silence.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] It is objected that Geology is a science: yet that Geology cannot

foretell the future changes of the earth's surface. Geology is not a

century old, and its periods are measured by millions of years. Yet, if

Geology cannot foretell future facts, it enabled Sir Roderick Murchison

to foretell the discovery of Australian gold.

[B] February 1864.

TIMES OF ERASMUS AND LUTHER:

THREE LECTURES

DELIVERED AT NEWCASTLE, 1867.

LECTURE I.

Ladies and Gentlemen,--I do not know whether I have made a very wise

selection in the subject which I have chosen for these Lectures. There

was a time--a time which, measured by the years of our national life,

was not so very long ago--when the serious thoughts of mankind were

occupied exclusively by religion and politics. The small knowledge which

they possessed of other things was tinctured by their speculative

opinions on the relations of heaven and earth; and, down to the

sixteenth century, art, science, scarcely even literature, existed in

this country, except as, in some way or other, subordinate to theology.

Philosophers--such philosophers as there were--obtained and half

deserved the reputation of quacks and conjurors. Astronomy was confused

with astrology. The physician's medicines were supposed to be powerless,

unless the priests said prayers over them. The great lawyers, the

ambassadors, the chief ministers of state, were generally bishops; even

the fighting business was not entirely secular. Half-a-dozen Scotch

prelates were killed at Flodden; and, late in the reign of Henry the

Eighth, no fitter person could be found than Rowland Lee, Bishop of

Coventry, to take command of the Welsh Marches, and harry the

freebooters of Llangollen.

Every single department of intellectual or practical life was penetrated

with the beliefs, or was interwoven with the interests, of the clergy;

and thus it was that, when differences of religious opinion arose, they

split society to its foundations. The lines of cleavage penetrated

everywhere, and there were no subjects whatever in which those who

disagreed in theology possessed any common concern. When men

quarrelled, they quarrelled altogether. The disturbers of settled

beliefs were regarded as public enemies who had placed themselves beyond

the pale of humanity, and were considered fit only to be destroyed like

wild beasts, or trampled out like the seed of a contagion.

Three centuries have passed over our heads since the time of which I am

speaking, and the world is so changed that we can hardly recognise it as

the same.

The secrets of nature have been opened out to us on a thousand lines;

and men of science of all creeds can pursue side by side their common

investigations. Catholics, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Lutherans,

Calvinists, contend with each other in honourable rivalry in arts, and

literature, and commerce, and industry. They read the same books. They

study at the same academies. They have seats in the same senates. They

preside together on the judicial bench, and carry on, without jar or

difference, the ordinary business of the country.

Those who share the same pursuits are drawn in spite of themselves into

sympathy and good-will. When they are in harmony in so large a part of

their occupations, the points of remaining difference lose their venom.

Those who thought they hated each other, unconsciously find themselves

friends; and as far as it affects the world at large, the acrimony of

controversy has almost disappeared.

Imagine, if you can, a person being now put to death for a speculative

theological opinion. You feel at once, that in the most bigoted country

in the world such a thing has become impossible; and the impossibility

is the measure of the alteration which we have all undergone. The

formulas remain as they were on either side--the very same formulas

which were once supposed to require these detestable murders. But we

have learnt to know each other better. The cords which bind together the

brotherhood of mankind are woven of a thousand strands. We do not any

more fly apart or become enemies, because, here and there, in one strand

out of so many, there are still unsound places.

If I were asked for a distinct proof that Europe was improving and not

retrograding, I should find it in this phenomenon. It has not been

brought about by controversy. Men are fighting still over the same

questions which they began to fight about at the Reformation. Protestant

divines have not driven Catholics out of the field, nor Catholics,

Protestants. Each polemic writes for his own partisans, and makes no

impression on his adversary.

Controversy has kept alive a certain quantity of bitterness; and that, I

suspect, is all that it would accomplish if it continued till the day of

judgment. I sometimes, in impatient moments, wish the laity in Europe

would treat their controversial divines as two gentlemen once treated

their seconds, when they found themselves forced into a duel without

knowing what they were quarrelling about.

As the principals were being led up to their places, one of them

whispered to the other, 'If you will shoot your second, I will shoot

mine.'

The reconciliation of parties, if I may use such a word, is no

tinkered-up truce, or convenient Interim. It is the healthy, silent,

spontaneous growth of a nobler order of conviction, which has conquered

our prejudices even before we knew that they were assailed. This better

spirit especially is represented in institutions like this, which

acknowledge no differences of creed--which are constructed on the

broadest principles of toleration--and which, therefore, as a rule, are

wisely protected from the intrusion of discordant subjects.

They exist, as I understand, to draw men together, not to divide

them--to enable us to share together in those topics of universal

interest and instruction which all can take pleasure in, and which give

offence to none.

If you ask me, then, why I am myself departing from a practice which I

admit to be so excellent, I fear that I shall give you rather a lame

answer. I might say that I know more about the history of the sixteenth

century than I know about anything else. I have spent the best years of

my life in reading and writing about it; and if I have anything to tell

you worth your hearing, it is probably on that subject.

Or, again, I might say--which is indeed most true--that to the

Reformation we can trace, indirectly, the best of those very influences

which I have been describing. The Reformation broke the theological

shackles in which men's minds were fettered. It set them thinking, and

so gave birth to science. The Reformers also, without knowing what they

were about, taught the lesson of religious toleration. They attempted to

supersede one set of dogmas by another. They succeeded with half the

world--they failed with the other half. In a little while it became

apparent that good men--without ceasing to be good--could think

differently about theology, and that goodness, therefore, depended on

something else than the holding orthodox opinions.

It is not, however, for either of these reasons that I am going to talk

to you about Martin Luther; nor is toleration of differences of opinion,

however excellent it be, the point on which I shall dwell in these

Lectures.

Were the Reformation a question merely of opinion, I for one should not

have meddled with it, either here or anywhere. I hold that, on the

obscure mysteries of faith, every one should be allowed to believe

according to his conscience, and that arguments on such matters are

either impertinent or useless.

But the Reformation, gentlemen, beyond the region of opinions, was a

historical fact--an objective something which may be studied like any of

the facts of nature. The Reformers were men of note and distinction, who

played a great part for good or evil on the stage of the world. If we

except the Apostles, no body of human beings ever printed so deep a mark

into the organisation of society; and if there be any value or meaning

in history at all, the lives, the actions, the characters of such men as

these can be matters of indifference to none of us.

We have not to do with a story which is buried in obscure antiquity. The

facts admit of being learnt. The truth, whatever it was, concerns us all

equally. If the divisions created by that great convulsion are ever to

be obliterated, it will be when we have learnt, each of us, to see the

thing as it really was, and not rather some mythical or imaginative

version of the thing--such as from our own point of view we like to

think it was. Fiction in such matters may be convenient for our

immediate theories, but it is certain to avenge itself in the end. We

may make our own opinions, but facts were made for us; and if we evade

or deny them, it will be the worse for us.

Unfortunately, the mythical version at present very largely

preponderates. Open a Protestant history of the Reformation, and you

will find a picture of the world given over to a lying tyranny--the

Christian population of Europe enslaved by a corrupt and degraded

priesthood, and the Reformers, with the Bible in their hands, coming to

the rescue like angels of light. All is black on one side--all is fair

and beautiful on the other.

Turn to a Catholic history of the same events and the same men, and we

have before us the Church of the Saints fulfilling quietly its blessed

mission in the saving of human souls. Satan a second time enters into

Paradise, and a second time with fatal success tempts miserable man to

his ruin. He disbelieves his appointed teachers, he aspires after

forbidden knowledge, and at once anarchy breaks loose. The seamless robe

of the Saviour is rent in pieces, and the earth becomes the habitation

of fiends.

Each side tells the story as it prefers to have it; facts, characters,

circumstances, are melted in the theological crucible, and cast in

moulds diametrically opposite. Nothing remains the same except the names

and dates. Each side chooses its own witnesses. Everything is credible

which makes for what it calls the truth. Everything is made false which

will not fit into its place. 'Blasphemous fables' is the usual

expression in Protestant controversial books for the accounts given by

Catholics. 'Protestant tradition,' says an eminent modern Catholic, 'is

based on lying--bold, wholesale, unscrupulous lying.'

Now, depend upon it, there is some human account of the matter different

from both these if we could only get at it, and it will be an excellent

thing for the world when that human account can be made out. I am not so

presumptuous as to suppose that I can give it to you; still less can you

expect me to try to do so within the compass of two or three lectures.

If I cannot do everything, however, I believe I can do a little; at any

rate I can give you a sketch, such as you may place moderate confidence

in, of the state of the Church as it was before the Reformation began. I

will not expose myself more than I can help to the censure of the divine

who was so hard on Protestant tradition. Most of what I shall have to

say to you this evening will be taken from the admissions of Catholics

themselves, or from official records earlier than the outbreak of the

controversy, when there was no temptation to pervert the truth.

Here, obviously, is the first point on which we require accurate

information. If all was going on well, the Reformers really and truly

told innumerable lies, and deserve all the reprobation which we can give

them. If all was not going on well--if, so far from being well, the

Church was so corrupt that Europe could bear with it no longer--then

clearly a Reformation was necessary of some kind; and we have taken one

step towards a fair estimate of the persons concerned in it.

A fair estimate--that, and only that, is what we want. I need hardly

observe to you, that opinion in England has been undergoing lately a

very considerable alteration about these persons.

Two generations ago, the leading Reformers were looked upon as little

less than saints; now a party has risen up who intend, as they frankly

tell us, to un-Protestantise the Church of England, who detest

Protestantism as a kind of infidelity, who desire simply to reverse

everything which the Reformers did.

One of these gentlemen, a clergyman, writing lately of Luther, called

him a heretic, a heretic fit only to be ranked with--whom, do you

think?--Joe Smith, the Mormon Prophet. Joe Smith and Luther--that is the

combination with which we are now presented.

The book in which this remarkable statement appeared was presented by

two bishops to the Upper House of Convocation. It was received with

gracious acknowledgments by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and was placed

solemnly in the library of reference, for that learned body to consult.

So, too, a professor at Oxford, the other day, spoke of Luther as a

Philistine--a Philistine meaning an oppressor of the chosen people; the

enemy of men of culture, of intelligence, such as the professor himself.

One notices these things, not as of much importance in themselves, but

as showing which way the stream is running; and, curiously enough, in

quite another direction we may see the same phenomenon. Our liberal

philosophers, men of high literary power and reputation, looking into

the history of Luther, and Calvin, and John Knox, and the rest, find

them falling far short of the philosophic ideal--wanting sadly in many

qualities which the liberal mind cannot dispense with. They are

discovered to be intolerant, dogmatic, narrow-minded, inclined to

persecute Catholics as Catholics had persecuted them; to be, in fact,

little if at all better than the popes and cardinals whom they were

fighting against.

Lord Macaulay can hardly find epithets strong enough to express his

contempt for Archbishop Cranmer. Mr. Buckle places Cranmer by the side

of Bonner, and hesitates which of the two characters is the more

detestable.

An unfavourable estimate of the Reformers, whether just or unjust, is

unquestionably gaining ground among our advanced thinkers. A greater man

than either Macaulay or Buckle--the German poet, Goethe--says of Luther,

that he threw back the intellectual progress of mankind for centuries,

by calling in the passions of the multitude to decide on subjects which

ought to have been left to the learned. Goethe, in saying this, was

alluding especially to Erasmus. Goethe thought that Erasmus, and men

like Erasmus, had struck upon the right track; and if they could have

retained the direction of the mind of Europe, there would have been more

truth, and less falsehood, among us at this present time. The party

hatreds, the theological rivalries, the persecutions, the civil wars,

the religious animosities which have so long distracted us, would have

been all avoided, and the mind of mankind would have expanded gradually

and equably with the growth of knowledge.

Such an opinion, coming from so great a man, is not to be lightly passed

over. It will be my endeavour to show you what kind of man Erasmus was,

what he was aiming at, what he was doing, and how Luther spoilt his

work--if spoiling is the word which we are to use for it.

One caution, however, I must in fairness give you before we proceed

further. It lies upon the face of the story, that the Reformers

imperfectly understood toleration; but you must keep before you the

spirit and temper of the men with whom they had to deal. For themselves,

when the movement began, they aimed at nothing but liberty to think and

speak their own way. They never dreamt of interfering with others,

although they were quite aware that others, when they could, were likely

to interfere with them. Lord Macaulay might have remembered that Cranmer

was working all his life with the prospect of being burnt alive as his

reward--and, as we all know, he actually was burnt alive.

When the Protestant teaching began first to spread in the

Netherlands--before one single Catholic had been illtreated there,

before a symptom of a mutinous disposition had shown itself among the

people, an edict was issued by the authorities for the suppression of

the new opinions.

The terms of this edict I will briefly describe to you.

The inhabitants of the United Provinces were informed that they were to

hold and believe the doctrines of the Holy Roman Catholic Church. 'Men

and women,' says the edict, 'who disobey this command shall be punished

as disturbers of public order. Women who have fallen into heresy shall

be buried alive. Men, if they recant, shall lose their heads. If they

continue obstinate, they shall be burnt at the stake.

'If man or woman be suspected of heresy, no one shall shelter or protect

him or her; and no stranger shall be admitted to lodge in any inn or

dwelling-house unless he bring with him a testimonial of orthodoxy from

the priest of his parish.

'The Inquisition shall enquire into the private opinions of every

person, of whatever degree; and all officers of all kinds shall assist

the Inquisition at their peril. Those who know where heretics are

concealed, shall denounce them, or they shall suffer as heretics

themselves. Heretics (observe the malignity of this paragraph)--heretics

who will give up other heretics to justice, shall themselves be pardoned

if they will promise to conform for the future.'

Under this edict, in the Netherlands alone, more than fifty thousand

human beings, first and last, were deliberately murdered. And,

gentlemen, I must say that proceedings of this kind explain and go far

to excuse the subsequent intolerance of Protestants.

Intolerance, Mr. Gibbon tells us, is a greater crime in a Protestant

than a Catholic. Criminal intolerance, as I understand it, is the

intolerance of such an edict as that which I have read to you--the

unprovoked intolerance of difference of opinion. I conceive that the

most enlightened philosopher might have grown hard and narrow-minded if

he had suffered under the administration of the Duke of Alva.

Dismissing these considerations, I will now go on with my subject.

Never in all their history, in ancient times or modern, never that we

know of, have mankind thrown out of themselves anything so grand, so

useful, so beautiful, as the Catholic Church once was. In these times of

ours, well-regulated selfishness is the recognised rule of action--every

one of us is expected to look out first for himself, and take care of

his own interests. At the time I speak of, the Church ruled the State

with the authority of a conscience; and self-interest, as a motive of

action, was only named to be abhorred. The bishops and clergy were

regarded freely and simply as the immediate ministers of the Almighty;

and they seem to me to have really deserved that high estimate of their

character. It was not for the doctrines which they taught, only or

chiefly, that they were held in honour. Brave men do not fall down

before their fellow-mortals for the words which they speak, or for the

rites which they perform. Wisdom, justice, self-denial, nobleness,

purity, highmindedness,--these are the qualities before which the

free-born races of Europe have been contented to bow; and in no order of

men were such qualities to be found as they were found six hundred years

ago in the clergy of the Catholic Church. They called themselves the

successors of the Apostles. They claimed in their Master's name

universal spiritual authority, but they made good their pretensions by

the holiness of their own lives. They were allowed to rule because they

deserved to rule, and in the fulness of reverence kings and nobles bent

before a power which was nearer to God than their own. Over prince and

subject, chieftain and serf, a body of unarmed defenceless men reigned

supreme by the magic of sanctity. They tamed the fiery northern warriors

who had broken in pieces the Roman Empire. They taught them--they

brought them really and truly to believe--that they had immortal souls,

and that they would one day stand at the awful judgment bar and give

account for their lives there. With the brave, the honest, and the

good--with those who had not oppressed the poor nor removed their

neighbour's landmark--with those who had been just in all their

dealings--with those who had fought against evil, and had tried

valiantly to do their Master's will,--at that great day, it would be

well. For cowards, for profligates, for those who lived for luxury and

pleasure and self-indulgence, there was the blackness of eternal death.

An awful conviction of this tremendous kind the clergy had effectually

instilled into the mind of Europe. It was not a PERHAPS; it was a

certainty. It was not a form of words repeated once a week at church; it

was an assurance entertained on all days and in all places, without any

particle of doubt. And the effect of such a belief on life and

conscience was simply immeasurable.

I do not pretend that the clergy were perfect. They were very far from

perfect at the best of times, and the European nations were never

completely submissive to them. It would not have been well if they had

been. The business of human creatures in this planet is not summed up in

the most excellent of priestly catechisms. The world and its concerns

continued to interest men, though priests insisted on their nothingness.

They could not prevent kings from quarrelling with each other. They

could not hinder disputed successions, and civil feuds, and wars, and

political conspiracies. What they did do was to shelter the weak from

the strong. In the eyes of the clergy, the serf and his lord stood on

the common level of sinful humanity. Into their ranks high birth was no

passport. They were themselves for the most part children of the people;

and the son of the artisan or peasant rose to the mitre and the triple

crown, just as nowadays the rail-splitter and the tailor become

Presidents of the Republic of the West.

The Church was essentially democratic, while at the same time it had the

monopoly of learning; and all the secular power fell to it which

learning, combined with sanctity and assisted by superstition, can

bestow.

The privileges of the clergy were extraordinary. They were not amenable

to the common laws of the land. While they governed the laity, the laity

had no power over them. From the throne downwards, every secular office

was dependent on the Church. No king was a lawful sovereign till the

Church placed the crown upon his head: and what the Church bestowed, the

Church claimed the right to take away. The disposition of property was

in their hands. No will could be proved except before the bishop or his

officer; and no will was held valid if the testator died out of

communion. There were magistrates and courts of law for the offences of

the laity. If a priest committed a crime, he was a sacred person. The

civil power could not touch him; he was reserved for his ordinary.

Bishops' commissaries sate in town and city, taking cognizance of the

moral conduct of every man and woman. Offences against life and property

were tried here in England, as now, by the common law; but the Church

Courts dealt with sins--sins of word or act. If a man was a profligate

or a drunkard; if he lied or swore; if he did not come to communion, or

held unlawful opinions; if he was idle or unthrifty; if he was unkind

to his wife or his servants; if a child was disobedient to his father,

or a father cruel to his child; if a tradesman sold adulterated wares,

or used false measures or dishonest weights,--the eye of the parish

priest was everywhere, and the Church Court stood always open to examine

and to punish.

Imagine what a tremendous power this must have been! Yet it existed

generally in Catholic Europe down to the eve of the Reformation. It

could never have established itself at all unless at one time it had

worked beneficially--as the abuse of it was one of the most fatal causes

of the Church's fall.

I know nothing in English history much more striking than the answer

given by Archbishop Warham to the complaints of the English House of

Commons after the fall of Cardinal Wolsey. The House of Commons

complained that the clergy made laws in Convocation which the laity were

excommunicated if they disobeyed. Yet the laws made by the clergy, the

Commons said, were often at variance with the laws of the realm.

What did Warham reply? He said he was sorry for the alleged discrepancy;

but, inasmuch as the laws made by the clergy were always in conformity

with the will of God, the laws of the realm had only to be altered and

then the difficulty would vanish.

What must have been the position of the clergy in the fulness of their

power, when they could speak thus on the eve of their prostration? You

have only to look from a distance at any old-fashioned cathedral city,

and you will see in a moment the mediæval relations between Church and

State. The cathedral _is_ the city. The first object you catch sight of

as you approach is the spire tapering into the sky, or the huge towers

holding possession of the centre of the landscape--majestically

beautiful--imposing by mere size amidst the large forms of Nature

herself. As you go nearer, the vastness of the building impresses you

more and more. The puny dwelling-place of the citizens creep at its

feet, the pinnacles are glittering in the tints of the sunset, when down

below among the streets and lanes the twilight is darkening. And even

now, when the towns are thrice their ancient size, and the houses have

stretched upwards from two stories to five; when the great chimneys are

vomiting their smoke among the clouds, and the temples of modern

industry--the workshops and the factories--spread their long fronts

before the eye, the cathedral is still the governing form in the

picture--the one object which possesses the imagination and refuses to

be eclipsed.

As that cathedral was to the old town, so was the Church of the middle

ages to the secular institutions of the world. Its very neighbourhood

was sacred; and its shadow, like the shadow of the Apostles, was a

sanctuary. When I look at the new Houses of Parliament in London, I see

in them a type of the change which has passed over us. The House of

Commons of the Plantagenets sate in the Chapter House of Westminster

Abbey. The Parliament of the Reform Bill, five-and-thirty years ago,

debated in St. Stephen's Chapel, the Abbey's small dependency. Now, by

the side of the enormous pile which has risen out of that chapel's

ashes, the proud Minster itself is dwarfed into insignificance.

Let us turn to another vast feature of the middle ages--I mean the

monasteries.

Some person of especial and exceptional holiness has lived or died at a

particular spot. He has been distinguished by his wisdom, by his piety,

by his active benevolence; and in an age when conjurors and witches were

supposed to be helped by the devil to do evil, he, on his part, has been

thought to have possessed in larger measure than common men the favour

and the grace of heaven. Blessed influences hang about the spot which he

has hallowed by his presence. His relics--his household possessions, his

books, his clothes, his bones, retain the shadowy sanctity which they

received in having once belonged to him. We all set a value, not wholly

unreal, on anything which has been the property of a remarkable man. At

worst, it is but an exaggeration of natural reverence.

Well, as nowadays we build monuments to great men, so in the middle ages

they built shrines or chapels on the spots which saints had made holy,

and communities of pious people gathered together there--beginning with

the personal friends the saint had left behind him--to try to live as he

had lived, to do good as he had done good, and to die as he had died.

Thus arose religious fraternities--companies of men who desired to

devote themselves to goodness--to give up pleasure, and amusement, and

self-indulgence, and to spend their lives in prayer and works of

charity.

These houses became centres of pious beneficence. The monks, as the

brotherhoods were called, were organised in different orders, with some

variety of rule, but the broad principle was the same in all. They were

to live for others, not for themselves. They took vows of poverty, that

they might not be entangled in the pursuit of money. They took vows of

chastity, that the care of a family might not distract them from the

work which they had undertaken. Their efforts of charity were not

limited to this world. Their days were spent in hard bodily labour, in

study, or in visiting the sick. At night they were on the stone-floors

of their chapels, holding up their withered hands to heaven, interceding

for the poor souls who were suffering in purgatory.

The world, as it always will, paid honour to exceptional excellence. The

system spread to the furthest limits of Christendom. The religious

houses became places of refuge, where men of noble birth, kings and

queens and emperors, warriors and statesmen, retired to lay down their

splendid cares, and end their days in peace. Those with whom the world

had dealt hardly, or those whom it had surfeited with its unsatisfying

pleasures, those who were disappointed with earth, and those who were

filled with passionate aspirations after heaven, alike found a haven of

rest in the quiet cloister. And, gradually, lands came to them, and

wealth, and social dignity--all gratefully extended to men who deserved

so well of their fellows; while no landlords were more popular than

they, for the sanctity of the monks sheltered their dependents as well

as themselves.

Travel now through Ireland, and you will see in the wildest parts of it

innumerable remains of religious houses, which had grown up among a

people who acknowledged no rule among themselves except the sword, and

where every chief made war upon his neighbour as the humour seized him.

The monks among the O's and the Mac's were as defenceless as sheep among

the wolves; but the wolves spared them for their character. In such a

country as Ireland then was, the monasteries could not have survived for

a generation but for the enchanted atmosphere which surrounded them.

Of authority, the religious orders were practically independent. They

were amenable only to the Pope and to their own superiors. Here in

England, the king could not send a commissioner to inspect a monastery,

nor even send a policeman to arrest a criminal who had taken shelter

within its walls. Archbishops and bishops, powerful as they were, found

their authority cease when they entered the gates of a Benedictine or

Dominican abbey.

So utterly have times changed, that with your utmost exertions you will

hardly be able to picture to yourselves the Catholic Church in the days

of its greatness. Our school-books tell us how the Emperor of Germany

held the stirrup for Pope Gregory the Seventh to mount his mule; how our

own English Henry Plantagenet walked barefoot through the streets of

Canterbury, and knelt in the Chapter House for the monks to flog him.

The first of these incidents, I was brought up to believe, proved the

Pope to be the Man of Sin. Anyhow, they are both facts, and not

romances; and you may form some notion from them how high in the world's

eyes the Church must have stood.

And be sure it did not achieve that proud position without deserving it.

The Teutonic and Latin princes were not credulous fools; and when they

submitted, it was to something stronger than themselves--stronger in

limb and muscle, or stronger in intellect and character.

So the Church was in its vigour: so the Church was _not_ at the opening

of the sixteenth century. Power--wealth--security--men are more than

mortal if they can resist the temptations to which too much of these

expose them. Nor were they the only enemies which undermined the

energies of the Catholic clergy. Churches exist in this world to remind

us of the eternal laws which we are bound to obey. So far as they do

this, they fulfil their end, and are honoured in fulfilling it. It would

have been better for all of us--it would be better for us now, could

Churches keep this their peculiar function steadily and singly before

them. Unfortunately, they have preferred in later times the speculative

side of things to the practical. They take up into their teaching

opinions and theories which are merely ephemeral; which would naturally

die out with the progress of knowledge; but, having received a spurious

sanctity, prolong their days unseasonably, and become first unmeaning,

and then occasions of superstition.

It matters little whether I say a paternoster in English or Latin, so

that what is present to my mind is the thought which the words express,

and not the words themselves. In these and all languages it is the most

beautiful of prayers. But you know that people came to look on a Latin

paternoster as the most powerful of spells--potent in heaven, if said

straightforward; if repeated backward, a charm which no spirit in hell

could resist.

So it is, in my opinion, with all forms--forms of words, or forms of

ceremony and ritualism. While the meaning is alive in them, they are not

only harmless, but pregnant and life-giving. When we come to think that

they possess in themselves material and magical virtues, then the

purpose which they answer is to hide God from us and make us practically

into Atheists.

This is what I believe to have gradually fallen upon the Catholic Church

in the generations which preceded Luther. The body remained; the mind

was gone away: the original thought which its symbolism represented was

no longer credible to intelligent persons.

The acute were conscious unbelievers. In Italy, when men went to mass

they spoke of it as going to a comedy. You may have heard the story of

Luther in his younger days saying mass at an altar in Rome, and hearing

his fellow-priests muttering at the consecration of the Eucharist,

'Bread thou art, and bread thou wilt remain.'

Part of the clergy were profane scoundrels like these; the rest repeated

the words of the service, conceiving that they were working a charm.

Religion was passing through the transformation which all religions have

a tendency to undergo. They cease to be aids and incentives to holy

life; they become contrivances rather to enable men to sin, and escape

the penalties of sin. Obedience to the law is dispensed with if men will

diligently profess certain opinions, or punctually perform certain

external duties. However scandalous the moral life, the participation of

a particular rite, or the profession of a particular belief, at the

moment of death, is held to clear the score.

The powers which had been given to the clergy required for their

exercise the highest wisdom and the highest probity. They had fallen at

last into the hands of men who possessed considerably less of these

qualities than the laity whom they undertook to govern. They had

degraded their conceptions of God; and, as a necessary consequence, they

had degraded their conceptions of man and man's duty. The aspirations

after sanctity had disappeared, and instead of them there remained the

practical reality of the five senses. The high prelates, the cardinals,

the great abbots, were occupied chiefly in maintaining their splendour

and luxury. The friars and the secular clergy, following their superiors

with shorter steps, indulged themselves in grosser pleasures; while

their spiritual powers, their supposed authority in this world and the

next, were turned to account to obtain from the laity the means for

their self-indulgence.

The Church forbade the eating of meat on fast days, but the Church was

ready with dispensations for those who could afford to pay for them. The

Church forbade marriage to the fourth degree of consanguinity, but

loving cousins, if they were rich and open-handed, could obtain the

Church's consent to their union. There were toll-gates for the priests

at every halting-place on the road of life--fees at weddings, fees at

funerals, fees whenever an excuse could be found to fasten them. Even

when a man was dead he was not safe from plunder, for a mortuary or

death present was exacted of his family.

And then those Bishop's Courts, of which I spoke just now: they were

founded for the discipline of morality--they were made the instruments

of the most detestable extortion. If an impatient layman spoke a

disrespectful word of the clergy, he was cited before the bishop's

commissary and fined. If he refused to pay, he was excommunicated, and

excommunication was a poisonous disease. When a poor wretch was under

the ban of the Church no tradesman might sell him clothes or food--no

friend might relieve him--no human voice might address him, under pain

of the same sentence; and if he died unreconciled, he died like a dog,

without the sacraments, and was refused Christian burial.

The records of some of these courts survive: a glance at their pages

will show the principles on which they were worked. When a layman

offended, the single object was to make him pay for it. The magistrates

could not protect him. If he resisted, and his friends supported him, so

much the better, for they were now all in the scrape together. The next

step would be to indict them in a body for heresy; and then, of course,

there was nothing for it but to give way, and compound for absolution by

money.

It was money--ever money. Even in case of real delinquency, it was

still money. Money, not charity, covered the multitude of sins.

I have told you that the clergy were exempt from secular jurisdiction.

They claimed to be amenable only to spiritual judges, and they extended

the broad fringe of their order till the word clerk was construed to

mean any one who could write his name or read a sentence from a book. A

robber or a murderer at the assizes had but to show that he possessed

either of these qualifications, and he was allowed what was called

benefit of clergy. His case was transferred to the Bishops' Court, to an

easy judge, who allowed him at once to compound.

Such were the clergy in matters of this world. As religious instructors,

they appear in colours if possible less attractive.

Practical religion throughout Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth

century was a very simple affair. I am not going to speak of the

mysterious doctrines of the Catholic Church. The creed which it

professed in its schools and theological treatises was the same which it

professes now, and which it had professed at the time when it was most

powerful for good. I do not myself consider that the formulas in which

men express their belief are of much consequence. The question is rather

of the thing expressed; and so long as we find a living consciousness

that above the world and above human life there is a righteous God, who

will judge men according to their works, whether they say their prayers

in Latin or English, whether they call themselves Protestants or call

themselves Catholics, appears to me of quite secondary importance. But

at the time I speak of, that consciousness no longer existed. The

formulas and ceremonies were all in all; and of God it is hard to say

what conceptions men had formed, when they believed that a dead man's

relations could buy him out of purgatory--buy him out of purgatory,--for

this was the literal truth--by hiring priests to sing masses for his

soul.

Religion, in the minds of ordinary people, meant that the keys of the

other world were held by the clergy. If a man confessed regularly to his

priest, received the sacrament, and was absolved, then all was well with

him. His duties consisted in going to confession and to mass. If he

committed sins, he was prescribed penances, which could be commuted for

money. If he was sick or ill at ease in his mind, he was recommended a

pilgrimage--a pilgrimage to a shrine or a holy well, or to some

wonder-working image--where, for due consideration, his case would be

attended to. It was no use to go to a saint empty-handed. The rule of

the Church was, nothing for nothing. At a chapel in Saxony there was an

image of a Virgin and Child. If the worshipper came to it with a good

handsome offering, the child bowed and was gracious: if the present was

unsatisfactory, it turned away its head, and withheld its favours till

the purse-strings were untied again.

There was a great rood or crucifix of the same kind at Boxley, in Kent,

where the pilgrims went in thousands. This figure used to bow, too, when

it was pleased; and a good sum of money was sure to secure its

good-will.

When the Reformation came, and the police looked into the matter, the

images were found to be worked with wires and pulleys. The German lady

was kept as a curiosity in the cabinet of the Elector of Saxony. Our

Boxley rood was brought up and exhibited in Cheapside, and was

afterwards torn in pieces by the people.

Nor here again was death the limit of extortion: death was rather the

gate of the sphere which the clergy made, peculiarly their own. When a

man died, his friends were naturally anxious for the fate of his soul.

If he died in communion, he was not in the worst place of all. He had

not been a saint, and therefore he was not in the best. Therefore he was

in purgatory--Purgatory Pickpurse, as our English Latimer called it--and

a priest, if properly paid, could get him out.

To be a mass priest, as it was called, was a regular profession, in

which, with little trouble, a man could earn a comfortable living. He

had only to be ordained and to learn by heart a certain form of words,

and that was all the equipment necessary for him. The masses were paid

for at so much a dozen, and for every mass that was said, so many years

were struck off from the penal period. Two priests were sometimes to be

seen muttering away at the opposite ends of the same altar, like a

couple of musical boxes playing different parts of the same tune at the

same time. It made no difference. The upper powers had what they wanted.

If they got the masses, and the priests got the money, all parties

concerned were satisfied.

I am speaking of the form which these things assumed in an age of

degradation and ignorance. The truest and wisest words ever spoken by

man might be abused in the same way.

The Sermon on the Mount or the Apostles' Creed, if recited mechanically,

and relied on to work a mechanical effort, would be no less perniciously

idolatrous.

You can see something of the same kind in a milder form in Spain at the

present day. The Spaniards, all of them, high and low, are expected to

buy annually a Pope's Bula or Bull--a small pardon, or indulgence, or

plenary remission of sins. The exact meaning of these things is a little

obscure; the high authorities themselves do not universally agree about

them, except so far as to say that they are of prodigious value of some

sort. The orthodox explanation, I believe, is something of this kind.

With every sin there is the moral guilt and the temporal penalty. The

pardon cannot touch the guilt; but when the guilt is remitted, there is

still the penalty. I may ruin my health by a dissolute life; I may

repent of my dissoluteness and be forgiven; but the bad health will

remain. For bad health, substitute penance in this world and purgatory

in the next; and in this sphere the indulgence takes effect.

Such as they are, at any rate, everybody in Spain has these bulls; you

buy them in the shops for a shilling apiece.

This is one form of the thing. Again, at the door of a Spanish church

you will see hanging on the wall an intimation that whoever will pray so

many hours before a particular image shall receive full forgiveness of

his sins. Having got that, one might suppose he would be satisfied; but

no--if he prays so many more hours, he can get off a hundred years of

purgatory, or a thousand, or ten thousand. In one place I remember

observing that for a very little trouble a man could escape a hundred

and fifty thousand years of purgatory.

What a prospect for the ill-starred Protestant, who will be lucky if he

is admitted into purgatory at all!

Again, if you enter a sacristy, you will see a small board like the

notices addressed to parishioners in our vestries. On particular days it

is taken out and hung up in the church, and little would a stranger,

ignorant of the language, guess the tremendous meaning of that

commonplace appearance. On these boards is written 'Hoy se sacan

animas,'--'This day, souls are taken out of purgatory.' It is an

intimation to every one with a friend in distress that now is his time.

You put a shilling in a plate, you give your friend's name, and the

thing is done. One wonders why, if purgatory can be sacked so easily,

any poor wretch is left to suffer there.

Such practices nowadays are comparatively innocent, the money asked and

given is trifling, and probably no one concerned in the business

believes much about it. They serve to show, however, on a small scale,

what once went on on an immense scale; and even such as they are, pious

Catholics do not much approve of them. They do not venture to say much

on the subject directly, but they allow themselves a certain

good-humoured ridicule. A Spanish novelist of some reputation tells a

story of a man coming to a priest on one of these occasions, putting a

shilling in the plate, and giving in the name of his friend.

'Is my friend's soul out?' he asked. The priest said it was. 'Quite

sure?' the man asked. 'Quite sure,' the priest answered. 'Very well,'

said the man, 'if he is out of purgatory they will not put him in again:

it is a bad shilling.'

Sadder than all else, even as the most beautiful things are worst in

their degradation, was the condition of the monasteries. I am here on

delicate ground. The accounts of those institutions, as they existed in

England and Germany at the time of their suppression, is so shocking

that even impartial writers have hesitated to believe the reports which

have come down to us. The laity, we are told, determined to appropriate

the abbey lands, and maligned the monks to justify the spoliation. Were

the charge true, the religious orders would still be without excuse, for

the whole education of the country was in the hands of the clergy; and

they had allowed a whole generation to grow up, which, on this

hypothesis, was utterly depraved.

But no such theory can explain away the accumulated testimony which

comes to us--exactly alike--from so many sides and witnesses. We are not

dependent upon evidence which Catholics can decline to receive. In the

reign of our Henry the Seventh the notorious corruption of some of the

great abbeys in England brought them under the notice of the Catholic

Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Morton. The archbishop, unable to

meddle with them by his own authority, obtained the necessary powers

from the Pope. He instituted a partial visitation in the neighbourhood

of London; and the most malignant Protestant never drew such a picture

of profligate brutality as Cardinal Morton left behind him in his

Register, in a description of the great Abbey of St. Albans. I cannot,

in a public lecture, give you the faintest idea of what it contains. The

monks were bound to celibacy--that is to say, they were not allowed to

marry. They were full-fed, idle, and sensual; of sin they thought only

as something extremely pleasant, of which they could cleanse one another

with a few mumbled words as easily as they could wash their faces in a

basin. And there I must leave the matter. Anybody who is curious for

particulars may see the original account in Morton's Register, in the

Archbishop's library at Lambeth.

A quarter of a century after this there appeared in Germany a book, now

called by Catholics an infamous libel, the 'Epistolæ Obscurorum

Virorum.' 'The obscure men,' supposed to be the writers of these

epistles, are monks or students of theology. The letters themselves are

written in dog-Latin--a burlesque of the language in which

ecclesiastical people then addressed each other. They are sketches,

satirical, but not malignant, of the moral and intellectual character of

these reverend personages.

On the moral, and by far the most important, side of the matter I am

still obliged to be silent; but I can give you a few specimens of the

furniture of the theological minds, and of the subjects with which they

were occupied.

A student writes to his ghostly father in an agony of distress because

he has touched his hat to a Jew. He mistook him for a doctor of

divinity; and on the whole, he fears he has committed mortal sin. Can

the father absolve him? Can the bishop absolve him? Can the Pope absolve

him? His case seems utterly desperate.

Another letter describes a great intellectual riddle, which was argued

for four days at the School of Logic at Louvaine. A certain Master of

Arts had taken out his degree at Louvaine, Leyden, Paris, Oxford,

Cambridge, Padua, and four other universities. He was thus a member of

ten universities. But how _could_ a man be a member of ten universities?

A university was a body, and one body might have many members; but how

one member could have many bodies, passed comprehension. In such a

monstrous anomaly, the member would be the body, and the universities

the member, and this would be a scandal to such grave and learned

corporations. The holy doctor St. Thomas himself could not make himself

into the body of ten universities.

The more the learned men argued, the deeper they floundered, and at

length gave up the problem in despair.

Again: a certain professor argues that Julius Cæsar could not have

written the book which passes under the name of 'Cæsar's Commentaries,'

because that book is written in Latin, and Latin is a difficult

language; and a man whose life is spent in marching and fighting has

notoriously no time to learn Latin.

Here is another fellow--a monk this one--describing to a friend the

wonderful things which he has seen in Rome.

'You may have heard,' he says, 'how the Pope did possess a monstrous

beast called an Elephant. The Pope did entertain for this beast a very

great affection, and now behold it is dead. When it fell sick, the Pope

called his doctors about him in great sorrow, and said to them, "If it

be possible, heal my elephant." Then they gave the elephant a purge,

which cost five hundred crowns, but it did not avail, and so the beast

departed; and the Pope grieves much for his elephant, for it was indeed

a miraculous beast, with a long, long, prodigious long nose; and when it

saw the Pope it kneeled down before him and said, with a terrible voice,

"Bar, bar, bar!"'

I will not tire you with any more of this nonsense, especially as I

cannot give you the really characteristic parts of the book.

I want you to observe, however, what Sir Thomas More says of it, and

nobody will question that Sir Thomas More was a good Catholic and a

competent witness. 'These epistles,' he says, 'are the delight of

everyone. The wise enjoy the wit; the blockheads of monks take them

seriously, and believe that they have been written to do them honour.

When we laugh, they think we are laughing at the style, which they admit

to be comical. But they think the style is made up for by the beauty of

the sentiment. The scabbard, they say, is rough, but the blade within it

is divine. The deliberate idiots would not have found out the jest for

themselves in a hundred years.'

Well might Erasmus exclaim, 'What fungus could be more stupid? yet

these are the Atlases who are to uphold the tottering Church!'

'The monks had a pleasant time of it,' says Luther. 'Every brother had

two cans of beer and a quart of wine for his supper, with gingerbread,

to make him take to his liquor kindly. Thus the poor things came to look

like fiery angels.'

And more gravely, 'In the cloister rule the seven deadly

sins--covetousness, lasciviousness, uncleanness, hate, envy, idleness,

and the loathing of the service of God.'

Consider such men as these owning a third, a half, sometimes two-thirds

of the land in every country in Europe, and, in addition to their other

sins, neglecting all the duties attaching to this property--the woods

cut down and sold, the houses falling to ruin--unthrift, neglect, waste

everywhere and in everything--the shrewd making the most of their time,

which they had sense to see might be a short one--the rest dreaming on

in sleepy sensuality, dividing their hours between the chapel, the

pothouse, and the brothel.

I do not think that, in its main features, the truth of this sketch can

be impugned; and if it be just even in outline, then a reformation of

some kind or other was overwhelmingly necessary. Corruption beyond a

certain point becomes unendurable to the coarsest nostril. The

constitution of human things cannot away with it.

Something was to be done; but what, or how? There were three possible

courses.

Either the ancient discipline of the Church might be restored by the

heads of the Church themselves.

Or, secondly, a higher tone of feeling might gradually be introduced

among clergy and laity alike, by education and literary culture. The

discovery of the printing press had made possible a diffusion of

knowledge which had been unattainable in earlier ages. The

ecclesiastical constitution, like a sick human body, might recover its

tone if a better diet were prepared for it.

Or, lastly, the common sense of the laity might take the matter at once

into their own hands, and make free use of the pruning knife and the

sweeping brush. There might be much partial injustice, much violence,

much wrongheadedness; but the people would, at any rate, go direct to

the point, and the question was whether any other remedy would serve.

The first of these alternatives may at once be dismissed. The heads of

the Church were the last persons in the world to discover that anything

was wrong. People of that sort always are. For them the thing as it

existed answered excellently well. They had boundless wealth, and all

but boundless power. What could they ask for more? No monk drowsing over

his wine-pot was less disturbed by anxiety than nine out of ten of the

high dignitaries who were living on the eve of the Judgment Day, and

believed that their seat was established for them for ever.

The character of the great ecclesiastics of that day you may infer from

a single example. The Archbishop of Mayence was one of the most

enlightened Churchmen in Germany. He was a patron of the Renaissance, a

friend of Erasmus, a liberal, an intelligent, and, as times went, and

considering his trade, an honourable, high-minded man.

When the Emperor Maximilian died, and the imperial throne was vacant,

the Archbishop of Mayence was one of seven electors who had to choose a

new emperor.

There were two competitors--Francis the First and Maximilian's grandson,

afterwards the well-known Charles the Fifth.

Well, of the seven electors six were bribed. John Frederick of Saxony,

Luther's friend and protector, was the only one of the party who came

out of the business with clean hands.

But the Archbishop of Mayence took bribes six times alternately from

both the candidates. He took money as coolly as the most rascally

ten-pound householder in Yarmouth or Totnes, and finally drove a hard

bargain for his actual vote.

The grape does not grow upon the blackthorn; nor does healthy reform

come from high dignitaries like the Archbishop of Mayence.

The other aspect of the problem I shall consider in the following

Lectures.

LECTURE II.

In the year 1467--the year in which Charles the Bold became Duke of

Burgundy--four years before the great battle of Barnet, which

established our own fourth Edward on the English throne--about the time

when William Caxton was setting up his printing press at

Westminster--there was born at Rotterdam, on the 28th of October,

Desiderius Erasmus. His parents, who were middle-class people, were

well-to-do in the world. For some reason or other they were prevented

from marrying by the interference of relations. The father died soon

after in a cloister; the mother was left with her illegitimate infant,

whom she called first, after his father, Gerard; but afterwards, from

his beauty and grace, she changed his name--the words Desiderius

Erasmus, one with a Latin, the other with a Greek, derivation, meaning

the lovely or delightful one.

Not long after, the mother herself died also. The little Erasmus was the

heir of a moderate fortune; and his guardians, desiring to appropriate

it to themselves, endeavoured to force him into a convent at Brabant.

The thought of living and dying in a house of religion was dreadfully

unattractive; but an orphan boy's resistance was easily overcome. He was

bullied into yielding, and, when about twenty, took the vows.

The life of a monk, which was uninviting on the surface, was not more

lovely when seen from within.

'A monk's holy obedience,' Erasmus wrote afterwards, 'consists in--what?

In leading an honest, chaste, and sober life? Not the least. In

acquiring learning, in study, and industry? Still less. A monk may be a

glutton, a drunkard, a whoremonger, an ignorant, stupid, malignant,

envious brute, but he has broken no vow, he is within his holy

obedience. He has only to be the slave of a superior as good for nothing

as himself, and he is an excellent brother.'

The misfortune of his position did not check Erasmus's intellectual

growth. He was a brilliant, witty, sarcastic, mischievous youth. He did

not trouble himself to pine and mope; but, like a young thorough-bred in

a drove of asses, he used his heels pretty freely.

While he played practical jokes upon the unreverend fathers, he

distinguished himself equally by his appetite for knowledge. It was the

dawn of the Renaissance--the revival of learning. The discovery of

printing was reopening to modern Europe the great literature of Greece

and Rome, and the writings of the Christian fathers. For studies of this

kind, Erasmus, notwithstanding the disadvantages of cowl and frock,

displayed extraordinary aptitude. He taught himself Greek when Greek was

the language which, in the opinion of the monks, only the devils spoke

in the wrong place. His Latin was as polished as Cicero's; and at length

the Archbishop of Cambray heard of him, and sent him to the University

of Paris.

At Paris he found a world where life could be sufficiently pleasant, but

where his religious habit was every moment in his way. He was a priest,

and so far could not help himself. That ink-spot not all the waters of

the German Ocean could wash away. But he did not care for the low

debaucheries, where the frock and cowl were at home. His place was in

the society of cultivated men, who were glad to know him and to

patronise him; so he shook off his order, let his hair grow, and flung

away his livery.

The Archbishop's patronage was probably now withdrawn. Life in Paris was

expensive, and Erasmus had for several years to struggle with poverty.

We see him, however, for the most part--in his early letters--carrying a

bold front to fortune; desponding one moment, and larking the next with

a Paris grisette; making friends, enjoying good company, enjoying

especially good wine when he could get it; and, above all, satiating his

literary hunger at the library of the University.

In this condition, when about eight-and-twenty, he made acquaintance

with two young English noblemen who were travelling on the Continent,

Lord Mountjoy and one of the Greys.

Mountjoy, intensely attracted by his brilliance, took him for his tutor,

carried him over to England, and introduced him at the court of Henry

the Seventh. At once his fortune was made. He charmed every one, and in

turn he was himself delighted with the country and the people. English

character, English hospitality, English manners--everything English

except the beer--equally pleased him. In the young London men--the

lawyers, the noblemen, even in some of the clergy--he found his own

passion for learning. Sir Thomas More, who was a few years younger than

himself, became his dearest friend; and Warham, afterwards Archbishop of

Canterbury--Fisher, afterwards Bishop of Rochester--Colet, the famous

Dean of St. Paul's--the great Wolsey himself--recognised and welcomed

the rising star of European literature.

Money flowed in upon him. Warham gave him a benefice in Kent, which was

afterwards changed to a pension. Prince Henry, when he became King,

offered him--kings in those days were not bad friends to

literature--Henry offered him, if he would remain in England, a house

large enough to be called a palace, and a pension which, converted into

our money, would be a thousand pounds a year.

Erasmus, however, was a restless creature, and did not like to be caged

or tethered. He declined the King's terms, but Mountjoy settled a

pension on him instead. He had now a handsome income, and he understood

the art of enjoying it. He moved about as he pleased--now to Cambridge,

now to Oxford, and, as the humour took him, back again to Paris; now

staying with Sir Thomas More at Chelsea, now going a pilgrimage with

Dean Colet to Becket's tomb at Canterbury--but always studying, always

gathering knowledge, and throwing it out again, steeped in his own

mother wit, in shining Essays or Dialogues, which were the delight and

the despair of his contemporaries.

Everywhere, in his love of pleasure, in his habits of thought, in his

sarcastic scepticism, you see the healthy, clever, well-disposed,

tolerant, epicurean, intellectual man of the world.

He went, as I said, with Dean Colet to Becket's tomb. At a shrine about

Canterbury he was shown an old shoe which tradition called the Saint's.

At the tomb itself, the great sight was a handkerchief which a monk took

from among the relics, and offered it to the crowd to kiss. The

worshippers touched it in pious adoration, with clasped hands and

upturned eyes. If the thing was genuine, as Erasmus observed, it had but

served for the archbishop to wipe his nose with--and Dean Colet, a

puritan before his time, looked on with eyes flashing scorn, and

scarcely able to keep his hands off the exhibitors. But Erasmus smiled

kindly, reflecting that mankind were fools, and in some form or other

would remain fools. He took notice only of the pile of gold and jewels,

and concluded that so much wealth might prove dangerous to its

possessors.

The peculiarities of the English people interested and amused him. 'You

are going to England,' he wrote afterwards to a friend; 'you will not

fail to be pleased. You will find the great people there most agreeable

and gracious; only be careful not to presume upon their intimacy. They

will condescend to your level, but do not you therefore suppose that you

stand upon theirs. The noble lords are gods in their own eyes.'

'For the other classes, be courteous, give your right hand, do not take

the wall, do not push yourself. Smile on whom you please, but trust no

one that you do not know; above all, speak no evil of England to them.

They are proud of their country above all nations in the world, as they

have good reason to be.'

These directions might have been written yesterday. The manners of the

ladies have somewhat changed. 'English ladies,' says Erasmus, 'are

divinely pretty, and _too_ good-natured. They have an excellent custom

among them, that wherever you go the girls kiss you. They kiss you when

you come, they kiss you when you go, they kiss you at intervening

opportunities, and their lips are soft, warm, and delicious.' Pretty

well that, for a priest!

The custom, perhaps, was not quite so universal as Erasmus would have us

believe. His own coaxing ways may have had something to do with it. At

any rate, he found England a highly agreeable place of residence.

Meanwhile, his reputation as a writer spread over the world. Latin--the

language in which he wrote--was in universal use. It was the vernacular

of the best society in Europe, and no living man was so perfect a master

of it. His satire flashed about among all existing institutions,

scathing especially his old enemies the monks; while the great secular

clergy, who hated the religious orders, were delighted to see them

scourged, and themselves to have the reputation of being patrons of

toleration and reform.

Erasmus, as he felt his ground more sure under him, obtained from Julius

the Second a distinct release from his monastic vows; and, shortly

after, when the brilliant Leo succeeded to the tiara, and gathered about

him the magnificent cluster of artists who have made his era so

illustrious, the new Pope invited Erasmus to visit him at Rome, and

become another star in the constellation which surrounded the Papal

throne.

Erasmus was at this time forty years old--the age when ambition becomes

powerful in men, and takes the place of love of pleasure. He was

received at Rome with princely distinction, and he could have asked for

nothing--bishoprics, red hats, or red stockings--which would not have

been freely given to him if he would have consented to remain.

But he was too considerable a man to be tempted by finery; and the

Pope's livery, gorgeous though it might be, was but a livery after all.

Nothing which Leo the Tenth could do for Erasmus could add lustre to his

coronet. More money he might have had, but of money he had already

abundance, and outward dignity would have been dearly bought by gilded

chains. He resisted temptation; he preferred the northern air, where he

could breathe at liberty, and he returned to England, half inclined to

make his home there.

But his own sovereign laid claim to his services; the future emperor

recalled him to the Low Countries, settled a handsome salary upon him,

and established him at the University of Louvaine.

He was now in the zenith of his greatness. He had an income as large as

many an English nobleman. We find him corresponding with popes,

cardinals, kings, and statesmen; and as he grew older, his mind became

more fixed upon serious subjects. The ignorance and brutality of the

monks, the corruption of the spiritual courts, the absolute irreligion

in which the Church was steeped, gave him serious alarm. He had no

enthusiasms, no doctrinal fanaticisms, no sectarian beliefs or

superstitions. The breadth of his culture, his clear understanding, and

the worldly moderation of his temper, seemed to qualify him above living

men to conduct a temperate reform. He saw that the system around him was

pregnant with danger, and he resolved to devote what remained to him of

life to the introduction of a higher tone in the minds of the clergy.

The revival of learning had by this time alarmed the religious orders.

Literature and education, beyond the code of the theological text-books,

appeared simply devilish to them. When Erasmus returned to Louvaine, the

battle was raging over the north of Europe.

The Dominicans at once recognised in Erasmus their most dangerous enemy.

At first they tried to compel him to re-enter the order, but, strong in

the Pope's dispensation, he was so far able to defy them. They could

bark at his heels, but dared not come to closer quarters: and with his

temper slightly ruffled, but otherwise contented to despise them, he

took up boldly the task which he had set himself.

'We kiss the old shoes of the saints,' he said, 'but we never read their

works.' He undertook the enormous labour of editing and translating

selections from the writings of the Fathers. The New Testament was as

little known as the lost books of Tacitus--all that the people knew of

the Gospels and the Epistles were the passages on which theologians had

built up the Catholic formulas. Erasmus published the text, and with it,

and to make it intelligible, a series of paraphrases, which rent away

the veil of traditional and dogmatic interpretation, and brought the

teaching of Christ and the Apostles into their natural relation with

reason and conscience.

In all this, although the monks might curse, he had countenance and

encouragement from the great ecclesiastics in all parts of Europe--and

it is highly curious to see the extreme freedom with which they allowed

him to propose to them his plans for a Reformation--we seem to be

listening to the wisest of modern broad Churchmen.

To one of his correspondents, an archbishop, he writes:--

'Let us have done with theological refinements. There is an excuse for

the Fathers, because the heretics forced them to define particular

points; but every definition is a misfortune, and for us to persevere in

the same way is sheer folly. Is no man to be admitted to grace who does

not know how the Father differs from the Son, and both from the Spirit?

or how the nativity of the Son differs from the procession of the

Spirit? Unless I forgive my brother his sins against me, God will not

forgive me my sins. Unless I have a pure heart--unless I put away envy,

hate, pride, avarice, lust, I shall not see God. But a man is not damned

because he cannot tell whether the Spirit has one principle or two. Has

he the fruits of the Spirit? That is the question. Is he patient, kind,

good, gentle, modest, temperate, chaste? Enquire if you will, but do not

define. True religion is peace, and we cannot have peace unless we leave

the conscience unshackled on obscure points on which certainty is

impossible. We hear now of questions being referred to the next

OEcumenical Council--better a great deal refer them to doomsday. Time

was, when a man's faith was looked for in his life, not in the Articles

which he professed. Necessity first brought Articles upon us, and ever

since, we have refined and refined till Christianity has become a thing

of words and creeds. Articles increase--sincerity vanishes

away--contention grows hot, and charity grows cold. Then comes in the

civil power, with stake and gallows, and men are forced to profess what

they do not believe, to pretend to love what in fact they hate, and to

say that they understand what in fact has no meaning for them.'

Again, to the Archbishop of Mayence:--

'Reduce the dogmas necessary to be believed, to the smallest possible

number; you can do it without danger to the realities of Christianity.

On other points, either discourage enquiry, or leave everyone free to

believe what he pleases--then we shall have no more quarrels, and

religion will again take hold of life. When you have done this, you can

correct the abuses of which the world with good reason complains. The

unjust judge heard the widow's prayer. You should not shut your ears to

the cries of those for whom Christ died. He did not die for the great

only, but for the poor and for the lowly. There need be no tumult. Do

you only set human affections aside, and let kings and princes lend

themselves heartily to the public good. But observe that the monks and

friars be allowed no voice; with these gentlemen the world has borne too

long. They care only for their own vanity, their own stomachs, their own

power; and they believe that if the people are enlightened, their

kingdom cannot stand.'

Once more to the Pope himself:--

'Let each man amend first his own wicked life. When he has done that,

and will amend his neighbour, let him put on Christian charity, which is

severe enough when severity is needed. If your holiness give power to

men who neither believe in Christ nor care for you, but think only of

their own appetites, I fear there will be danger. We can trust your

holiness, but there are bad men who will use your virtues as a cloke for

their own malice.'

That the spiritual rulers of Europe should have allowed a man like

Erasmus to use language such as this to them is a fact of supreme

importance. It explains the feeling of Goethe, that the world would have

gone on better had there been no Luther, and that the revival of

theological fanaticism did more harm than good.

But the question of questions is, what all this latitudinarian

philosophising, this cultivated epicurean gracefulness would have come

to if left to itself; or rather, what was the effect which it was

inevitably producing? If you wish to remove an old building without

bringing it in ruins about your ears, you must begin at the top, remove

the stones gradually downwards, and touch the foundation last. But

latitudinarianism loosens the elementary principles of theology. It

destroys the premises on which the dogmatic system rests. It would beg

the question to say that this would in itself have been undesirable; but

the practical effect of it, as the world then stood, would have only

been to make the educated into infidels, and to leave the multitude to a

convenient but debasing superstition.

The monks said that Erasmus laid the egg, and Luther hatched a

cockatrice. Erasmus resented deeply such an account of his work; but it

was true after all. The sceptical philosophy is the most powerful of

solvents, but it has no principle of organic life in it; and what of

truth there was in Erasmus's teaching had to assume a far other form

before it was available for the reinvigoration of religion. He himself,

in his clearer moments, felt his own incapacity, and despaired of making

an impression on the mass of ignorance with which he saw himself

surrounded.

'The stupid monks,' he writes, 'say mass as a cobbler makes a shoe; they

come to the altar reeking from their filthy pleasures. Confession with

the monks is a cloke to steal the people's money, to rob girls of their

virtue, and commit other crimes too horrible to name! Yet these people

are the tyrants of Europe. The Pope himself is afraid of them.'

'Beware!' he says to an impetuous friend, 'beware how you offend the

monks. You have to do with an enemy that cannot be slain; an order never

dies, and they will not rest till they have destroyed you.'

The heads of the Church might listen politely, but Erasmus had no

confidence in them. 'Never,' he says, 'was there a time when divines

were greater fools, or popes and prelates more worldly.' Germany was

about to receive a signal illustration of the improvement which it was

to look for from liberalism and intellectual culture.

We are now on the edge of the great conflagration. Here we must leave

Erasmus for the present. I must carry you briefly over the history of

the other great person who was preparing to play his part on the stage.

You have seen something of what Erasmus was; you must turn next to the

companion picture of Martin Luther. You will observe in how many points

their early experiences touch, as if to show more vividly the contrast

between the two men.

Sixteen years after the birth of Erasmus, therefore in the year 1483,

Martin Luther came into the world in a peasant's cottage, at Eisleben,

in Saxony. By peasant, you need not understand a common boor. Hans

Luther, the father, was a thrifty, well-to-do man for his station in

life--adroit with his hands, and able to do many useful things, from

farm work to digging in the mines. The family life was strict and

stern--rather too stern, as Martin thought in later life.

'Be temperate with your children,' he said, long after, to a friend;

'punish them if they lie or steal, but be just in what you do. It is a

lighter sin to take pears and apples than to take money. I shudder when

I think of what I went through myself. My mother beat me about some nuts

once till the blood came. I had a terrible time of it, but she meant

well.'

At school, too, he fell into rough hands, and the recollection of his

sufferings made him tender ever after with young boys and girls.

'Never be hard with children,' he used to say. 'Many a fine character

has been ruined by the stupid brutality of pedagogues. The parts of

speech are a boy's pillory. I was myself flogged fifteen times in one

forenoon over the conjugation of a verb. Punish if you will, but be

kind too, and let the sugar-plum go with the rod.' This is not the

language of a demagogue or a fanatic; it is the wise thought of a

tender, human-hearted man.

At seventeen, he left school for the University at Erfurt. It was then

no shame for a poor scholar to maintain himself by alms. Young Martin

had a rich noble voice and a fine ear, and by singing ballads in the

streets he found ready friends and help. He was still uncertain with

what calling he should take up, when it happened that a young friend was

killed at his side by lightning.

Erasmus was a philosopher. A powder magazine was once blown up by

lightning in a town where Erasmus was staying, and a house of infamous

character was destroyed. The inhabitants saw in what had happened the

Divine anger against sin. Erasmus told them that if there was any anger

in the matter, it was anger merely with the folly which had stored

powder in an exposed situation.

Luther possessed no such premature intelligence. He was distinguished

from other boys only by the greater power of his feelings and the

vividness of his imagination. He saw in his friend's death the immediate

hand of the great Lord of the universe. His conscience was terrified. A

life-long penitence seemed necessary to atone for the faults of his

boyhood. He too, like Erasmus, became a monk, not forced into it--for

his father knew better what the holy men were like, and had no wish to

have son of his among them--but because the monk of Martin's imagination

spent his nights and days upon the stones in prayer; and Martin, in the

heat of his repentance, longed to be kneeling at his side.

In this mood he entered the Augustine monastery at Erfurt. He was full

of an overwhelming sense of his own wretchedness and sinfulness. Like

St. Paul, he was crying to be delivered from the body of death which he

carried about him. He practised all possible austerities. He, if no one

else, mortified his flesh with fasting. He passed nights in the chancel

before the altar, or on his knees on the floor of his cell. He weakened

his body till his mind wandered, and he saw ghosts and devils. Above

all, he saw the flaming image of his own supposed guilt. God required

that he should keep the law in all points. He had not so kept the

law--could not so keep the law--and therefore he believed that he was

damned. One morning, he was found senseless and seemingly dead; a

brother played to him on a flute, and soothed his senses back to

consciousness.

It was long since any such phenomenon had appeared among the rosy friars

of Erfurt. They could not tell what to make of him. Staupitz, the prior,

listened to his accusations of himself in confession. 'My good fellow,'

he said, 'don't be so uneasy; you have committed no sins of the least

consequence; you have not killed anybody, or committed adultery, or

things of that sort. If you sin to some purpose, it is right that you

should think about it, but don't make mountains out of trifles.'

Very curious: to the commonplace man the uncommonplace is for ever

unintelligible. What was the good of all that excitement--that agony of

self-reproach for little things? None at all, if the object is only to

be an ordinary good sort of man--if a decent fulfilment of the round of

common duties is the be-all and the end-all of human life on earth.

The plague came by-and-by into the town. The commonplace clergy ran

away--went to their country-houses, went to the hills, went

anywhere--and they wondered in the same way why Luther would not go with

them. They admired him and liked him. They told him his life was too

precious to be thrown away. He answered, quite simply, that his place

was with the sick and dying; a monk's life was no great matter. The sun

he did not doubt would continue to shine, whatever became of him. 'I am

no St. Paul,' he said; 'I am afraid of death; but there are things worse

than death, and if I die, I die.'

Even a Staupitz could not but feel that he had an extraordinary youth in

his charge. To divert his mind from feeding upon itself, he devised a

mission for him abroad, and brother Martin was despatched on business of

the convent to Rome.

Luther too, like Erasmus, was to see Rome; but how different the figures

of the two men there! Erasmus goes with servants and horses, the

polished, successful man of the world. Martin Luther trudges penniless

and barefoot across the Alps, helped to a meal and a night's rest at the

monasteries along the road, or begging, if the convents fail him, at the

farm-houses.

He was still young, and too much occupied with his own sins to know much

of the world outside him. Erasmus had no dreams. He knew the hard truth

on most things. But Rome, to Luther's eager hopes, was the city of the

saints, and the court and palace of the Pope fragrant with the odours of

Paradise. 'Blessed Rome,' he cried, as he entered the gate--'Blessed

Rome, sanctified with the blood of martyrs!'

Alas! the Rome of reality was very far from blessed. He remained long

enough to complete his disenchantment. The cardinals, with their gilded

chariots and their parasols of peacocks' plumes, were poor

representatives of the apostles. The gorgeous churches and more gorgeous

rituals, the pagan splendour of the paintings, the heathen gods still

almost worshipped in the adoration of the art which had formed them, to

Luther, whose heart was heavy with thoughts of man's depravity, were

utterly horrible. The name of religion was there: the thinnest veil was

scarcely spread over the utter disbelief with which God and Christ were

at heart regarded. Culture enough there was. It was the Rome of Raphael

and Michael Angelo, of Perugino, and Benvenuto; but to the poor German

monk, who had come there to find help for his suffering soul, what was

culture?

He fled at the first moment that he could. 'Adieu! Rome,' he said; 'let

all who would lead a holy life depart from Rome. Everything is permitted

in Rome except to be an honest man.' He had no thought of leaving the

Roman Church. To a poor monk like him, to talk of leaving the Church was

like talking of leaping off the planet. But perplexed and troubled he

returned to Saxony; and his friend Staupitz, seeing clearly that a

monastery was no place for him, recommended him to the Elector as

Professor of Philosophy at Wittenberg.

The senate of Wittenberg gave him the pulpit of the town church, and

there at once he had room to show what was in him. 'This monk,' said

some one who heard him, 'is a marvellous fellow. He has strange eyes,

and will give the doctors trouble by-and-by.'

He had read deeply, especially he had read that rare and almost unknown

book, the 'New Testament.' He was not cultivated like Erasmus. Erasmus

spoke the most polished Latin. Luther spoke and wrote his own vernacular

German. The latitudinarian philosophy, the analytical acuteness, the

sceptical toleration of Erasmus were alike strange and distasteful to

him. In all things he longed only to know the truth--to shake off and

hurl from him lies and humbug.

Superstitious he was. He believed in witches and devils and fairies--a

thousand things without basis in fact, which Erasmus passed by in

contemptuous indifference. But for things which were really true--true

as nothing else in this world, or any world, is true--the justice of

God, the infinite excellence of good, the infinite hatefulness of

evil--these things he believed and felt with a power of passionate

conviction to which the broader, feebler mind of the other was for ever

a stranger.

We come now to the memorable year 1517, when Luther was thirty-five

years old. A new cathedral was in progress at Rome. Michael Angelo had

furnished Leo the Tenth with the design of St. Peter's; and the question

of questions was to find money to complete the grandest structure which

had ever been erected by man.

Pope Leo was the most polished and cultivated of mankind. The work to be

done was to be the most splendid which art could produce. The means to

which the Pope had recourse will serve to show us how much all that

would have done for us.

You remember what I told you about indulgences. The notable device of

his Holiness was to send distinguished persons about Europe with sacks

of indulgences. Indulgences and dispensations! Dispensations to eat meat

on fast-days--dispensations to marry one's near relation--dispensations

for anything and everything which the faithful might wish to purchase

who desired forbidden pleasures. The dispensations were simply

scandalous. The indulgences--well, if a pious Catholic is asked nowadays

what they were, he will say that they were the remission of the penances

which the Church inflicts upon earth; but it is also certain that they

would have sold cheap if the people had thought that this was all that

they were to get by them. As the thing was represented by the spiritual

hawkers who disposed of these wares, they were letters of credit on

heaven. When the great book was opened, the people believed that these

papers would be found entire on the right side of the account.

Debtor--so many murders, so many robberies, lies, slanders, or

debaucheries. Creditor--the merits of the saints placed to the account

of the delinquent by the Pope's letters, in consideration of value

received.

This is the way in which the pardon system was practically worked. This

is the way in which it is worked still, where the same superstitions

remain.

If one had asked Pope Leo whether he really believed in these pardons of

his, he would have said officially that the Church had always held that

the Pope had power to grant them.

Had he told the truth, he would have added privately that if the people

chose to be fools, it was not for him to disappoint them.

The collection went on. The money of the faithful came in plentifully;

and the pedlars going their rounds appeared at last in Saxony.

The Pope had bought the support of the Archbishop of Mayence, Erasmus's

friend, by promising him half the spoil which was gathered in his

province. The agent was the Dominican monk Tetzel, whose name has

acquired a forlorn notoriety in European history.

His stores were opened in town after town. He entered in state. The

streets everywhere were hung with flags. Bells were pealed; nuns and

monks walked in procession before and after him, while he himself sate

in a chariot, with the Papal Bull on a velvet cushion in front of him.

The sale-rooms were the churches. The altars were decorated, the candles

lighted, the arms of St. Peter blazoned conspicuously on the roof.

Tetzel from the pulpit explained the efficacy of his medicines; and if

any profane person doubted their power, he was threatened with

excommunication.

Acolytes walked through the crowds, clinking their plates and crying,

'Buy! buy!' The business went as merry as a marriage bell till the

Dominican came near to Wittenberg.

Half a century before, such a spectacle would have excited no particular

attention. The few who saw through the imposition would have kept their

thoughts to themselves; the many would have paid their money, and in a

month all would have been forgotten.

But the fight between the men of letters and the monks, the writings of

Erasmus and Reuchlin, the satires of Ulric von Hutten, had created a

silent revolution in the minds of the younger laity.

A generation had grown to manhood of whom the Church authorities knew

nothing; and the whole air of Germany, unsuspected by pope or prelate,

was charged with electricity.

Had Luther stood alone, he, too, would probably have remained silent.

What was he, a poor, friendless, solitary monk, that he should set

himself against the majesty of the triple crown?

However hateful the walls of a dungeon, a man of sense confined alone

there does not dash his hands against the stones.

But Luther knew that his thoughts were the thoughts of thousands. Many

wrong things, as we all know, have to be endured in this world.

Authority is never very angelic; and moderate injustice, a moderate

quantity of lies, is more tolerable than anarchy.

But it is with human things as it is with the great icebergs which drift

southward out of the frozen seas. They swim two-thirds under water, and

one-third above; and so long as the equilibrium is sustained, you would

think that they were as stable as the rocks. But the sea-water is warmer

than the air. Hundreds of fathoms down, the tepid current washes the

base of the berg. Silently in those far deeps the centre of gravity is

changed; and then, in a moment, with one vast roll, the enormous mass

heaves over, and the crystal peaks which had been glancing so proudly in

the sunlight, are buried in the ocean for ever.

Such a process as this had been going on in Germany, and Luther knew it,

and knew that the time was come for him to speak. Fear had not kept him

back. The danger to himself would be none the less because he would have

the people at his side. The fiercer the thunderstorm, the greater peril

to the central figure who stands out above the rest exposed to it. But

he saw that there was hope at last of a change; and for himself--as he

said in the plague--if he died, he died.

Erasmus admitted frankly for himself that he did not like danger.

'As to me,' he wrote to Archbishop Warham, 'I have no inclination to

risk my life for truth. We have not all strength for martyrdom; and if

trouble come, I shall imitate St. Peter. Popes and emperors must settle

the creeds. If they settle them well, so much the better; if ill, I

shall keep on the safe side.'

That is to say, truth was not the first necessity to Erasmus. He would

prefer truth, if he could have it. If not, he could get on moderately

well upon falsehood. Luther could not. No matter what the danger to

himself, if he could smite a lie upon the head and kill it, he was

better pleased than by a thousand lives. We hear much of Luther's

doctrine about faith. Stripped of theological verbiage, that doctrine

means this.

Reason says that, on the whole, truth and justice are desirable things.

They make men happier in themselves, and make society more prosperous.

But there reason ends, and men will not die for principles of utility.

Faith says that between truth and lies, there is an infinite difference:

one is of God, the other of Satan; one is eternally to be loved, the

other eternally to be abhorred. It cannot say why, in language

intelligible to reason. It is the voice of the nobler nature in man

speaking out of his heart.

While Tetzel, with his bull and his gilt car, was coming to Wittenberg,

Luther, loyal still to authority while there was a hope that authority

would be on the side of right, wrote to the Archbishop of Mayence to

remonstrate.

The archbishop, as we know, was to have a share of Tetzel's spoils; and

what were the complaints of a poor insignificant monk to a supreme

archbishop who was in debt and wanted money?

The Archbishop of Mayence flung the letter into his waste-paper basket;

and Luther made his solemn appeal from earthly dignitaries to the

conscience of the German people. He set up his protest on the church

door at Wittenberg; and, in ninety-five propositions he challenged the

Catholic Church to defend Tetzel and his works.

The Pope's indulgences, he said, cannot take away sins. God alone remits

sins; and He pardons those who are penitent, without help from man's

absolutions.

The Church may remit penalties which the Church inflicts. But the

Church's power is in this world only, and does not reach to purgatory.

If God has thought fit to place a man in purgatory, who shall say that

it is good for him to be taken out of purgatory? who shall say that he

himself desires it?

True repentance does not shrink from chastisement. True repentance

rather loves chastisement.

The bishops are asleep. It is better to give to the poor than to buy

indulgences; and he who sees his neighbour in want, and instead of

helping his neighbour buys a pardon for himself, is doing what is

displeasing to God. Who is this man who dares to say that for so many

crowns the soul of a sinner can be made whole?

These, and like these, were Luther's propositions. Little guessed the

Catholic prelates the dimensions of the act which had been done. The

Pope, when he saw the theses, smiled in good-natured contempt. 'A

drunken German wrote them,' he said; 'when he has slept off his wine, he

will be of another mind.'

Tetzel bayed defiance; the Dominican friars took up the quarrel; and

Hochstrat of Cologne, Reuchlin's enemy, clamoured for fire and faggot.

Voice answered voice. The religious houses all Germany over were like

kennels of hounds howling to each other across the spiritual waste. If

souls could not be sung out of purgatory, their occupation was gone.

Luther wrote to Pope Leo to defend himself; Leo cited him to answer for

his audacity at Rome; while to the young laymen, to the noble spirits

all Europe over, Wittenberg became a beacon of light shining in the

universal darkness.

It was a trying time to Luther. Had he been a smaller man, he would have

been swept away by his sudden popularity--he would have placed himself

at the head of some great democratic movement, and in a few years his

name would have disappeared in the noise and smoke of anarchy.

But this was not his nature. His fellow-townsmen were heartily on his

side. He remained quietly at his post in the Augustine Church at

Wittenberg. If the powers of the world came down upon him and killed

him, he was ready to be killed. Of himself at all times he thought

infinitely little; and he believed that his death would be as

serviceable to truth as his life.

Killed undoubtedly he would have been if the clergy could have had their

way. It happened, however, that Saxony just then was governed by a

prince of no common order. Were all princes like the Elector Frederick,

we should have no need of democracy in this world--we should never have

heard of democracy. The clergy could not touch Luther against the will

of the Wittenberg senate, unless the Elector would help them; and, to

the astonishment of everybody, the Elector was disinclined to consent.

The Pope himself wrote to exhort him to his duties. The Elector still

hesitated. His professed creed was the creed in which the Church had

educated him; but he had a clear secular understanding outside his

formulas. When he read the propositions, they did not seem to him the

pernicious things which the monks said they were. 'There is much in the

Bible about Christ,' he said, 'but not much about Rome.' He sent for

Erasmus, and asked him what he thought about the matter.

The Elector knew to whom he was speaking. He wished for a direct answer,

and looked Erasmus full and broad in the face. Erasmus pinched his thin

lips together. 'Luther,' he said at length, 'has committed two sins: he

has touched the Pope's crown and the monks' bellies.'

He generously and strongly urged Frederick not to yield for the present

to Pope Leo's importunacy; and the Pope was obliged to try less hasty

and more formal methods.

He had wished Luther to be sent to him to Rome, where his process would

have had a rapid end. As this could not be, the case was transferred to

Augsburg, and a cardinal legate was sent from Italy to look into it.

There was no danger of violence at Augsburg. The townspeople there and

everywhere were on the side of freedom; and Luther went cheerfully to

defend himself. He walked from Wittenberg. You can fancy him still in

his monk's brown frock, with all his wardrobe on his back--an apostle of

the old sort. The citizens, high and low, attended him to the gates, and

followed him along the road, crying 'Luther for ever!' 'Nay,' he

answered, 'Christ for ever!'

The cardinal legate, being reduced to the necessity of politeness,

received him civilly. He told him, however, simply and briefly, that the

Pope insisted on his recantation, and would accept nothing else. Luther

requested the cardinal to point out to him where he was wrong. The

cardinal waived discussion. 'He was come to command,' he said, 'not to

argue.' And Luther had to tell him that it could not be.

Remonstrances, threats, entreaties, even bribes were tried. Hopes of

high distinction and reward were held out to him if he would only be

reasonable. To the amazement of the proud Italian, a poor peasant's

son--a miserable friar of a provincial German town--was prepared to defy

the power and resist the prayers of the Sovereign of Christendom.

'What!' said the cardinal at last to him, 'do you think the Pope cares

for the opinion of a German boor? The Pope's little finger is stronger

than all Germany. Do you expect your princes to take up arms to defend

_you_--_you_, a wretched worm like you? I tell you, No! and where will

you be then--where will you be then?'

Luther answered, 'Then, as now, in the hands of Almighty God.'

The Court dissolved. The cardinal carried back his report to his master.

The Pope, so defied, brought out his thunders; he excommunicated Luther;

he wrote again to the elector, entreating him not to soil his name and

lineage by becoming a protector of heretics; and he required him,

without further ceremony, to render up the criminal to justice.

The elector's power was limited. As yet, the quarrel was simply between

Luther and the Pope. The elector was by no means sure that his bold

subject was right--he was only not satisfied that he was wrong--and it

was a serious question with him how far he ought to go. The monk might

next be placed under the ban of the empire; and if he persisted in

protecting him afterwards, Saxony might have all the power of Germany

upon it. He did not venture any more to refuse absolutely. He temporised

and delayed; while Luther himself, probably at the elector's

instigation, made overtures for peace to the Pope. Saving his duty to

Christ, he promised to be for the future an obedient son of the Church,

and to say no more about indulgences if Tetzel ceased to defend them.

'My being such a small creature,' Luther said afterwards, 'was a

misfortune for the Pope. He despised me too much! What, he thought,

could a slave like me do to him--to him, who was the greatest man in all

the world. Had he accepted my proposal, he would have extinguished me.'

But the infallible Pope conducted himself like a proud, irascible,

exceedingly fallible mortal. To make terms with the town preacher of

Wittenberg was too preposterous.

Just then the imperial throne fell vacant; and the pretty scandal I told

you of, followed at the choice of his successor. Frederick of Saxony

might have been elected if he had liked--and it would have been better

for the world perhaps if Frederick had been more ambitious of high

dignities--but the Saxon Prince did not care to trouble himself with the

imperial sceptre. The election fell on Maximilian's grandson

Charles--grandson also of Ferdinand the Catholic--Sovereign of Spain;

Sovereign of Burgundy and the Low Countries; Sovereign of Naples and

Sicily; Sovereign, beyond the Atlantic, of the New Empire of the Indies.

No fitter man could have been found to do the business of the Pope. With

the empire of Germany added to his inherited dominions, who could resist

him?

To the new emperor, unless the elector yielded, Luther's case had now to

be referred.

The elector, if he had wished, could not interfere. Germany was

attentive, but motionless. The students, the artisans, the tradesmen,

were at heart with the Reformer; and their enthusiasm could not be

wholly repressed. The press grew fertile with pamphlets; and it was

noticed that all the printers and compositors went for Luther. The

Catholics could not get their books into type without sending them to

France or the Low Countries.

Yet none of the princes except the elector had as yet shown him favour.

The bishops were hostile to a man. The nobles had given no sign; and

their place would be naturally on the side of authority. They had no

love for bishops--there was hope in that; and they looked with no favour

on the huge estates of the religious orders. But no one could expect

that they would peril their lands and lives for an insignificant monk.

There was an interval of two years before the emperor was at leisure to

take up the question. The time was spent in angry altercation, boding no

good for the future.

The Pope issued a second bull condemning Luther and his works. Luther

replied by burning the bull in the great square at Wittenberg.

At length, in April 1521, the Diet of the Empire assembled at Worms, and

Luther was called to defend himself in the presence of Charles the

Fifth.

That it should have come to this at all, in days of such high-handed

authority, was sufficiently remarkable. It indicated something growing

in the minds of men, that the so-called Church was not to carry things

any longer in the old style. Popes and bishops might order, but the

laity intended for the future to have opinions of their own how far such

orders should be obeyed.

The Pope expected anyhow that the Diet, by fair means or foul, would

now rid him of his adversary. The elector, who knew the ecclesiastical

ways of handling such matters, made it a condition of his subject

appearing, that he should have a safe conduct, under the emperor's hand;

that Luther, if judgment went against him, should be free for the time

to return to the place from which he had come; and that he, the elector,

should determine afterwards what should be done with him.

When the interests of the Church were concerned, safe conducts, it was

too well known, were poor security. Pope Clement the Seventh, a little

after, when reproached for breaking a promise, replied with a smile,

'The Pope has power to bind and to loose.' Good, in the eyes of

ecclesiastical authorities, meant what was good for the Church; evil,

whatever was bad for the Church; and the highest moral obligation became

sin when it stood in St. Peter's way.

There had been an outburst of free thought in Bohemia a century and a

half before. John Huss, Luther's forerunner, came with a safe conduct to

the Council of Constance; but the bishops ruled that safe conducts could

not protect heretics. They burnt John Huss for all their promises, and

they hoped now that so good a Catholic as Charles would follow so

excellent a precedent. Pope Leo wrote himself to beg that Luther's safe

conduct should not be observed. The bishops and archbishops, when

Charles consulted them, took the same view as the Pope.

'There is something in the office of a bishop,' Luther said, a year or

two later, 'which is dreadfully demoralising. Even good men change their

natures at their consecration; Satan enters into them as he entered into

Judas, as soon as they have taken the sop.'

It was most seriously likely that, if Luther trusted himself at the Diet

on the faith of his safe conduct, he would never return alive. Rumours

of intended treachery were so strong, that if he refused to go, the

elector meant to stand by him at any cost. Should he appear, or not

appear? It was for himself to decide. If he stayed away, judgment would

go against him by default. Charles would call out the forces of the

empire, and Saxony would be invaded.

Civil war would follow, with insurrection all over Germany, with no

certain prospect except bloodshed and misery.

Luther was not a man to expose his country to peril that his own person

might escape. He had provoked the storm; and if blood was to be shed,

his blood ought at least to be the first. He went. On his way, a friend

came to warn him again that foul play was intended, that he was

condemned already, that his books had been burnt by the hangman, and

that he was a dead man if he proceeded.

Luther trembled--he owned it--but he answered, 'Go to Worms! I will go

if there are as many devils in Worms as there are tiles upon the roofs

of the houses.'

The roofs, when he came into the city, were crowded, not with devils,

but with the inhabitants, all collecting there to see him as he passed.

A nobleman gave him shelter for the night; the next day he was led to

the Town Hall.

No more notable spectacle had been witnessed in this planet for many a

century--not, perhaps, since a greater than Luther stood before the

Roman Procurator.

There on the raised dais sate the sovereign of half the world. There on

either side of him stood the archbishops, the ministers of state, the

princes of the empire, gathered together to hear and judge the son of a

poor miner, who had made the world ring with his name.

The body of the hall was thronged with knights and nobles--stern hard

men in dull gleaming armour. Luther, in his brown frock, was led forward

between their ranks. The looks which greeted him were not all

unfriendly. The first Article of a German credo was belief in _courage_.

Germany had had its feuds in times past with Popes of Rome, and they

were not without pride that a poor countryman of theirs should have

taken by the beard the great Italian priest. They had settled among

themselves that, come what would, there should be fair play; and they

looked on half admiring, and half in scorn.

As Luther passed up the hall, a steel baron touched him on the shoulder

with his gauntlet.

'Pluck up thy spirit, little monk;' he said, 'some of us here have seen

warm work in our time, but, by my troth, nor I nor any knight in this

company ever needed a stout heart more than thou needest it now. If thou

hast faith in these doctrines of thine, little monk, go on, in the name

of God.'

'Yes, in the name of God,' said Luther, throwing back his head, 'In the

name of God, forward!'

As at Augsburg, one only question was raised. Luther had broken the

laws of the Church. He had taught doctrines which the Pope had declared

to be false. Would he or would he not retract?

As at Augsburg, he replied briefly that he would retract when his

doctrines were not declared to be false merely, but were proved to be

false. Then, but not till then. That was his answer, and his last word.

There, as you understand, the heart of the matter indeed rested. In

those words lay the whole meaning of the Reformation. Were men to go on

for ever saying that this and that was true, because the Pope affirmed

it? Or were Popes' decrees thenceforward to be tried like the words of

other men--by the ordinary laws of evidence?

It required no great intellect to understand that a Pope's pardon, which

you could buy for five shillings, could not really get a soul out of

purgatory. It required a quality much rarer than intellect to look such

a doctrine in the face--sanctioned as it was by the credulity of ages,

and backed by the pomp and pageantry of earthly power--and say to it

openly, 'You are a lie.' Cleverness and culture could have given a

thousand reasons--they did then and they do now--why an indulgence

should be believed in; when honesty and common sense could give but one

reason for thinking otherwise. Cleverness and imposture get on

excellently well together--imposture and veracity, never.

Luther looked at those wares of Tetzel's, and said, 'Your pardons are no

pardons at all--no letters of credit on heaven, but flash notes of the

Bank of Humbug, and you know it.' They did know it. The conscience of

every man in Europe answered back, that what Luther said was true.

Bravery, honesty, veracity, these were the qualities which were

needed--which were needed then, and are needed always, as the root of

all real greatness in man.

The first missionaries of Christianity, when they came among the heathen

nations, and found them worshipping idols, did not care much to reason

that an image which man had made could not be God. The priests might

have been a match for them in reasoning. They walked up to the idol in

the presence of its votaries. They threw stones at it, spat upon it,

insulted it. 'See,' they said, 'I do this to your God. If he is God, let

him avenge himself.'

It was a simple argument; always effective; easy, and yet most

difficult. It required merely a readiness to be killed upon the spot by

the superstition which is outraged.

And so, and only so, can truth make its way for us in any such matters.

The form changes--the thing remains. Superstition, folly, and cunning

will go on to the end of time, spinning their poison webs around the

consciences of mankind. Courage and veracity--these qualities, and only

these, avail to defeat them.

From the moment that Luther left the emperor's presence a free man, the

spell of Absolutism was broken, and the victory of the Reformation

secured. The ban of the Pope had fallen; the secular arm had been called

to interfere; the machinery of authority strained as far as it would

bear. The emperor himself was an unconscious convert to the higher

creed. The Pope had urged him to break his word. The Pope had told him

that honour was nothing, and morality was nothing, where the interests

of orthodoxy were compromised. The emperor had refused to be tempted

into perjury; and, in refusing, had admitted that there was a spiritual

power upon the earth, above the Pope, and above him.

The party of the Church felt it so. A plot was formed to assassinate

Luther on his return to Saxony. The insulted majesty of Rome could be

vindicated at least by the dagger.

But this, too, failed. The elector heard what was intended. A party of

horse, disguised as banditti, waylaid the Reformer upon the road, and

carried him off to the castle of Wartburg, where he remained out of

harm's way till the general rising of Germany placed him beyond the

reach of danger.

At Wartburg for the present evening we leave him.

The Emperor Charles and Luther never met again. The monks of Yuste, who

watched on the deathbed of Charles, reported that at the last hour he

repented that he had kept his word, and reproached himself for having

allowed the arch-heretic to escape from his hands.

It is possible that, when the candle of life was burning low, and spirit

and flesh were failing together, and the air of the sick room was thick

and close with the presence of the angel of death, the nobler nature of

the emperor might have yielded to the influences which were around him.

His confessor might have thrust into his lips the words which he so

wished to hear.

But Charles the Fifth, though a Catholic always, was a Catholic of the

old grand type, to whom creed and dogmas were but the robe of a regal

humanity. Another story is told of Charles--an authentic story this

one--which makes me think that the monks of Yuste mistook or maligned

him. Six and twenty years after this scene at Worms, when the then

dawning heresy had become broad day; when Luther had gone to his

rest--and there had gathered about his name the hate which mean men feel

for an enemy who has proved too strong for them--a passing vicissitude

in the struggle brought the emperor at the head of his army to

Wittenberg.

The vengeance which the monks could not inflict upon him in life, they

proposed to wreak upon his bones.

The emperor desired to be conducted to Luther's tomb; and as he stood

gazing at it, full of many thoughts, some one suggested that the body

should be taken up and burnt at the stake in the Market Place.

There was nothing unusual in the proposal; it was the common practice of

the Catholic Church with the remains of heretics who were held unworthy

to be left in repose in hallowed ground. There was scarcely, perhaps,

another Catholic prince who would have hesitated to comply. But Charles

was one of nature's gentlemen; he answered, 'I war not with the dead.'

LECTURE III.

We have now entered upon the movement which broke the power of the

Papacy--which swept Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, England,

Scotland, into the stream of revolution, and gave a new direction to the

spiritual history of mankind.

You would not thank me if I were to take you out into that troubled

ocean. I confine myself, and I wish you to confine your attention, to

the two kinds of men who appear as leaders in times of change--of whom

Erasmus and Luther are respectively the types.

On one side there are the large-minded latitudinarian philosophers--men

who have no confidence in the people--who have no passionate

convictions; moderate men, tolerant men, who trust to education, to

general progress in knowledge and civilisation, to forbearance, to

endurance, to time--men who believe that all wholesome reforms proceed

downwards from the educated to the multitudes; who regard with contempt,

qualified by terror, appeals to the popular conscience or to popular

intelligence.

Opposite to these are the men of faith--and by faith I do not mean

belief in dogmas, but belief in goodness, belief in justice, in

righteousness, above all, belief in truth. Men of faith consider

conscience of more importance than knowledge--or rather as a first

condition--without which all the knowledge in the world is no use to a

man--if he wishes to be indeed a man in any high and noble sense of the

word. They are not contented with looking for what may be useful or

pleasant to themselves; they look by quite other methods for what is

honourable--for what is good--for what is just. They believe that if

they can find out that, then at all hazards, and in spite of all present

consequences to themselves, that is to be preferred. If, individually

and to themselves, no visible good ever came from it, in this world or

in any other, still they would say, 'Let us do that and nothing else.

Life will be of no value to us if we are to use it only for our own

gratification.'

The soldier before a battle knows that if he shirks and pretends to be

ill, he may escape danger and make sure of his life. There are very few

men, indeed, if it comes to that, who would not sooner die ten times

over than so dishonour themselves. Men of high moral nature carry out

the same principle into the details of their daily life; they do not

care to live unless they may live nobly. Like my uncle Toby, they have

but one fear--the fear of doing a wrong thing.

I call this faith, because there is no proof, such as will satisfy the

scientific enquirer, that there is any such thing as moral truth--any

such thing as absolute right and wrong at all. As the Scripture says,

'Verily, thou art a God that hidest thyself.' The forces of nature pay

no respect to what we call good and evil. Prosperity does not uniformly

follow virtue; nor are defeat and failure necessary consequences of

vice.

Certain virtues--temperance, industry, and things within reasonable

limits--command their reward. Sensuality, idleness, and waste, commonly

lead to ruin.

But prosperity is consistent with intense worldliness, intense

selfishness, intense hardness of heart; while the grander features of

human character--self-sacrifice, disregard of pleasure, patriotism, love

of knowledge, devotion to any great and good cause--these have no

tendency to bring men what is called fortune. They do not even

necessarily promote their happiness; for do what they will in this way,

the horizon of what they desire to do perpetually flies before them.

High hopes and enthusiasms are generally disappointed in results; and

the wrongs, the cruelties, the wretchednesses of all kinds which for

ever prevail among mankind--the shortcomings in himself of which he

becomes more conscious as he becomes really better--these things, you

may be sure, will prevent a noble-minded man from ever being

particularly happy.

If you see a man happy, as the world goes--contented with himself and

contented with what is round him--such a man may be, and probably is,

decent and respectable; but the highest is not in him, and the highest

will not come out of him.

Judging merely by outward phenomena--judging merely by what we call

reason--you cannot prove that there is any moral government in the world

at all, except what men, for their own convenience, introduce into it.

Right and wrong resolve themselves into principles of utility and social

convenience. Enlightened selfishness prescribes a decent rule of conduct

for common purposes; and virtue, by a large school of philosophy, is

completely resolved into that.

True, when nations go on long on the selfish hypothesis, they are apt to

find at last that they have been mistaken. They find it in bankruptcy of

honour and character--in social wreck and dissolution. All lies in

serious matters end at last, as Carlyle says, in broken heads. That is

the final issue which they are sure to come to in the long run. The

Maker of the world does not permit a society to continue which forgets

or denies the nobler principles of action.

But the end is often long in coming; and these nobler principles are

meanwhile _not_ provided for us by the inductive philosophy.

Patriotism, for instance, of which we used to think something--a

readiness to devote our energies while we live, to devote our lives, if

nothing else will serve, to what we call our country--what are we to say

of that?

I once asked a distinguished philosopher what he thought of patriotism.

He said he thought it was a compound of vanity and superstition; a bad

kind of prejudice, which would die out with the growth of reason. My

friend believed in the progress of humanity--he could not narrow his

sympathies to so small a thing as his own country. I could but say to

myself, 'Thank God, then, we are not yet a nation of philosophers.'

A man who takes up with philosophy like that, may write fine books, and

review articles and such like, but at the bottom of him he is a poor

caitiff, and there is no more to be said about him.

So when the air is heavy with imposture, and men live only to make

money, and the service of God is become a thing of words and ceremonies,

and the kingdom of heaven is bought and sold, and all that is high and

pure in man is smothered by corruption--fire of the same kind bursts out

in higher natures with a fierceness which cannot be controlled; and,

confident in truth and right, they call fearlessly on the seven

thousand in Israel who have not bowed the knee to Baal to rise and stand

by them.

They do not ask whether those whom they address have wide knowledge of

history, or science, or philosophy; they ask rather that they shall be

honest, that they shall be brave, that they shall be true to the common

light which God has given to all His children. They know well that

conscience is no exceptional privilege of the great or the cultivated,

that to be generous and unselfish is no prerogative of rank or

intellect.

Erasmus considered that, for the vulgar, a lie might be as good as

truth, and often better. A lie, ascertained to be a lie, to Luther was

deadly poison--poison to him, and poison to all who meddled with it. In

his own genuine greatness, he was too humble to draw insolent

distinctions in his own favour; or to believe that any one class on

earth is of more importance than another in the eyes of the Great Maker

of them all.

Well, then, you know what I mean by faith, and what I mean by intellect.

It was not that Luther was without intellect. He was less subtle, less

learned, than Erasmus; but in mother wit, in elasticity, in force, and

imaginative power, he was as able a man as ever lived. Luther created

the German language as an instrument of literature. His translation of

the Bible is as rich and grand as our own, and his table talk as full of

matter as Shakespeare's plays.

Again; you will mistake me if you think I represent Erasmus as a man

without conscience, or belief in God and goodness. But in Luther that

belief was a certainty; in Erasmus it was only a high probability--and

the difference between the two is not merely great, it is infinite. In

Luther, it was the root; in Erasmus, it was the flower. In Luther, it

was the first principle of life; in Erasmus, it was an inference which

might be taken away, and yet leave the world a very tolerable and

habitable place after all.

You see the contrast in their early lives. You see Erasmus--light,

bright, sarcastic, fond of pleasure, fond of society, fond of wine and

kisses, and intellectual talk and polished company. You see Luther

throwing himself into the cloister, that he might subdue his will to the

will of God; prostrate in prayer, in nights of agony, and distracting

his easy-going confessor with the exaggerated scruples of his

conscience.

You see it in the effects of their teaching. You see Erasmus addressing

himself with persuasive eloquence to kings, and popes, and prelates; and

for answer, you see Pope Leo sending Tetzel over Germany with his

carriage-load of indulgences. You see Erasmus's dearest friend, our own

gifted admirable Sir Thomas More, taking his seat beside the bishops and

sending poor Protestant artisans to the stake.

You see Luther, on the other side, standing out before the world, one

lone man, with all authority against him--taking lies by the throat, and

Europe thrilling at his words, and saying after him, 'The reign of

Imposture shall end.'

Let us follow the course of Erasmus after the tempest had broken.

He knew Luther to be right. Luther had but said what Erasmus had been

all his life convinced of, and Luther looked to see him come forward and

take his place at his side. Had Erasmus done so, the course of things

would have been far happier and better. His prodigious reputation would

have given the Reformers the influence with the educated which they had

won for themselves with the multitude, and the Pope would have been left

without a friend to the north of the Alps. But there would have been

some danger--danger to the leaders, if certainty of triumph to the

cause--and Erasmus had no gift for martyrdom.

His first impulse was generous. He encouraged the elector, as we have

seen, to protect Luther from the Pope. 'I looked on Luther,' he wrote to

Duke George of Saxe, 'as a necessary evil in the corruption of the

Church; a medicine, bitter and drastic, from which sounder health would

follow.'

And again, more boldly: 'Luther has taken up the cause of honesty and

good sense against abominations which are no longer tolerable. His

enemies are men under whose worthlessness the Christian world has

groaned too long.'

So to the heads of the Church he wrote, pressing them to be moderate and

careful:--

'I neither approve Luther nor condemn him,' he said to the Archbishop of

Mayence; 'if he is innocent, he ought not to be oppressed by the

factions of the wicked; if he is in error, he should be answered, not

destroyed. The theologians'--observe how true they remain to the

universal type in all times and in all countries--'the theologians do

not try to answer him. They do but raise an insane and senseless

clamour, and shriek and curse. Heresy, heretic, heresiarch, schismatic,

Antichrist--these are the words which are in the mouths of all of them;

and, of course, they condemn without reading. I warned them what they

were doing. I told them to scream less, and to think more. Luther's life

they admit to be innocent and blameless. Such a tragedy I never saw. The

most humane men are thirsting for his blood, and they would rather kill

him than mend him. The Dominicans are the worst, and are more knaves

than fools. In old times, even a heretic was quietly listened to. If he

recanted, he was absolved; if he persisted, he was at worst

excommunicated. Now they will have nothing but blood. Not to agree with

them is heresy. To know Greek is heresy. To speak good Latin is heresy.

Whatever they do not understand is heresy. Learning, they pretend, has

given birth to Luther, though Luther has but little of it. Luther thinks

more of the Gospel than of scholastic divinity, and that is his crime.

This is plain at least, that the best men everywhere are those who are

least offended with him.'

Even to Pope Leo, in the midst of his fury, Erasmus wrote bravely;

separating himself from Luther, yet deprecating violence. 'Nothing,' he

said, 'would so recommend the new teaching as the howling of fools:'

while to a member of Charles's council he insisted that 'severity had

been often tried in such cases and had always failed; unless Luther was

encountered calmly and reasonably, a tremendous convulsion was

inevitable.'

Wisely said all this, but it presumed that those whom he was addressing

were reasonable men; and high officials, touched in their pride, are a

class of persons of whom Solomon may have been thinking when he said,

'Let a bear robbed of her whelps meet a man rather than a fool in his

folly.'

So to Luther, so to the people, Erasmus preached moderation. It was like

preaching to the winds in a hurricane. The typhoon itself is not wilder

than human creatures when once their passions are stirred. You cannot

check them; but, if you are brave, you can guide them wisely. And this,

Erasmus had not the heart to do.

He said at the beginning, 'I will not countenance revolt against

authority. A bad government is better than none.' But he said at the

same time, 'You bishops, cease to be corrupt: you popes and cardinals,

reform your wicked courts: you monks, leave your scandalous lives, and

obey the rules of your order, so you may recover the respect of mankind,

and be obeyed and loved as before.'

When he found that the case was desperate; that his exhortations were

but words addressed to the winds; that corruption had tainted the blood;

that there was no hope except in revolution--as, indeed, in his heart he

knew from the first that there was none--then his place ought to have

been with Luther.

But Erasmus, as the tempest rose, could but stand still in feeble

uncertainty. The responsibilities of his reputation weighed him down.

The Lutherans said, 'You believe as we do.' The Catholics said, 'You are

a Lutheran at heart; if you are not, prove it by attacking Luther.'

He grew impatient. He told lies. He said he had not read Luther's books,

and had no time to read them. What was he, he said, that he should

meddle in such a quarrel. He was the vine and the fig tree of the Book

of Judges. The trees said to them, Rule over us. The vine and the fig

tree answered, they would not leave their sweetness for such a thankless

office. 'I am a poor actor,' he said; 'I prefer to be a spectator of the

play.'

But he was sore at heart, and bitter with disappointment. All had been

going on so smoothly--literature was reviving, art and science were

spreading, the mind of the world was being reformed in the best sense by

the classics of Greece and Rome, and now an apple of discord had been

flung out into Europe.

The monks who had fought against enlightenment could point to the

confusion as a fulfilment of their prophecies; and he, and all that he

had done, was brought to disrepute.

To protect himself from the Dominicans, he was forced to pretend to an

orthodoxy which he did not possess. Were all true which Luther had

written, he pretended that it ought not to have been said, or should

have been addressed in a learned language to the refined and educated.

He doubted whether it was not better on the whole to teach the people

lies for their good, when truth was beyond their comprehension. Yet he

could not for all that wish the Church to be successful.

'I fear for that miserable Luther,' he said; 'the popes and princes are

furious with him. His own destruction would be no great matter, but if

the monks triumph there will be no bearing them. They will never rest

till they have rooted learning out of the land. The Pope expects _me_ to

write against Luther. The orthodox, it appears, can call him names--call

him blockhead, fool, heretic, toadstool, schismatic, and Antichrist--but

they must come to me to answer his arguments.'

'Oh! that this had never been,' he wrote to our own Archbishop Warham.

'Now there is no hope for any good. It is all over with quiet learning,

thought, piety, and progress; violence is on one side and folly on the

other; and they accuse me of having caused it all. If I joined Luther I

could only perish with him, and I do not mean to run my neck into a

halter. Popes and emperors must decide matters. I will accept what is

good, and do as I can with the rest. Peace on any terms is better than

the justest war.'

Erasmus never stooped to real baseness. He was too clever, too

genuine--he had too great a contempt for worldly greatness. They offered

him a bishopric if he would attack Luther. He only laughed at them. What

was a bishopric to him? He preferred a quiet life among his books at

Louvaine.

But there was no more quiet for Erasmus at Louvaine or anywhere. Here is

a scene between him and the Prior of the Dominicans in the presence of

the Rector of the University.

The Dominican had preached at Erasmus in the University pulpit. Erasmus

complained to the rector, and the rector invited the Dominican to defend

himself. Erasmus tells the story.

'I sate on one side and the monk on the other, the rector between us to

prevent our scratching.

'The monk asked what the matter was, and said he had done no harm.

'I said he had told lies of me, and that was harm.

'It was after dinner. The holy man was flushed. He turned purple.

'"Why do you abuse monks in your books?" he said.

'"I spoke of your order," I answered. "I did not mention you. You

denounced me by name as a friend of Luther."

'He raged like a madman. "You are the cause of all this trouble," he

said; "you are a chameleon, you can twist everything."

'"You see what a fellow he is," said I, turning to the rector. "If it

comes to calling names, why I can do that too; but let us be

reasonable."

'He still roared and cursed; he vowed he would never rest till he had

destroyed Luther.

'I said he might curse Luther till he burst himself if he pleased. I

complained of his cursing me.

'He answered, that if I did not agree with Luther, I ought to say so,

and write against him.

'"Why should I?" urged I. "The quarrel is none of mine. Why should I

irritate Luther against me, when he has horns and knows how to use

them?"

'"Well, then," said he, "if you will not write, at least you can say

that we Dominicans have had the best of the argument."

'"How can I do that?" replied I. "You have burnt his books, but I never

heard that you had answered them."

'He almost spat upon me. I understand that there is to be a form of

prayer for the conversion of Erasmus and Luther.'

But Erasmus was not to escape so easily. Adrian the Sixth, who succeeded

Leo, was his old schoolfellow, and implored his assistance in terms

which made refusal impossible. Adrian wanted Erasmus to come to him to

Rome. He was too wary to walk into the wolf's den. But Adrian required

him to write, and reluctantly he felt that he must comply.

What was he to say?

'If his Holiness will set about reform in good earnest,' he wrote to the

Pope's secretary, 'and if he will not be too hard on Luther, I may,

perhaps, do good; but what Luther writes of the tyranny, the corruption,

the covetousness of the Roman court, would, my friend, that it was not

true.'

To Adrian himself, Erasmus addressed a letter really remarkable.

'I cannot go to your Holiness,' he said, 'King Calculus will not let me.

I have dreadful health, which this tornado has not improved. I, who was

the favourite of everybody, am now cursed by everybody--at Louvaine by

the monks; in Germany by the Lutherans. I have fallen into trouble in my

old age, like a mouse into a pot of pitch. You say, Come to Rome; you

might as well say to the crab, Fly. The crab says, Give me wings; I say,

Give me back my health and my youth. If I write calmly against Luther I

shall be called lukewarm; if I write as he does, I shall stir a hornet's

nest. People think he can be put down by force. The more force you try,

the stronger he will grow. Such disorders cannot be cured in that way.

The Wickliffites in England were put down, but the fire smouldered.

'If you mean to use violence you have no need of me; but mark this--if

monks and theologians think only of themselves, no good will come of it.

Look rather into the causes of all this confusion, and apply your

remedies there. Send for the best and wisest men from all parts of

Christendom and take their advice.'

Tell a crab to fly. Tell a pope to be reasonable. You must relieve him

of his infallibility if you want him to act like a sensible man. Adrian

could undertake no reforms, and still besought Erasmus to take arms for

him.

Erasmus determined to gratify Adrian with least danger to himself and

least injury to Luther.

'I remember Uzzah, and am afraid,' he said, in his quizzing way; 'it is

not everyone who is allowed to uphold the ark. Many a wise man has

attacked Luther, and what has been effected? The Pope curses, the

emperor threatens; there are prisons, confiscations, faggots; and all is

vain. What can a poor pigmy like me do?

* * * * *

'The world has been besotted with ceremonies. Miserable monks have ruled

all, entangling men's consciences for their own benefit. Dogma has been

heaped on dogma. The bishops have been tyrants, the Pope's commissaries

have been rascals. Luther has been an instrument of God's displeasure,

like Pharaoh or Nebuchadnezzar, or the Cæsars, and I shall not attack

him on such grounds as these.'

Erasmus was too acute to defend against Luther the weak point of a bad

cause. He would not declare for him--but he would not go over to his

enemies. Yet, unless he quarrelled with Adrian, he could not be

absolutely silent; so he chose a subject to write upon on which all

schools of theology, Catholic or Protestant--all philosophers, all

thinkers of whatever kind, have been divided from the beginning of time:

fate and free will, predestination and the liberty of man--a problem

which has no solution--which may be argued even from eternity to

eternity.

The reason of the selection was obvious. Erasmus wished to please the

Pope and not exasperate Luther. Of course he pleased neither, and

offended both.

Luther, who did not comprehend his motive, was needlessly angry. Adrian

and the monks were openly contemptuous. Sick of them and their quarrels,

he grew weary of the world, and began to wish to be well out of it.

It is characteristic of Erasmus that, like many highly-gifted men, but

unlike all theologians, he expressed a hope for sudden death, and

declared it to be one of the greatest blessings which a human creature

can receive.

Do not suppose that he broke down or showed the white feather to

fortune's buffets. Through all storms he stuck bravely to his own proper

work; editing classics, editing the Fathers, writing paraphrases--still

doing for Europe what no other man could have done.

The Dominicans hunted him away from Louvaine. There was no living for

him in Germany for the Protestants. He suffered dreadfully from the

stone, too, and in all ways had a cruel time of it. Yet he continued,

for all that, to make life endurable.

He moved about in Switzerland and on the Upper Rhine. The lakes, the

mountains, the waterfalls, the villas on the hill slopes, delighted

Erasmus when few people else cared for such things. He was particular

about his wine. The vintage of Burgundy was as new blood in his veins,

and quickened his pen into brightness and life.

The German wines he liked worse--for this point among others, which is

curious to observe in those days. The great capitalist winegrowers,

anti-Reformers all of them, were people without conscience and humanity,

and adulterated their liquors. Of course they did. They believed in

nothing but money, and this was the way to make money.

'The water they mix with the wine,' Erasmus says, 'is the least part of

the mischief. They put in lime, and alum, and resin, and sulphur, and

salt--and then they say it is good enough for heretics.'

Observe the practical issue of religious corruption. Show me a people

where trade is dishonest, and I will show you a people where religion is

a sham.

'We hang men that steal money,' Erasmus exclaimed, writing doubtless

with the remembrance of a stomach-ache. 'These wretches steal our money

and our lives too, and get off scot free.'

He settled at last at Basle, which the storm had not yet reached, and

tried to bury himself among his books. The shrieks of the conflict,

however, still troubled his ears. He heard his own name still cursed,

and he could not bear it or sit quiet under it.

His correspondence was still enormous. The high powers still appealed to

him for advice and help: of open meddling he would have no more; he did

not care, he said, to make a post of himself for every dog of a

theologian to defile. Advice, however, he continued to give in the old

style.

'Put down the preachers on both sides. Fill the pulpits with men who

will kick controversy into the kennel, and preach piety and good

manners. Teach nothing in the schools but what bears upon life and duty.

Punish those who break the peace, and punish no one else; and when the

new opinions have taken root, allow liberty of conscience.'

Perfection of wisdom; but a wisdom which, unfortunately, was three

centuries at least out of date, which even now we have not grown big

enough to profit by. The Catholic princes and bishops were at work with

fire and faggot. The Protestants were pulling down monasteries, and

turning the monks and nuns out into the world. The Catholics declared

that Erasmus was as much to blame as Luther. The Protestants held him

responsible for the persecutions, and insisted, not without reason, that

if Erasmus had been true to his conscience, the whole Catholic world

must have accepted the Reformation.

He suffered bitterly under these attacks upon him. He loved quiet--and

his ears were deafened with clamour. He liked popularity--and he was the

best abused person in Europe. Others who suffered in the same way he

could advise to leave the black-coated jackdaws to their noise--but he

could not follow his own counsel. When the curs were at his heels, he

could not restrain himself from lashing out at them; and, from his

retreat at Basle, his sarcasms flashed out like jagged points of

lightning.

Describing an emeute, and the burning of an image of a saint, 'They

insulted the poor image so,' he said, 'it is a marvel there was no

miracle. The saint worked so many in the good old times.'

When Luther married an escaped nun, the Catholics exclaimed that

Antichrist would be born from such an incestuous intercourse. 'Nay,'

Erasmus said, 'if monk and nun produce Antichrist, there must have been

legions of Antichrists these many years.'

More than once he was tempted to go over openly to Luther--not from a

noble motive, but, as he confessed, 'to make those furies feel the

difference between him and them.'

He was past sixty, with broken health and failing strength. He thought

of going back to England, but England had by this time caught fire, and

Basle had caught fire. There was no peace on earth.

'The horse has his heels,' he said, when advised to be quiet, 'the dog

his teeth, the hedgehog his spines, the bee his sting. I myself have my

tongue and my pen, and why should I not use them?'

Yet to use them to any purpose now, he must take a side, and, sorely

tempted as he was, he could not.

With the negative part of the Protestant creed he sympathised heartily;

but he did not understand Luther's doctrine of faith, because he had

none of his own, and he disliked it as a new dogma.

He regarded Luther's movement as an outburst of commonplace revolution,

caused by the folly and wickedness of the authorities, but with no

organising vitality in itself; and his chief distress, as we gather from

his later letters, was at his own treatment. He had done his best for

both sides. He had failed, and was abused by everybody.

Thus passed away the last years of one of the most gifted men that

Europe has ever seen. I have quoted many of his letters. I will add one

more passage, written near the end of his life, very touching and

pathetic:--

'Hercules,' he said, 'could not fight two monsters at once; while I,

poor wretch, have lions, cerberuses, cancers, scorpions every day at my

sword's point; not to mention smaller vermin--rats, mosquitoes, bugs,

and fleas. My troops of friends are turned to enemies. At dinner-tables

or social gatherings, in churches and king's courts, in public carriage

or public flyboat, scandal pursues me, and calumny defiles my name.

Every goose now hisses at Erasmus; and it is worse than being stoned,

once for all, like Stephen, or shot with arrows like Sebastian.

'They attack me now even for my Latin style, and spatter me with

epigrams. Fame I would have parted with; but to be the sport of

blackguards--to be pelted with potsherds and dirt and ordure--is not

this worse than death?

'There is no rest for me in my age, unless I join Luther; and I cannot,

for I cannot accept his doctrines. Sometimes I am stung with a desire to

avenge my wrongs; but I say to myself, "Will you, to gratify your

spleen, raise your hand against your mother the Church, who begot you at

the font and fed you with the word of God?" I cannot do it. Yet I

understand now how Arius, and Tertullian, and Wickliff were driven into

schism. The theologians say I am their enemy. Why? Because I bade monks

remember their vows; because I told parsons to leave their wranglings

and read the Bible; because I told popes and cardinals to look at the

Apostles, and make themselves more like to them. If this is to be their

enemy, then indeed I have injured them.'

This was almost the last. The stone, advancing years, and incessant toil

had worn him to a shred. The clouds grew blacker. News came from England

that his dear friends More and Fisher had died upon the scaffold. He had

long ceased to care for life; and death, almost as sudden as he had

longed for, gave him peace at last.

So ended Desiderius Erasmus, the world's idol for so many years; and

dying heaped with undeserved but too intelligible anathemas, seeing all

that he had laboured for swept away by the whirlwind.

Do not let me lead you to undervalue him. Without Erasmus, Luther would

have been impossible; and Erasmus really succeeded--so much of him as

deserved to succeed--in Luther's victory.

He was brilliantly gifted. His industry never tired. His intellect was

true to itself; and no worldly motives ever tempted him into

insincerity. He was even far braver than he professed to be. Had he been

brought to the trial, he would have borne it better than many a man who

boasted louder of his courage.

And yet, in his special scheme for remodelling the mind of Europe, he

failed hopelessly--almost absurdly. He believed, himself, that his work

was spoilt by the Reformation; but, in fact, under no conditions could

any more have come of it.

Literature and cultivation will feed life when life exists already; and

toleration and latitudinarianism are well enough when mind and

conscience are awake and energetic of themselves.

When there is no spiritual life at all; when men live only for

themselves and for sensual pleasure; when religion is superstition, and

conscience a name, and God an idol half feared and half despised--then,

for the restoration of the higher nature in man, qualities are needed

different in kind from any which Erasmus possessed.

And now to go back to Luther. I cannot tell you all that Luther did; it

would be to tell you all the story of the German Reformation. I want you

rather to consider the kind of man that Luther was, and to see in his

character how he came to achieve what he did.

You remember that the Elector of Saxony, after the Diet of Worms, sent

him to the Castle of Wartburg, to prevent him from being murdered or

kidnapped. He remained there many months; and during that time the old

ecclesiastical institutions of Germany were burning like a North

American forest. The monasteries were broken up; the estates were

appropriated by the nobles; the monks were sent wandering into the

world. The bishops looked helplessly on while their ancient spiritual

dominion was torn to pieces and trodden under foot. The Elector of

Saxony, the Landgrave of Hesse, and several more of the princes,

declared for the Reformation. The Protestants had a majority in the

Diet, and controlled the force of the empire. Charles the Fifth, busy

with his French wars, and in want of money, dared not press questions to

a crisis which he had not power to cope with; and he was obliged for a

time to recognise what he could not prevent. You would have thought

Luther would have been well pleased to see the seed which he had sown

bear fruit so rapidly; yet it was exactly while all this was going on

that he experienced those temptations of the devil of which he has left

so wonderful an account.

We shall have our own opinions on the nature of these apparitions. But

Luther, it is quite certain, believed that Satan himself attacked him in

person. Satan, he tells us, came often to him, and said, 'See what you

have done. Behold this ancient Church--this mother of saints--polluted

and defiled by brutal violence. And it is you--you, a poor ignorant

monk, that have set the people on to their unholy work. Are you so much

wiser than the saints who approved the things which you have denounced?

Popes, bishops, clergy, kings, emperors--are none of these--are not all

these together--wiser than Martin Luther the monk?'

The devil, he says, caused him great agony by these suggestions. He fell

into deep fits of doubt and humiliation and despondency. And wherever

these thoughts came from, we can only say that they were very natural

thoughts--natural and right. He called them temptations; yet these were

temptations which would not have occurred to any but a high-minded man.

He had, however, done only what duty had forced him to do. His business

was to trust to God, who had begun the work and knew what He meant to

make of it. His doubts and misgivings, therefore, he ascribed to Satan,

and his enormous imaginative vigour gave body to the voice which was

speaking in him.

He tells many humorous stories--not always producible--of the means with

which he encountered his offensive visitor.

'The devil,' he says, 'is very proud, and what he least likes is to be

laughed at.' One night he was disturbed by something rattling in his

room; the modern unbeliever will suppose it was a mouse. He got up, lit

a candle, searched the apartment through, and could find nothing--the

Evil One was indisputably there.

'Oh!' he said, 'it is you, is it?' He returned to bed, and went to

sleep.

Think as you please about the cause of the noise, but remember that

Luther had not the least doubt that he was alone in the room with the

actual devil, who, if he could not overcome his soul, could at least

twist his neck in a moment--and then think what courage there must have

been in a man who could deliberately sleep in such a presence!

During his retirement he translated the Bible. The confusion at last

became so desperate that he could no longer be spared; and, believing

that he was certain to be destroyed, he left Wartburg and returned to

Wittenberg. Death was always before him as supremely imminent. He used

to say that it would be a great disgrace to the Pope if he died in his

bed. He was wanted once at Leipsic. His friends said if he went there

Duke George would kill him.

'Duke George!' he said; 'I would go to Leipsic if it rained Duke Georges

for nine days!'

No such cataclysm of Duke Georges happily took place. The single one

there was would have gladly been mischievous if he could; but Luther

outlived him--lived for twenty-four years after this, in continued toil,

re-shaping the German Church, and giving form to its new doctrine.

Sacerdotalism, properly so called, was utterly abolished. The

corruptions of the Church had all grown out of one root--the notion that

the Christian priesthood possesses mystical power, conferred through

episcopal ordination.

Religion, as Luther conceived it, did not consist in certain things done

to and for a man by a so-called priest. It was the devotion of each

individual soul to the service of God. Masses were nothing, and

absolution was nothing; and a clergyman differed only from a layman in

being set apart for the especial duties of teaching and preaching.

I am not concerned to defend Luther's view in this matter. It is a

matter of fact only, that in getting rid of episcopal ordination, he

dried up the fountain from which the mechanical and idolatrous

conceptions of religion had sprung; and, in consequence, the religious

life of Germany has expanded with the progress of knowledge, while

priesthoods everywhere cling to the formulas of the past, in which they

live, and move, and have their being.

Enough of this.

The peculiar doctrine which has passed into Europe under Luther's name

is known as Justification by Faith. Bandied about as a watchword of

party, it has by this time hardened into a formula, and has become

barren as the soil of a trodden footpath. As originally proclaimed by

Luther, it contained the deepest of moral truths. It expressed what was,

and is, and must be, in one language or another, to the end of time, the

conviction of every generous-minded man.

The service of God, as Luther learnt it from the monks, was a thing of

desert and reward. So many good works done, so much to the right page in

the great book; where the stock proved insufficient, there was the

reserve fund of the merits of the saints, which the Church dispensed for

money to those who needed.

'Merit!' Luther thought. 'What merit can there be in such a poor caitiff

as man? The better a man is--the more clearly he sees how little he is

good for, the greater mockery it seems to attribute to him the notion of

having deserved reward.'

'Miserable creatures that we are!' he said; 'we earn our bread in sin.

Till we are seven years old, we do nothing but eat and drink and sleep

and play; from seven to twenty-one we study four hours a day, the rest

of it we run about and amuse ourselves; then we work till fifty, and

then we grow again to be children. We sleep half our lives; we give God

a tenth of our time: and yet we think that with our good works we can

merit heaven. What have I been doing to-day? I have talked for two

hours; I have been at meals three hours; I have been idle four hours!

Ah, enter not into judgment with thy servant, O Lord!'

A perpetual struggle. For ever to be falling, yet to rise again and

stumble forward with eyes turned to heaven--this was the best which

would ever come of man. It was accepted in its imperfection by the

infinite grace of God, who pities mortal weakness, and accepts the

intention for the deed--who, when there is a sincere desire to serve

Him, overlooks the shortcomings of infirmity.

Do you say such teaching leads to disregard of duty? All doctrines, when

petrified into formulas, lead to that. But, as Luther said, 'where real

faith is, a good life follows, as light follows the sun; faint and

clouded, yet ever struggling to break through the mist which envelopes

it, and welcoming the roughest discipline which tends to clear and raise

it.

'The barley,' he says, in a homely but effective image--'the barley

which we brew, the flax of which we weave our garments, must be bruised

and torn ere they come to the use for which they are grown. So must

Christians suffer. The natural creature must be combed and threshed. The

old Adam must die, for the higher life to begin. If man is to rise to

nobleness, he must first be slain.'

In modern language, the poet Goethe tells us the same truth. 'The

natural man,' he says, 'is like the ore out of the iron mine. It is

smelted in the furnace; it is forged into bars upon the anvil. A new

nature is at last forced upon it, and it is made steel.'

It was this doctrine--it was this truth rather (the word doctrine

reminds one of quack medicines)--which, quickening in Luther's mind,

gave Europe its new life. It was the flame which, beginning with a small

spark, kindled the hearth-fires in every German household.

Luther's own life was a model of quiet simplicity. He remained poor. He

might have had money if he had wished; but he chose rather, amidst his

enormous labour, to work at a turning-lathe for his livelihood.

He was sociable, cheerful, fond of innocent amusements, and delighted to

encourage them. His table-talk, collected by his friends, makes one of

the most brilliant books in the world. He had no monkish theories about

the necessity of abstinence; but he was temperate from habit and

principle. A salt herring and a hunch of bread was his ordinary meal;

and he was once four days without food of any sort, having emptied his

larder among the poor.

All kinds of people thrust themselves on Luther for help. Flights of

nuns from the dissolved convents came to him to provide for them--naked,

shivering creatures, with scarce a rag to cover them. Eight florins were

wanted once to provide clothes for some of them. 'Eight florins!' he

said; 'and where am I to get eight florins?' Great people had made him

presents of plate: it all went to market to be turned into clothes and

food for the wretched.

Melancthon says that, unless provoked, he was usually very gentle and

tolerant. He recognised, and was almost alone in recognising, the

necessity of granting liberty of conscience. No one hated Popery more

than he did, yet he said:--

'The Papists must bear with us, and we with them. If they will not

follow us, we have no right to force them. Wherever they can, they will

hang, burn, behead, and strangle us. I shall be persecuted as long as I

live, and most likely killed. But it must come to this at last--every

man must be allowed to believe according to his conscience, and answer

for his belief to his Maker.'

Erasmus said of Luther that there were two natures in him: sometimes he

wrote like an apostle--sometimes like a raving ribald.

Doubtless, Luther could be impolite on occasions. When he was angry,

invectives rushed from him like boulder rocks down a mountain torrent

in flood. We need not admire all that; in quiet times it is hard to

understand it.

Here, for instance, is a specimen. Our Henry the Eighth, who began life

as a highly orthodox sovereign, broke a lance with Luther for the

Papacy.

Luther did not credit Henry with a composition which was probably his

own after all. He thought the king was put forward by some of the

English bishops--'Thomists' he calls them, as men who looked for the

beginning and end of wisdom to the writings of Thomas Aquinas.

'Courage,' he exclaimed to them, 'swine that you are! burn me then, if

you can and dare. Here I am; do your worst upon me. Scatter my ashes to

all the winds--spread them through all seas. My spirit shall pursue you

still. Living, I am the foe of the Papacy; and dead, I will be its foe

twice over. Hogs of Thomists! Luther shall be the bear in your way--the

lion in your path. Go where you will, Luther shall cross you. Luther

shall leave you neither peace nor rest till he has crushed in your brows

of brass and dashed out your iron brains.'

Strong expressions; but the times were not gentle. The prelates whom he

supposed himself to be addressing were the men who filled our Smithfield

with the reek of burning human flesh.

Men of Luther's stature are like the violent forces of Nature

herself--terrible when roused, and in repose, majestic and beautiful. Of

vanity he had not a trace. 'Do not call yourselves Lutherans,' he said;

'call yourselves Christians. Who and what is Luther? Has Luther been

crucified for the world?'

I mentioned his love of music. His songs and hymns were the expression

of the very inmost heart of the German people. 'Music' he called 'the

grandest and sweetest gift of God to man.' 'Satan hates music,' he said;

'he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us.'

He was extremely interested in all natural things. Before the science of

botany was dreamt of, Luther had divined the principle of vegetable

life. 'The principle of marriage runs through all creation,' he said;

'and flowers as well as animals are male and female.'

A garden called out bursts of eloquence from him; beautiful sometimes as

a finished piece of poetry.

One April day as he was watching the swelling buds, he exclaimed:--

'Praise be to God the Creator, who out of a dead world makes all alive

again. See those shoots how they burgeon and swell. Image of the

resurrection of the dead! Winter is death--summer is the resurrection.

Between them lie spring and autumn, as the period of uncertainty and

change. The proverb says--

Trust not a day

Ere birth of May.

Let us pray our Father in heaven to give us this day our daily bread.'

'We are in the dawn of a new era,' he said another time; 'we are

beginning to think something of the natural world which was ruined in

Adam's fall. We are learning to see all round us the greatness and glory

of the Creator. We can see the Almighty hand--the infinite goodness--in

the humblest flower. We praise Him--we thank Him--we glorify Him--we

recognise in creation the power of His word. He spoke and it was there.

The stone of the peach is hard; but the soft kernel swells and bursts it

when the time comes. An egg--what a thing is that! If an egg had never

been seen in Europe, and a traveller had brought one from Calcutta, how

would all the world have wondered!'

And again:--

'If a man could make a single rose, we should give him an empire; yet

roses, and flowers no less beautiful, are scattered in profusion over

the world, and no one regards them.'

There are infinite other things which I should like to tell you about

Luther, but time wears on. I must confine what more I have to say to a

single matter--for which more than any other he has been blamed--I mean

his marriage.

He himself, a monk and a priest, had taken a vow of celibacy. The person

whom he married had been a nun, and as such had taken a vow of celibacy

also.

The marriage was unquestionably no affair of passion. Luther had come to

middle age when it was brought about, when temptations of that kind lose

their power; and among the many accusations which have been brought

against his early life, no one has ventured to charge him with

incontinence. His taking a wife was a grave act deliberately performed;

and it was either meant as a public insult to established ecclesiastical

usage, or else he considered that the circumstances of the time required

it of him.

Let us see what those circumstances were. The enforcement of celibacy on

the clergy was, in Luther's opinion, both iniquitous in itself, and

productive of enormous immorality. The impurity of the religious orders

had been the jest of satirists for a hundred years. It had been the

distress and perplexity of pious and serious persons. Luther himself was

impressed with profound pity for the poor men, who were cut off from the

natural companionship which nature had provided for them--who were thus

exposed to temptations which they ought not to have been called upon to

resist.

The dissolution of the religious houses had enormously complicated the

problem. Germany was covered with friendless and homeless men and women

adrift upon the world. They came to Luther to tell them what to do; and

advice was of little service without example.

The world had grown accustomed to immorality in such persons. They might

have lived together in concubinage, and no one would have thought much

about it. Their marriage was regarded with a superstitious terror as a

kind of incest.

Luther, on the other hand, regarded marriage as the natural and healthy

state in which clergy as well as laity were intended to live. Immorality

was hateful to him as a degradation of a sacrament--impious, loathsome,

and dishonoured. Marriage was the condition in which humanity was at

once purest, best, and happiest.

For himself, he had become inured to a single life. He had borne the

injustice of his lot, when the burden had been really heavy. But time

and custom had lightened the load; and had there been nothing at issue

but his own personal happiness, he would not have given further occasion

to the malice of his enemies.

But tens of thousands of poor creatures were looking to him to guide

them--guide them by precept, or guide them by example. He had satisfied

himself that the vow of celibacy had been unlawfully imposed both on him

and them--that, as he would put it, it had been a snare devised by the

devil. He saw that all eyes were fixed on him--that it was no use to

tell others that they might marry, unless he himself led the way, and

married first. And it was characteristic of him that, having resolved to

do the thing, he did it in the way most likely to show the world his

full thought upon the matter.

That this was his motive, there is no kind of doubt whatever.

'We may be able to live unmarried,' he said; 'but in these days we must

protest in deed as well as word, against the doctrine of celibacy. It is

an invention of Satan. Before I took my wife, I had made up my mind that

I must marry some one: and had I been overtaken by illness, I should

have betrothed myself to some pious maiden.'

He asked nobody's advice. Had he let his intention be suspected, the

moderate respectable people--the people who thought like Erasmus--those

who wished well to what was good, but wished also to stand well with the

world's opinion--such persons as these would have overwhelmed him with

remonstrances. 'When you marry,' he said to a friend in a similar

situation, 'be quiet about it, or mountains will rise between you and

your wishes. If I had not been swift and secret, I should have had the

whole world in my way.'

Catherine Bora, the lady whom he chose for his wife, was a nun of good

family, left homeless and shelterless by the breaking-up of her convent.

She was an ordinary, unimaginative body--plain in person and plain in

mind, in no sense whatever a heroine of romance--but a decent, sensible,

commonplace Haus Frau.

The age of romance was over with both of them; yet, for all that, never

marriage brought a plainer blessing with it. They began with respect,

and ended with steady affection.

The happiest life on earth, Luther used to say, is with a pious, good

wife; in peace and quiet, contented with a little, and giving God

thanks.

He spoke from his own experience. His Katie, as he called her, was not

clever, and he had numerous stories to tell of the beginning of their

adventures together.

'The first year of married life is an odd business,' he says. 'At meals,

where you used to be alone, you are yourself and somebody else. When you

wake in the morning, there are a pair of tails close to you on the

pillow. My Katie used to sit with me when I was at work. She thought she

ought not to be silent. She did not know what to say, so she would ask

me.

'"Herr Doctor, is not the master of the ceremonies in Prussia the

brother of the Margrave?"'

She was an odd woman.

'Doctor,' she said to him one day, 'how is it that under Popery we

prayed so often and so earnestly, and now our prayers are cold and

seldom?'

Katie might have spoken for herself. Luther, to the last, spent hours of

every day in prayer. He advised her to read the Bible a little more. She

said she had read enough of it, and knew half of it by heart. 'Ah!' he

said, 'here begins weariness of the word of God. One day new lights will

rise up, and the Scriptures will be despised and be flung away into the

corner.'

His relations with his children were singularly beautiful. The

recollection of his own boyhood made him especially gentle with them,

and their fancies and imaginations delighted him.

Children, to him, were images of unfallen nature. 'Children,' he said,

'imagine heaven a place where rivers run with cream, and trees are hung

with cakes and plums. Do not blame them. They are but showing their

simple, natural, unquestioning, all-believing faith.'

One day, after dinner, when the fruit was on the table, the children

were watching it with longing eyes. 'That is the way,' he said, 'in

which we grown Christians ought to look for the Judgment Day.'

His daughter Magdalen died when she was fourteen. He speaks of his loss

with the unaffected simplicity of natural grief, yet with the faith of a

man who had not the slightest doubt into whose hands his treasure was

passing. Perfect nature and perfect piety. Neither one emotion nor the

other disguised or suppressed.

You will have gathered something, I hope, from these faint sketches, of

what Luther was; you will be able to see how far he deserves to be

called by our modern new lights, a Philistine or a heretic. We will now

return to the subject with which we began, and resume, in a general

conclusion, the argument of these Lectures.

In part, but not wholly, it can be done in Luther's words.

One regrets that Luther did not know Erasmus better, or knowing him,

should not have treated him with more forbearance.

Erasmus spoke of him for the most part with kindness. He interceded for

him, defended him, and only with the utmost reluctance was driven into

controversy with him.

Luther, on the other hand, saw in Erasmus a man who was false to his

convictions; who played with truth; who, in his cold, sarcastic

scepticism, believed in nothing--scarcely even in God. He was unaware of

his own obligations to him, for Erasmus was not a person who would

trumpet out his own good deeds.

Thus Luther says:--

'All you who honour Christ, I pray you hate Erasmus. He is a scoffer and

a mocker. He speaks in riddles; and jests at Popery and Gospel, and

Christ and God, with his uncertain speeches. He might have served the

Gospel if he would, but, like Judas, he has betrayed the Son of Man with

a kiss. He is not with us, and he is not with our foes; and I say with

Joshua, Choose whom ye will serve. He thinks we should trim to the

times, and hang our cloaks to the wind. He is himself his own first

object; and as he lived, he died.

'I take Erasmus to be the worst enemy that Christ has had for a thousand

years. Intellect does not understand religion, and when it comes to the

things of God, it laughs at them. He scoffs like Lucian, and by-and-by

he will say, Behold, how are these among the saints whose life we

counted for folly.

'I bid you, therefore, take heed of Erasmus. He treats theology as a

fool's jest, and the Gospel as a fable good for the ignorant to

believe.'

Of Erasmus personally, much of this was unjust and untrue. Erasmus knew

many things which it would have been well for Luther to have known; and,

as a man, he was better than his principles.

But if for the name of Erasmus we substitute the theory of human things

which Erasmus represented, between that creed and Luther there is, and

must be, an eternal antagonism.

If to be true in heart and just in act are the first qualities necessary

for the elevation of humanity--if without these all else is worthless,

intellectual culture cannot give what intellectual culture does not

require or imply. You cultivate the plant which has already life; you

will waste your labour in cultivating a stone. The moral life is the

counterpart of the natural, alike mysterious in its origin, and alike

visible only in its effects.

Intellectual gifts are like gifts of strength, or wealth, or rank, or

worldly power--splendid instruments if nobly used--but requiring

qualities to use them nobler and better than themselves.

The rich man may spend his wealth on vulgar luxury. The clever man may

live for intellectual enjoyment--refined enjoyment it may be--but

enjoyment still, and still centering in self.

If the spirit of Erasmus had prevailed, it would have been with modern

Europe as with the Roman Empire in its decay. The educated would have

been mere sceptics; the multitude would have been sunk in superstition.

In both alike all would have perished which deserves the name of

manliness.

And this leads me to the last observation that I have to make to you. In

the sciences, the philosopher leads; the rest of us take on trust what

he tells us. The spiritual progress of mankind has followed the opposite

course. Each forward step has been made first among the people, and the

last converts have been among the learned.

The explanation is not far to look for. In the sciences there is no

temptation of self-interest to mislead. In matters which affect life and

conduct, the interests and prejudices of the cultivated classes are

enlisted on the side of the existing order of things, and their better

trained faculties and larger acquirements serve only to find them

arguments for believing what they wish to believe.

Simpler men have less to lose; they come more in contact with the

realities of life, and they learn wisdom in the experience of suffering.

Thus it was that when the learned and the wise turned away from

Christianity, the fishermen of the Galilean lake listened, and a new

life began for mankind. A miner's son converted Germany to the

Reformation. The London artisans and the peasants of Buckinghamshire

went to the stake for doctrines which were accepted afterwards as a

second revelation.

So it has been; so it will be to the end. When a great teacher comes

again upon the earth, he will find his first disciples where Christ

found them and Luther found them. Had Luther written for the learned,

the words which changed the face of Europe would have slumbered in

impotence on the bookshelves.

In appealing to the German nation, you will agree, I think, with me,

that he did well and not ill; you will not sacrifice his great name to

the disdain of a shallow philosophy, or to the grimacing of a dead

superstition, whose ghost is struggling out of its grave.

THE INFLUENCE OF THE REFORMATION ON THE SCOTTISH CHARACTER:

A LECTURE DELIVERED AT EDINBURGH, NOVEMBER 1865.

I have undertaken to speak this evening on the effects of the

Reformation in Scotland, and I consider myself a very bold person to

have come here on any such undertaking. In the first place, the subject

is one with which it is presumptuous for a stranger to meddle. Great

national movements can only be understood properly by the people whose

disposition they represent. We say ourselves about our own history that

only Englishmen can properly comprehend it. The late Chevalier Bunsen

once said to me of our own Reformation in England, that, for his part,

he could not conceive how we had managed to come by such a thing. We

seemed to him to be an obdurate, impenetrable, stupid people, hide-bound

by tradition and precedent, and too self-satisfied to be either willing

or able to take in new ideas upon any theoretic subject whatever,

especially German ideas. That is to say, he could not get inside the

English mind. He did not know that some people go furthest and go

fastest when they look one way and row the other. It is the same with

every considerable nation. They work out their own political and

spiritual lives, through tempers, humours, and passions peculiar to

themselves; and the same disposition which produces the result is

required to interpret it afterwards. This is one reason why I should

feel diffident about what I have undertaken. Another is, that I do not

conceal from myself that the subject is an exceedingly delicate one. The

blazing passions of those stormy sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are

no longer, happily, at their old temperature. The story of those times

can now be told or listened to with something like impartiality. Yet, if

people no longer hate each other for such matters, the traditions of the

struggle survive in strong opinions and sentiments, which it is easy to

wound without intending it.

My own conviction with respect to all great social and religious

convulsions is the extremely commonplace one that much is to be said on

both sides. I believe that nowhere and at no time any such struggle can

take place on a large scale unless each party is contending for

something which has a great deal of truth in it. Where the right is

plain, honest, wise, and noble-minded men are all on one side; and only

rogues and fools are on the other. Where the wise and good are divided,

the truth is generally found to be divided also. But this is precisely

what cannot be admitted as long as the conflict continues. Men begin to

fight about things when reason and argument fail to convince them. They

make up in passion what is wanting in logic. Each side believes that all

the right is theirs--that their enemies have all the bad qualities which

their language contains names for; and even now, on the subject on which

I have to talk to-night, one has but to take up any magazine, review,

newspaper, or party organ of any kind which touches on it, to see that

opinion is still Whig or Tory, Cavalier or Roundhead, Protestant or

Catholic, as the case may be. The unfortunate person who is neither

wholly one nor wholly the other is in the position of Hamlet's 'baser

nature,' 'between the incensed points of mighty opposites.' He is the

Laodicean, neither cold nor hot, whom decent people consider bad

company. He pleases no one, and hurts the sensitiveness of all.

Here, then, are good reasons why I should have either not come here at

all, or else should have chosen some other matter to talk about. In

excuse for persisting, I can but say that the subject is one about which

I have been led by circumstances to read and think considerably; and

though, undoubtedly, each of us knows more about himself and his own

affairs than anyone else can possibly know, yet a stranger's eye will

sometimes see things which escape those more immediately interested; and

I allow myself to hope that I may have something to say not altogether

undeserving your attention. I shall touch as little as possible on

questions of opinion; and if I tread by accident on any sensitive

point, I must trust to your kindness to excuse my awkwardness.

Well, then, if we look back on Scotland as it stood in the first quarter

of the sixteenth century, we see a country in which the old feudal

organisation continued, so far as it generally affected the people, more

vigorous than in any other part of civilised Europe. Elsewhere, the

growth of trade and of large towns had created a middle class, with an

organisation of their own, independent of the lords. In Scotland, the

towns were still scanty and poor; such as they were, they were for the

most part under the control of the great nobleman who happened to live

nearest to them; and a people, as in any sense independent of lords,

knights, abbots, or prelates, under whose rule they were born, had as

yet no existence. The tillers of the soil (and the soil was very

miserably tilled) lived under the shadow of the castle or the monastery.

They followed their lord's fortunes, fought his battles, believed in his

politics, and supported him loyally in his sins or his good deeds, as

the case might be. There was much moral beauty in the life of those

times. The loyal attachment of man to man--of liege servant to liege

lord--of all forms under which human beings can live and work together,

has most of grace and humanity about it. It cannot go on without mutual

confidence and affection--mutual benefits given and received. The length

of time which the system lasted proves that in the main there must have

been a fine fidelity in the people--truth, justice, generosity in their

leaders. History brings down many bad stories to us out of those times;

just as in these islands nowadays you may find bad instances of the

abuses of rights of property. You may find stories--too many also--of

husbands ill-using their wives, and so on. Yet we do not therefore lay

the blame on marriage, or suppose that the institution of property on

the whole does more harm than good. I do not doubt that down in that

feudal system somewhere lie the roots of some of the finest qualities in

the European peoples.

So much for the temporal side of the matter; and the spiritual was not

very unlike it. As no one lived independently, in our modern sense of

the word, so no one thought independently. The minds of men were looked

after by a Church which, for a long time also, did, I suppose, very

largely fulfil the purpose for which it was intended. It kept alive and

active the belief that the world was created and governed by a just

Being, who hated sins and crimes, and steadily punished such things. It

taught men that they had immortal souls, and that this little bit of

life was an entirely insignificant portion of their real existence. It

taught these truths, indeed, along with a great deal which we now

consider to have been a mistake--a great many theories of earthly things

which have since passed away, and special opinions clothed in outward

forms and ritual observances which we here, most of us at least, do not

think essential for our soul's safety. But mistakes like these are

hurtful only when persisted in in the face of fuller truth, after truth

has been discovered. Only a very foolish man would now uphold the

Ptolemaic astronomy. But the Ptolemaic astronomy, when first invented,

was based on real if incomplete observations, and formed a groundwork

without which further progress in that science would have been probably

impossible. The theories and ceremonials of the Catholic Church suited

well with an age in which little was known and much was imagined: when

superstition was active and science was not yet born. When I am told

here or anywhere that the Middle Ages were times of mere spiritual

darkness and priestly oppression, with the other usual formulas, I say,

as I said before, if the Catholic Church, for those many centuries that

it reigned supreme over all men's consciences, was no better than the

thing which we see in the generation which immediately preceded the

Reformation, it could not have existed at all. You might as well argue

that the old fading tree could never have been green and young.

Institutions do not live on lies. They either live by the truth and

usefulness which there is in them, or they do not live at all.

So things went on for several hundred years. There were scandals enough,

and crimes enough, and feuds, and murders, and civil wars. Systems,

however good, cannot prevent evil. They can but compress it within

moderate and tolerable limits. I should conclude, however, that,

measuring by the average happiness of the masses of the people, the

mediæval institutions were very well suited for the inhabitants of these

countries as they then were. Adam Smith and Bentham themselves could

hardly have mended them if they had tried.

But times change, and good things as well as bad grow old and have to

die. The heart of the matter which the Catholic Church had taught was

the fear of God; but the language of it and the formulas of it were made

up of human ideas and notions about things which the mere increase of

human knowledge gradually made incredible. To trace the reason of this

would lead us a long way. It is intelligible enough, but it would take

us into subjects better avoided here. It is enough to say that, while

the essence of religion remains the same, the mode in which it is

expressed changes and has changed--changes as living languages change

and become dead, as institutions change, as forms of government change,

as opinions on all things in heaven and earth change, as half the

theories held at this time among ourselves will probably change--that

is, the outward and mortal parts of them. Thus the Catholic formulas,

instead of living symbols, become dead and powerless cabalistic signs.

The religion lost its hold on the conscience and the intellect, and the

effect, singularly enough, appeared in the shepherds before it made

itself felt among the flocks. From the see of St. Peter to the far

monasteries in the Hebrides or the Isle of Arran, the laity were shocked

and scandalised at the outrageous doings of high cardinals, prelates,

priests, and monks. It was clear enough that these great personages

themselves did not believe what they taught; so why should the people

believe it? And serious men, to whom the fear of God was a living

reality, began to look into the matter for themselves. The first steps

everywhere were taken with extreme reluctance; and had the popes and

cardinals been wise, they would have taken the lead in the enquiry,

cleared their teaching of its lumber, and taken out a new lease of life

both for it and for themselves. An infallible pope and an infallible

council might have done something in this way, if good sense had been

among the attributes of their omniscience. What they did do was

something very different. It was as if, when the new astronomy began to

be taught, the professors of that science in all the universities of

Europe had met together and decided that Ptolemy's cycles and epicycles

were eternal verities; that the theory of the rotation of the earth was

and must be a damnable heresy; and had invited the civil authorities to

help them in putting down by force all doctrines but their own. This, or

something very like it, was the position taken up in theology by the

Council of Trent. The bishops assembled there did not reason. They

decided by vote that certain things were true, and were to be believed;

and the only arguments which they condescended to use were fire and

faggot, and so on. How it fared with them, and with this experiment of

theirs, we all know tolerably well.

The effect was very different in different countries. Here, in Scotland,

the failure was most marked and complete, but the way in which it came

about was in many ways peculiar. In Germany, Luther was supported by

princes and nobles. In England, the Reformation rapidly mixed itself up

with politics and questions of rival jurisdiction. Both in England and

Germany, the revolution, wherever it established itself, was accepted

early by the Crown or the Government, and by them legally recognised.

Here, it was far otherwise: the Protestantism of Scotland was the

creation of the commons, as in turn the commons may be said to have been

created by Protestantism. There were many young high-spirited men,

belonging to the noblest families in the country, who were among the

earliest to rally round the Reforming preachers; but authority, both in

Church and State, set the other way. The congregations who gathered in

the fields around Wishart and John Knox were, for the most part,

farmers, labourers, artisans, tradesmen, or the smaller gentry; and

thus, for the first time in Scotland, there was created an organisation

of men detached from the lords and from the Church--brave, noble,

resolute, daring people, bound together by a sacred cause, unrecognised

by the leaders whom they had followed hitherto with undoubting

allegiance. That spirit which grew in time to be the ruling power of

Scotland--that which formed eventually its laws and its creed, and

determined its after fortunes as a nation--had its first germ in these

half-outlawed wandering congregations. In this it was that the

Reformation in Scotland differed from the Reformation in any other part

of Europe. Elsewhere it found a middle class existing--created already

by trade or by other causes. It raised and elevated them, but it did not

materially affect their political condition. In Scotland, the commons,

as an organised body, were simply created by religion. Before the

Reformation they had no political existence; and therefore it has been

that the print of their origin has gone so deeply into their social

constitution. On them, and them only, the burden of the work of the

Reformation was eventually thrown; and when they triumphed at last, it

was inevitable that both they and it should react one upon the other.

How this came about I must endeavour to describe, although I can give

but a brief sketch of an exceedingly complicated matter. Everybody knows

the part played by the aristocracy of Scotland in the outward

revolution, when the Reformation first became the law of the land. It

would seem at first sight as if it had been the work of the whole

nation--as if it had been a thing on which high and low were heartily

united. Yet on the first glance below the surface you see that the

greater part of the noble lords concerned in that business cared nothing

about the Reformation at all; or, if they cared, they rather disliked it

than otherwise. How, then, did they come to act as they did? or, how

came they to permit a change of such magnitude when they had so little

sympathy with it? I must make a slight circuit to look for the

explanation.

The one essentially noble feature in the great families of Scotland was

their patriotism. They loved Scotland and Scotland's freedom with a

passion proportioned to the difficulty with which they had defended

their liberties; and yet the wisest of them had long seen that, sooner

or later, union with England was inevitable; and the question was, how

that union was to be brought about--how they were to make sure that,

when it came, they should take their place at England's side as equals,

and not as a dependency. It had been arranged that the little Mary

Stuart should marry our English Edward VI., and the difficulty was to be

settled so. They would have been contented, they said, if Scotland had

had the 'lad' and England the 'lass.' As it stood, they broke their

bargain, and married the little queen away into France, to prevent the

Protector Somerset from getting hold of her. Then, however, appeared an

opposite danger; the queen would become a Frenchwoman; her French mother

governed Scotland with French troops and French ministers; the country

would become a French province, and lose its freedom equally. Thus an

English party began again; and as England was then in the middle of her

great anti-Church revolution, so the Scottish nobles began to be

anti-Church. It was not for doctrines: neither they nor their brothers

in England cared much about doctrines; but in both countries the Church

was rich--much richer than there seemed any occasion for it to be. Harry

the Eighth had been sharing among the laity the spoils of the English

monasteries; the Scotch Lords saw in a similar process the probability

of a welcome addition to their own scanty incomes. Mary of Guise and the

French stood by the Church, and the Church stood by them; and so it came

about that the great families--even those who, like the Hamiltons, were

most closely connected with France--were tempted over by the bait to the

other side. They did not want reformed doctrines, but they wanted the

Church lands; and so they came to patronise, or endure, the Reformers,

because the Church hated them, and because they weakened the Church; and

thus for a time, and especially as long as Mary Stuart was Queen of

France, all classes in Scotland, high and low, seemed to fraternise in

favour of the revolution.

And it seemed as if the union of the realms could be effected at last,

at the same juncture, and in connexion with the same movement. Next in

succession to the Scotch crown, after Mary Stuart, was the house of

Hamilton. Elizabeth, who had just come to the English throne, was

supposed to be in want of a husband. The heir of the Hamiltons was of

her own age, and in years past had been thought of for her by her

father. What could be more fit than to make a match between those two?

Send a Scot south to be King of England, find or make some pretext to

shake off Mary Stuart, who had forsaken her native country, and so join

the crowns, the 'lass' and the 'lad' being now in the right relative

position. Scotland would thus annex her old oppressor, and give her a

new dynasty.

I seem to be straying from the point; but these political schemes had so

much to do with the actions of the leading men at that time, that the

story of the Reformation cannot be understood without them. It was thus,

and with these incongruous objects, that the combination was formed

which overturned the old Church of Scotland in 1559-60, confiscated its

possessions, destroyed its religious houses, and changed its creed. The

French were driven away from Leith by Elizabeth's troops; the Reformers

took possession of the churches; and the Parliament of 1560 met with a

clear stage to determine for themselves the future fate of the country.

Now, I think it certain that, if the Scotch nobility, having once

accepted the Reformation, had continued loyal to it--especially if

Elizabeth had met their wishes in the important point of the

marriage--the form of the Scotch Kirk would have been something

extremely different from what it in fact became. The people were

perfectly well inclined to follow their natural leaders if the matters

on which their hearts were set had received tolerable consideration from

them, and the democratic form of the ecclesiastical constitution would

have been inevitably modified. One of the conditions of the proposed

compact with England was the introduction of the English Liturgy and the

English Church constitution. This too, at the outset, and with fair

dealing, would not have been found impossible. But it soon became clear

that the religious interests of Scotland were the very last thing which

would receive consideration from any of the high political personages

concerned. John Knox had dreamt of a constitution like that which he had

seen working under Calvin at Geneva--a constitution in which the clergy

as ministers of God should rule all things--rule politically at the

council board, and rule in private at the fireside. It was soon made

plain to Knox that Scotland was not Geneva. 'Eh, mon,' said the younger

Maitland to him, 'then we may all bear the barrow now to build the House

of the Lord.' Not exactly. The churches were left to the ministers; the

worldly good things and worldly power remained with the laity; and as to

religion, circumstances would decide what they would do about that.

Again, I am not speaking of all the great men of those times. Glencairn,

Ruthven, young Argyll--above all, the Earl of Moray--really did in some

degree interest themselves in the Kirk. But what most of them felt was

perhaps rather broadly expressed by Maitland when he called religion 'a

bogle of the nursery.' That was the expression which a Scotch statesman

of those days actually ventured to use. Had Elizabeth been conformable,

no doubt they would in some sense or other have remained on the side of

the Reformation. But here, too, there was a serious hitch. Elizabeth

would not marry Arran. Elizabeth would be no party to any of their

intrigues. She detested Knox. She detested Protestantism entirely, in

all shapes in which Knox approved of it. She affronted the nobles on one

side, she affronted the people on another; and all idea of uniting the

two crowns after the fashion proposed by the Scotch Parliament she

utterly and entirely repudiated. She was right enough, perhaps, so far

as this was concerned; but she left the ruling families extremely

perplexed as to the course which they would follow. They had allowed the

country to be revolutionised in the teeth of their own sovereign, and

what to do next they did not very well know.

It was at this crisis that circumstances came in to their help. Francis

the Second died. Mary Stuart was left a childless widow. Her connexion

with the Crown of France was at an end, and all danger on that side to

the liberties of Scotland at an end also. The Arran scheme having

failed, she would be a second card as good as the first to play for the

English Crown--as good as he, or better, for she would have the English

Catholics on her side. So, careless how it would affect religion, and

making no condition at all about that, the same men who a year before

were ready to whistle Mary Stuart down the wind, now invited her back to

Scotland; the same men who had been the loudest friends of Elizabeth now

encouraged Mary Stuart to persist in the pretension to the Crown of

England, which had led to all the past trouble. While in France, she had

assumed the title of Queen of England. She had promised to abandon it,

but, finding her own people ready to support her in withdrawing her

promise, she stood out, insisting that at all events the English

Parliament should declare her next in the succession; and it was well

known that, as soon as the succession was made sure in her favour, some

rascal would be found to put a knife or a bullet into Elizabeth. The

object of the Scotch nobles was political, national, patriotic. For

religion it was no great matter either way; and as they had before acted

with the Protestants, so now they were ready to turn about, and openly

or tacitly act with the Catholics. Mary Stuart's friends in England and

on the Continent were Catholics, and therefore it would not do to offend

them. First, she was allowed to have mass at Holyrood; then there was a

move for a broader toleration. That one mass, Knox said, was more

terrible to him than ten thousand armed men landed in the country--and

he had perfectly good reason for saying so. He thoroughly understood

that it was the first step towards a counter-revolution which in time

would cover all Scotland and England, and carry them back to Popery. Yet

he preached to deaf ears. Even Murray was so bewitched with the notion

of the English succession, that for a year and a half he ceased to speak

to Knox; and as it was with Murray, so it was far more with all the

rest--their zeal for religion was gone no one knew where. Of course

Elizabeth would not give way. She might as well, she said, herself

prepare her shroud; and then conspiracies came, and under-ground

intrigues with the Romanist English noblemen. France and Spain were to

invade England, Scotland was to open its ports to their fleets, and its

soil to their armies, giving them a safe base from which to act, and a

dry road over the Marches to London. And if Scotland had remained

unchanged from what it had been--had the direction of its fortunes

remained with the prince and with the nobles, sooner or later it would

have come to this. But suddenly it appeared that there was a new power

in this country which no one suspected till it was felt.

The commons of Scotland had hitherto been the creatures of the nobles.

They had neither will nor opinion of their own. They thought and acted

in the spirit of their immediate allegiance. No one seems to have dreamt

that there would be any difficulty in dealing with them if once the

great families agreed upon a common course. Yet it appeared, when the

pressure came, that religion, which was the play-thing of the nobles,

was to the people a clear matter of life and death. They might love

their country: they might be proud of anything which would add lustre to

its crown; but if it was to bring back the Pope and Popery--if it

threatened to bring them back--if it looked that way--they would have

nothing to do with it; nor would they allow it to be done. Allegiance

was well enough; but there was a higher allegiance suddenly discovered

which superseded all earthly considerations. I know nothing finer in

Scottish history than the way in which the commons of the Lowlands took

their places by the side of Knox in the great convulsions which

followed. If all others forsook him, they at least would never forsake

him while tongue remained to speak and hand remained to strike. Broken

they might have been, trampled out as the Huguenots at last were

trampled out in France, had Mary Stuart been less than the most

imprudent or the most unlucky of sovereigns. But Providence, or the

folly of those with whom they had to deal, fought for them. I need not

follow the wild story of the crimes and catastrophes in which Mary

Stuart's short reign in Scotland closed. Neither is her own share, be it

great or small, or none at all, in those crimes of any moment to us

here. It is enough that, both before that strange business and after it,

when at Holyrood or across the Border, in Sheffield or Tutbury, her ever

favourite dream was still the English throne. Her road towards it was

through a Catholic revolution and the murder of Elizabeth. It is enough

that, both before and after, the aristocracy of Scotland, even those

among them who had seemed most zealous for the Reformation, were eager

to support her. John Knox alone, and the commons, whom Knox had raised

into a political power, remained true.

Much, indeed, is to be said for the Scotch nobles. In the first shock of

the business at Kirk-o'-Field, they forgot their politics in a sense of

national disgrace. They sent the queen to Loch Leven. They intended to

bring her to trial, and, if she was proved guilty, to expose and perhaps

punish her. All parties for a time agreed in this--even the Hamiltons

themselves; and had they been left alone they would have done it. But

they had a perverse neighbour in England, to whom crowned heads were

sacred. Elizabeth, it might have been thought, would have had no

particular objection; but Elizabeth had aims of her own which baffled

calculation. Elizabeth, the representative of revolution, yet detested

revolutionists. The Reformers in Scotland, the Huguenots in France, the

insurgents in the United Provinces, were the only friends she had in

Europe. For her own safety she was obliged to encourage them; yet she

hated them all, and would at any moment have abandoned them all, if, in

any other way, she could have secured herself. She might have conquered

her personal objection to Knox--she could not conquer her aversion to a

Church which rose out of revolt against authority, which was democratic

in constitution and republican in politics. When driven into alliance

with the Scotch Protestants, she angrily and passionately disclaimed any

community of creed with them; and for subjects to sit in judgment on

their prince was a precedent which she would not tolerate. Thus she

flung her mantle over Mary Stuart. She told the Scotch Council here in

Edinburgh that, if they hurt a hair of her head, she would harry their

country, and hang them all on the trees round the town, if she could

find any trees there for that purpose. She tempted the queen to England

with her fair promises after the battle of Langside, and then, to her

astonishment, imprisoned her. Yet she still shielded her reputation,

still fostered her party in Scotland, still incessantly threatened and

incessantly endeavoured to restore her. She kept her safe, because, in

her lucid intervals, her ministers showed her the madness of acting

otherwise. Yet for three years she kept her own people in a fever of

apprehension. She made a settled Government in Scotland impossible;

till, distracted and perplexed, the Scottish statesmen went back to

their first schemes. They assured themselves that in one way or other

the Queen of Scots would sooner or later come again among them. They,

and others besides them, believed that Elizabeth was cutting her own

throat, and that the best that they could do was to recover their own

queen's favour, and make the most of her and her titles; and so they

lent themselves again to the English Catholic conspiracies.

The Earl of Moray--the one supremely noble man then living in the

country--was put out of the way by an assassin. French and Spanish money

poured in, and French and Spanish armies were to be again invited over

to Scotland. This is the form in which the drama unfolds itself in the

correspondence of the time. Maitland, the soul and spirit of it all,

said, in scorn, that 'he would make the Queen of England sit upon her

tail and whine like a whipped dog.' The only powerful noblemen who

remained on the Protestant side were Lennox, Morton, and Mar. Lord

Lennox was a poor creature, and was soon dispatched; Mar was old and

weak; and Morton was an unprincipled scoundrel, who used the Reformation

only as a stalking-horse to cover the spoils which he had clutched in

the confusion, and was ready to desert the cause at any moment if the

balance of advantage shifted. Even the ministers of the Kirk were fooled

and flattered over. Maitland told Mary Stuart that he had gained them

all except one.

John Knox alone defied both his threats and his persuasions. Good reason

has Scotland to be proud of Knox. He only, in this wild crisis, saved

the Kirk which he had founded, and saved with it Scottish and English

freedom. But for Knox, and what he was able still to do, it is almost

certain that the Duke of Alva's army would have been landed on the

eastern coast. The conditions were drawn out and agreed upon for the

reception, the support, and the stay of the Spanish troops. Two-thirds

of the English peerage had bound themselves to rise against Elizabeth,

and Alva waited only till Scotland itself was quiet. Only that quiet

would not be. Instead of quiet came three dreadful years of civil war.

Scotland was split into factions, to which the mother and son gave

names. The queen's lords, as they were called, with unlimited money from

France and Flanders, held Edinburgh and Glasgow; all the border line was

theirs, and all the north and west. Elizabeth's Council, wiser than

their mistress, barely squeezed out of her reluctant parsimony enough to

keep Mar and Morton from making terms with the rest; but there her

assistance ended. She would still say nothing, promise nothing, bind

herself to nothing, and, so far as she was concerned, the war would have

been soon enough brought to a close. But away at St. Andrews, John Knox,

broken in body, and scarcely able to stagger up the pulpit stairs, still

thundered in the parish church; and his voice, it was said, was like ten

thousand trumpets braying in the ear of Scottish Protestantism. All the

Lowlands answered to his call. Our English Cromwell found in the man of

religion a match for the man of honour. Before Cromwell, all over the

Lothians, and across from St. Andrews to Stirling and Glasgow--through

farm, and town, and village--the words of Knox had struck the inmost

chords of the Scottish commons' hearts. Passing over knight and noble,

he had touched the farmer, the peasant, the petty tradesman, and the

artisan, and turned the men of clay into men of steel. The village

preacher, when he left his pulpit, doffed cap and cassock, and donned

morion and steel-coat. The Lothian yeoman's household became for the

nonce a band of troopers, who would cross swords with the night riders

of Buccleuch. It was a terrible time, a time rather of anarchy than of

defined war, for it was without form or shape. Yet the horror of it was

everywhere. Houses and villages were burned, and women and children

tossed on pike-point into the flames. Strings of poor men were dangled

day after day from the walls of Edinburgh Castle. A word any way from

Elizabeth would have ended it, but that word Elizabeth would never

speak; and, maddened with suffering, the people half believed that she

was feeding the fire for her own bad purposes, when it was only that she

would not make up her mind to allow a crowned princess to be dethroned.

No earthly influence could have held men true in such a trial. The noble

lords--the Earl of Morton and such-like--would have made their own

conditions, and gone with the rest; but the vital force of the Scotch

nation, showing itself where it was least looked for, would not have it

so.

A very remarkable account of the state of the Scotch commons at this

time is to be found in a letter of an English emissary, who had been

sent by Lord Burleigh to see how things were going there. It was not

merely a new creed that they had got; it was a new vital power. 'You

would be astonished to see how men are changed here,' this writer said.

'There is little of that submission to those above them which there used

to be. The poor think and act for themselves. They are growing strong,

confident, independent. The farms are better cultivated; the farmers are

growing rich. The merchants at Leith are thriving, and, notwithstanding

the pirates, they are increasing their ships and opening a brisk trade

with France.'

All this while civil war was raging, and the flag of Queen Mary was

still floating over Edinburgh Castle. It surprised the English; still

more it surprised the politicians. It was the one thing which

disconcerted, baffled, and finally ruined the schemes and the dreams of

Maitland. When he had gained the aristocracy, he thought that he had

gained everybody, and, as it turned out, he had all his work still to

do. The Spaniards did not come. The prudent Alva would not risk invasion

till Scotland at least was assured. As time passed on, the English

conspiracies were discovered and broken up. The Duke of Norfolk lost his

head; the Queen of Scots was found to have been mixed up with the plots

to murder Elizabeth; and Elizabeth at last took courage and recognised

James. Supplies of money ceased to come from abroad, and gradually the

tide turned. The Protestant cause once more grew towards the ascendant.

The great families one by one came round again; and, as the backward

movement began, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew gave it a fresh and

tremendous impulse. Even the avowed Catholics--the Hamiltons, the

Gordons, the Scotts, the Kers, the Maxwells--quailed before the wail of

rage and sorrow which at that great horror rose over their country. The

Queen's party dwindled away to a handful of desperate politicians, who

still clung to Edinburgh Castle. But Elizabeth's 'peace-makers,' as the

big English cannon were called, came round, at the Regent's request,

from Berwick; David's tower, as Knox had long ago foretold, 'ran down

over the cliff like a sandy brae;' and the cause of Mary Stuart in

Scotland was extinguished for ever. Poor Grange, who deserved a better

end, was hanged at the Market Cross. Secretary Maitland, the cause of

all the mischief--the cleverest man, as far as intellect went, in all

Britain--died (so later rumour said) by his own hand. A nobler version

of his end is probably a truer one: He had been long ill--so ill that

when the Castle cannon were fired, he had been carried into the cellars

as unable to bear the sound. The breaking down of his hopes finished

him. 'The secretary,' wrote some one from the spot to Cecil, 'is dead of

grief, being unable to endure the great hatred which all this people

bears towards him.' It would be well if some competent man would write a

life of Maitland, or at least edit his papers. They contain by far the

clearest account of the inward movements of the time; and he himself is

one of the most tragically interesting characters in the cycle of the

Reformation history.

With the fall of the Castle, then, but not till then, it became clear to

all men that the Reformation would hold its ground. It was the final

trampling out of the fire which for five years had threatened both

England and Scotland with flames and ruin. For five years--as late

certainly as the massacre of St. Bartholomew--those who understood best

the true state of things, felt the keenest misgivings how the event

would turn. That things ended as they did was due to the spirit of the

Scotch commons. There was a moment when, if they had given way, all

would have gone, perhaps even to Elizabeth's throne. They had passed for

nothing; they had proved to be everything; had proved--the ultimate test

in human things--to be the power which could hit the hardest blows, and

they took rank accordingly. The creed began now in good earnest to make

its way into hall and castle; but it kept the form which it assumed in

the first hours of its danger and trial, and never after lost it. Had

the aristocracy dealt sincerely with things in the earlier stages of the

business, again I say the democratic element in the Kirk might have been

softened or modified. But the Protestants had been trifled with by their

own natural leaders. Used and abused by Elizabeth, despised by the

worldly intelligence and power of the times--they triumphed after all,

and, as a natural consequence, they set their own mark and stamp upon

the fruits of the victory.

The question now is, what has the Kirk so established done for Scotland?

Has it justified its own existence? Briefly, we might say, it has

continued its first function as the guardian of Scottish freedom. But

that is a vague phrase, and there are special accusations against the

Kirk and its doctrines which imply that it has cared for other things

than freedom. Narrow, fanatical, dictatorial, intrusive, superstitious,

a spiritual despotism, the old priesthood over again with a new

face--these and other such epithets and expressions we have heard often

enough applied to it at more than one stage of its history. Well, I

suppose that neither the Kirk nor anything else of man's making is

altogether perfect. But let us look at the work which lay before it when

it had got over its first perils. Scotch patriotism succeeded at last in

the object it had so passionately set its heart upon. It sent a king at

last of the Scotch blood to England, and a new dynasty; and it never

knew peace or quiet after. The Kirk had stood between James Stuart and

his kingcraft. He hated it as heartily as did his mother; and, when he

got to England, he found people there who told him it would be easy to

destroy it, and he found the strength of a fresh empire to back him in

trying to do it. To have forced prelacy upon Scotland would have been to

destroy the life out of Scotland. Thrust upon them by force, it would

have been no more endurable than Popery. They would as soon, perhaps

sooner, have had what the Irish call the 'rale thing' back again. The

political freedom of the country was now wrapped up in the Kirk; and the

Stuarts were perfectly well aware of that, and for that very reason

began their crusade against it.

And now, suppose the Kirk had been the broad, liberal, philosophical,

intellectual thing which some people think it ought to have been, how

would it have fared in that crusade; how altogether would it have

encountered those surplices of Archbishop Laud or those dragoons of

Claverhouse? It is hard to lose one's life for a 'perhaps,' and

philosophical belief at the bottom means a 'perhaps' and nothing more.

For more than half the seventeenth century, the battle had to be fought

out in Scotland, which in reality was the battle between liberty and

despotism; and where, except in an intense, burning conviction that they

were maintaining God's cause against the devil, could the poor Scotch

people have found the strength for the unequal struggle which was forced

upon them? Toleration is a good thing in its place; but you cannot

tolerate what will not tolerate you, and is trying to cut your throat.

Enlightenment you cannot have enough of, but it must be true

enlightenment, which sees a thing in all its bearings. In these matters

the vital questions are not always those which appear on the surface;

and in the passion and resolution of brave and noble men there is often

an inarticulate intelligence deeper than what can be expressed in words.

Action sometimes will hit the mark, when the spoken word either misses

it or is but half the truth. On such subjects, and with common men,

latitude of mind means weakness of mind. There is but a certain quantity

of spiritual force in any man. Spread it over a broad surface, the

stream is shallow and languid; narrow the channel, and it becomes a

driving force. Each may be well at its own time. The mill-race which

drives the water-wheel is dispersed in rivulets over the meadow at its

foot. The Covenanters fought the fight and won the victory, and then,

and not till then, came the David Humes with their essays on miracles,

and the Adam Smiths with their political economies, and steam-engines,

and railroads, and philosophical institutions, and all the other blessed

or unblessed fruits of liberty.

But we may go further. Institutions exist for men, not men for

institutions; and the ultimate test of any system of politics, or body

of opinions, or form of belief, is the effect produced on the conduct

and condition of the people who live and die under them. Now, I am not

here to speak of Scotland of the present day. That, happily, is no

business of mine. We have to do here with Scotland before the march of

intellect; with Scotland of the last two centuries; with the three or

four hundred thousand families, who for half-a-score of generations

believed simply and firmly in the principles of the Reformation, and

walked in the ways of it.

Looked at broadly, one would say they had been an eminently pious

people. It is part of the complaint of modern philosophers about them,

that religion, or superstition, or whatever they please to call it, had

too much to do with their daily lives. So far as one can look into that

commonplace round of things which historians never tell us about, there

have rarely been seen in this world a set of people who have thought

more about right and wrong, and the judgment about them of the upper

powers. Long-headed, thrifty industry,--a sound hatred of waste,

imprudence, idleness, extravagance,--the feet planted firmly upon the

earth,--a conscientious sense that the worldly virtues are,

nevertheless, very necessary virtues, that without these, honesty for

one thing is not possible, and that without honesty no other excellence,

religious or moral, is worth anything at all--this is the stuff of which

Scotch life was made, and very good stuff it is. It has been called

gloomy, austere, harsh, and such other epithets. A gifted modern writer

has favoured us lately with long strings of extracts from the sermons of

Scotch divines of the last century, taking hard views of human

shortcomings and their probable consequences, and passing hard censures

upon the world and its amusements. Well, no doubt amusement is a very

good thing; but I should rather infer from the vehemence and frequency

of these denunciations that the people had not been in the habit of

denying themselves too immoderately; and, after all, it is no very hard

charge against those teachers that they thought more of duty than of

pleasure. Sermons always exaggerate the theoretic side of things; and

the most austere preacher, when he is out of the pulpit, and you meet

him at the dinner-table, becomes singularly like other people. We may

take courage, I think, we may believe safely that in those

minister-ridden days, men were not altogether so miserable; we may hope

that no large body of human beings have for any length of time been too

dangerously afraid of enjoyment. Among other good qualities, the Scots

have been distinguished for humour--not for venomous wit, but for

kindly, genial humour, which half loves what it laughs at--and this

alone shows clearly enough that those to whom it belongs have not looked

too exclusively on the gloomy side of the world. I should rather say

that the Scots had been an unusually happy people. Intelligent industry,

the honest doing of daily work, with a sense that it must be done well,

under penalties; the necessaries of life moderately provided for; and a

sensible content with the situation of life in which men are born--this

through the week, and at the end of it the 'Cottar's Saturday

Night'--the homely family, gathered reverently and peacefully together,

and irradiated with a sacred presence.--Happiness! such happiness as we

human creatures are likely to know upon this world, will be found there,

if anywhere.

The author of the 'History of Civilisation' makes a naïve remark in

connexion with this subject. Speaking of the other country, which he

censures equally with Scotland for its slavery to superstition, he says

of the Spaniards that they are a well-natured, truthful, industrious,

temperate, pious people, innocent in their habits, affectionate in their

families, full of humour, vivacity, and shrewdness, yet that all this

'has availed them nothing'--'has availed them nothing,' that is his

expression--because they are loyal, because they are credulous, because

they are contented, because they have not apprehended the first

commandment of the new covenant: 'Thou shalt get on and make money, and

better thy condition in life;' because, therefore, they have added

nothing to the scientific knowledge, the wealth, and the progress of

mankind. Without these, it seems, the old-fashioned virtues avail

nothing. They avail a great deal to human happiness. Applied science,

and steam, and railroads, and machinery, enable an ever-increasing

number of people to live upon the earth; but the happiness of those

people remains, so far as I know, dependent very much on the old

conditions. I should be glad to believe that the new views of things

will produce effects upon the character in the long run half so

beautiful.

There is much more to say on this subject, were there time to say it,

but I will not trespass too far upon your patience; and I would gladly

have ended here, had not the mention of Spain suggested one other topic,

which I should not leave unnoticed. The Spain of Cervantes and Don

Quixote was the Spain of the Inquisition. The Scotland of Knox and

Melville was the Scotland of the witch trials and witch burnings. The

belief in witches was common to all the world. The prosecution and

punishment of the poor creatures was more conspicuous in Scotland when

the Kirk was most powerful; in England and New England, when Puritan

principles were also dominant there. It is easy to understand the

reasons. Evil of all kinds was supposed to be the work of a personal

devil; and in the general horror of evil, this particular form of it,

in which the devil was thought especially active, excited the most

passionate detestation. Thus, even the best men lent themselves

unconsciously to the most detestable cruelty. Knox himself is not free

from reproach. A poor woman was burned at St. Andrews when he was living

there, and when a word from him would have saved her. It remains a

lesson to all time, that goodness, though the indispensable adjunct to

knowledge, is no substitute for it; that when conscience undertakes to

dictate beyond its province, the result is only the more monstrous.

It is well that we should look this matter in the face; and as

particular stories leave more impression than general statements, I will

mention one, perfectly well authenticated, which I take from the

official report of the proceedings:--Towards the end of 1593 there was

trouble in the family of the Earl of Orkney. His brother laid a plot to

murder him, and was said to have sought the help of a 'notorious witch'

called Alison Balfour. When Alison Balfour's life was looked into, no

evidence could be found connecting her either with the particular

offence or with witchcraft in general; but it was enough in these

matters to be accused. She swore she was innocent; but her guilt was

only held to be aggravated by perjury. She was tortured again and again.

Her legs were put in the caschilaws--an iron frame which was gradually

heated till it burned into the flesh--but no confession could be wrung

from her. The caschilaws failed utterly, and something else had to be

tried. She had a husband, a son, and a daughter, a child seven years

old. As her own sufferings did not work upon her, she might be touched,

perhaps, by the sufferings of those who were dear to her. They were

brought into court, and placed at her side; and the husband first was

placed in the 'lang irons'--some accursed instrument; I know not what.

Still the devil did not yield. She bore this; and her son was next

operated on. The boy's legs were set in 'the boot,'--the iron boot you

may have heard of. The wedges were driven in, which, when forced home,

crushed the very bone and marrow. Fifty-seven mallet strokes were

delivered upon the wedges. Yet this, too, failed. There was no

confession yet. So, last of all, the little daughter was taken. There

was a machine called the piniwinkies--a kind of thumbscrew, which

brought blood from under the finger nails, with a pain successfully

terrible. These things were applied to the poor child's hands, and the

mother's constancy broke down, and she said she would admit anything

they wished. She confessed her witchcraft--so tried, she would have

confessed to the seven deadly sins--and then she was burned, recalling

her confession, and with her last breath protesting her innocence.

It is due to the intelligence of the time to admit that after this her

guilt was doubted, and such vicarious means of extorting confession do

not seem to have been tried again. Yet the men who inflicted these

tortures would have borne them all themselves sooner than have done any

act which they consciously knew to be wrong. They did not know that the

instincts of humanity were more sacred than the logic of theology, and

in fighting against the devil they were themselves doing the devil's

work. We should not attempt to apologise for these things, still less to

forget them. No martyrs ever suffered to instil into mankind a more

wholesome lesson--more wholesome, or one more hard to learn. The more

conscientious men are, the more difficult it is for them to understand

that in their most cherished convictions, when they pass beyond the

limits where the wise and good of all sorts agree, they may be the

victims of mere delusion. Yet, after all, and happily, such cases were

but few, and affected but lightly the general condition of the people.

The student running over the records of other times finds certain

salient things standing out in frightful prominence. He concludes that

the substance of those times was made up of the matters most dwelt on by

the annalist. He forgets that the things most noticed are not those of

every-day experience, but the abnormal, the extraordinary, the

monstrous. The exceptions are noted down, the common and usual is passed

over in silence. The philosophic historian, studying hereafter this

present age, in which we are ourselves living, may say that it was a

time of unexampled prosperity, luxury, and wealth; but catching at

certain horrible murders which have lately disgraced our civilisation,

may call us a nation of assassins. It is to invert the pyramid and stand

it on its point. The same system of belief which produced the tragedy

which I have described, in its proper province as the guide of ordinary

life, has been the immediate cause of all that is best and greatest in

Scottish character.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF CATHOLICISM.[C]

Not long ago I heard a living thinker of some eminence say that he

considered Christianity to have been a misfortune. Intellectually, he

said, it was absurd; and practically, it was an offence, over which he

stumbled. It would have been far better for mankind, he thought, if they

could have kept clear of superstition, and followed on upon the track of

the Grecian philosophy. So little do men care to understand the

conditions which have made them what they are, and which has created for

them that very wisdom in which they themselves are so contented. But it

is strange, indeed, that a person who could deliberately adopt such a

conclusion should trouble himself any more to look for truth. If a mere

absurdity could make its way out of a little fishing village in Galilee,

and spread through the whole civilised world; if men are so pitiably

silly, that in an age of great mental activity their strongest thinkers

should have sunk under an abortion of fear and folly, should have

allowed it to absorb into itself whatever of heroism, of devotion,

self-sacrifice, and moral nobleness there was among them; surely there

were nothing better for a wise man than to make the best of his time,

and to crowd what enjoyment he can find into it, sheltering himself in a

very disdainful Pyrrhonism from all care for mankind or for their

opinions. For what better test of truth have we than the ablest men's

acceptance of it? and if the ablest men eighteen centuries ago

deliberately accepted what is now too absurd to reason upon, what right

have we to hope that with the same natures, the same passions, the same

understandings, no better proof against deception, we, like they, are

not entangled in what, at the close of another era, shall seem again

ridiculous? The scoff of Cicero at the divinity of Liber and Ceres

(bread and wine) may be translated literally by the modern Protestant;

and the sarcasms which Clement and Tertullian flung at the Pagan creed,

the modern sceptic returns upon their own. Of what use is it to destroy

an idol, when another, or the same in another form, takes immediate

possession of the vacant pedestal?

I shall not argue with the extravagant hypothesis of my friend. In the

opinion even of Goethe, who was not troubled with credulity, the human

race can never attain to anything higher than Christianity--if we mean

by Christianity the religion which was revealed to the world in the

teaching and the life of its Founder. But even the more limited

reprobation by our own Reformers of the creed of mediæval Europe is not

more just or philosophical.

Ptolemy was not perfect, but Newton had been a fool if he had scoffed at

Ptolemy. Newton could not have been without Ptolemy, nor Ptolemy without

the Chaldees; and as it is with the minor sciences, so far more is it

with the science of sciences--the science of life, which has grown

through all the ages from the beginning of time. We speak of the errors

of the past. We, with this glorious present which is opening on us, we

shall never enter on it, we shall never understand it, till we have

learnt to see in that past, not error, but instalment of truth,

hard-fought-for truth, wrung out with painful and heroic effort. The

promised land is smiling before us, but we may not pass over into the

possession of it while the bones of our fathers who laboured through the

wilderness lie bleaching on the sands, or a prey to the unclean birds.

We must gather their relics and bury them, and sum up their labours, and

inscribe the record of their actions on their tombs as an honourable

epitaph. If Catholicism really is passing away, if it has done its work,

and if what is left of it is now holding us back from better things, it

is not for our bitterness but for our affectionate acknowledgment, nor

for our heaping contempt on what it is, but for our reverend and patient

examination of what it has been, that it will be content to bid us

farewell, and give us God speed on our further journey.

In the Natural History of Religions, certain broad phenomena perpetually

repeat themselves; they rise in the highest thought extant at the time

of their origin; the conclusions of philosophy settle into a creed; art

ornaments it, devotion consecrates it, time elaborates it. It grows

through a long series of generations into the heart and habits of the

people; and so long as no disturbing cause interferes, or so long as the

idea at the centre of it survives, a healthy, vigorous, natural life

shoots beautifully up out of the intellectual root. But at last the idea

becomes obsolete; the numbing influence of habit petrifies the spirit in

the outside ceremonial, while new questions arise among the thinkers,

and ideas enter into new and unexplained relations. The old formula will

not serve; but new formulæ are tardy in appearing; and habit and

superstition cling to the past, and policy vindicates it, and statecraft

upholds it forcibly as serviceable to order, till, from the combined

action of folly, and worldliness, and ignorance, the once beautiful

symbolism becomes at last no better than 'a whited sepulchre full of

dead men's bones and all uncleanness.' So it is now. So it was in the

era of the Cæsars, out of which Christianity arose; and Christianity, in

the form which it assumed at the close of the Arian controversy, was the

deliberate solution which the most powerful intellects of that day could

offer of the questions which had grown with the growth of mankind, and

on which Paganism had suffered shipwreck.

Paganism, as a creed, was entirely physical. When Paganism rose, men had

not begun to reflect upon themselves, or the infirmities of their own

nature. The bad man was a bad man--the coward, a coward--the liar, a

liar--individually hateful and despicable: but in hating and despising

such unfortunates, the old Greeks were satisfied to have felt all that

it was necessary to feel about them; and how such a phenomenon as a bad

man came to exist in this world, they scarcely cared to enquire. There

is no evil spirit in the mythology as an antagonist of the gods. There

is the Erinnys as the avenger of monstrous villanies; there is a

Tartarus where the darkest criminals suffer eternal tortures. But

Tantalus and Ixion are suffering for enormous crimes, to which the small

wickedness of common men offers no analogy. Moreover, these and other

such stories are only curiously ornamented myths, representing physical

phenomena. But with Socrates a change came over philosophy; a

sign--perhaps a cause--of the decline of the existing religion. The

study of man superseded the study of nature: a purer Theism came in with

the higher ideal of perfection, and sin and depravity at once assumed an

importance, the intensity of which made every other question

insignificant. How man could know the good and yet choose the evil; how

God could be all pure and almighty, and yet evil have broken into his

creation--these were the questions which thenceforth were the perplexity

of philosophic speculation.

Whatever difficulty there might be in discovering how evil came to be,

the leaders of all the sects agreed at last upon the seat of it. Whether

_matter_ was eternal, as Aristotle thought, or created, as Plato

thought, both Plato and Aristotle were equally satisfied that the secret

of all the shortcomings in this world lay in the imperfection,

reluctancy, or inherent grossness of this impracticable substance. God

would have everything perfect, but the nature of the element in which He

worked in some way defeated his purpose. Death, disease, decay, clung

necessarily to everything which was created out of it; and pain, and

want, and hunger, and suffering. Worse than all, the spirit in its

material body was opposed and borne down, its aspirations crushed, its

purity tainted by the passions and appetites of its companion--the

fleshly lusts which waged perpetual war against the soul.

Matter was the cause of evil, and thenceforth the question was how to

conquer matter, or, at least, how to set free the spirit from its

control.

The Greek language and the Greek literature spread behind the march of

Alexander; but as his generals could only make their conquests permanent

by largely accepting the Eastern manners, so philosophy could only make

good its ground by becoming itself Orientalised. The one pure and holy

God whom Plato had painfully reasoned out for himself had existed from

immemorial time in the traditions of the Jews; while the Persians, who

had before taught the Jews at Babylon the existence of an independent

evil being, now had him to offer to the Greeks as their account of the

difficulties which had perplexed Socrates. Seven centuries of struggle,

and many hundred thousand folios, were the results of the remarkable

fusion which followed. Out of these elements, united in various

proportions, rose successively the Alexandrian philosophy, the

Hellenists, the Therapeutæ, those strange Essene communists, with the

innumerable sects of Gnostic or Christian heretics. Finally, the battle

was limited to the two great rivals, under one or other of which the

best of the remainder had ranged themselves--Manicheism and Catholic

Christianity: Manicheism in which the Persian--Catholicism in which the

Jewish--element most preponderated. It did not end till the close of the

fifth century, and it ended then rather by arbitration than by a decided

victory which either side could claim. The Church has yet to acknowledge

how large a portion of its enemy's doctrines it incorporated through the

mediation of Augustine before the field was surrendered to it. Let us

trace something of the real bearings of this section of the world's

Oriental history, which to so many moderns seems no better than an idle

fighting over words and straws.

Facts witnessing so clearly that the especial strength of evil lay, as

the philosophers had seen, in _matter_, it was so far a conclusion which

both Jew and Persian were ready to accept; the naked Aristotelic view of

it being most acceptable to the Persian, the Platonic to the Hellenistic

Jew. But the purer theology of the Jew forced him to look for a solution

of the question which Plato had left doubtful, and to explain how evil

had crept into matter. He could not allow that what God had created

could be of its own nature imperfect. God made it very good; some other

cause had broken in to spoil it. Accordingly, as before he had reduced

the independent Arimanes, whose existence he had learnt at Babylon, into

a subordinate spirit; so now, not questioning the facts of disease, of

death, of pain, or of the infirmity of the flesh which the natural

strength of the spirit was unable to resist, he accounted for them under

the supposition that the first man had deliberately sinned, and by his

sin had brought a curse upon the whole material earth, and upon all

which was fashioned out of it. The earth was created pure and lovely--a

garden of delight, loading itself of its own free accord with fruit and

flower, and everything most exquisite and beautiful. No bird or beast of

prey broke the eternal peace which reigned over its hospitable surface.

In calm and quiet intercourse, the leopard lay down by the kid, the lion

browsed beside the ox, and the corporeal frame of man, knowing neither

decay nor death, nor unruly appetite, nor any change or infirmity, was

pure as the immortal substance of the unfallen angels.

But with the fatal apple all this fair scene passed away, and creation

as it seemed was hopelessly and irretrievably ruined. Adam sinned--no

matter how, he sinned; the sin was the one terrible fact: moral evil was

brought into the world by the only creature who was capable of

committing it. Sin entered in, and death by sin; death and disease,

storm and pestilence, earthquake and famine. The imprisoned passions of

the wild animals were let loose, and earth and air became full of

carnage: worst of all, man's animal nature came out in gigantic

strength--the carnal lusts, unruly appetites, jealousies, hatreds,

rapines, and murders; and then the law, and with it, of course, breaches

of the law, and sin on sin. The seed of Adam was infected in the animal

change which had passed over Adam's person, and every child, therefore,

thenceforth naturally engendered in his posterity, was infected with the

curse which he had incurred. Every material organisation thenceforward

contained in itself the elements of its own destruction, and the

philosophic conclusions of Aristotle were accepted and explained by

theology. Already, in the popular histories, those who were infected by

disease were said to be bound by Satan; madness was a 'possession' by

the Evil Spirit; and the whole creation, from Adam till Christ, groaned

and travailed under Satan's power. The nobler nature in man still made

itself felt; but it was a slave when it ought to command. It might will

to obey the higher law, but the law in the members was over-strong for

it and bore it down. This was the body of death which philosophy

detected but could not explain, and from which Catholicism now came

forward with its magnificent promise of deliverance.

The carnal doctrine of the sacraments, which Protestants are compelled

to acknowledge to have been taught as fully in the early Church as it is

now taught by the Roman Catholics, has long been the stumbling-block to

modern thought. It was the very essence of the original creed. Unless

the body could be purified, the soul could not be saved; because from

the beginning, soul and flesh were one man and inseparable. Without his

flesh, man was not, or would cease to be. But the natural organisation

of the flesh was infected with evil, and unless organisation could begin

again from a new original, no pure material substance could exist at

all. He, therefore, by whom God had first made the world, entered into

the womb of the Virgin in the form (if I may with reverence say so) of a

new organic cell; and around it, through the virtue of his creative

energy, a material body grew again of the substance of his mother, pure

of taint and clean as the first body of the first man was clean when it

passed out under his hand in the beginning of all things. In Him thus

wonderfully born was the virtue which was to restore the lost power of

mankind. He came to redeem man; and, therefore, He took a human body,

and He kept it pure through a human life, till the time came when it

could be applied to its marvellous purpose. He died, and then appeared

what was the nature of a material human body when freed from the

limitations of sin. The grave could not hold it, neither was it possible

that it should see corruption. It was real, for the disciples were

allowed to feel and handle it. He ate and drank with them to assure

their senses. But space had no power over it, nor any of the material

obstacles which limit an ordinary power. He willed, and his body obeyed.

He was here, He was there. He was visible, He was invisible. He was in

the midst of his disciples and they saw Him, and then he was gone

whither who could tell? At last He passed away to heaven; but while in

heaven, He was still on earth. His body became the body of his Church on

earth, not in metaphor, but in fact!--his very material body, in which

and by which the faithful would be saved. His flesh and blood were

thenceforth to be their food. They were to eat it as they would eat

ordinary meat. They were to take it into their system, a pure material

substance, to leaven the old natural substance and assimilate it to

itself. As they fed upon it it would grow into them, and it would become

their own real body. Flesh grown in the old way was the body of death,

but the flesh of Christ was the life of the world, over which death had

no power. Circumcision availed nothing, nor uncircumcision--but a _new

creature_--and this new creature, which the child first put on in

baptism, was born again into Christ of water and the Spirit. In the

Eucharist he was fed and sustained, and went on from strength to

strength; and ever as the nature of his body changed, being able to

render a more complete obedience, he would at last pass away to God

through the gate of the grave, and stand holy and perfect in the

presence of Christ. Christ had indeed been ever present with him; but

because while life lasted some particles of the old Adam would

necessarily cling to every man, the Christian's mortal eye on earth

could not see Him. Hedged in by 'his muddy vesture of decay,' his eyes,

like the eyes of the disciples of Emmaus, are holden, and only in faith

he feels Him. But death, which till Christ had died had been the last

victory of evil, in virtue of his submission to it, became its own

destroyer, for it had power only over the tainted particles of the old

substance, and there was nothing needed but that these should be washed

away, and the elect would stand out at once pure and holy, clothed in

immortal bodies, like refined gold, the redeemed of God.

The being who accomplished a work so vast--a work compared to which the

first creation appears but a trifling difficulty--what could He be but

God? God Himself! Who but God could have wrested his prize from a power

which half the thinking world believed to be his coequal and coeternal

adversary? He was God. He was man also, for He was the second Adam--the

second starting-point of human growth. He was virgin born, that no

original impurity might infect the substance which He assumed; and being

Himself sinless, He showed, in the nature of his person, after his

resurrection, what the material body would have been in all of us except

for sin, and what it will be when, after feeding on it in its purity,

the bodies of each of us are transfigured after its likeness. Here was

the secret of the spirit which set St. Simeon on his pillar and sent St.

Anthony to the tombs--of the night watches, the weary fasts, the

penitential scourgings, the life-long austerities which have been

alternately the glory and the reproach of the mediæval saints. They

desired to overcome their animal bodies, and anticipate in life the work

of death in uniting themselves more completely to Christ by the

destruction of the flesh, which lay as a veil between themselves and

Him.

Such I believe to have been the central idea of the beautiful creed

which, for 1,500 years, tuned the heart and formed the mind of the

noblest of mankind. From this centre it radiated out and spread, as time

went on, into the full circle of human activity, flinging its own

philosophy and its own peculiar grace over the common details of the

common life of all of us. Like the seven lamps before the Throne of God,

the seven mighty angels, and the seven stars, the seven sacraments shed

over mankind a never-ceasing stream of blessed influences. The priests,

a holy order set apart and endowed with mysterious power, represented

Christ and administered his gifts. Christ, in his twelfth year, was

presented in the Temple, and first entered on his Father's business; and

the baptised child, when it has grown to an age to become conscious of

its vow and of its privilege, again renews it in full knowledge of what

it undertakes, and receives again sacramentally a fresh gift of grace to

assist it forward on its way. In maturity it seeks a companion to share

its pains and pleasures; and, again, Christ is present to consecrate the

union. Marriage, which, outside the Church, only serves to perpetuate

the curse and bring fresh inheritors of misery into the world, He made

holy by his presence at Cana, and chose it as the symbol to represent

his own mystic union with his Church. Even saints cannot live without at

times some spot adhering to them. The atmosphere in which we breathe and

move is soiled, and Christ has anticipated our wants. Christ did penance

forty days in the wilderness, not to subdue his own flesh--for that

which was already perfect did not need subduing--but to give to penance

a cleansing virtue to serve for our daily or our hourly ablution. Christ

consecrates our birth; Christ throws over us our baptismal robe of pure

unsullied innocence. He strengthens us as we go forward. He raises us

when we fall. He feeds us with the substance of his own most precious

body. In the person of his minister he does all this for us, in virtue

of that which in his own person He actually performed when a man living

on this earth. Last of all, when time is drawing to its close with

us--when life is past, when the work is done, and the dark gate is near,

beyond which the garden of an eternal home is waiting to receive us, his

tender care has not forsaken us. He has taken away the sting of death,

but its appearance is still terrible; and He will not leave us without

special help at our last need. He tried the agony of the moment; and He

sweetens the cup for us before we drink it. We are dismissed to the

grave with our bodies anointed with oil, which He made holy in his last

anointing before his passion, and then all is over. We lie down and seem

to decay--to decay--but not all. Our natural body decays, being the last

remains of the infected matter which we have inherited from Adam; but

the spiritual body, the glorified substance which has made our life, and

is our real body as we are in Christ, that can never decay, but passes

off into the kingdom which is prepared for it; that other world where

there is no sin, and God is all and in all!

FOOTNOTES:

[C] From the _Leader_, 1851.

A PLEA FOR THE FREE DISCUSSION OF THEOLOGICAL DIFFICULTIES.[D]

In the ordinary branches of human knowledge or enquiry, the judicious

questioning of received opinions has been regarded as the sign of

scientific vitality, the principle of scientific advancement, the very

source and root of healthy progress and growth. If medicine had been

regulated three hundred years ago by Act of Parliament; if there had

been Thirty-nine Articles of Physic, and every licensed practitioner had

been compelled, under pains and penalties, to compound his drugs by the

prescriptions of Henry the Eighth's physician, Doctor Butts, it is easy

to conjecture in what state of health the people of this country would

at present be found. Constitutions have changed with habits of life, and

the treatment of disorders has changed to meet the new conditions. New

diseases have shown themselves of which Doctor Butts had no cognizance;

new continents have given us plants with medicinal virtues previously

unknown; new sciences, and even the mere increase of recorded

experience, have added a thousand remedies to those known to the age of

the Tudors. If the College of Physicians had been organised into a board

of orthodoxy, and every novelty of treatment had been regarded as a

crime against society, which a law had been established to punish, the

hundreds who die annually from preventible causes would have been

thousands and tens of thousands.

Astronomy is the most perfect of the sciences. The accuracy of the

present theory of the planetary movements is tested daily and hourly by

the most delicate experiments, and the Legislature, if it so pleased,

might enact the first principles of these movements into a statute,

without danger of committing the law of England to falsehood. Yet, if

the Legislature were to venture on any such paternal procedure in a few

years gravitation itself would be called in question, and the whole

science would wither under the fatal shadow. There are many phenomena

still unexplained to give plausibility to scepticism; there are others

more easily formularised for working purposes in the language of

Hipparchus; and there would be reactionists who would invite us to

return to the safe convictions of our forefathers. What the world has

seen the world may see again; and were it once granted that astronomy

were something to be ruled by authority, new popes would imprison new

Galileos; the knowledge already acquired would be strangled in the cords

which were intended to keep it safe from harm, and, deprived of the free

air on which its life depends, it would dwindle and die.

A few years ago, an Inspector of Schools--a Mr. Jellinger

Symonds--opening, perhaps for the first time, an elementary book on

astronomy, came on something which he conceived to be a difficulty in

the theory of lunar motion. His objection was on the face of it

plausible. The true motions of the heavenly bodies are universally the

opposite of the apparent motions. Mr. Symonds conceived that the moon

could not revolve on its axis, because the same side of it was

continually turned towards the earth; and because if it were connected

with the earth by a rigid bar--which, as he thought, would deprive it of

power of rotation--the relative aspects of the two bodies would remain

unchanged. He sent his views to the 'Times.' He appealed to the common

sense of the world, and common sense seemed to be on his side. The men

of science were of course right; but a phenomenon, not entirely obvious,

had been hitherto explained in language which the general reader could

not readily comprehend. A few words of elucidation cleared up the

confusion. We do not recollect whether Mr. Symonds was satisfied or not;

but most of us who had before received what the men of science told us

with an unintelligent and languid assent, were set thinking for

ourselves, and, as a result of the discussion, exchanged a confused idea

for a clear one.

It was an excellent illustration of the true claims of authority and of

the value of open enquiry. The ignorant man has not as good a right to

his own opinion as the instructed man. The instructed man, however

right he may be, must not deliver his conclusions as axioms, and merely

insist that they are true. The one asks a question, the other answers

it, and all of us are the better for the business.

Now, let us suppose the same thing to have happened when the only reply

to a difficulty was an appeal to the Astronomer-Royal, where the

rotation of the moon was an article of salvation decreed by the law of

the land, and where all persons admitted to hold office under the State

were required to subscribe to it. The Astronomer-Royal--as it was, if we

remember right, he was a little cross at Mr. Symond's presumption--would

have brought an action against him in the Court of Arches; Mr. Symonds

would have been deprived of his inspectorship--for, of course, he would

have been obstinate in his heresy; the world outside would have had an

antecedent presumption that truth lay with the man who was making

sacrifices for it, and that there was little to be said in the way of

argument for what could not stand without the help of the law. Everybody

could understand the difficulty; not everybody would have taken the

trouble to attend to the answer. Mr. Symonds would have been a Colenso,

and a good many of us would have been convinced in our secret hearts

that the moon as little turned on its axis as the drawing-room table.

As it is in idea essential to a reverence for truth to believe in its

capacity for self-defence, so practically, in every subject except one,

errors are allowed free room to express themselves, and the liberty of

opinion which is the life of knowledge, as surely becomes the death of

falsehood. A method--the soundness of which is so evident that to argue

in favour of it is almost absurd--might be expected to have been

applied, as a matter of course, to the one subject where mistake is

supposed to be fatal,--where to come to wrong conclusions is held to be

a crime for which the Maker of the universe has neither pardon nor pity.

Yet many reasons, not difficult to understand, have long continued to

exclude theology from the region where free discussion is supposed to be

applicable. That so many persons have a personal interest in the

maintenance of particular views, would of itself be fatal to fair

argument. Though they know themselves to be right, yet right is not

enough for them unless there is might to support it, and those who talk

most of faith show least that they possess it. But there are deeper and

more subtle objections. The theologian requires absolute certainty, and

there are no absolute certainties in science. The conclusions of science

are never more than in a high degree probable; they are no more than the

best explanations of phenomena which are attainable in the existing

state of knowledge. The most elementary laws are called laws only in

courtesy. They are generalisations which are not considered likely to

require modification, but which no one pretends to be in the nature of

the cause exhaustively and ultimately true. As phenomena become more

complicated, and the data for the interpretation of them more

inadequate, the explanations offered are put forward hypothetically, and

are graduated by the nature of the evidence. Such modest hesitation is

altogether unsuited to the theologian, whose certainty increases with

the mystery and obscurity of his matter; his convictions admit of no

qualification; his truth is sure as the axioms of geometry; he knows

what he believes, for he has the evidence in his heart; if he enquire,

it is with a foregone conclusion, and serious doubt with him is sin. It

is in vain to point out to him the thousand forms of opinions for each

of which the same internal witness is affirmed. The Mayo peasant

crawling with bare knees over the splintered rocks on Croagh Patrick,

the nun prostrate before the image of St. Mary, the Methodist in the

spasmodic ecstasy of a revival, alike are conscious of emotions in

themselves which correspond to their creed: the more passionate, or--as

some would say--the more unreasoning the piety, the louder and more

clear is the voice within. But these varieties are no embarrassment to

the theologian. He finds no fault with the method which is identical in

them all. Whatever the party to which he himself belongs, he is equally

satisfied that he alone has the truth; the rest are under illusions of

Satan.

Again, we hear--or we used to hear when the High Church party were more

formidable than they are at present--much about 'the right of private

judgment.' 'Why,' the eloquent Protestant would say, 'should I pin my

faith upon the Church? the Church is but a congregation of fallible men,

no better able to judge than I am; I have a right to my own opinion.' It

sounds like a paradox to say that free discussion is interfered with by

a cause which, above all others, would have been expected to further it;

but this in fact has been the effect, because it tends to remove the

grounds of theological belief beyond the province of argument. No one

talks of 'a right of private judgment' in anything but religion; no one

but a fool insists on his 'right to his own opinion' with his lawyer or

his doctor. Able men who have given their time to special subjects, are

authorities upon those subjects to be listened to with deference, and

the ultimate authority at any given time is the collective general sense

of the wisest men living in the department to which they belong. The

utmost 'right of private judgment' which anybody claims in such cases,

is the choice of the physician to whom he will trust his body, or of the

counsel to whom he will commit the conduct of his cause. The expression,

as it is commonly used, implies a belief that, in matters of religion,

the criteria of truth are different in kind from what prevail elsewhere,

and the efforts which have been made to bring such a notion into harmony

with common sense and common subjects have not been the least

successful. The High Church party used to say, as a point against the

Evangelicals, that either 'the right of private judgment' meant nothing,

or it meant that a man had a right to be in the wrong. 'No,' said a

writer in the 'Edinburgh Review,' 'it means only that if a man chooses

to be in the wrong, no one else has a right to interfere with him. A man

has no right to get drunk in his own house, but the policeman may not

force a way into his house and prevent him.' The illustration fails of

its purpose.

In the first place, the Evangelicals never contemplated a wrong use of

the thing; they meant merely that they had a right to their own opinions

as against the Church. They did not indeed put forward their claim quite

so nakedly; they made it general, as sounding less invidious; but nobody

ever heard an Evangelical admit a High Churchman's right to be a High

Churchman, or a Catholic's right to be a Catholic.

But secondly, society has a most absolute right to prevent all manner of

evil--drunkenness, and the rest of it, if it can--only in doing so,

society must not use means which would create a greater evil than it

would remedy. As a man can by no possibility be doing anything but most

foul wrong to himself in getting drunk, society does him no wrong, but

rather does him the greatest benefit, if it can possibly keep him sober;

and in the same way, since a false belief in serious matters is among

the greatest of misfortunes, so to drive it out of man, by the whip, if

it cannot be managed by persuasion, is an act of brotherly love and

affection, provided the belief really and truly is false, and you have a

better to give him in the place of it. The question is not what to do,

but merely 'how to do it;' although Mr. Mill in his love of 'liberty,'

thinks otherwise. Mr. Mill demands for every man a right to say out his

convictions in plain language, whatever they may be; and so far as he

means that there should be no Act of Parliament to prevent him, he is

perfectly just in what he says. But when Mr. Mill goes from Parliament

to public opinion--when he lays down as a general principle that the

free play of thought is unwholesomely interfered with by society, he

would take away the sole protection which we possess from the inroads of

any kind of folly. His dread of tyranny is so great, that he thinks a

man better off with a false opinion of his own than with a right opinion

inflicted upon him from without; while, for our own part, we should be

grateful for tyranny or for anything else which would perform so useful

an office for us.

Public opinion may be unjust at particular times and on particular

subjects; we believe it to be both unjust and unwise on the matter of

which we are at present speaking: but, on the whole, it is like the

ventilation of a house, which keeps the air pure. Much in this world has

to be taken for granted, and we cannot be for ever arguing over our

first principles. If a man persists in talking of what he does not

understand, he is put down; if he sports loose views on morals at a

decent dinner party, the better sort of people fight shy of him, and he

is not invited again; if he profess himself a Buddhist or a Mahometan,

it is assumed that he has not adopted those beliefs on serious

conviction, but rather in wilful levity and eccentricity which does not

deserve to be tolerated. Men have no right to make themselves bores and

nuisances; and the common sense of mankind inflicts wholesome

inconveniences on those who carry their 'right of private judgment' to

any such extremities. It is a check, the same in kind as that which

operates so wholesomely in the sciences. Mere folly is extinguished in

contempt; objections reasonably urged obtain a hearing and are

reasonably met. New truths, after encountering sufficient opposition to

test their value, make their way into general reception.

A further cause which has operated to prevent theology from obtaining

the benefit of free discussion is the interpretation popularly placed

upon the constitution of the Church Establishment. For fifteen centuries

of its existence, the Christian Church was supposed to be under the

immediate guidance of the Holy Spirit, which miraculously controlled its

decisions, and precluded the possibility of error. This theory broke

down at the Reformation, but it left behind it a confused sense that

theological truth was in some way different from other truth; and,

partly on grounds of public policy, partly because it was supposed to

have succeeded to the obligations and the rights of the Papacy, the

State took upon itself to fix by statute the doctrines which should be

taught to the people. The distractions created by divided opinions were

then dangerous. Individuals did not hesitate to ascribe to themselves

the infallibility which they denied to the Church. Everybody was

intolerant upon principle, and was ready to cut the throat of an

opponent whom his arguments had failed to convince. The State, while it

made no pretensions to Divine guidance, was compelled to interfere in

self-protection; and to keep the peace of the realm, and to prevent the

nation from tearing itself in pieces, a body of formulas was enacted,

for the time broad and comprehensive, within which opinion might be

allowed convenient latitude, while forbidden to pass beyond the border.

It might have been thought that in abandoning for itself, and formally

denying to the Church its pretensions to immunity from error, the State

could not have intended to bind the conscience. When this or that law is

passed, the subject is required to obey it, but he is not required to

approve of the law as just. The Prayer-Book and the Thirty-nine

Articles, so far as they are made obligatory by Act of Parliament, are

as much laws as any other statute. They are a rule to conduct; it is not

easy to see why they should be more; it is not easy to see why they

should have been supposed to deprive clergymen of a right to their

opinions, or to forbid discussion of their contents. The judge is not

forbidden to ameliorate the law which he administers. If in discharge of

his duty he has to pronounce a sentence which he declares at the same

time that he thinks unjust, no indignant public accuses him of

dishonesty, or requires him to resign his office. The soldier is asked

no questions as to the legitimacy of the war on which he is sent to

fight; nor need he throw up his commission if he think the quarrel a bad

one. Doubtless, if a law was utterly iniquitous--if a war was

unmistakably wicked--honourable men might feel uncertain what to do, and

would seek some other profession rather than continue instruments of

evil. But within limits, and in questions of detail, where the service

is generally good and honourable, we leave opinion its free play, and

exaggerated scrupulousness would be folly or something worse. Somehow or

other, however, this wholesome freedom is not allowed to the clergyman.

The idea of absolute inward belief has been substituted for that of

obedience; and the man who, in taking orders, signs the Articles and

accepts the Prayer Book, does not merely undertake to use the services

in the one, and abstain from contradicting to his congregation the

doctrines contained in the other; but he is held to promise what no

honest man, without presumption, can undertake to promise--that he will

continue to think to the end of his life as he thinks when he makes his

engagement.

It is said that if his opinions change, he may resign, and retire into

lay communion. We are not prepared to say that either the Convocation of

1562, or the Parliament which afterwards endorsed its proceedings, knew

exactly what they meant, or did not mean; but it is quite clear that

they did not contemplate the alternative of a clergyman's retirement. If

they had, they would have provided means by which he could have

abandoned his orders, and not have remained committed for life to a

profession from which he could not escape. If the popular theory of

subscription be true, and the Articles are articles of belief, a

reasonable human being, when little more than a boy, pledges himself to

a long series of intricate and highly-difficult propositions of abstruse

divinity. He undertakes never to waver or doubt--never to allow his mind

to be shaken, whatever the weight of argument or evidence brought to

bear upon him. That is to say, he promises to do what no man living has

a right to promise to do. He is doing, on the authority of Parliament,

precisely what the Church of Rome required him to do on the authority of

a Council.

If a clergyman--in trouble amidst the abstruse subjects with which he

has to deal, or unable to reconcile some new-discovered truth of science

with the established formulas--puts forward his perplexities; if he

ventures a doubt of the omniscience of the statesmen and divines of the

sixteenth century, which they themselves disowned, there is an instant

cry to have him stifled, silenced, or trampled down; and if no longer

punished in life and limb, to have him deprived of the means on which

life and limb can be supported, while with ingenious tyranny he is

forbidden to maintain himself by any other occupation.

So far have we gone in this direction, that when the 'Essays and

Reviews' appeared, it was gravely said--and said by men who had no

professional antipathy to them--that the writers had broken their faith.

Laymen were free to say what they pleased on such subjects; clergymen

were the hired exponents of the established opinions, and were committed

to them in thought and word. It was one more anomaly where there were

enough already. To say that the clergy, who are set apart to study a

particular subject, are to be the only persons unpermitted to have an

independent opinion upon it, is like saying that lawyers must take no

part in the amendment of the statute-book; that engineers must be silent

upon mechanism; and if an improvement is wanted in the art of medicine,

physicians may have nothing to say to it.

These causes would, perhaps, have been insufficient to repress free

enquiry, if there had been on the part of the really able men among us a

determination to break the ice; in other words, if theology had

preserved the same commanding interest for the more powerful minds with

which it affected them three hundred years ago. But on the one hand, a

sense, half serious, half languid, of the hopelessness of the subject

has produced an indisposition to meddle with it; on the other, there has

been a creditable reluctance to disturb by discussion the minds of the

uneducated or half-educated, to whom the established religion is simply

an expression of the obedience which they owe to Almighty God, on the

details of which they think little, and are therefore unconscious of its

difficulties, while in general it is the source of all that is best and

noblest in their lives and actions.

This last motive no doubt deserves respect, but the force which it once

possessed it possesses no longer. The uncertainty which once affected

only the more instructed extends now to all classes of society. A

superficial crust of agreement, wearing thinner day by day, is

undermined everywhere by a vague misgiving; and there is an unrest

which will be satisfied only when the sources of it are probed to the

core. The Church authorities repeat a series of phrases which they are

pleased to call answers to objections; they treat the most serious

grounds of perplexity as if they were puerile and trifling; while it is

notorious that for a century past extremely able men have either not

known what to say about them, or have not said what they thought. On the

Continent the peculiar English view has scarcely a single educated

defender. Even in England the laity keep their judgment in suspense, or

remain warily silent.

'Of what religion are you, Mr. Rogers?' said a lady once.

'What religion, madam? I am of the religion of all sensible men.'

'And what is that?' she asked.

'All sensible men, madam, keep that to themselves.'

If Mr. Rogers had gone on to explain himself, he would have said,

perhaps, that where the opinions of those best able to judge are

divided, the questions at issue are doubtful. Reasonable men who are

unable to give them special attention withhold their judgment, while

those who are able, form their conclusions with diffidence and modesty.

But theologians will not tolerate diffidence; they demand absolute

assent, and will take nothing short of it; and they affect, therefore,

to drown in foolish ridicule whatever troubles or displeases them. The

Bishop of Oxford talks in the old style of punishment. The Archbishop of

Canterbury refers us to Usher as our guide in Hebrew chronology. The

objections of the present generation of 'infidels,' he says, are the

same which have been refuted again and again, and are such as a child

might answer. The young man just entering upon the possession of his

intellect, with a sense of responsibility for his belief, and more

anxious for truth than for success in life, finds, when he looks into

the matter, that the archbishop has altogether misrepresented it; that

in fact, like other official persons, he had been using merely a

stereotyped form of words, to which he attached no definite meaning. The

words are repeated year after year, but the enemies refuse to be

exorcised. They come and come again, from Spinoza and Lessing to Strauss

and Renan. The theologians have resolved no single difficulty; they

convince no one who is not convinced already; and a Colenso coming

fresh to the subject with no more than a year's study, throws the Church

of England into convulsions.

If there were any real danger that Christianity would cease to be

believed, it would be no more than a fulfilment of prophecy. The state

in which the Son of Man would find the world at his coming he did not

say would be a state of faith. But if that dark time is ever literally

to come upon the earth, there are no present signs of it. The creed of

eighteen centuries is not about to fade away like an exhalation, nor are

the new lights of science so exhilarating that serious persons can look

with comfort to exchanging one for the other. Christianity has abler

advocates than its professed defenders, in those many quiet and humble

men and women who in the light of it and the strength of it live holy,

beautiful, and self-denying lives. The God that answers by fire is the

God whom mankind will acknowledge; and so long as the fruits of the

Spirit continue to be visible in charity, in self-sacrifice, in those

graces which raise human creatures above themselves, and invest them

with that beauty of holiness which only religion confers, thoughtful

persons will remain convinced that with them in some form or other is

the secret of truth. The body will not thrive on poison, or the soul on

falsehood; and as the vital processes of health are too subtle for

science to follow; as we choose our food, not by the most careful

chemical analysis, but by the experience of its effects upon the system;

so when a particular belief is fruitful in nobleness of character, we

need trouble ourselves very little with scientific demonstrations that

it is false. The most deadly poison may be chemically undistinguishable

from substances which are perfectly innocent. Prussic acid, we are told,

is formed of the same elements, combined in the same proportions, as

gum-arabic.

What that belief is for which the fruits speak thus so positively, it is

less easy to define. Religion from the beginning of time has expanded

and changed with the growth of knowledge. The religion of the prophets

was not the religion which was adapted to the hardness of heart of the

Israelites of the Exodus. The Gospel set aside the Law; the creed of the

early Church was not the creed of the Middle Ages, any more than the

creed of Luther and Cranmer was the creed of St. Bernard and Aquinas.

Old things pass away, new things come in their place; and they in their

turn grow old, and give place to others; yet in each of the many forms

which Christianity has assumed in the world, holy men have lived and

died, and have had the witness of the Spirit that they were not far from

the truth. It may be that the faith which saves is the something held in

common by all sincere Christians, and by those as well who should come

from the east and the west, and sit down in the kingdom of God, when the

children of the covenant would be cast out. It may be that the true

teaching of our Lord is overlaid with doctrines; and theology, when

insisting on the reception of its huge catena of formulas, may be

binding a yoke upon our necks which neither we nor our fathers were able

to bear.

But it is not the object of this paper to put forward either this or any

other particular opinion. The writer is conscious only that he is

passing fast towards the dark gate which soon will close behind him. He

believes that some kind of sincere and firm conviction on these things

is of infinite moment to him, and, entirely diffident of his own power

to find his way towards such a conviction, he is both ready and anxious

to disclaim 'all right of private judgment' in the matter. He wishes

only to learn from those who are able to teach him. The learned prelates

talk of the presumptuousness of human reason; they tell us that doubts

arise from the consciousness of sin and the pride of the unregenerate

heart. The present writer, while he believes generally that reason,

however inadequate, is the best faculty to which we have to trust, yet

is most painfully conscious of the weakness of his own reason; and once

let the real judgment of the best and wisest men be declared--let those

who are most capable of forming a sound opinion, after reviewing the

whole relations of science, history, and what is now received as

revelation, tell us fairly how much of the doctrines popularly taught

they conceive to be adequately established, how much to be uncertain,

and how much, if anything, to be mistaken; there is scarcely, perhaps, a

single serious enquirer who would not submit with delight to a court

which is the highest on earth.

Mr. Mansell tells us that in the things of God reason is beyond its

depth, that the wise and the unwise are on the same level of incapacity,

and that we must accept what we find established, or we must believe

nothing. We presume that Mr. Mansell's dilemma itself is a conclusion

of reason. Do what we will, reason is and must be our ultimate

authority; and were the collective sense of mankind to declare Mr.

Mansell right, we should submit to that opinion as readily as to

another. But the collective sense of mankind is less acquiescent. He has

been compared to a man sitting on the end of a plank and deliberately

sawing off his seat. It seems never to have occurred to him that, if he

is right, he has no business to be a Protestant. What Mr. Mansell says

to Professor Jowett, Bishop Gardiner in effect replied to Frith and

Ridley. Frith and Ridley said that transubstantiation was unreasonable;

Gardiner answered that there was the letter of Scripture for it, and

that the human intellect was no measure of the power of God. Yet the

Reformers somehow believed, and Mr. Mansell by his place in the Church

of England seems to agree with them, that the human intellect was not so

wholly incompetent. It might be a weak guide, but it was better than

none; and they declared on grounds of mere reason, that Christ being in

heaven and not on earth, 'it was contrary to the truth for a natural

body to be in two places at once.' The common sense of the country was

of the same opinion, and the illusion was at an end.

There have been 'Aids to Faith' produced lately, and 'Replies to the

Seven Essayists,' 'Answers to Colenso,' and much else of the kind. We

regret to say that they have done little for us. The very life of our

souls is at issue in the questions which have been raised, and we are

fed with the professional commonplaces of the members of a close guild,

men holding high office in the Church, or expecting to hold high office

there; in either case with a strong temporal interest in the defence of

the institution which they represent. We desire to know what those of

the clergy think whose love of truth is unconnected with their prospects

in life; we desire to know what the educated laymen, the lawyers, the

historians, the men of science, the statesmen think; and these are for

the most part silent, or confess themselves modestly uncertain. The

professional theologians alone are loud and confident; but they speak in

the old angry tone which rarely accompanies deep and wise convictions.

They do not meet the real difficulties; they mistake them, misrepresent

them, claim victories over adversaries with whom they have never even

crossed swords, and leap to conclusions with a precipitancy at which we

can only smile. It has been the unhappy manner of their class from

immemorial time; they call it zeal for the Lord, as if it were beyond

all doubt that they were on God's side--as if serious enquiry after

truth was something which they were entitled to resent. They treat

intellectual difficulties as if they deserved rather to be condemned and

punished than considered and weighed, and rather stop their ears and run

with one accord upon anyone who disagrees with them than listen

patiently to what he has to say.

We do not propose to enter in detail upon the particular points which

demand re-discussion. It is enough that the more exact habit of thought

which science has engendered, and the closer knowledge of the value and

nature of evidence, has notoriously made it necessary that the grounds

should be reconsidered on which we are to believe that one country and

one people was governed for sixteen centuries on principles different

from those which we now find to prevail universally. One of many

questions, however, shall be briefly glanced at, on which the real issue

seems habitually to be evaded.

Much has been lately said and written on the authenticity of the

Pentateuch and the other historical books of the Old Testament. The

Bishop of Natal has thrown out in a crude form the critical results of

the enquiries of the Germans, coupled with certain arithmetical

calculations, for which he has a special aptitude. He supposes himself

to have proved that the first five books of the Bible are a compilation

of uncertain date, full of inconsistencies and impossibilities. The

apologists have replied that the objections are not absolutely

conclusive, that the events described in the Book of Exodus might

possibly, under certain combinations of circumstances, have actually

taken place; and they then pass to the assumption that because a story

is not necessarily false, therefore it is necessarily true. We have no

intention of vindicating Dr. Colenso. His theological training makes his

arguments very like those of his opponents, and he and Dr. M'Call may

settle their differences between themselves. The question is at once

wider and simpler than any which has been raised in that controversy.

Were it proved beyond possibility of error that the Pentateuch was

written by Moses, that those and all the books of the Old and New

Testaments were really the work of the writers whose names they bear;

were the Mosaic cosmogony in harmony with physical discoveries; and were

the supposed inconsistencies and contradictions shown to have no

existence except in Dr. Colenso's imagination--we should not have

advanced a single step towards making good the claim put forward for the

Bible, that it is absolutely and unexceptionably true in all its parts.

The 'genuineness and authenticity' argument is irrelevant and needless.

The clearest demonstration of the human authorship of the Pentateuch

proves nothing about its immunity from errors. If there are no mistakes

in it, it was not the workmanship of man; and if it was inspired by the

Holy Spirit, there is no occasion to show that the hand of Moses was the

instrument made use of. To the most excellent of contemporary histories,

to histories written by eye-witnesses of the facts which they describe,

we accord but a limited confidence. The highest intellectual competence,

the most admitted truthfulness, immunity from prejudice, and the absence

of temptation to misstate the truth; these things may secure great

credibility, but they are no guarantee for minute and circumstantial

exactness. Two historians, though with equal gifts and equal

opportunities, never describe events in exactly the same way. Two

witnesses in a court of law, while they agree in the main, invariably

differ in some particulars. It appears as if men could not relate facts

precisely as they saw or as they heard them. The different parts of a

story strike different imaginations unequally; and the mind, as the

circumstances pass through it, alters their proportions unconsciously,

or shifts the perspective. The credit which we give to the most

authentic work of a man has no resemblance to that universal acceptance

which is demanded for the Bible. It is not a difference of degree: it is

a difference in kind; and we desire to know on what ground this

infallibility, which we do not question, but which is not proved,

demands our belief. Very likely, the Bible is thus infallible. Unless it

is, there can be no moral obligation to accept the facts which it

records; and though there may be intellectual error in denying them,

there can be no moral sin. Facts may be better or worse authenticated;

but all the proofs in the world of the genuineness and authenticity of

the human handiwork cannot establish a claim upon the conscience. It

might be foolish to question Thucydides' account of Pericles, but no

one would call it sinful. Men part with all sobriety of judgment when

they come on ground of this kind. When Sir Henry Rawlinson read the name

of Sennacherib on the Assyrian marbles, and found allusions there to the

Israelites in Palestine, we were told that a triumphant answer had been

found to the cavils of sceptics, and a convincing proof of the inspired

truth of the Divine Oracles. Bad arguments in a good cause are a sure

way to bring distrust upon it. The Divine Oracles may be true, and may

be inspired; but the discoveries at Nineveh certainly do not prove them

so. No one supposes that the Books of Kings or the prophecies of Isaiah

and Ezekiel were the work of men who had no knowledge of Assyria or the

Assyrian Princes. It is possible that in the excavations at Carthage

some Punic inscription may be found confirming Livy's account of the

battle of Cannæ; but we shall not be obliged to believe therefore in the

inspiration of Livy, or rather (for the argument comes to that) in the

inspiration of the whole Latin literature.

We are not questioning the fact that the Bible is infallible; we desire

only to be told on what evidence that great and awful fact concerning it

properly rests. It would seem, indeed, as if instinct had been wiser

than argument--as if it had been felt that nothing short of this literal

and close inspiration could preserve the facts on which Christianity

depends. The history of the early world is a history everywhere of

marvels. The legendary literature of every nation upon earth tells the

same stories of prodigies and wonders, of the appearances of the gods

upon earth, and of their intercourse with men. The lives of the saints

of the Catholic Church, from the time of the Apostles till the present

day, are a complete tissue of miracles resembling and rivalling those of

the Gospels. Some of these stories are romantic and imaginative; some

clear, literal, and prosaic; some rest on mere tradition; some on the

sworn testimony of eye-witnesses; some are obvious fables; some are as

well authenticated as facts of such a kind can be authenticated at all.

The Protestant Christian rejects every one of them--rejects them without

enquiry--involves those for which there is good authority and those for

which there is none or little in one absolute, contemptuous, and

sweeping denial. The Protestant Christian feels it more likely, in the

words of Hume, that men should deceive or be deceived, than that the

laws of nature should be violated. At this moment we are beset with

reports of conversations with spirits, of tables miraculously lifted, of

hands projected out of the world of shadows into this mortal life. An

unusually able, accomplished person, accustomed to deal with

common-sense facts, a celebrated political economist, and notorious for

business-like habits, assured this writer that a certain mesmerist, who

was my informant's intimate friend, had raised a dead girl to life. We

should believe the people who tell us these things in any ordinary

matter: they would be admitted in a court of justice as good witnesses

in a criminal case, and a jury would hang a man on their word. The

person just now alluded to is incapable of telling a wilful lie; yet our

experience of the regularity of nature on one side is so uniform, and

our experience of the capacities of human folly on the other is so

large, that when people tell us these wonderful stories, most of us are

contented to smile; and we do not care so much as to turn out of our way

to examine them.

The Bible is equally a record of miracles; but as from other histories

we reject miracles without hesitation, so of those in the Bible we

insist on the universal acceptance: the former are all false, the latter

are all true. It is evident that, in forming conclusions so sweeping as

these, we cannot even suppose that we are being guided by what is called

historical evidence. Were it admitted that, as a whole, the miracles of

the Bible are better authenticated than the miracles of the saints, we

should be far removed still from any large inference, that in the one

set there is no room for falsehood, in the other no room for truth. The

writer or writers of the Books of Kings are not known. The books

themselves are in fact confessedly taken from older writings which are

lost; and the accounts of the great prophets of Israel are a

counterpart, curiously like, of those of the mediæval saints. In many

instances the authors of the lives of these saints were their companions

and friends. Why do we feel so sure that what we are told of Elijah or

Elisha took place exactly as we read it? Why do we reject the account of

St. Columba or St. Martin as a tissue of idle fable? Why should not God

give a power to the saint which He had given to the prophet? We can

produce no reason from the nature of things, for we know not what the

nature of things is; and if down to the death of the Apostles the

ministers of religion were allowed to prove their commission by working

miracles, what right have we, on grounds either of history or

philosophy, to draw a clear line at the death of St. John--to say that

before that time all such stories were true, and after it all were

false?

There is no point on which Protestant controversialists evade the real

question more habitually than on that of miracles. They accuse those who

withhold that unreserved and absolute belief which they require for all

which they accept themselves, of denying that miracles are possible.

They assume this to be the position taken up by the objector, and

proceed easily to argue that man is no judge of the power of God. Of

course he is not. No sane man ever raised his narrow understanding into

a measure of the possibilities of the universe; nor does any person with

any pretensions to religion disbelieve in miracles of some kind. To pray

is to expect a miracle. When we pray for the recovery of a sick friend,

for the gift of any blessing, or the removal of any calamity, we expect

that God will do something by an act of his personal will which

otherwise would not have been done--that he will suspend the ordinary

relations of natural cause and effect; and this is the very idea of a

miracle. The thing we pray for may be given us, and no miracle may have

taken place. It may be given to us by natural causes, and would have

occurred whether we had prayed or not. But prayer itself in its very

essence implies a belief in the possible intervention of a power which

is above nature. The question about miracles is simply one of

evidence--whether in any given case the proof is so strong that no room

is left for mistake, exaggeration, or illusion, while more evidence is

required to establish a fact antecedently improbable than is sufficient

for a common occurrence.

It has been said recently by 'A Layman,' in a letter to Mr. Maurice,

that the resurrection of our Lord is as well authenticated as the death

of Julius Cæsar. It is far better authenticated, unless we are mistaken

in supposing the Bible inspired; or if we admit as evidence that inward

assurance of the Christian, which would make him rather die than

disbelieve a truth so dear to him. But if the layman meant that there

was as much proof of it, in the sense in which proof is understood in a

court of justice, he could scarcely have considered what he was saying.

Julius Cæsar was killed in a public place, in the presence of friend

and foe, in a remarkable but still perfectly natural manner. The

circumstances were minutely known to all the world, and were never

denied or doubted by any one. Our Lord, on the other hand, seems

purposely to have withheld such public proof of his resurrection as

would have left no room for unbelief. He showed himself, 'not to all the

people'--not to his enemies, whom his appearance would have

overwhelmed--but 'to witnesses chosen before;' to the circle of his own

friends. There is no evidence which a jury could admit that he was ever

actually dead. So unusual was it for persons crucified to die so soon,

that Pilate, we are told, 'marvelled.' The subsequent appearances were

strange, and scarcely intelligible. Those who saw Him did not recognise

Him till He was made known to them in the breaking of bread. He was

visible and invisible. He was mistaken by those who were most intimate

with Him for another person; nor do the accounts agree which are given

by the different Evangelists. Of investigation in the modern sense

(except in the one instance of St. Thomas, and St. Thomas was rather

rebuked than praised) there was none, and could be none. The evidence

offered was different in kind, and the blessing was not to those who

satisfied themselves of the truth of the fact by a searching enquiry,

but who gave their assent with the unhesitating confidence of love.

St. Paul's account of his own conversion is an instance of the kind of

testimony which then worked the strongest conviction. St. Paul, a fiery

fanatic on a mission of persecution with the midday Syrian sun streaming

down upon his head, was struck to the ground, and saw in a vision our

Lord in the air. If such a thing were to occur at the present day, and

if a modern physician were consulted about it, he would say, without

hesitation, that it was an effect of an overheated brain and that there

was nothing in it extraordinary or unusual. If the impression left by

the appearance had been too strong for such an explanation to be

satisfactory, the person to whom it occurred, especially if he was a man

of St Paul's intellectual stature, would have at once examined into the

facts otherwise known, connected with the subject of what he had seen.

St. Paul had evidently before disbelieved our Lord's resurrection--had

disbelieved it fiercely and passionately; we should have expected that

he would at once have sought for those who could best have told him the

details of the truth. St. Paul, however, did nothing of the kind. He

went for a year into Arabia, and when at last he returned to Jerusalem,

he rather held aloof from those who had been our Lord's companions, and

who had witnessed his ascension. He saw Peter, he saw James; 'of the

rest of the apostles saw he none.' To him evidently the proof of the

resurrection was the vision which he had himself seen. It was to that

which he always referred when called on for a defence of his faith.

Of evidence for the resurrection, in the common sense of the word, there

may be enough to show that something extraordinary occurred; but not

enough, unless we assume the fact to be true on far other grounds, to

produce any absolute and unhesitating conviction; and inasmuch as the

resurrection is the keystone of Christianity, the belief in it must be

something far different from that suspended judgment in which history

alone would leave us.

Human testimony, we repeat, under the most favourable circumstances

imaginable, knows nothing of 'absolute certainty;' and if historical

facts are bound up with the creed, and if they are to be received with

the same completeness as the laws of conscience, they rest, and must

rest, either on the divine truth of Scripture, or on the divine witness

in ourselves. On human evidence the miracles of St. Teresa and St.

Francis of Assisi are as well established as those of the New Testament.

M. Ernest Renan has recently produced an account of the Gospel story

which, written as it is by a man of piety, intellect, and imagination,

is spreading rapidly through the educated world. Carrying out the

principles with which Protestants have swept modern history clear of

miracles to their natural conclusions, he dismisses all that is

miraculous from the life of our Lord, and endeavours to reproduce the

original Galilean youth who lived and taught, and died in Palestine

eighteen hundred years ago. We have no intention of reviewing M. Renan.

He will be read soon enough by many who would better consider their

peace of mind by leaving him alone. For ourselves, we are unable to see

by what right, if he rejects the miraculous part of the narrative, he

retains the rest; the imagination and the credulity which invent

extraordinary incidents, invent ordinary incidents also; and if the

divine element in the life is legendary, the human may be legendary

also. But there is one lucid passage in the introduction which we

commend to the perusal of controversial theologians:--

'No miracle such as those of which early histories are full has taken

place under conditions which science can accept. Experience shows,

without exception, that miracles occur only in times and in countries in

which miracles are believed in, and in the presence of persons who are

disposed to believe them. No miracle has ever been performed before an

assemblage of spectators capable of testing its reality. Neither

uneducated people, nor even men of the world, have the requisite

capacity; great precautions are needed, and a long habit of scientific

research. Have we not seen men of the world in our own time become the

dupes of the most childish and absurd illusions? And if it be certain

that no contemporary miracles will bear investigation, is it not

possible that the miracles of the past, were we able to examine into

them in detail, would be found equally to contain an element of error?

It is not in the name of this or that philosophy, it is in the name of

an experience which never varies, that we banish miracles from history.

We do not say a miracle is impossible--we say only that no miracle has

ever yet been proved. Let a worker of miracles come forward to-morrow

with pretensions serious enough to deserve examination. Let us suppose

him to announce that he is able to raise a dead man to life. What would

be done? A committee would be appointed, composed of physiologists,

physicians, chemists, and persons accustomed to exact investigation; a

body would then be selected which the committee would assure itself was

really dead; and a place would be chosen where the experiment was to

take place. Every precaution would be taken to leave no opening for

uncertainty; and if, under those conditions, the restoration to life was

effected, a probability would be arrived at which would be almost equal

to certainty. An experiment, however, should always admit of being

repeated. What a man has done once he should be able to do again; and in

miracles there can be no question of ease or difficulty. The performer

would be requested to repeat the operation under other circumstances

upon other bodies; and if he succeeded on every occasion, two points

would be established: first, that there may be in this world such things

as supernatural operations; and, secondly, that the power to perform

them is delegated to, or belongs to, particular persons. But who does

not perceive that no miracle was ever performed under such conditions as

these?'

We have quoted this passage because it expresses with extreme precision

and clearness the common-sense principle which we apply to all

supernatural stories of our own time, which Protestant theologians

employ against the whole cycle of Catholic miracles, and which M. Renan

is only carrying to its logical conclusions in applying to the history

of our Lord, if the Gospels are tried by the mere tests of historical

criticism. The Gospels themselves tell us why M. Renan's conditions were

never satisfied. Miracles were not displayed in the presence of sceptics

to establish scientific truths. When the adulterous generation sought

after a sign, the sign was not given; nay, it is even said that in the

presence of unbelief, our Lord was not able to work miracles. But

science has less respect for that undoubting and submissive willingness

to believe; and it is quite certain that if we attempt to establish the

truth of the New Testament on the principles of Paley--if with Professor

Jowett 'we interpret the Bible as any other book,' the element of

miracle which has evaporated from the entire surface of human history

will not maintain itself in the sacred ground of the Gospels, and the

facts of Christianity will melt in our hands like a snowball.

Nothing less than a miraculous history can sustain the credibility of

miracles, and nothing could be more likely, if revelation be a reality

and not a dream, than that the history containing it should be saved in

its composition from the intermixture of human infirmity. This is the

position in which instinct long ago taught Protestants to entrench

themselves, and where alone they can hope to hold their ground: once

established in these lines, they were safe and unassailable, unless it

could be demonstrated that any fact or facts related in the Bible were

certainly untrue.

Nor would it be necessary to say any more upon the subject. Those who

believed Christianity would admit the assumption; those who disbelieved

Christianity would repudiate it. The argument would be narrowed to that

plain and single issue, and the elaborate treatises upon external

evidence would cease to bring discredit upon the cause by their

feebleness. Unfortunately--and this is the true secret of our present

distractions--it seems certain that in some way or other this belief in

inspiration itself requires to be revised. We are compelled to examine

more precisely what we mean by the word. The account of the creation of

man and the world which is given in Genesis, and which is made by St.

Paul the basis of his theology, has not yet been reconciled with facts

which science knows to be true. Death was in the world before Adam's

sin, and unless Adam's age be thrust back to a distance which no

ingenuity can torture the letter of Scripture into recognising, men and

women lived and died upon the earth whole millenniums before the Eve of

Sacred History listened to the temptation of the snake. Neither has any

such deluge as that from which, according to the received

interpretation, the ark saved Noah, swept over the globe within the

human period. We are told that it was not God's purpose to anticipate

the natural course of discovery: as the story of the creation was

written in human language, so the details of it may have been adapted to

the existing state of human knowledge. The Bible, it is said, was not

intended to teach men science, but to teach them what was necessary for

the moral training of their souls. It may be that this is true.

Spiritual grace affects the moral character of men, but leaves their

intellect unimproved. The most religious men are as liable as atheists

to ignorance of ordinary facts, and inspiration may be only infallible

when it touches on truths necessary to salvation. But if it be so, there

are many things in the Bible which must become as uncertain as its

geology or its astronomy. There is the long secular history of the

Jewish people. Let it be once established that there is room for error

anywhere, and we have no security for the accuracy of this history. The

inspiration of the Bible is the foundation of our whole belief; and it

is a grave matter if we are uncertain to what extent it reaches, or how

much and what it guarantees to us as true. We cannot live on

probabilities. The faith in which we can live bravely and die in peace

must be a certainty, so far as it professes to be a faith at all, or it

is nothing. It may be that all intellectual efforts to arrive at it are

in vain; that it is given to those to whom it is given, and withheld

from those from whom it is withheld. It may be that the existing belief

is undergoing a silent modification, like those to which the

dispensations of religion have been successively subjected; or, again,

it may be that to the creed as it is already established there is

nothing to be added, and nothing any more to be taken from it. At this

moment, however, the most vigorous minds appear least to see their way

to a conclusion; and notwithstanding all the school and church building,

the extended episcopate, and the religious newspapers, a general doubt

is coming up like a thunderstorm against the wind, and blackening the

sky. Those who cling most tenaciously to the faith in which they were

educated, yet confess themselves perplexed. They know what they believe;

but why they believe it, or why they should require others to believe,

they cannot tell or cannot agree. Between the authority of the Church

and the authority of the Bible, the testimony of history and the

testimony of the Spirit, the ascertained facts of science and the

contradictory facts which seem to be revealed, the minds of men are

tossed to and fro, harassed by the changed attitude in which scientific

investigation has placed us all towards accounts of supernatural

occurrences. We thrust the subject aside; we take refuge in practical

work; we believe, perhaps, that the situation is desperate, and hopeless

of improvement; we refuse to let the question be disturbed. But we

cannot escape from our shadow, and the spirit of uncertainty will haunt

the world like an uneasy ghost, till we take it by the throat like men.

We return then to the point from which we set out. The time is past for

repression. Despotism has done its work; but the day of despotism is

gone, and the only remedy is a full and fair investigation. Things will

never right themselves if they are let alone. It is idle to say peace

when there is no peace; and the concealed imposthume is more dangerous

than an open wound. The law in this country has postponed our trial, but

cannot save us from it; and the questions which have agitated the

Continent are agitating us at last. The student who twenty years ago was

contented with the Greek and Latin fathers and the Anglican divines, now

reads Ewald and Renan. The Church authorities still refuse to look their

difficulties in the face: they prescribe for mental troubles the

established doses of Paley and Pearson; they refuse dangerous questions

as sinful, and tread the round of commonplace in placid comfort. But it

will not avail. Their pupils grow to manhood, and fight the battle for

themselves, unaided by those who ought to have stood by them in their

trial, and could not or would not; and the bitterness of those

conflicts, and the end of most of them in heart-broken uncertainty or

careless indifference, is too notorious to all who care to know about

such things.

We cannot afford year after year to be distracted with the tentative

scepticism of essayists and reviewers. In a healthy condition of public

opinion such a book as Bishop Colenso's would have passed unnoticed, or

rather would never have been written, for the difficulties with which it

deals would have been long ago met and disposed of. When questions rose

in the early and middle ages of the Church, they were decided by

councils of the wisest: those best able to judge met together, and

compared their thoughts, and conclusions were arrived at which

individuals could accept and act upon. At the beginning of the English

Reformation, when Protestant doctrine was struggling for reception, and

the old belief was merging in the new, the country was deliberately held

in formal suspense. Protestants and Catholics were set to preach on

alternate Sundays in the same pulpit; subjects were discussed freely in

the ears of the people; and at last, when all had been said on both

sides, Convocation and Parliament embodied the result in formulas.

Councils will no longer answer the purpose; the clergy have no longer a

superiority of intellect or cultivation; and a conference of prelates

from all parts of Christendom, or even from all departments of the

English Church, would not present an edifying spectacle. Parliament may

no longer meddle with opinions unless it be to untie the chains which it

forged three centuries ago. But better than councils, better than

sermons, better than Parliament, is that free discussion through a free

press which is the best instrument for the discovery of truth, and the

most effectual means for preserving it.

We shall be told, perhaps, that we are beating the air--that the press

is free, and that all men may and do write what they please. It is not

so. Discussion is not free so long as the clergy who take any side but

one are liable to be prosecuted and deprived of their means of living;

it is not free so long as the expression of doubt is considered as a sin

by public opinion and as a crime by the law. So far are we from free

discussion, that the world is not yet agreed that a free discussion is

desirable; and till it be so agreed, the substantial intellect of the

country will not throw itself into the question. The battle will

continue to be fought by outsiders, who suffice to disturb a repose

which they cannot restore; and that collective voice of the national

understanding, which alone can give back to us a peaceful and assured

conviction, will not be heard.

FOOTNOTES:

[D] _Fraser's Magazine_, 1863.

CRITICISM AND THE GOSPEL HISTORY.[E]

The spirit of criticism is not the spirit of religion. The spirit of

criticism is a questioning spirit; the spirit of religion is a spirit of

faith, of humility and submission. Other qualities may go to the

formation of a religious character in the highest and grandest sense of

the word; but the virtues which religious teachers most generally

approve, which make up the ideal of a Catholic saint, which the Catholic

and all other churches endeavour most to cultivate in their children,

are those of passive and loyal obedience, a devotion without reserve or

qualification; or to use the technical word, 'a spirit of

teachableness.' A religious education is most successful when it has

formed a mind to which difficulties are welcome as an opportunity for

the triumph of faith--which regards doubts as temptations to be resisted

like the suggestions of sensuality, and which alike in action or opinion

follows the path prescribed to it with affectionate and unhesitating

confidence.

To men or women of the tender and sensitive piety which is produced by

such a training, an enquiry into the grounds of its faith appears

shocking and profane. To demand an explanation of ambiguities or

mysteries of which they have been accustomed to think only upon their

knees, is as it were to challenge the Almighty to explain his ways to

his creatures, and to refuse obedience unless human presumption has been

first gratified.

Undoubtedly, not in religion only, but in any branch of human knowledge,

teachableness is the condition of growth. We augur ill for the future of

the youth who sets his own judgment against that of his instructors, and

refuses to believe what cannot be at once made plain to him. Yet again,

the wise instructor will not lightly discourage questions which are

prompted by an intelligent desire of knowledge. That an unenquiring

submission produces characters of great and varied beauty; that it has

inspired the most splendid acts of endurance which have given a lustre

to humanity, no one will venture to deny. A genial faith is one of that

group of qualities which commend themselves most to the young, the

generous, and the enthusiastic--to those whose native and original

nobleness has suffered least from contact with the world--which belong

rather to the imagination than the reason, and stand related to truth

through the emotions rather than through the sober calculations of

probability. It is akin to loyalty, to enthusiasm, to hero-worship, to

that deep affection to a person or a cause which can see no fault in

what it loves.

'Belief,' says Mr. Sewell, 'is a virtue; doubt is a sin.' Iago is

nothing if not critical; and the sceptical spirit--_der Geist der stets

verneint_--which is satisfied with nothing, which sees in everything

good the seed of evil, and the weak spot in every great cause or nature,

has been made the special characteristic--we all feel with justice--of

the devil.

And yet this devotedness or devotion, this reverence for authority, is

but one element of excellence. To reverence is good; but on the one

condition that the object of it be a thing which deserves reverence; and

the necessary complement, the security that we are not bestowing our

best affections where they should not be given, must be looked for in

some quality which, if less attractive, is no less essential for our

true welfare. To prove all things--to try the spirits whether they be of

God--is a duty laid upon us by the highest authority; and what is called

progress in human things--religious as well as material--has been due

uniformly to a dissatisfaction with them as they are. Every advance in

science, every improvement in the command of the mechanical forces of

nature, every step in political or social freedom, has risen in the

first instance from an act of scepticism, from an uncertainty whether

the formulas, or the opinions, or the government, or the received

practical theories were absolutely perfect; or whether beyond the circle

of received truths there might not lie something broader, deeper, truer,

and thus better deserving the acceptance of mankind.

Submissiveness, humility, obedience, produce if uncorrected, in politics

a nation of slaves, whose baseness becomes an incentive to tyranny; in

religion, they produce the consecration of falsehood, poperies,

immaculate conceptions, winking images, and the confessional. The spirit

of enquiry if left to itself becomes in like manner a disease of

uncertainty, and terminates in universal scepticism. It seems as if in a

healthy order of things, to the willingness to believe there should be

chained as its inseparable companion a jealousy of deception; and there

is no lesson more important for serious persons to impress upon

themselves than that each of these temperaments must learn to tolerate

the other; faith accepting from reason the sanction of its service, and

reason receiving in return the warm pulsations of life. The two

principles exist together in the highest natures; and the man who in the

best sense of the word is devout, is also the most cautious to whom or

to what he pays his devotion. Among the multitude, the units of which

are each inadequate and incomplete, the elements are disproportionately

mixed; some men are humble and diffident, some are sceptical and

enquiring; yet both are filling a place in the great intellectual

economy; both contribute to make up the sum and proportion of qualities

which are required to hold the balance even; and neither party is

entitled to say to the other, 'Stand by; I am holier than thou.'

And as it is with individuals, so is it also with whole periods and

cycles. For centuries together the believing spirit held undisputed

sovereignty; and these were what are called 'ages of faith;' ages, that

is, in which the highest business of the intellect was to pray rather

than to investigate; when for every unusual phenomenon a supernatural

cause was instinctively assumed; when wonders were credible in

proportion to their magnitude; and theologians, with easy command of

belief, added miracle to miracle and piled dogma upon dogma. Then the

tide changed; a fresh era opened, which in the eyes of those who

considered the old system the only right one, was the letting loose of

the impersonated spirit of evil; when profane eyes were looking their

idols in the face; when men were saying to the miraculous images, 'You

are but stone and wood,' and to the piece of bread, 'You are but dust as

I am dust;' and then the huge mediæval fabric crumbled down in ruin.

All forms of thought, all objects of devotion, are made thus liable to

perpetual revision, if only that belief shall not petrify into habit,

but remain the reasonable conviction of a reasonable soul. The change of

times and the change of conditions change also the appearance of things

which in themselves are the same which they always were. Facts supposed

once to be as fixed as the stars melt into fiction. A closer

acquaintance with the phenomena of experience has revealed to us the

action of forces before undreamt of working throughout nature with

unerring uniformity; and to the mediæval stories of magic, witchcraft,

or the miracles of saints, we are thus placed in a new relation. The

direct evidence on which such stories were received may remain

unimpaired, but it no longer produces the same conviction. Even in

ordinary human things where the evidence is lost--as in some of our own

State trials, and where we know only that it was such as brought

conviction to judges, juries, and parliaments--historians do not

hesitate to call their verdicts into question, thinking it more likely

that whole masses of men should have been led away by passion or fraud

or cowardice than that this or that particular crime should have been

committed. That we often go beyond our office and exaggerate the value

of our new criteria of truth may be possible enough; but it is no less

certain that this is the tendency of modern thought. Our own age, like

every age which has gone before it, judges the value of testimony, not

by itself merely, but by the degree to which it corresponds with our own

sense of the laws of probability; and we consider events probable or

improbable by the habit of mind which is the result of our general

knowledge and culture. To the Catholic of the middle ages a miracle was

more likely than not; and when he was told that a miracle had been

worked, he believed it as he would have believed had he been told that a

shower of rain had fallen, or that the night frost had killed the buds

upon his fruit trees. If his cattle died, he found the cause in the

malice of Satan or the evil eye of a witch; and if two or more witnesses

could have been found to swear that they had heard an old woman curse

him, she would have been burnt for a sorceress. The man of science, on

the other hand, knows nothing of witches and sorcerers; when he can find

a natural cause he refuses to entertain the possibility of the

intervention of a cause beyond nature; and thus that very element of

marvel which to the more superstitious temperament was an evidence of

truth, becomes to the better informed a cause of suspicion.

So it has been that throughout history, as between individuals among

ourselves, we trace two habits of thought, one of which has given us

churches, creeds, and the knowledge of God; the other has given us

freedom and science, has pruned the luxuriance of imaginative reverence,

and reminds piety of what it is too ready to forget--that God is truth.

Yet, essential as they are to one another, each keeps too absolutely to

the circle of its own convictions, and, but half able to recognise the

merit of principles which are alien to its own, regards the other as its

natural enemy.

To the warm and enthusiastic pietist the enquirer appears as a hater of

God, an inveterate blasphemer of holy things, soiling with rude and

insolent hands what ought only to be humbly adored. The saint when he

has the power calls the sword to his aid, and in his zeal for what he

calls the honour of God, makes war upon such people with steel and fire.

The innovator, on the other hand, knowing that he is not that evil

creature which his rival represents him as being, knowing that he too

desires only truth--first suffers, suffers in rough times at stake and

scaffold, suffers in our own later days in good name, in reputation, in

worldly fortune; and as the whirligig of time brings round his turn of

triumph, takes, in French revolutions and such other fits of madness,

his own period of wild revenge. The service of truth is made to appear

as one thing, the service of God as another; and in that fatal

separation religion dishonours itself with unavailing enmity to what

nevertheless it is compelled at last to accept in humiliation; and

science, welcoming the character which its adversary flings upon it,

turns away with answering hostility from doctrines without which its own

highest achievements are but pyramids of ashes.

Is this antagonism a law of humanity? As mankind move upwards through

the ascending circles of progress, is it for ever to be with them as

with the globe which they inhabit--of which one hemisphere is

perpetually dark? Have the lessons of the Reformation been thrown away?

Is knowledge always to advance under the ban of religion? Is faith

never to cease to dread investigation? Is science chiefly to value each

new discovery as a victory gained over its rival? Is the spiritual world

to revolve eternally upon an axis of which the two poles are materialism

and superstition, to be buried in their alternate occultations in

periods of utter darkness, or lifted into an icy light where there is

neither life nor warmth?

How it may be in the remote future it is idle to guess; for the present

the signs are not hopeful. We are arrived visibly at one of those

recurring times when the accounts are called in for audit; when the

title-deeds are to be looked through, and established opinions again

tested. It is a process which has been repeated more than once in the

world's history; the last occasion and greatest being the Reformation of

the sixteenth century; and the experience of that matter might have

satisfied the most timid that truth has nothing to fear; and that

religion emerges out of such trials stronger and brighter than before.

Yet Churchmen have not profited by the experience; the pulpits and the

religious press ring again with the old shrieks of sacrilege; the

machinery of the law courts is set creaking on its rusty hinges, and

denunciation and anathema in the old style take the place of reasoning.

It will not answer; and the worst danger to what is really true is the

want of wisdom in its defenders. The language which we sometimes hear

about these things seems to imply that while Christianity is

indisputably true, it cannot stand nevertheless without bolt and

shackle, as if the Author of our faith had left the evidence so weak

that an honest investigation would fail to find it.

Inevitably, the altered relation in which modern culture places the

minds of all of us towards the supernatural, will compel a

reconsideration of the grounds on which the acceptance of miracles is

required. If the English learned clergy had faith as a grain of mustard

seed, they would be the first to take possession of the field; they

would look the difficulty in the face fearlessly and frankly, and we

should not be tossing as we are now in an ocean of uncertainty, ignorant

whether, if things seem obscure to us, the fault is with our intellects

or our hearts.

It might have been that Providence, anticipating the effect produced on

dead testimony by time and change, had raised religion into a higher

sphere, and had appointed on earth a living and visible authority which

could not err--guided by the Holy Spirit into truth, and divinely

sustained in the possession of it. Such a body the Roman Catholic Church

conceives itself to be; but in breaking away from its communion,

Protestant Christians have declared their conviction that neither the

Church of Rome, nor they themselves, nor any other body of men on earth,

are exempt from a liability to error. It is no longer competent for the

Anglican communion to say that a doctrine or a fact is true because it

forms a part of their teaching, because it has come down to them from

antiquity, and because to deny it is sin. Transubstantiation came down

to the fathers of the Reformation from antiquity; it was received and

insisted upon by the Catholic Church of Christendom; yet nevertheless it

was flung out from among us as a lie and an offence. The theory of the

Divine authority of the Church was abandoned in the act of Protestantism

three centuries ago; it was the central principle of that great revolt

that the establishment of particular opinions was no guarantee for their

truth; and it becomes thus our duty as well as our right to examine

periodically our intellectual defences, to abandon positions which the

alteration of time makes untenable, and to admit and invite into the

service of the sanctuary the fullest light of advancing knowledge. Of

all positions the most fatally suicidal for Protestants to occupy is the

assumption, which it is competent for Roman Catholics to hold, but not

for them, that beliefs once sanctioned by the Church are sacred, and

that to impugn them is not error but crime.

With a hope, then, that this reproach may be taken away from us; that,

in this most wealthily-endowed Church of England, where so many of the

most gifted and most accomplished men among us are maintained in

well-paid leisure to attend to such things, we may not be left any

longer to grope our way in the dark, the present writer puts forward

some few perplexities of which it would be well if English divinity

contained a clearer solution than is found there. The laity, occupied in

other matters, regard the clergy as the trustees of their spiritual

interests; but inasmuch as the clergy tell them that the safety of their

souls depends on the correctness of their opinions, they dare not close

their eyes to the questions which are being asked in louder and even

louder tones; and they have a right to demand that they shall not be

left to their own unaided efforts to answer such questions. We go to our

appointed teachers as to our physicians; we say to them, 'We feel pain

here, and here, and here: we do not see our way, and we require you to

help us.'

Most of these perplexities are not new: they were felt with the first

beginnings of critical investigation; but the fact that they have been

so many years before the world without being satisfactorily encountered

makes the situation only the more serious. It is the more strange that

as time passes on, and divine after divine is raised to honour and

office for his theological services, we should find only when we turn to

their writings that loud promises end in no performance; that the chief

object which they set before themselves is to avoid difficult ground;

and that the points on which we most cry out for satisfaction are passed

over in silence, or are disposed of with ineffectual commonplaces.

With a temperament constitutionally religious, and with an instinctive

sense of the futility of theological controversies, the English people

have long kept the enemy at bay by passive repugnance. To the

well-conditioned English layman the religion in which he has been

educated is part of the law of the land; the truth of it is assumed in

the first principles of his personal and social existence; and attacks

on the credibility of his sacred books he has regarded with the same

impatience and disdain with which he treats speculations on the rights

of property or the common maxims of right and wrong. Thus, while the

inspiration of the Bible has been a subject of discussion for a century

in Germany, Holland, and France; while even in the desolate villages in

the heart of Spain the priests find it necessary to placard the church

walls with cautions against rationalism, England hitherto has escaped

the trial; and it is only within a very few years that the note of

speculation has compelled our deaf ears to listen. That it has come at

last is less a matter of surprise than that it should have been so long

delayed; and though slow to move, it is likely that so serious a people

will not now rest till they have settled the matter for themselves in

some practical way. We are assured that if the truth be, as we are told,

of vital moment--vital to all alike, wise and foolish, educated and

uneducated--the road to it cannot lie through any very profound

enquiries. We refuse to believe that every labourer or mechanic must

balance arduous historical probabilities and come to a just conclusion,

under pain of damnation. We are satisfied that these poor people are not

placed in so cruel a dilemma. Either these abstruse historical questions

are open questions, and we are not obliged under those penalties to hold

a definite opinion upon them, or else there must be some general

principle accessible and easily intelligible, by which the details can

be summarily disposed of.

We shall not be much mistaken, perhaps, if we say that the view of most

educated English laymen at present is something of this kind. They are

aware that many questions may be asked, difficult or impossible to

answer satisfactorily, about the creation of the world, the flood, and

generally on the historical portion of the Old Testament; but they

suppose that if the authority of the Gospel history can be well

ascertained, the rest may and must be taken for granted. If it be true

that of the miraculous birth, life, death, and resurrection of our Lord,

we have the evidence of two evangelists who were eye-witnesses of the

facts which they relate, and of two others who wrote under the direction

of, or upon the authority of, eye-witnesses, we can afford to dispense

with merely curious enquiries. The subordinate parts of a divine economy

which culminated in so stupendous a mystery may well be as marvellous as

itself; and it may be assumed, we think, with no great want of charity,

that those who doubt the truth of the Old Testament extend their

incredulity to the New; that the point of their disbelief, towards which

they are trenching their way through the weak places in the Pentateuch,

is the Gospel narrative itself.[F] Whatever difficulty there may be in

proving the ancient Hebrew books to be the work of the writers whose

names they bear, no one would have cared to challenge their genuineness

who was thoroughly convinced of the resurrection of our Lord. And the

real object of these speculations lies open before us in the now

notorious work of M. Renan, which is shooting through Europe with a

rapidity which recalls the era of Luther.

To the question of the authenticity of the Gospels, therefore, the

common sense of Englishmen has instinctively turned. If, as English

commentators confidently tell us, the Gospel of St. Matthew, such as we

now possess it, is undoubtedly the work of the publican who followed our

Lord from the receipt of custom, and remained with Him to be a witness

of His ascension; if St. John's Gospel was written by the beloved

disciple who lay on Jesus' breast at supper; if the other two were

indeed the composition of the companions of St. Peter and St. Paul; if

in these four Gospels we have independent accounts of our Lord's life

and passion, mutually confirming each other, and if it can be proved

that they existed and were received as authentic in the first century of

the Christian Church, a stronger man than M. Renan will fail to shake

the hold of Christianity in England.

We put the question hypothetically, not as meaning to suggest the fact

as uncertain, but being--as the matter is of infinite moment--being, as

it were, the hinge on which our faith depends, we are forced beyond our

office to trespass on ground which we leave usually to professional

theologians, and to tell them plainly that there are difficulties which

it is their business to clear up, but to which, with worse than

imprudence, they close their own eyes, and deliberately endeavour to

keep them from ours. Some of these it is the object of this paper to

point out, with an earnest hope that Dean Alford, or Dr. Ellicott, or

some other competent clergyman, may earn our gratitude by telling us

what to think about them. Setting aside their duty to us, they will find

frank dealing in the long run their wisest policy. The conservative

theologians of England have carried silence to the point of

indiscretion.

Looking, then, to the three first Gospels, usually called the

Synoptical, we are encountered immediately with a remarkable common

element which runs through them all--a resemblance too peculiar to be

the result of accident, and impossible to reconcile with the theory that

the writers were independent of each other. It is not that general

similarity which we should expect in different accounts of the same

scenes and events, but amidst many differences, a broad vein of

circumstantial identity extending both to substance and expression.

And the identity is of several kinds.

I. Although the three evangelists relate each of them some things

peculiar to themselves, and although between them there are some

striking divergencies--as, for instance, between the account of our

Lord's miraculous birth in St. Matthew and St. Luke, and in the absence

in St. Mark of any mention of the miraculous birth at all--nevertheless,

the body of the story is essentially the same. Out of those words and

actions--so many, that if all were related the world itself could not

contain the books that should be written--the three evangelists select

for the most part the same; the same parables, the same miracles, and,

more or less complete, the same addresses. When the material from which

to select was so abundant--how abundant we have but to turn to the

fourth evangelist to see--it is at least singular that three writers

should have made so nearly the same choice.

II. But this is not all. Not only are the things related the same, but

the language in which they are expressed is the same. Sometimes the

resemblance is such as would have arisen had the evangelists been

translating from a common document in another language. Sometimes, and

most frequently, there is an absolute verbal identity; sentences,

paragraphs, long passages, are word for word the very same; a few

expressions have been slightly varied, a particle transposed, a tense or

a case altered, but the differences being no greater than would arise if

a number of persons were to write from memory some common passages which

they knew almost by heart. That there should have been this identity in

the account of the _words_ used by our Lord seems at first sight no more

than we should expect. But it extends to the narrative as well; and with

respect to the parables and discourses, there is this extraordinary

feature, that whereas our Lord is supposed to have spoken in the

ordinary language of Palestine, the resemblance between the evangelists

is in the Greek translation of them; and how unlikely it is that a

number of persons in translating from one language into another should

hit by accident on the same expressions, the simplest experiment will

show.

Now, waiving for a moment the inspiration of the Gospels; interpreting

the Bible, to use Mr. Jowett's canon, as any other book, what are we to

conclude from phenomena of this kind? What in fact do we conclude when

we encounter them elsewhere? In the lives of the saints, in the monkish

histories, there are many parallel cases. A mediæval chronicler, when he

found a story well told by his predecessor, seldom cared to recompose

it; he transcribed the words as they stood into his own narrative,

contented perhaps with making a few trifling changes to add a finish or

a polish. Sometimes two chroniclers borrow from a third. There is the

same identity in particular expressions, the same general resemblance,

the same divergence, as each improves his original from his independent

knowledge by addition or omission; but the process is so transparent,

that when the original is lost, the existence of it can be inferred with

certainty.

Or to take a more modern parallel--we must entreat our readers to pardon

any seeming irreverence which may appear in the comparison--if in the

letters of the correspondents of three different newspapers written from

America or Germany, we were to read the same incidents told in the same

language, surrounded it might be with much that was unlike, but

nevertheless in themselves identical, and related in words which, down

to unusual and remarkable terms of expression, were exactly the same,

what should we infer?

Suppose, for instance, the description of a battle; if we were to find

but a single paragraph in which two out of three correspondents agreed

verbally, we should regard it as a very strange coincidence. If all

three agreed verbally, we should feel certain it was more than accident.

If throughout their letters there was a recurring series of such

passages, no doubt would be left in the mind of any one that either the

three correspondents had seen each other's letters, or that each had had

before him some common narrative which he had incorporated in his own

account. It might be doubtful which of these two explanations was the

true one; but that one or other of them was true, unless we suppose a

miracle, is as certain as any conclusion in human things can be certain

at all. The sworn testimony of eye-witnesses who had seen the letters so

composed would add nothing to the weight of a proof which without their

evidence would be overwhelming; and were the writers themselves, with

their closest friends and companions, to swear that there had been no

intercommunication, and no story pre-existing of which they had made

use, and that each had written _bonâ fide_ from his own original

observation, an English jury would sooner believe the whole party

perjured than persuade themselves that so extraordinary a coincidence

would have occurred.

Nor would it be difficult to ascertain from internal evidence which of

the two possible interpretations was the real one. If the writers were

men of evident good faith; if their stories were in parts widely

different; if they made no allusion to each other, nor ever referred to

one another as authorities; finally, if neither of them, in giving a

different account of any matter from that given by his companions,

professed either to be supplying an omission or correcting a mistake,

then we should have little doubt that they had themselves not

communicated with each other, but were supplementing, each of them from

other sources of information, a central narrative which all alike had

before them.

How far may we apply the parallel to the Synoptical Gospels? In one

sense the inspiration lifts them above comparison, and disposes

summarily of critical perplexities; there is no difficulty which may not

be explained by a miracle; and in that aspect the points of disagreement

between these accounts are more surprising than the similarities. It is

on the disagreements in fact that the labours of commentators have

chiefly been expended. Yet it is a question whether, on the whole,

inspiration does not leave unaffected the ordinary human phenomena; and

it is hard to suppose that where the rules of judgment in ordinary

writings are so distinct, God would have thus purposely cast a

stumbling-block in our way, and contrived a snare into which our reason

should mislead us. That is hard to credit; yet that and nothing else we

must believe if we refuse to apply to the Gospel the same canons of

criticism which with other writings would be a guide so decisive. It may

be assumed that the facts connected with them admit a natural

explanation; and we arrive, therefore, at the same conclusion as before:

that either two of the evangelists borrowed from the third, or else that

there was some other Gospel besides those which are now extant; existing

perhaps both in Hebrew and Greek--existing certainly in Greek--the

fragments of which are scattered up and down through St. Mark, St.

Matthew, and St. Luke, in masses sufficiently large to be distinctly

recognisable.

That at an early period in the Christian Church many such Gospels

existed, we know certainly from the words of St. Luke. St. Paul alludes

to words used by our Lord which are not mentioned by the evangelists,

which he assumed nevertheless to be well known to his hearers. He

speaks, too, of an appearance of our Lord after His resurrection to five

hundred brethren; on which the four Gospels are also silent. It is

indisputable, therefore, that besides and antecedent to them there were

other accounts of our Lord's life in use in the Christian Church. And

indeed, what more natural, what more necessary, than that from the day

on which the apostles entered upon their public mission, some narrative

should have been drawn up of the facts which they were about to make

known? Then as little as now could the imagination of men be trusted to

relate accurately a story composed of stupendous miracles without

mistake or exaggeration; and their very first step would have been to

compose an account of what had passed, to which they could speak with

certainty, and which they could invest with authoritative sanction. Is

it not possible then that the identical passages in the Synoptical

Gospels are the remains of something of this kind, which the

evangelists, in their later, fuller, and more complete histories,

enlarged and expanded? The conjecture has been often made, and English

commentators have for the most part dismissed it slightingly; not

apparently being aware that in rejecting one hypothesis they were bound

to suggest another; or at least to admit that there was something which

required explanation, though this particular suggestion did not seem

satisfactory. Yet if it were so, the external testimony for the truth of

the Gospel history would be stronger than before. It would amount to the

collective view of the first congregation of Christians, who had all

immediate and personal knowledge of our Lord's miracles and death and

resurrection.

But perhaps the external history of the four Gospels may throw some

light upon the question, if indeed we can speak of light where all is a

cloud of uncertainty. It would seem as if the sources of Christianity,

like the roots of all other living things, were purposely buried in

mystery. There exist no ancient writings whatever of such vast moment to

mankind of which so little can be authentically known.

The four Gospels, in the form and under the names which they at present

bear, become visible only with distinctness towards the end of the

second century of the Christian era. Then it was that they assumed the

authoritative position which they have ever since maintained, and were

selected by the Church out of the many other then existing narratives

as the supreme and exclusive authorities for our Lord's life. Irenæus is

the first of the Fathers in whom they are found attributed by name to

St. Matthew, St. Mark, St. Luke, and St. John. That there were four true

evangelists, and that there could be neither more nor less than four,

Irenæus had persuaded himself because there were four winds or spirits,

and four divisions of the earth, for which the Church being universal

required four columns; because the cherubim had four faces, to each of

which an evangelist corresponded; because four covenants had been given

to mankind--one before the Deluge in Adam, one after the Deluge in Noah,

the third in Moses, the fourth and greatest in the New Testament; while

again the name of Adam was composed of four letters. It is not to be

supposed that the intellects of those great men who converted the world

to Christianity were satisfied with arguments so imaginative as these;

they must have had other closer and more accurate grounds for their

decision; but the mere employment of such figures as evidence in any

sense, shows the enormous difference between their modes of reasoning

and ours, and illustrates the difficulty of deciding at our present

distance from them how far their conclusions were satisfactory.

Of the Gospels separately the history is immediately lost in legend.

The first notice of a Gospel of St. Matthew is in the well-known words

of Papias, a writer who in early life might have seen St. John. The

works of Papias are lost--a misfortune the more to be regretted because

Eusebius speaks of him as a man of very limited understanding, [Greek:

panu smikros ton noun]. Understanding and folly are words of

undetermined meaning; and when language like that of Irenæus could seem

profound it is quite possible that Papias might have possessed

commonplace faculties which would have been supremely useful to us. A

surviving fragment of him says that St. Matthew put together the

discourses of our Lord in Hebrew, and that every one interpreted them as

he could. Pantænus, said by Eusebius to have been another contemporary

of the apostles, was reported to have gone to India, to have found there

a congregation of Christians which had been established by St.

Bartholomew, and to have seen in use among them this Hebrew Gospel.

Origen repeats the story, which in his time had become the universal

Catholic tradition, that St. Matthew's was the first Gospel, that it was

written in Hebrew, and that it was intended for the use of the Jewish

converts. Jerome adds that it was unknown when or by whom it was

rendered into a Greek version. That was all which the Church had to say;

and what had become of that Hebrew original no one could tell.

That there existed _a_ Hebrew Gospel in very early times is well

authenticated; there was a Gospel called the Gospel of the Ebionites or

Nazarenes, of which Origen possessed a copy, and which St. Jerome

thought it worth while to translate; this too is lost, and Jerome's

translation of it also; but the negative evidence seems conclusive that

it was not the lost Gospel of St. Matthew. Had it been so it could not

have failed to be recognised, although from such accounts of it as have

been preserved, it possessed some affinity with St. Matthew's Gospel. In

one instance, indeed, it gave the right reading of a text which has

perplexed orthodox commentators, and has induced others to suspect that

that Gospel in its present form could not have existed before the

destruction of Jerusalem. The Zachariah the son of Barachiah said by St.

Matthew to have been slain between the temple and the altar, is unknown

to Old Testament history, while during the siege of Jerusalem a

Zachariah the son of Barachiah actually was killed exactly in the manner

described. But in the Ebionite Gospel the same words are found with this

slight but important difference, that the Zachariah in question is there

called the son of Jehoiadah, and is at once identified with the person

whose murder is related in the Second Book of Chronicles. The later

translator of St. Matthew had probably confused the names.

Of St. Mark's Gospel the history is even more profoundly obscure.

Papias, again the highest discoverable link of the Church tradition,

says that St. Mark accompanied St. Peter to Rome as his interpreter; and

that while there he wrote down what St. Peter told him, or what he could

remember St. Peter to have said. Clement of Alexandria enlarges the

story. According to Clement, when St. Peter was preaching at Rome, the

Christian congregation there requested St. Mark to write a Gospel for

them; St. Mark complied without acquainting St. Peter, and St. Peter

when informed of it was uncertain whether to give or withhold his

sanction till his mind was set at rest by a vision.

Irenæus, on the other hand, says that St. Mark's Gospel was not written

till after the death of St. Peter and St. Paul. St. Chrysostom says that

after it was written St. Mark went to Egypt and published it at

Alexandria; Epiphanius again, that the Egyptian expedition was

undertaken at the express direction of St. Peter himself.

Thus the Church tradition is inconsistent with itself, and in all

probability is nothing but a structure of air; it is bound up with the

presence of St. Peter at Rome; and the only ground for supposing that

St. Peter was ever at Rome at all is the passage at the close of St.

Peter's First Epistle, where it pleased the Fathers to assume that the

'Babylon' there spoken of must have been the city of the Cæsars. This

passage alone, with the wild stories (now known to have originated in

the misreading of an inscription) of St. Peter's conflict with Simon

Magus in the presence of the emperor, form together the light and airy

arches on which the huge pretences of the Church of Rome have reared

themselves. If the Babylon of the Epistle was Babylon on the

Euphrates--and there is not the slightest historical reason to suppose

it to have been anything else--the story of the origin of St. Mark's

Gospel perishes with the legend to which it was inseparably attached by

Church tradition.

Of St. John's Gospel we do not propose to speak in this place; it forms

a subject by itself; and of that it is enough to say that the defects of

external evidence which undoubtedly exist seem overborne by the

overwhelming proofs of authenticity contained in the Gospel itself.

The faint traditionary traces which inform us that St. Matthew and St.

Mark were supposed to have written Gospels fail us with St. Luke. The

apostolic and the immediately post-apostolic Fathers never mention Luke

as having written a history of our Lord at all. There was indeed a

Gospel in use among the Marcionites which resembled that of St. Luke, as

the Gospel of the Ebionites resembled that of St. Matthew. In both the

one and the other there was no mention of our Lord's miraculous birth;

and later writers accused Marcion of having mutilated St. Luke. But

apparently their only reason for thinking so was that the two Gospels

were like each other; and for all that can be historically proved, the

Gospel of the Marcionites may have been the older of the two. What is

wanting externally, however, is supposed to be more than made up by the

language of St. Luke himself. The Gospel was evidently composed in its

present form by the same person who wrote the Acts of the Apostles. In

the latter part of the Acts of the Apostles the writer speaks in the

first person as the companion of St. Paul; and the date of this Gospel

seems to be thus conclusively fixed at an early period in the apostolic

age. There is at least a high probability that this reasoning is sound;

yet it has seemed strange that a convert so eminent as 'the most

excellent' Theophilus, to whom St. Luke addressed himself, should be

found impossible to identify. 'Most excellent' was a title given only to

persons of high rank; and it is singular that St. Paul himself should

never have mentioned so considerable a name. And again, there is

something peculiar in the language of the introduction to the Gospel

itself. Though St. Luke professes to be writing on the authority of

eye-witnesses, he does not say he had spoken with eye-witnesses; so far

from it, that the word translated in the English version 'delivered' is

literally 'handed down;' it is the verb which corresponds to the

technical expression for 'tradition;' and the words translated 'having

had perfect understanding of all things from the first,' might be

rendered more properly, 'having traced or followed up all things from

the beginning.' And again, as it is humanly speaking certain that in St.

Luke's Gospel there are passages, however they are to be explained,

which were embodied in it from some other source, so, though extremely

probable, it is not absolutely certain that those passages in the Acts

in which the writer speaks in the first person are by the same hand as

the body of the narrative. If St. Luke had anywhere directly introduced

himself--if he had said plainly that he, the writer who was addressing

Theophilus, had personally joined St. Paul, and in that part of his

story was relating what he had seen and heard, there would be no room

for uncertainty. But, so far as we know, there is no other instance in

literature of a change of person introduced abruptly without

explanation. The whole book is less a connected history than a series of

episodes and fragments of the proceedings of the apostles; and it is to

be noticed that the account of St. Paul's conversion, as given in its

place in the first part of the narrative, differs in one material point

from the second account given later in the part which was unquestionably

the work of one of St. Paul's companions. There is a possibility--it

amounts to no more, and the suggestion is thrown out for the

consideration of those who are better able than this writer to judge of

it--that in the Gospel and the Acts we have the work of a careful editor

of the second century. Towards the close of that century a prominent

actor in the great movement which gave their present authority to the

four Gospels was Theophilus, Bishop of Antioch; he it was who brought

them together, incorporated into a single work--_in unum opus_; and it

may be, after all, that in him we have the long-sought person to whom

St. Luke was writing; that the Gospel which we now possess was compiled

at his desire out of other imperfect Gospels in use in the different

Churches; and that it formed a part of his scheme to supersede them by

an account more exhaustive, complete, and satisfactory.

To this hypothesis indeed there is an answer which if valid at all is

absolutely fatal. We are told that although the names of the writers of

the Gospels may not be mentioned until a comparatively late period, yet

that the Gospels themselves can be shown to have existed, because they

are habitually quoted in the authentic writings of the earliest of the

Fathers. If this be so, the slightness of the historical thread is of

little moment, and we may rest safely on the solid ground of so

conclusive a fact. But is it so? That the early Fathers quoted some

accounts of our Lord's life is abundantly clear; but did they quote

these? We proceed to examine this question--again tentatively only--we

do but put forward certain considerations on which we ask for fuller

information.

If any one of the primitive Christian writers was likely to have been

acquainted with the authentic writings of the evangelists, that one was

indisputably Justin Martyr. Born in Palestine in the year 89, Justin

Martyr lived to the age of seventy-six; he travelled over the Roman

world as a missionary; and intellectually he was more than on a level

with most educated Oriental Christians. He was the first distinctly

controversial writer which the Church produced; and the great facts of

the Gospel history were obviously as well known to him as they are to

ourselves. There are no traces in his writings of an acquaintance with

anything peculiar either to St. John or St. Mark; but there are extracts

in abundance often identical with and generally nearly resembling

passages in St. Matthew and St. Luke. Thus at first sight it would be

difficult to doubt that with these two Gospels at least he was

intimately familiar. And yet in all his citations there is this

peculiarity, that Justin Martyr never speaks of either of the

evangelists by name; he quotes or seems to quote invariably from

something which he calls [Greek: apomnêmoneumata tôn Apostolôn], or

'Memoirs of the Apostles.' It is no usual habit of his to describe his

authorities vaguely: when he quotes the Apocalypse he names St. John;

when he refers to a prophet he specifies Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Daniel.

Why, unless there was some particular reason for it, should he use so

singular an expression whenever he alludes to the sacred history of the

New Testament? why, if he knew the names of the evangelists, did he

never mention them even by accident? Nor is this the only singularity in

Justin Martyr's quotations. There are those slight differences between

them and the text of the Gospels which appear between the Gospels

themselves. When we compare an extract in Justin with the parallel

passage in St. Matthew, we find often that it differs from St. Matthew

just as St. Matthew differs from St. Luke, or both from St. Mark--great

verbal similarity--many paragraphs agreeing word for word--and then

other paragraphs where there is an alteration of expression, tense,

order, or arrangement.

Again, just as in the midst of the general resemblance between the

Synoptical Gospels, each evangelist has something of his own which is

not to be found in the others, so in these 'Memoirs of the Apostles'

there are facts unknown to either of the evangelists. In the account

extracted by Justin from 'the Memoirs,' of the baptism in the Jordan,

the words heard from heaven are not as St. Matthew gives them--'Thou art

my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased'--but the words of the psalm,

'Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten Thee;' a reading which,

singularly enough, was to be found in the Gospel of the Ebionites.

Another curious addition to the same scene is in the words [Greek: kai

pur anêphthê en Iordanê], 'and a fire was kindled in Jordan.'

Again, Justin Martyr speaks of our Lord having promised 'to clothe us

with garments made ready for us if we keep his commandments'--[Greek:

kai aiônion basileian pronoêsai]--whatever those words may precisely

mean.

These and other peculiarities in Justin may be explained if we suppose

him to have been quoting from memory. The evangelical text might not as

yet have acquired its verbal sanctity; and as a native of Palestine he

might well have been acquainted with other traditions which lay outside

the written word. The silence as to names, however, remains unexplained;

and as the facts actually stand there is the same kind of proof, and no

more, that Justin Martyr was acquainted with St. Matthew and St. Luke as

there is that one of these evangelists made extracts from the other, or

both from St. Mark. So long as one set of commentators decline to

recognise the truth of this relation between the Gospels, there will be

others who with as much justice will dispute the relation of Justin to

them. He too might have used another Gospel, which, though like them,

was not identical with them.

After Justin Martyr's death, about the year 170, appeared Tatian's

'Diatessaron,' a work which, as its title implies, was a harmony of four

Gospels, and most likely of _the_ four; yet again not exactly as we have

them. Tatian's harmony, like so many others of the early evangelical

histories, was silent on the miraculous birth, and commenced only with

the public ministration. The text was in other places different, so much

so that Theodoret accuses Tatian of having mutilated the Gospels; but of

this Theodoret had probably no better means of judging than we have. The

'Diatessaron' has been long lost, and the name is the only clue to its

composition.

Of far more importance than either Justin or Tatian are such writings as

remain of the immediate successors of the apostles--Barnabas, Clement of

Rome, Polycarp, and Ignatius: it is asserted confidently that in these

there are quotations from the Gospels so exact that they cannot be

mistaken.

We will examine them one by one.

In an epistle of Barnabas there is one passage--it is the only one of

the kind to be found in him--agreeing word for word with the Synoptical

Gospels, 'I came not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.'

It is one of the many passages in which the Greek of the three

evangelists is exactly the same; it was to be found also in Justin's

'Memoirs;' and there can be no doubt that Barnabas either knew those

Gospels or else the common source--if common source there was--from

which the evangelists borrowed. More than this such a quotation does not

enable us to say; and till some satisfactory explanation has been

offered of the agreement between the evangelists, the argument can

advance no further. On the other hand, Barnabas like St. Paul had other

sources from which he drew his knowledge of our Lord's words. He too

ascribes words to Him which are not recorded by the evangelists, [Greek:

houtô phêsin Iêsous; hoi thelontes me idein kai hapsasthai mou tês

basileias opheilousi thlibentes kai pathontes labein me]. The thought is

everywhere in the Gospels, the words nowhere, nor anything like them.

Both Ignatius and Polycarp appear to quote the Gospels, yet with them

also there is the same uncertainty; while Ignatius quotes as genuine an

expression which, so far as we know, was peculiar to a translation of

the Gospel of the Ebionites--'Handle me and see, for I am not a spirit

without body,' [Greek: hoti ouk eimi daimonion asômaton].

Clement's quotations are still more free, for Clement nowhere quotes the

text of the evangelists exactly as it at present stands; often he

approaches it extremely close; at times the agreement is rather in

meaning than words, as if he were translating from another language. But

again Clement more noticeably than either of the other apostolic Fathers

cites expressions of our Lord of which the evangelists knew nothing.

For instance--

'The Lord saith, "If ye be with me gathered into my bosom, and do not

after my commandments, I will cast you off, and I will say unto you,

Depart from me, I know you not, ye workers of iniquity."'

And again:--

'The Lord said, "Ye shall be as sheep in the midst of wolves." Peter

answered and said unto Him, "Will the wolves then tear the sheep?" Jesus

said unto Peter, "The sheep need not fear the wolves after they (the

sheep) be dead: and fear not ye those who kill you and can do nothing to

you; but fear Him who after you be dead hath power over soul and body to

cast them into hell-fire."'

In these words we seem to have the lost link in a passage which appears

in a different connection in St. Matthew and St. Luke. It may be said,

as with Justin Martyr, that Clement was quoting from memory in the sense

rather than in the letter; although even so it is difficult to suppose

that he could have invented an interlocution of St. Peter. Yet no

hypothesis will explain the most strange words which follow:--

'The Lord being asked when His kingdom should come, said, "When two

shall be one, and that which is without as that which is within, and the

male with the female neither male nor female."'

It is needless to say how remote are such expressions as these from any

which have come down to us through the evangelists; but they were no

inventions of Clement. The passage reappears later in Clement of

Alexandria, who found it in something which he called the Gospel of the

Egyptians.

It will be urged that because Clement quoted other authorities beside

the evangelists, it does not follow that he did not know and quote from

them. If the citation of a passage which appears in almost the same

words in another book is not to be accepted as a proof of an

acquaintance with that book, we make it impossible, it may be said, to

prove from quotations at all the fact of any book's existence. But this

is not the case. If a Father, in relating an event which is told

variously in the Synoptical Gospels, had followed one of them minutely

in its verbal peculiarities, it would go far to prove that he was

acquainted with that one; if the same thing was observed in all his

quotations, the proof would amount to demonstration. If he agreed

minutely in one place with one Gospel, minutely in a second with

another, minutely in a third with another, there would be reason to

believe that he was acquainted with them all; but when he merely relates

what they also relate in language which approaches theirs and yet

differs from it, as they also resemble yet differ from one another, we

do not escape from the circle of uncertainty, and we conclude either

that the early Fathers made quotations with a looseness irreconcileable

with the idea that the language of the Gospels possessed any verbal

sacredness to them, or that there were in their times other narratives

of our Lord's life standing in the same relation to the three Gospels as

St. Matthew stands to St. Mark and St. Luke.

Thus the problem returns upon us; and it might almost seem as if the

explanation was laid purposely beyond our reach. We are driven back upon

internal criticism; and we have to ask again what account is to be given

of that element common to the Synoptical Gospels, common also to those

other Gospels of which we find traces so distinct--those verbal

resemblances, too close to be the effect of accident--those differences

which forbid the supposition that the evangelists copied one another. So

many are those common passages, that if all which is peculiar to each

evangelist by himself were dropped, if those words and those actions

only were retained which either all three or two at least share

together, the figure of our Lord from His baptism to His ascension would

remain with scarcely impaired majesty.

One hypothesis, and so far as we can see one only, would make the

mystery intelligible, that immediately on the close of our Lord's life

some original sketch of it was drawn up by the congregation, which

gradually grew and gathered round it whatever His mother, His relations,

or His disciples afterwards individually might contribute. This primary

history would thus not be the work of any one mind or man; it would be

the joint work of the Church, and thus might well be called 'Memoirs of

the Apostles;' and would naturally be quoted without the name of either

one of them being specially attached to it. As Christianity spread over

the world, and separate Churches were founded by particular apostles,

copies would be multiplied, and copies of those copies; and, unchecked

by the presence (before the invention of printing impossible) of any

authoritative text, changes would creep in--passages would be left out

which did not suit the peculiar views of this or that sect; others would

be added as this or that apostle recollected something which our Lord

had said that bore on questions raised in the development of the creed.

Two great divisions would form themselves between the Jewish and the

Gentile Churches; there would be a Hebrew Gospel and a Greek Gospel, and

the Hebrew would be translated into Greek, as Papias says St. Matthew's

Gospel was. Eventually the confusion would become intolerable; and among

the conflicting stories the Church would have been called on to make its

formal choice.

This fact at least is certain from St. Luke's words, that at the time

when he was writing many different narratives did actually exist. The

hypothesis of a common origin for them has as yet found little favour

with English theologians; yet rather perhaps because it would be

inconvenient for certain peculiar forms of English thought than because

it has not probability on its side. That the Synoptical Gospels should

have been a natural growth rather than the special and independent work

of three separate writers, would be unfavourable to a divinity which has

built itself up upon particular texts, and has been more concerned with

doctrinal polemics than with the broader basements of historic truth.

Yet the text theory suffers equally from the mode in which the first

Fathers treated the Gospels, if it were these Gospels indeed which they

used. They at least could have attributed no importance to words and

phrases; while again, as we said before, a narrative dating from the

cradle of Christianity, with the testimony in its favour of such broad

and deep reception, would, however wanting in some details, be an

evidence of the truth of the main facts of the Gospel history very much

stronger than that of three books composed we know not when, and the

origin of which it is impossible to trace, which it is impossible to

regard as independent, and the writers of which in any other view of

them must be assumed to have borrowed from each other.

But the object of this article is not to press either this or any other

theory; it is but to ask from those who are able to give it an answer to

the most serious of questions. The truth of the Gospel history is now

more widely doubted in Europe than at any time since the conversion of

Constantine. Every thinking person who has been brought up a Christian

and desires to remain a Christian, yet who knows anything of what is

passing in the world, is looking to be told on what evidence the New

Testament claims to be received. The state of opinion proves of itself

that the arguments hitherto offered produce no conviction. Every other

miraculous history is discredited as legend, however exalted the

authority on which it seems to be rested. We crave to have good reason

shown us for maintaining still the one great exception. Hard worked in

other professions, and snatching with difficulty sufficient leisure to

learn how complicated is the problem, the laity can but turn to those

for assistance who are set apart and maintained as their theological

trustees. We can but hope and pray that some one may be found to give us

an edition of the Gospels in which the difficulties will neither be

slurred over with convenient neglect or noticed with affected

indifference. It may or may not be a road to a bishopric; it may or may

not win the favour of the religious world; but it will earn at least the

respectful gratitude of those who cannot trifle with holy things, and

who believe that true religion is the service of truth.

The last words were scarcely written when an advertisement appeared, the

importance of which can scarcely be over-estimated. A commentary is

announced on the Old and New Testaments, to be composed with a view to

what are called the 'misrepresentations' of modern criticism. It is to

be brought out under the direction of the heads of the Church, and is

the nearest approach to an official act in these great matters which

they have ventured for two hundred years. It is not for us to anticipate

the result. The word 'misrepresentations' is unfortunate; we should have

augured better for the work if instead of it had been written 'the

sincere perplexities of honest minds.' But the execution may be better

than the promise. If these perplexities are encountered honourably and

successfully, the Church may recover its supremacy over the intellect of

the country; if otherwise, the archbishop who has taken the command will

have steered the vessel direct upon the rocks.

FOOTNOTES:

[E] _Fraser's Magazine_, 1864.

[F] I do not speak of individuals; I speak of _tendency_.

THE BOOK OF JOB.[G]

It will be matter some day of curious enquiry to ascertain why,

notwithstanding the high reverence with which the English people regard

the Bible, they have done so little in comparison with their continental

contemporaries towards arriving at a proper understanding of it. The

books named below[H] form but a section of a long list which has

appeared during the last few years in Germany on the Book of Job alone;

and this book has not received any larger share of attention than the

others, either of the Old or the New Testament. Whatever be the nature

or the origin of these books (and on this point there is much difference

of opinion among the Germans as among ourselves) they are all agreed,

orthodox and unorthodox, that at least we should endeavour to understand

them; and that no efforts can be too great, either of research or

criticism, to discover their history, or elucidate their meaning.

We shall assent, doubtless, eagerly, perhaps noisily and indignantly, to

so obvious a truism; but our own efforts in the same direction will not

bear us out. Able men in England employ themselves in matters of a more

practical character; and while we refuse to avail ourselves of what has

been done elsewhere, no book, or books, which we produce on the

interpretation of Scripture acquire more than a partial or an ephemeral

reputation. The most important contribution to our knowledge on this

subject which has been made in these recent years is the translation of

the 'Library of the Fathers,' by which it is about as rational to

suppose that the analytical criticism of modern times can be superseded,

as that the place of Herman and Dindorf could be supplied by an edition

of the old scholiasts.

It is, indeed, reasonable that as long as we are persuaded that our

English theory of the Bible, as a whole, is the right one, we should

shrink from contact with investigations which, however ingenious in

themselves, are based on what we know to be a false foundation. But

there are some learned Germans whose orthodoxy would pass examination at

Exeter Hall; and there are many subjects, such, for instance, as the

present, on which all their able men are agreed in conclusions that

cannot rationally give offence to any one. With the Book of Job,

analytical criticism has only served to clear up the uncertainties which

have hitherto always hung about it. It is now considered to be, beyond

all doubt, a genuine Hebrew original, completed by its writer almost in

the form in which it now remains to us. The questions on the

authenticity of the Prologue and Epilogue, which once were thought

important, have given way before a more sound conception of the dramatic

unity of the entire poem; and the volumes before us contain merely an

enquiry into its meaning, bringing, at the same time, all the resources

of modern scholarship and historical and mythological research to bear

upon the obscurity of separate passages. It is the most difficult of all

the Hebrew compositions--many words occurring in it, and many thoughts,

not to be found elsewhere in the Bible. How difficult our translators

found it may be seen by the number of words which they were obliged to

insert in italics, and the doubtful renderings which they have suggested

in the margin. One instance of this, in passing, we will notice in this

place--it will be familiar to every one as the passage quoted at the

opening of the English burial service, and adduced as one of the

doctrinal proofs of the resurrection of the body:--'I know that my

Redeemer liveth, and that He shall stand at the latter _day_ upon the

earth; and _though_, after my skin _worms_ destroy this _body_, yet in

my flesh I shall see God.' So this passage stands in the ordinary

version. But the words in italics have nothing answering to them in the

original--they were all added by the translators[I] to fill out their

interpretation; and for _in my flesh_, they tell us themselves in the

margin that we may read (and, in fact, we ought to read, and must read)

'_out of_,' or _'without' my flesh_. It is but to write out the verses,

omitting the conjectural additions, and making that one small but vital

correction, to see how frail a support is there for so large a

conclusion: 'I know that my Redeemer liveth, and shall stand at the

latter       upon the earth; and after my skin       destroy

this       ; yet without my flesh I shall see God.' If there is any

doctrine of a resurrection here, it is a resurrection precisely _not_ of

the body, but of the spirit. And now let us only add, that the word

translated Redeemer is the technical expression for the 'avenger of

blood;' and that the second paragraph ought to be rendered--'and one to

come after me (my next of kin, to whom the avenging my injuries belongs)

shall stand upon my dust,' and we shall see how much was to be done

towards the mere exegesis of the text. This is an extreme instance, and

no one will question the general beauty and majesty of our translation;

but there are many mythical and physical allusions scattered over the

poem, which, in the sixteenth century, there were positively no means of

understanding; and perhaps, too, there were mental tendencies in the

translators themselves which prevented them from adequately apprehending

even the drift and spirit of the composition. The form of the story was

too stringent to allow such tendencies any latitude; but they appear,

from time to time, sufficiently to produce serious confusion. With these

recent assistances, therefore, we propose to say something of the nature

of this extraordinary book--a book of which it is to say little to call

it unequalled of its kind, and which will one day, perhaps, when it is

allowed to stand on its own merits, be seen towering up alone, far away

above all the poetry of the world. How it found its way into the canon,

smiting as it does through and through the most deeply-seated Jewish

prejudices, is the chief difficulty about it now; to be explained only

by a traditional acceptance among the sacred books, dating back from the

old times of the national greatness, when the minds of the people were

hewn in a larger type than was to be found among the Pharisees of the

great synagogue. But its authorship, its date, and its history, are

alike a mystery to us; it existed at the time when the canon was

composed; and this is all that we know beyond what we can gather out of

the language and contents of the poem itself.

Before going further, however, we must make room for a few remarks of a

very general kind. Let it have been written when it would, it marks a

period in which the religious convictions of thinking men were passing

through a vast crisis; and we shall not understand it without having

before us clearly something of the conditions which periods of such a

kind always and necessarily exhibit.

The history of religious speculation appears in extreme outline to have

been of the following character. We may conceive mankind to have been

originally launched into the universe with no knowledge either of

themselves or of the scene in which they were placed; with no actual

knowledge, but distinguished from the rest of the creation by a faculty

of gaining knowledge; and first unconsciously, and afterwards

consciously and laboriously, to have commenced that long series of

experience and observation which has accumulated in thousands of years

to what we now see around us. Limited on all sides by conditions which

they must have felt to be none of their own imposing, and finding

everywhere forces working, over which they had no control, the fear

which they would naturally entertain of these invisible and mighty

agents assumed, under the direction of an idea which we may perhaps call

inborn and inherent in human nature, a more generous character of

reverence and awe. The laws of the outer world, as they discovered them,

they regarded as the decrees, or as the immediate energies of personal

beings; and as knowledge grew up among them, they looked upon it, not as

knowledge of nature, but of God, or the gods. All early paganism

appears, on careful examination, to have arisen out of a consecration of

the first rudiments of physical or speculative science. The twelve

labours of Hercules are the labours of the sun, of which Hercules is an

old name, through the twelve signs. Chronos, or _time_, being measured

by the apparent motion of the heavens, is figured as their child; Time,

the universal parent, devours its own offspring, yet is again itself, in

the high faith of a human soul conscious of its power and its

endurance, supposed to be baffled and dethroned by Zeus, or _life_; and

so on through all the elaborate theogonies of Greece and Egypt. They are

no more than real insight into real phenomena, allegorised as time went

on, elaborated by fancy, or idealised by imagination, but never losing

their original character.

Thus paganism, in its very nature, was expansive, self-developing, and,

as Mr. Hume observed, tolerant; a new god was welcomed to the Pantheon

as a new scientific discovery is welcomed by the Royal Society; and the

various nations found no difficulty in interchanging their divinities--a

new god either representing a new power not hitherto discovered, or one

with which they were already familiar under a new name. With such a

power of adaptation and enlargement, if there had been nothing more in

it than this, such a system might have gone on accommodating itself to

the change of times, and keeping pace with the growth of human

character. Already in its later forms, as the unity of nature was more

clearly observed, and the identity of nature throughout the known world,

the separate powers were subordinating themselves to a single supreme

king; and, as the poets had originally personified the elemental forces,

the thinkers were reversing the earlier process, and discovering the law

under the person. Happily or unhappily, however, what they could do for

themselves they could not do for the multitude. Phoebus and Aphrodite

had been made too human to be allegorised. Humanised, and yet, we may

say, only half-humanised, retaining their purely physical nature, and

without any proper moral attribute at all, these gods and goddesses

remained to the many examples of sensuality made beautiful; and, as soon

as right and wrong came to have a meaning, it was impossible to worship

any more these idealised despisers of it. The human caprices and

passions which served at first to deepen the illusion, justly revenged

themselves; paganism became a lie, and perished.

In the meantime, the Jews (and perhaps some other nations, but the Jews

chiefly and principally) had been moving forward along a road wholly

different. Breaking early away from the gods of nature, they advanced

along the line of their moral consciousness; and leaving the nations to

study physics, philosophy, and art, they confined themselves to man and

to human life. Their theology grew up round the knowledge of good and

evil, and God, with them, was the supreme Lord of the world, who stood

towards man in the relation of a ruler and a judge. Holding such a

faith, to them the toleration of paganism was an impossibility; the laws

of nature might be many, but the law of conduct was one; there was one

law and one king; and the conditions under which he governed the world,

as embodied in the Decalogue or other similar code, were looked upon as

iron and inflexible certainties, unalterable revelations of the will of

an unalterable Being. So far there was little in common between this

process and the other; but it was identical with it in this one

important feature, that moral knowledge, like physical, admitted of

degrees; and the successive steps of it were only purchasable by

experience. The dispensation of the law, in the language of modern

theology, was not the dispensation of grace, and the nature of good and

evil disclosed itself slowly as men were able to comprehend it. Thus, no

system of law or articles of belief were or could be complete and

exhaustive for all time. Experience accumulates; new facts are observed,

new forces display themselves, and all such formulæ must necessarily be

from period to period broken up and moulded afresh. And yet the steps

already gained are a treasure so sacred, so liable are they at all times

to be attacked by those lower and baser elements in our nature which it

is their business to hold in check, that the better part of mankind have

at all times practically regarded their creed as a sacred total to which

nothing may be added, and from which nothing may be taken away; the

suggestion of a new idea is resented as an encroachment, punished as an

insidious piece of treason, and resisted by the combined forces of all

common practical understandings, which know too well the value of what

they have, to risk the venture upon untried change. Periods of religious

transition, therefore, when the advance has been a real one, always have

been violent, and probably will always continue to be so. They to whom

the precious gift of fresh light has been given are called upon to

exhibit their credentials as teachers in suffering for it. They, and

those who oppose them, have alike a sacred cause; and the fearful

spectacle arises of earnest, vehement men contending against each other

as for their own souls, in fiery struggle. Persecutions come, and

martyrdoms, and religions wars; and, at last, the old faith, like the

phoenix, expires upon its altar, and the new rises out of the ashes.

Such, in briefest outline, has been the history of religions, natural

and moral; the first, indeed, being in no proper sense a religion at

all, as we understand religion; and only assuming the character of it in

the minds of great men whose moral sense had raised them beyond their

time and country, and who, feeling the necessity of a real creed, with

an effort and with indifferent success, endeavoured to express, under

the systems which they found, emotions which had no proper place in

them.

Of the transition periods which we have described as taking place under

the religion which we call moral, the first known to us is marked at its

opening by the appearance of the Book of Job, the first fierce collision

of the new fact with the formula which will not stretch to cover it.

The earliest phenomenon likely to be observed connected with the moral

government of the world is the general one, that on the whole, as things

are constituted, good men prosper and are happy, bad men fail and are

miserable. The cause of such a condition is no mystery, and lies very

near the surface. As soon as men combine in society, they are forced to

obey certain laws under which alone society is possible, and these laws,

even in their rudest form, approach the laws of conscience. To a certain

extent, every one is obliged to sacrifice his private inclinations; and

those who refuse to do so are punished, or are crushed. If society were

perfect, the imperfect tendency would carry itself out till the two sets

of laws were identical; but perfection so far has been only in Utopia,

and, as far as we can judge by experience hitherto, they have

approximated most nearly in the simplest and most rudimentary forms of

life. Under the systems which we call patriarchal, the modern

distinction between sins and crimes had no existence. All gross sins

were offences against society, as it then was constituted, and, wherever

it was possible, were punished as being so; chicanery and those subtle

advantages which the acute and unscrupulous can take over the simple,

without open breach of enacted statutes, became only possible under the

complications of more artificial polities; and the oppression or injury

of man by man was open, violent, obvious, and therefore easily

understood. Doubtless, therefore, in such a state of things it would,

on the whole, be true to experience that, judging merely by outward

prosperity or the reverse, good and bad men would be rewarded and

punished as such in this actual world; so far, that is, as the

administration of such rewards and punishments was left in the power of

mankind. But theology could not content itself with general tendencies.

Theological propositions then, as much as now, were held to be absolute,

universal, admitting of no exceptions, and explaining every phenomenon.

Superficial generalisations were construed into immutable decrees; the

God of this world was just and righteous, and temporal prosperity or

wretchedness were dealt out by Him immediately by His own will to His

subjects according to their behaviour. Thus the same disposition towards

completeness which was the ruin of paganism, here, too, was found

generating the same evils; the half truth rounding itself out with

falsehoods. Not only the consequences of ill actions which followed

through themselves, but the accidents, as we call them, of

nature--earthquakes, storms, and pestilences--were the ministers of

God's justice, and struck sinners only with discriminating accuracy.

That the sun should shine alike on the evil and the good was a creed too

high for the early divines, or that the victims of a fallen tower were

no greater offenders than their neighbours. The conceptions of such men

could not pass beyond the outward temporal consequence; and if God's

hand was not there it was nowhere. We might have expected that such a

theory of things could not long resist the accumulated contradictions of

experience; but the same experience shows also what a marvellous power

is in us of thrusting aside phenomena which interfere with our cherished

convictions; and when such convictions are consecrated into a creed

which it is a sacred duty to believe, experience is but like water

dropping upon a rock, which wears it away, indeed, at last, but only in

thousands of years. This theory was and is the central idea of the

Jewish polity, the obstinate toughness of which has been the perplexity

of Gentiles and Christians from the first dawn of its existence; it

lingers among ourselves in our Liturgy and in the popular belief; and in

spite of the emphatic censure of Him after whose name we call ourselves,

is still the instant interpreter for us of any unusual calamity, a

potato blight, a famine, or an epidemic: such vitality is there in a

moral faith, though now, at any rate, contradicted by the experience of

all mankind, and at issue even with Christianity itself.

At what period in the world's history misgivings about it began to show

themselves it is now impossible to say; it was at the close, probably,

of the patriarchal period, when men who really _thought_ must have found

the ground palpably shaking under them. Indications of such misgivings

are to be found in the Psalms, those especially passing under the name

of Asaph; and all through Ecclesiastes there breathes a spirit of

deepest and saddest scepticism. But Asaph thrusts his doubts aside, and

forces himself back into his old position; and the scepticism of

Ecclesiastes is confessedly that of a man who had gone wandering after

enjoyment; searching after pleasures--pleasures of sense and pleasures

of intellect--and who, at last, bears reluctant testimony that, by such

methods, no pleasures can be found which will endure; that he had

squandered the power which might have been used for better things, and

had only strength remaining to tell his own sad tale as a warning to

mankind. There is nothing in Ecclesiastes like the misgivings of a noble

nature. The writer's own personal happiness had been all for which he

had cared; he had failed, as all men gifted as he was gifted are sure to

fail, and the lights of heaven were extinguished by the disappointment

with which his own spirit had been clouded.

Utterly different from these, both in character and in the lesson which

it teaches, is the Book of Job. Of unknown date, as we said, and unknown

authorship, the language impregnated with strange idioms and strange

allusions, un-Jewish in form, and in fiercest hostility with Judaism, it

hovers like a meteor over the old Hebrew literature, in it, but not of

it, compelling the acknowledgment of itself by its own internal majesty,

yet exerting no influence over the minds of the people, never alluded

to, and scarcely ever quoted, till at last the light which it had

heralded rose up full over the world in Christianity.

The conjectures which have been formed upon the date of this book are so

various, that they show of themselves on how slight a foundation the

best of them must rest. The language is no guide, for although

unquestionably of Hebrew origin, the poem bears no analogy to any of the

other books in the Bible; while of its external history nothing is

known at all, except that it was received into the canon at the time of

the great synagogue. Ewald decides, with some confidence, that it

belongs to the great prophetic period, and that the writer was a

contemporary of Jeremiah. Ewald is a high authority in these matters,

and this opinion is the one which we believe is now commonly received

among biblical scholars. In the absence of proof, however (and the

reasons which he brings forward are really no more than conjectures),

these opposite considerations may be of moment. It is only natural that

at first thought we should ascribe the grandest poem in a literature to

the time at which the poetry of the nation to which it belongs was

generally at its best; but, on reflection, the time when the poetry of

prophecy is the richest, is not likely to be favourable to compositions

of another kind. The prophets wrote in an era of decrepitude,

dissolution, sin, and shame, when the glory of Israel was falling round

them into ruin, and their mission, glowing as they were with the ancient

spirit, was to rebuke, to warn, to threaten, and to promise. Finding

themselves too late to save, and only, like Cassandra, despised and

disregarded, their voices rise up singing the swan song of a dying

people, now falling away in the wild wailing of despondency over the

shameful and desperate present, now swelling in triumphant hope that God

will not leave them for ever, and in His own time will take His chosen

to Himself again. But such a period is an ill occasion for searching

into the broad problems of human destiny; the present is all-important

and all-absorbing; and such a book as that of Job could have arisen only

out of an isolation of mind, and life, and interest, which we cannot

conceive of as possible under such conditions.

The more it is studied, the more the conclusion forces itself upon us

that, let the writer have lived when he would, in his struggle with the

central falsehood of his own people's creed, he must have divorced

himself from them outwardly as well as inwardly; that he travelled away

into the world, and lived long, perhaps all his matured life, in exile.

Everything about the book speaks of a person who had broken free from

the narrow littleness of 'the peculiar people.' The language, as we

said, is full of strange words. The hero of the poem is of strange land

and parentage--a Gentile certainly, not a Jew. The life, the manners,

the customs are of all varieties and places--Egypt, with its river and

its pyramids, is there; the description of mining points to Phoenicia;

the settled life in cities, the nomad Arabs, the wandering caravans, the

heat of the tropics, and the ice of the north, all are foreign to

Canaan, speaking of foreign things and foreign people. No mention, or

hint of mention, is there throughout the poem of Jewish traditions or

Jewish certainties. We look to find the three friends vindicate

themselves, as they so well might have done, by appeals to the fertile

annals of Israel, to the Flood, to the cities of the plain, to the

plagues of Egypt, or the thunders of Sinai. But of all this there is not

a word; they are passed by as if they had no existence; and instead of

them, when witnesses are required for the power of God, we have strange

un-Hebrew stories of the eastern astronomic mythology, the old wars of

the giants, the imprisoned Orion, the wounded dragon, 'the sweet

influences of the seven stars,' and the glittering fragments of the

sea-snake Rahab[J] trailing across the northern sky. Again, God is not

the God of Israel, but the father of mankind; we hear nothing of a

chosen people, nothing of a special revelation, nothing of peculiar

privileges; and in the court of heaven there is a Satan, not the prince

of this world and the enemy of God, but the angel of judgment, the

accusing spirit whose mission was to walk to and fro over the earth, and

carry up to heaven an account of the sins of mankind. We cannot believe

that thoughts of this kind arose out of Jerusalem in the days of Josiah.

In this book, if anywhere, we have the record of some [Greek: anêr

polutropos] who, like the old hero of Ithaca,

[Greek:

pollôn anthrôpôn iden astea kai noon egnô,

polla d' hog' en pontô pathen algea hon kata thumon,

arnumenos psuchên.... ]

but the scenes, the names, and the incidents, are all contrived as if to

baffle curiosity--as if, in the very form of the poem, to teach us that

it is no story of a single thing which happened once, but that it

belongs to humanity itself, and is the drama of the trial of man, with

Almighty God and the angels as the spectators of it.

No reader can have failed to have been struck with the simplicity of

the opening. Still, calm, and most majestic, it tells us everything

which is necessary to be known in the fewest possible words. The history

of Job was probably a tradition in the East; his name, like that of

Priam in Greece, the symbol of fallen greatness, and his misfortunes the

problem of philosophers. In keeping with the current belief, he is

described as a model of excellence, the most perfect and upright man

upon the earth, 'and the same was the greatest man in all the east.' So

far, greatness and goodness had gone hand in hand together, as the

popular theory required. The details of his character are brought out in

the progress of the poem. He was 'the father of the oppressed, and of

those who had none to help them.' When he sat as a judge in the

market-places, 'righteousness clothed him' there, and 'his justice was a

robe and a diadem.' He 'broke the jaws of the wicked, and plucked the

spoil out of his teeth;' and, humble in the midst of his power, he 'did

not despise the cause of his manservant, or his maidservant, when they

contended with him,' knowing (and amidst those old people where the

multitude of mankind were regarded as the born slaves of the powerful,

to be carved into eunuchs or polluted into concubines at their master's

pleasure, it was no easy matter to know it)--knowing that 'He who had

made him had made them,' and _one_ 'had fashioned them both in the

womb.' Above all, he was the friend of the poor; 'the blessing of him

that was ready to perish came upon him,' and he 'made the widow's heart

to sing for joy.'

Setting these characteristics of his daily life by the side of his

unaffected piety, as it is described in the first chapter, we have a

picture of the best man who could then be conceived; not a hard ascetic,

living in haughty or cowardly isolation, but a warm figure of flesh and

blood, a man full of all human loveliness, and to whom, that no room

might be left for any possible Calvinistic falsehood, God Himself bears

the emphatic testimony, that 'there was none like him upon the earth, a

perfect and upright man, who feared God and eschewed evil.' If such a

person as this, therefore, could be made miserable, necessarily the

current belief of the Jews was false to the root; and tradition

furnished the fact that he had been visited by every worst calamity. How

was it then to be accounted for? Out of a thousand possible

explanations, the poet introduces a single one. He admits us behind the

veil which covers the ways of Providence, and we hear the accusing angel

charging Job with an interested piety, and of being obedient because it

was his policy. 'Job does not serve God for nought,' he says; 'strip him

of his splendour, and see if he will care for God then. Humble him into

poverty and wretchedness, so only we shall know what is in his heart.'

The cause thus introduced is itself a rebuke to the belief which, with

its 'rewards and punishments,' immediately fostered selfishness; and the

poem opens with a double action, on one side to try the question whether

it is possible for man to love God disinterestedly--the issue of which

trial is not foreseen or even foretold, and we watch the progress of it

with an anxious and fearful interest; on the other side, to bring out,

in contrast to the truth which we already know, the cruel falsehood of

the popular faith--to show how, instead of leading men to mercy and

affection, it hardens their heart, narrows their sympathies, and

enhances the trials of the sufferer, by refinements which even Satan had

not anticipated. The combination of evils, as blow falls on blow,

suddenly, swiftly, and terribly, has all the appearance of a purposed

visitation (as indeed it was); if ever outward incidents might with

justice be interpreted as the immediate action of Providence, those

which fell on Job might be so interpreted. The world turns disdainfully

from the fallen in the world's way; but far worse than this, his chosen

friends, wise, good, pious men, as wisdom and piety were then, without

one glimpse of the true cause of his sufferings, see in them a judgment

upon his secret sins. He becomes to them an illustration, and even (such

are the paralogisms of men of this description) a proof of their theory

that 'the prosperity of the wicked is but for a while;' and instead of

the comfort and help which they might have brought him, and which in the

end they were made to bring him, he is to them no more than a text for

the enunciation of solemn falsehood. And even worse again, the sufferer

himself had been educated in the same creed; he, too, had been taught to

see the hand of God in the outward dispensation; and feeling from the

bottom of his heart, that he, in his own case, was a sure contradiction

of what he had learnt to believe, he himself finds his very faith in God

shaken from its foundation. The worst evils which Satan had devised

were distanced far by those which had been created by human folly.

The creed in which Job had believed was tried and found wanting, and, as

it ever will be when the facts of experience come in contact with the

inadequate formula, the true is found so mingled with the false, that

they can hardly be disentangled, and are in danger of being swept away

together.

A studied respect is shown, however, to orthodoxy, even while it is

arraigned for judgment. It may be doubtful whether the writer purposely

intended it. He probably cared only to tell the real truth; to say for

the old theory the best which could be said, and to produce as its

defenders the best and wisest men whom in his experience he had known to

believe and defend it. At any rate, he represents the three friends, not

as a weaker person would have represented them, as foolish, obstinate

bigots, but as wise, humane, and almost great men, who, at the outset,

at least, are animated only by the kindest feelings, and speak what they

have to say with the most earnest conviction that it is true. Job is

vehement, desperate, reckless. His language is the wild, natural

outpouring of suffering. The friends, true to the eternal nature of man,

are grave, solemn, and indignant, preaching their half truth, and

mistaken only in supposing that it is the whole; speaking, as all such

persons would speak and still do speak, in defending what they consider

sacred truth against the assaults of folly and scepticism. How beautiful

is their first introduction:--

'Now when Job's three friends heard of all this evil which was come upon

him, they came every one from his own place; Eliphaz the Temanite, and

Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite: for they had made an

appointment together to come to mourn with him and to comfort him. And

when they lifted up their eyes afar off, and knew him not, they lifted

up their voice and wept, and they rent every one his mantle, and

sprinkled dust upon their heads towards heaven. So they sat down with

him upon the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spake a word

unto him, for they saw that his grief was very great.'

What a picture is there! What majestic tenderness! His wife had scoffed

at his faith, bidding him 'leave God and die.' 'His acquaintance had

turned from him.' He 'had called his servant, and he had given him no

answer.' Even the children, in their unconscious cruelty, had gathered

round and mocked him as he lay among the ashes. But 'his friends

sprinkle dust towards heaven, and sit silently by him, and weep for him

seven days and seven nights upon the ground.' That is, they were

true-hearted, truly loving, devout, religious men; and yet they, with

their religion, were to become the instruments of the most poignant

sufferings, the sharpest temptations, which he had to endure. So it was,

and is, and will be--of such materials is this human life of ours

composed.

And now, remembering the double action of the drama--the actual trial of

Job, the result of which is uncertain; and the delusion of these men,

which is, at the outset, certain--let us go rapidly through the

dialogue. Satan's share in the temptation had already been overcome.

Lying sick in the loathsome disease which had been sent upon him, his

wife, in Satan's own words, had tempted Job to say, 'Farewell to

God,'--think no more of God or goodness, since this was all which came

of it; and Job had told her that she spoke as one of the foolish women.

He 'had received good at the hand of the Lord, and should he not receive

evil?' But now, when real love and real affection appear, his heart

melts in him; he loses his forced self-composure, and bursts into a

passionate regret that he had ever been born. In the agony of his

sufferings, hope of better things had died away. He does not complain of

injustice; as yet, and before his friends have stung and wounded him, he

makes no questioning of Providence,--but why was life given to him at

all, if only for this? Sick in mind, and sick in body, but one wish

remains to him, that death will come quickly and end all. It is a cry

from the very depths of a single and simple heart. But for such

simplicity and singleness his friends could not give him credit;

possessed beforehand with their idea, they see in his misery only a

fatal witness against him; such calamities could not have befallen a

man, the justice of God would not have permitted it, unless they had

been deserved. Job had sinned and he had suffered, and this wild passion

was but impenitence and rebellion.

Being as certain that they were right in this opinion as they were that

God Himself existed, that they should speak what they felt was only

natural and necessary; and their language at the outset is, all which

would be dictated by the tenderest sympathy. Eliphaz opens, the oldest

and most important of the three, in a soft, subdued, suggestive strain,

contriving in every way to spare the feelings of the sufferer, to the

extreme to which his love will allow him. All is general, impersonal,

indirect,--the rule of the world, the order of Providence. He does not

accuse Job, but he describes his calamities, and leaves him to gather

for himself the occasion which had produced them; and then passes off,

as if further to soften the blow, to the mysterious vision in which the

infirmity of mortal nature had been revealed to him, the universal

weakness which involved both the certainty that Job had shared in it,

and the excuse for him, if he would confess and humble himself: the

blessed virtue of repentance follows, and the promise that all shall be

well.

This is the note on which each of the friends strikes successively, in

the first of the three divisions into which the dialogue divides itself,

but each with increasing peremptoriness and confidence, as Job, so far

from accepting their interpretation of what had befallen him, hurls it

from him in anger and disdain. Let us observe (and the Calvinists should

consider this), he will hear as little of the charges against mankind as

of charges against himself. He will not listen to the 'corruption of

humanity,' because in the consciousness of his own innocency, he knows

that it is not corrupt: he knows that he is himself just and good, and

we know it, the Divine sentence upon him having been already passed. He

will not acknowledge his sin, for he knows not of what to repent. If he

could have reflected calmly, he might have foreseen what they would say.

He knew all that as well as they: it was the old story which he had

learnt, and could repeat, if necessary, as well as anyone: and if it had

been no more than a philosophical discussion, touching himself no more

nearly than it touched his friends, he might have allowed for the

tenacity of opinion in such matters, and listened to it and replied to

it with equanimity. But, as the proverb says, 'It is ill talking between

a full man and a fasting:' and in Job such equanimity would have been

but Stoicism, or the affectation of it, and unreal as the others'

theories. Possessed with the certainty that he had not deserved what had

befallen him, harassed with doubt, and worn out with pain and

unkindness, he had assumed (and how natural that he should assume it)

that those who loved him should not have been hasty to believe evil of

him; he had spoken to them as he really felt, and he thought that he

might have looked to them for something warmer and more sympathising

than such dreary eloquence. So when the revelation comes upon him of

what was passing in them, he attributes it (and now he is unjust to

them) to a falsehood of heart, and not to a blindness of understanding.

Their sermons, so kindly intended, roll past him as a dismal mockery.

They had been shocked (and how true again is this to nature) at his

passionate cry for death. 'Do ye reprove words?' he says, 'and the

speeches of one that is desperate, which are as wind?' It was but poor

friendship and narrow wisdom. He had looked to them for pity, for

comfort, and love. He had longed for it as the parched caravans in the

desert for the water-streams, and 'his brethren had dealt deceitfully

with him.' The brooks, in the cool winter, roll in a full turbid

torrent; 'what time it waxes warm they vanish, when it is hot they are

consumed out of their place; the caravans of Tema looked for them, the

companies of Sheba waited for them; they were confounded because they

had hoped; they came thither, and there was nothing.' If for once these

poor men could have trusted their hearts, if for once they could have

believed that there might be 'more things in heaven and earth' than were

dreamt of in their philosophy--but this is the one thing which they

could not do, which the theologian proper never has done or will do. And

thus whatever of calmness or endurance Job alone, on his ash-heap, might

have conquered for himself, is all scattered away; and as the strong

gusts of passion sweep to and fro across his heart, he pours himself out

in wild fitful music, so beautiful because so true, not answering them

or their speeches, but now flinging them from him in scorn, now

appealing to their mercy, or turning indignantly to God; now praying for

death; now in perplexity doubting whether, in some mystic way which he

cannot understand, he may not, perhaps, after all, really have sinned,

and praying to be shown his fault; and then staggering further into the

darkness, and breaking out into upbraidings of the Power which has

become so dreadful an enigma to him. 'Thou enquirest after my iniquity,

thou searchest after my sin, and thou knowest that I am not wicked. Why

didst thou bring me forth out of the womb? Oh, that I had given up the

ghost, and no eye had seen me. Cease, let me alone. It is but a little

while that I have to live. Let me alone, that I may take comfort a

little before I go, whence I shall not return to the land of darkness

and the shadow of death.' In what other poem in the world is there

pathos deep as this? With experience so stern as his, it was not for Job

to be calm, and self-possessed, and delicate in his words. He speaks not

what he knows, but what he feels; and without fear the writer allows him

to throw out his passion all genuine as it rises, not overmuch caring

how nice ears might be offended, but contented to be true to the real

emotion of a genuine human heart. So the poem runs on to the end of the

first answer to Zophar.

But now, with admirable fitness, as the contest goes forward, the

relative position of the speakers begins to change. Hitherto, Job only

had been passionate; and his friends temperate and collected. Now,

becoming shocked at his obstinacy, and disappointed in the result of

their homilies, they stray still further from the truth in an endeavour

to strengthen their position, and, as a natural consequence, visibly

grow angry. To them, Job's vehement and desperate speeches are damning

evidence of the truth of their suspicion. Impiety is added to his first

sin, and they begin to see in him a rebel against God. At first they had

been contented to speak generally, and much which they had urged was

partially true; now they step forward to a direct application, and

formally and personally accuse himself. Here their ground is positively

false; and with delicate art it is they who are now growing violent, and

wounded self-love begins to show behind their zeal for God; while in

contrast to them, as there is less and less truth in what they say, Job

grows more and more collected. For a time it had seemed doubtful how he

would endure his trial. The light of his faith was burning feebly and

unsteadily; a little more, and it seemed as if it might have utterly

gone out. But at last the storm was lulling; as the charges are brought

personally home to him, the confidence in his own real innocence rises

against them. He had before known that he was innocent; now he feels the

strength which lies in innocence, as if God were beginning to reveal

Himself within him, to prepare the way for the after outward

manifestation of Himself.

The friends, as before, repeat one another with but little difference;

the sameness being of course intentional, as showing that they were not

speaking for themselves, but as representatives of a prevailing opinion.

Eliphaz, again, gives the note which the others follow. Hear this

Calvinist of the old world: 'Thy own mouth condemneth thee, and thine

own lips testify against thee. What is man that he should be clean, and

he that is born of a woman that he should be righteous? Behold, he

putteth no trust in his saints; yea, the heavens are not clean in his

sight; how much more abominable and filthy is man, which drinketh

iniquity like water.' Strange, that after all these thousands of years

we should still persist in this degrading confession, as a thing which

it is impious to deny and impious to attempt to render otherwise, when

Scripture itself, in language so emphatic, declares that it is a lie.

Job _is_ innocent, perfect, righteous. God Himself bears witness to it.

It is Job who is found at last to have spoken truth, and the friends to

have sinned in denying it. And he holds fast by his innocency, and with

a generous confidence thrusts away the misgivings which had begun to

cling to him. Among his complainings he had exclaimed, that God was

remembering upon him the sins of his youth--not denying them; knowing

well that he, like others, had gone astray before he had learnt to

control himself, but feeling that at least in an earthly father it is

unjust to visit the faults of childhood on the matured man; feeling that

he had long, long shaken them off from him, and they did not even impair

the probity of his after-life. But now these doubts, too, pass away in

the brave certainty that God is not less just than man. As the

denouncings grow louder and darker, he appeals from his narrow judges to

the Supreme Tribunal--calls on God to hear him and to try his cause--and

then, in the strength of this appeal the mist rises from before his

eyes. His sickness is mortal: he has no hope in life, and death is near;

but the intense feeling that justice must and will be done, holds to him

closer and closer. God may appear on earth for him; or if that be too

bold a hope, and death finds him as he is--what is death then? God will

clear his memory in the place where he lived; his injuries will be

righted over his grave; while for himself, like a sudden gleam of

sunlight between clouds, a clear, bright hope beams up, that he too,

then, in another life, if not in this, when his skin is wasted off his

bones, and the worms have done their work on the prison of his spirit,

he too, at last, may then see God; may see Him, and have his pleadings

heard.

With such a hope, or even the shadow of one, he turns back to the world

again to look at it. Facts against which he had before closed his eyes

he allows and confronts, and he sees that his own little experience is

but the reflection of a law. You tell me, he seems to say, that the good

are rewarded, and that the wicked are punished; that God is just, and

that this is always so. Perhaps it is, or will be, but not in the way

which you imagine. You have known me, you have known what my life has

been; you see what I am, and it is no difficulty to you. You prefer

believing that I, whom you call your friend, am a deceiver or a

pretender, to admitting the possibility of the falsehood of your

hypothesis. You will not listen to my assurance, and you are angry with

me because I will not lie against my own soul, and acknowledge sins

which I have not committed. You appeal to the course of the world in

proof of your faith, and challenge me to answer you. Well, then, I

accept your challenge. The world is not what you say. You have told me

what you have seen of it: I will tell you what I have seen.

'Even while I remember I am afraid, and trembling taketh hold upon my

flesh. Wherefore do the wicked become old, yea, and are mighty in power?

Their seed is established in their sight with them, and their offspring

before their eyes. Their houses are safe from fear, neither is the rod

of God upon them. Their bull gendereth and faileth not; their cow

calveth, and casteth not her calf. They send forth their little ones

like a flock, and their children dance. They take the timbrel and harp,

and rejoice at the sound of the organ. They spend their days in wealth,

and in a moment go down into the grave. Therefore they say unto God,

Depart from us, for we desire not the knowledge of Thy ways. What is the

Almighty that we should serve Him? and what profit should we have if we

pray to Him?'

Will you quote the weary proverb? Will you say that 'God layeth up His

iniquity for His children?' (Our translators have wholly lost the sense

of this passage, and endeavour to make Job acknowledge what he is

steadfastly denying.) Well, and what then? What will he care? 'Will his

own eye see his own fall? Will he drink the wrath of the Almighty? What

are the fortunes of his house to him if the number of his own months is

fulfilled?' One man is good and another wicked, one is happy and another

is miserable. In the great indifference of nature they share alike in

the common lot. 'They lie down alike in the dust, and the worms cover

them.'

Ewald, and many other critics, suppose that Job was hurried away by his

feelings to say all this; and that in his calmer moments he must have

felt that it was untrue. It is a point on which we must decline

accepting even Ewald's high authority. Even then, in those old times, it

was beginning to be terribly true. Even then the current theory was

obliged to bend to large exceptions; and what Job saw as exceptions we

see round us everywhere. It was true then, it is infinitely more true

now, that what is called virtue in the common sense of the word, still

more that nobleness, godliness, or heroism of character in any form

whatsoever, have nothing to do with this or that man's prosperity, or

even happiness. The thoroughly vicious man is no doubt wretched enough;

but the worldly, prudent, self-restraining man, with his five senses,

which he understands how to gratify with tempered indulgence, with a

conscience satisfied with the hack routine of what is called

respectability,--such a man feels no wretchedness; no inward uneasiness

disturbs him, no desires which he cannot gratify; and this though he be

the basest and most contemptible slave of his own selfishness.

Providence will not interfere to punish him. Let him obey the laws under

which prosperity is obtainable, and he will obtain it, let him never

fear. He will obtain it, be he base or noble. Nature is indifferent; the

famine and the earthquake, and the blight or the accident, will not

discriminate to strike him. He may insure himself against casualties in

these days of ours, with the money perhaps which a better man would have

given away, and he will have his reward. He need not doubt it.

And, again, it is not true, as optimists would persuade us, that such

prosperity brings no real pleasure. A man with no high aspirations, who

thrives, and makes money, and envelops himself in comforts, is as happy

as such a nature can be. If unbroken satisfaction be the most blessed

state for a man (and this certainly is the practical notion of

happiness), he is the happiest of men. Nor are those idle phrases any

truer, that the good man's goodness is a never-ceasing sunshine; that

virtue is its own reward, &c. &c. If men truly virtuous care to be

rewarded for it, their virtue is but a poor investment of their moral

capital. Was Job so happy then on that ash-heap of his, the mark of the

world's scorn, and the butt for the spiritual archery of the theologian,

alone in his forlorn nakedness, like some old dreary stump which the

lightning has scathed, rotting away in the wind and the rain? If

happiness be indeed what we men are sent into this world to seek for,

those hitherto thought the noblest among us were the pitifullest and

wretchedest. Surely it was no error in Job. It was that real insight

which once was given to all the world in Christianity, however we have

forgotten it now. Job was learning to see that it was not in the

possession of enjoyment, no, nor of happiness itself, that the

difference lies between the good and the bad. True, it might be that God

sometimes, even generally, gives such happiness--gives it in what

Aristotle calls an [Greek: epigignomenon telos], but it is no part of

the terms on which He admits us to His service, still less is it the end

which we may propose to ourselves on entering His service. Happiness He

gives to whom He will, or leaves to the angel of nature to distribute

among those who fulfil the laws upon which _it_ depends. But to serve

God and to love Him is higher and better than happiness, though it be

with wounded feet, and bleeding brows, and hearts loaded with sorrow.

Into this high faith Job is rising, treading his temptations under his

feet, and finding in them a ladder on which his spirit rises. Thus he is

passing further and even further from his friends, soaring where their

imaginations cannot follow him. To them he is a blasphemer whom they

gaze at with awe and terror. They had charged him with sinning on the

strength of their hypothesis, and he has answered with a deliberate

denial of it. Losing now all mastery over themselves, they pour out a

torrent of mere extravagant invective and baseless falsehood, which in

the calmer outset they would have blushed to think of. They _know_ no

evil of Job, but they do not hesitate to convert conjecture into

certainty, and specify in detail the particular crimes which he must

have committed. He _ought_ to have committed them, and so he had; the

old argument then as now.--'Is not thy wickedness great?' says Eliphaz.

'Thou hast taken a pledge from thy brother for nought, and stripped the

naked of their clothing; thou hast not given water to the weary, and

thou hast withholden bread from the hungry;' and so on through a series

of mere distracted lies. But the time was past when words like these

could make Job angry. Bildad follows them up with an attempt to frighten

him by a picture of the power of that God whom he was blaspheming; but

Job cuts short his harangue, and ends it for him in a spirit of

loftiness which Bildad could not have approached; and then proudly and

calmly rebukes them all, no longer in scorn and irony, but in high,

tranquil self-possession. 'God forbid that I should justify you,' he

says; 'till I die I will not remove my integrity from me. My

righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go. My heart shall not

reproach me so long as I live.'

So far all has been clear, each party, with increasing confidence,

having insisted on their own position, and denounced their adversaries.

A difficulty now arises which, at first sight, appears insurmountable.

As the chapters are at present printed, the entire of the twenty-seventh

is assigned to Job, and the paragraph from the eleventh to the

twenty-third verses is in direct contradiction to all which he has

maintained before--is, in fact, a concession of having been wrong from

the beginning. Ewald, who, as we said above, himself refuses to allow

the truth of Job's last and highest position, supposes that he is here

receding from it, and confessing what an over-precipitate passion had

betrayed him into denying. For many reasons, principally because we are

satisfied that Job said then no more than the real fact, we cannot think

Ewald right; and the concessions are too large and too inconsistent to

be reconciled even with his own general theory of the poem. Another

solution of the difficulty is very simple, although it is to be admitted

that it rather cuts the knot than unties it. Eliphaz and Bildad have

each spoken a third time; the symmetry of the general form requires that

now Zophar should speak; and the suggestion, we believe, was first made

by Dr. Kennicott, that he did speak, and that the verses in question

belong to him. Any one who is accustomed to MSS. will understand easily

how such a mistake, if it be one, might have arisen. Even in

Shakespeare, the speeches in the early editions are in many instances

wrongly divided, and assigned to the wrong persons. It might have

arisen from inadvertence; it might have arisen from the foolishness of

some Jewish transcriber, who resolved, at all costs, to drag the book

into harmony with Judaism, and make Job unsay his heresy. This view has

the merit of fully clearing up the obscurity. Another, however, has been

suggested by Eichorn, who originally followed Kennicott, but discovered,

as he supposed, a less violent hypothesis, which was equally

satisfactory. Eichorn imagines the verses to be a summary by Job of his

adversaries' opinions, as if he said--'Listen now; you know what the

facts are as well as I, and yet you maintain this;' and then passed on

with his indirect reply to it. It is possible that Eichorn may be

right--at any rate, either he is right, or else Dr. Kennicott is.

Certainly, Ewald is not. Taken as an account of Job's own conviction,

the passage contradicts the burden of the whole poem. Passing it by,

therefore, and going to what immediately follows, we arrive at what, in

a human sense, is the final climax--Job's victory and triumph. He had

appealed to God, and God had not appeared; he had doubted and fought

against his doubts, and at last had crushed them down. He, too, had been

taught to look for God in outward judgments; and when his own experience

had shown him his mistake, he knew not where to turn. He had been

leaning on a bruised reed, and it had run into his hand and pierced him.

But as soon as in the speeches of his friend he saw it all laid down in

its weakness and its false conclusions--when he saw the defenders of it

wandering further and further from what he knew to be true, growing

every moment, as if from a consciousness of the unsoundness of their

standing ground, more violent, obstinate, and unreasonable, the scales

fell more and more from his eyes--he had seen the fact that the wicked

might prosper, and in learning to depend upon his innocency he had felt

that the good man's support was there, if it was anywhere; and at last,

with all his heart, was reconciled to the truth. The mystery of the

outer world becomes deeper to him, but he does not any more try to

understand it. The wisdom which can compass that mystery, he knows, is

not in man, though man search for it deeper and harder than the miner

searches for the hidden treasures of the earth; the wisdom which alone

is attainable is resignation to God.

'Where,' he cries, 'shall wisdom be found, and where is the place of

understanding? Man knoweth not the price thereof, neither is it found

in the land of the living. The depth said it is not with me; and the sea

said it is not in me. It is hid from the eyes of all living, and kept

close from the fowls of the air.[K] God understandeth the way thereof,

and He knoweth the place thereof [He, not man, understands the mysteries

of the world which He has made]. And unto man He said, Behold! the fear

of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil, that is

understanding.'

Here, therefore, it might seem as if all was over. There is no clearer

or purer faith possible for man; and Job had achieved it. His evil had

turned to good; and sorrow had severed for him the last links which

bound him to lower things. He had felt that he could do without

happiness, that it was no longer essential, and that he could live on,

and still love God, and cling to Him. But he is not described as of

preternatural, or at all Titanic nature, but as very man, full of all

human tenderness and susceptibility. His old life was still beautiful to

him. He does not hate it because he can renounce it; and now that the

struggle is over, the battle fought and won, and his heart has flowed

over in that magnificent song of victory, the note once more changes: he

turns back to earth to linger over those old departed days, with which

the present is so hard a contrast; and his parable dies away in a strain

of plaintive, but resigned melancholy. Once more he throws himself on

God, no longer in passionate expostulation, but in pleading humility.[L]

And then comes (perhaps, as Ewald says, it _could not_ have come

before) the answer out of the whirlwind. Job had called on God, and

prayed that he might appear, that he might plead his cause with him; and

now he comes, and what will Job do? He comes not as the healing spirit

in the heart of man; but, as Job had at first demanded, the outward God,

the Almighty Creator of the universe, and clad in the terrors and the

glory of it. Job, in his first precipitancy, had desired to reason with

him on his government. The poet, in gleaming lines, describes for an

answer the universe as it then was known, the majesty and awfulness of

it; and then asks whether it is this which he requires to have explained

to him, or which he believes himself capable of conducting. The

revelation acts on Job as the sign of the Macrocosmos on the modern

Faust; but when he sinks, crushed, it is not as the rebellious upstart,

struck down in his pride--for he had himself, partially at least,

subdued his own presumption--but as a humble penitent, struggling to

overcome his weakness. He abhors himself for his murmurs, and 'repents

in dust and ashes.' It will have occurred to every one that the secret

which has been revealed to the reader is not, after all, revealed to Job

or to his friends, and for this plain reason: the burden of the drama

is, not that we do, but that we do not, and cannot, know the mystery of

the government of the world--that it is not for man to seek it, or for

God to reveal it. We, the readers, are, in this one instance, admitted

behind the scenes--for once, in this single case--because it was

necessary to meet the received theory by a positive fact which

contradicted it. But the explanation of one case need not be the

explanation of another; our business is to do what we know to be right,

and ask no questions. The veil which in the Ægyptian legend lay before

the face of Isis is not to be raised; and we are not to seek to

penetrate secrets which are not ours.

While, however, God does not condescend to justify his ways to man, he

gives judgment on the past controversy. The self-constituted pleaders

for him, the acceptors of his person, were all wrong; and Job--the

passionate, vehement, scornful, misbelieving Job--he had spoken the

truth; he at least had spoken facts, and they had been defending a

transient theory as an everlasting truth.

'And it was so, that after the Lord had spoken these words to Job, the

Lord said to Eliphaz the Temanite, My wrath is kindled against thee and

against thy two friends; for ye have not spoken of me the thing that is

right, as my servant Job hath. Therefore take unto you now seven

bullocks and seven rams, and go to my servant Job; and offer for

yourselves a burnt-offering. And my servant Job shall pray for you, and

him will I accept. Lest I deal with you after your folly, for that ye

have not spoken of me the thing which is right, like my servant Job.'

One act of justice remains. Knowing as we do the cause of Job's

misfortunes, and that as soon as his trial was over it was no longer

operative, our sense of fitness could not be satisfied unless he were

indemnified outwardly for his outward sufferings. Satan is defeated, and

Job's integrity proved; and there is no reason why the general law

should be interfered with, which, however large the exceptions, tends to

connect goodness and prosperity; or why obvious calamities, obviously

undeserved, should remain any more unremoved. Perhaps, too, a deeper

lesson still lies below his restoration--something perhaps of this kind.

Prosperity, enjoyment, happiness, comfort, peace, whatever be the name

by which we designate that state in which life is to our own selves

pleasant and delightful, as long as they are sought or prized as things

essential, so far have a tendency to disennoble our nature, and are a

sign that we are still in servitude to selfishness. Only when they lie

outside us, as ornaments merely to be worn or laid aside as God

pleases--only then may such things be possessed with impunity. Job's

heart in early times had clung to them more than he knew, but now he was

purged clean, and they were restored because he had ceased to need them.

Such in outline is this wonderful poem. With the material of which it is

woven we have not here been concerned, although it is so rich and

pregnant that we might with little difficulty construct out of it a

complete picture of the world as then it was: its life, knowledge, arts,

habits, superstitions, hopes, and fears. The subject is the problem of

all mankind, and the composition embraces no less wide a range. But what

we are here most interested upon is the epoch which it marks in the

progress of mankind, as the first recorded struggle of a new experience

with an established orthodox belief. True, for hundreds of years,

perhaps for a thousand, the superstition against which it was directed

continued. When Christ came it was still in its vitality. Nay, as we

saw, it is alive, or in a sort of mock life, among us at this very day.

But even those who retained their imperfect belief had received into

their canon a book which treated it with contumely and scorn, so

irresistible was the majesty of truth.

In days like these, when we hear so much of progress, it is worth while

to ask ourselves what advances we have made further in the same

direction? and once more, at the risk of some repetition, let us look at

the position in which this book leaves us. It had been assumed that man,

if he lived a just and upright life, had a right to expect to be happy.

Happiness, 'his being's end and aim,' was his legitimate and covenanted

reward. If God therefore was just, such a man would be happy; and

inasmuch as God was just, the man who was not happy had not deserved to

be. There is no flaw in this argument; and if it is unsound, the fallacy

can only lie in the supposed right to happiness. It is idle to talk of

inward consolations. Job felt them, but they were not everything. They

did not relieve the anguish of his wounds; they did not make the loss of

his children, or his friends' unkindness, any the less painful to him.

The poet, indeed, restores him in the book; but in life it need not have

been so. He might have died upon his ash-heap, as thousands of good men

have died, and will die again, in misery. Happiness, therefore, is _not_

what we are to look for. Our place is to be true to the best which we

know, to seek that and do that; and if by 'virtue its own reward' be

meant that the good man cares only to continue good, desiring nothing

more, then it is a true and noble saying. But if virtue be valued

because it is politic, because in pursuit of it will be found most

enjoyment and fewest sufferings, then it is not noble any more, and it

is turning the truth of God into a lie. Let us do right, and whether

happiness come or unhappiness it is no very mighty matter. If it come,

life will be sweet; if it do not come, life will be bitter--bitter, not

sweet, and yet to be borne. On such a theory alone is the government of

this world intelligibly just. The well-being of our souls depends only

on what we _are_; and nobleness of character is nothing else but steady

love of good and steady scorn of evil. The government of the world is a

problem while the desire of selfish enjoyment survives; and when

justice is not done according to such standard (which will not be till

the day after doomsday, and not then), self-loving men will still ask,

why? and find no answer. Only to those who have the heart to say, 'We

can do without that; it is not what we ask or desire,' is there no

secret. Man will have what he deserves, and will find what is really

best for him, exactly as he honestly seeks for it. Happiness may fly

away, pleasure pall or cease to be obtainable, wealth decay, friends

fail or prove unkind, and fame turn to infamy; but the power to serve

God never fails, and the love of Him is never rejected.

Most of us, at one time or other of our lives, have known something of

love--of that only pure love in which no _self_ is left remaining. We

have loved as children, we have loved as lovers; some of us have learnt

to love a cause, a faith, a country; and what love would that be which

existed only with a prudent view to after-interests. Surely there is a

love which exults in the power of self-abandonment, and can glory in the

privilege of suffering for what is good. _Que mon nom soit flétri,

pourvu que la France soit libre_, said Danton; and those wild patriots

who had trampled into scorn the faith in an immortal life in which they

would be rewarded for what they were suffering, went to their graves as

beds, for the dream of a people's liberty. Justice is done; the balance

is not deranged. It only seems deranged, as long as we have not learnt

to serve without looking to be paid for it.

Such is the theory of life which is to be found in the Book of Job; a

faith which has flashed up in all times and all lands, wherever

high-minded men were to be found, and which passed in Christianity into

the acknowledged creed of half the world. The cross was the new symbol,

the Divine sufferer the great example; and mankind answered to the call,

because the appeal was not to what was poor and selfish in them, but to

whatever of best and bravest was in their nature. The law of reward and

punishment was superseded by the law of love. Thou shalt love God and

thou shalt love man; and that was not love--men knew it once--which was

bought by the prospect of reward. Times are changed with us now. Thou

shalt love God and thou shalt love man, in the hands of a Paley, are

found to mean no more than, Thou shalt love thyself after an enlightened

manner. And the same base tone has saturated not only our common

feelings, but our Christian theologies and our Antichristian

philosophies. A prudent regard to our future interests; an abstinence

from present unlawful pleasures, because they will entail the loss of

greater pleasure by-and-by, or perhaps be paid for with pain,--this is

called virtue now; and the belief that such beings as men can be

influenced by any more elevated feelings, is smiled at as the dream of

enthusiasts whose hearts have outrun their understandings. Indeed, he

were but a poor lover whose devotion to his mistress lay resting on the

feeling that a marriage with her would conduce to his own comforts. That

were a poor patriot who served his country for the hire which his

country would give to him. And we should think but poorly of a son who

thus addressed his earthly father: 'Father, on whom my fortunes depend,

teach me to do what pleases thee, that I, pleasing thee in all things,

may obtain those good things which thou hast promised to give to thy

obedient children.' If any of us who have lived in so meagre a faith

venture, by-and-by, to put in our claims, Satan will be likely to say of

us (with better reason than he did of Job), 'Did they serve God for

nought, then? Take their reward from them, and they will curse Him to

His face.' If Christianity had never borne itself more loftily than

this, do we suppose that those fierce Norsemen who had learnt, in the

fiery war-songs of the Edda, of what stuff the hearts of heroes are

composed, would have fashioned their sword-hilts into crosses, and

themselves into a crusading chivalry? Let us not dishonour our great

fathers with the dream of it. The Christians, like the Stoics and the

Epicureans, would have lived their little day among the ignoble sects of

an effete civilisation, and would have passed off and been heard of no

more. It was in another spirit that those first preachers of

righteousness went out upon their warfare with evil. They preached, not

enlightened prudence, but purity, justice, goodness; holding out no

promises in this world except of suffering as their great Master had

suffered, and rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer for His

sake. And that crown of glory which they did believe to await them in a

life beyond the grave, was no enjoyment of what they had surrendered in

life, was not enjoyment at all in any sense which human thought or

language can attach to the words; as little like it as the crown of love

is like it, which the true lover looks for when at last he obtains his

mistress. It was to be with Christ--to lose themselves in Him.

How these high feelings ebbed away, and Christianity became what we know

it, we are partially beginning to see. The living spirit organised for

itself a body of perishable flesh: not only the real gains of real

experience, but mere conjectural hypotheses, current at the day for the

solution of unexplained phenomena, became formulæ and articles of faith.

Again, as before, the living and the dead were bound together, and the

seeds of decay were already planted on the birth of a constructed

polity.

But there was another cause allied to this, and yet different from it,

which, though a law of human nature itself, seems nowadays altogether

forgotten. In the rapid and steady advance of our knowledge of material

things, we are apt to believe that all our knowledge follows the same

law; that it is merely generalised experience; that experience

accumulates daily, and, therefore, that 'progress of the species,' _in

all senses_, is an obvious and necessary fact. There is something which

is true in this view, mixed with a great deal which is false. Material

knowledge, the physical and mechanical sciences, make their way from

step to step, from experiment to experiment, and each advance is secured

and made good, and cannot again be lost. One generation takes up the

general sum of experience where the last laid it down, adds to it what

it has the opportunity of adding, and leaves it with interest to the

next. The successive positions, as they are gained, require nothing for

the apprehension of them but an understanding ordinarily cultivated.

Prejudices have to be encountered, but prejudices of opinion merely, not

prejudices of conscience or prejudices of self-love, like those which

beset our progress in the science of morality. But in morals we enter

upon conditions wholly different--conditions in which age differs from

age, man differs from man, and even from himself, at different moments.

We all have experienced times when, as we say, we should not know

ourselves; some, when we fall below our average level; some, when we are

lifted above, and put on, as it were, a higher nature. At such intervals

as these last (unfortunately, with most of us, of rare occurrence), many

things become clear to us which before were hard sayings; propositions

become alive which, usually, are but dry words; our hearts seem purer,

our motives loftier; our purposes, what we are proud to acknowledge to

ourselves.

And, as man is unequal to himself, so is man to his neighbour, and

period to period. The entire method of action, the theories of human

life which in one era prevail universally, to the next are unpractical

and insane, as those of this next would have seemed mere baseness to the

first, if the first could have anticipated them. One epoch, we may

suppose, holds some 'greatest nobleness principle,' the other some

'greatest happiness principle;' and then their very systems of axioms

will contradict one another; their general conceptions and their

detailed interpretations, their rules, judgments, opinions, practices

will be in perpetual and endless collision. Our minds take shape from

our hearts, and the facts of moral experience do not teach their own

meaning, but submit to many readings according to the power of the eye

which we bring with us.

The want of a clear perception of so important a feature about us leads

to many singular contradictions. A believer in popular Protestantism,

who is also a believer in progress, ought, if he were consistent, to

regard mankind as growing every day towards a more and more advantageous

position with respect to the trials of life; and yet if he were asked

whether it was easier for him to 'save his soul' in the nineteenth

century than it would have been in the first or second, or whether the

said soul was necessarily better worth saving, he would be perplexed for

an answer. There is hardly one of us who, in childhood, has not felt

like the Jews to whom Christ spoke, that if he had 'lived in the days of

the Fathers,' if he had had their advantages, he would have found duty a

much easier matter; and some of us in mature life have felt that in old

Athens, or old republican Rome, in the first ages of Christianity, in

the Crusades or at the Reformation, there was a contagious atmosphere of

heroism, in which we should have been less troubled with the little

feelings which cling about us now. At any rate, it is at these rare

epochs only that real additions are made to our moral knowledge. At such

times, new truths are, indeed, sent down among us, and, for periods

longer or shorter, may be seen to exercise an elevating influence on

mankind. Perhaps what is gained on these occasions is never entirely

lost. The historical monuments of their effects are at least

indestructible; and when the spirit which gave them birth reappears,

their dormant energy awakens again.

But it seems from our present experience of what, in some at least of

its modern forms, Christianity has been capable of becoming, that there

is no doctrine in itself so pure, but what the meaner nature which is in

us can disarm and distort it, and adapt it to its own littleness. The

once living spirit dries up into formulæ, and formulæ, whether of

mass-sacrifice or vicarious righteousness, or 'reward and punishment,'

are contrived ever so as to escape making over-high demands upon the

conscience. Some aim at dispensing with obedience altogether, and those

which insist on obedience rest the obligations of it on the poorest of

motives. So things go on till there is no life left at all; till, from

all higher aspirations, we are lowered down to the love of self after an

enlightened manner; and then nothing remains but to fight the battle

over again. The once beneficial truth has become, as in Job's case, a

cruel and mischievous deception, and the whole question of life and its

obligations must again be opened.

It is now some three centuries since the last of such reopenings. If we

ask ourselves how much during this time has been actually added to the

sum of our knowledge in these matters; what, in all the thousands upon

thousands of sermons, and theologies, and philosophies with which Europe

has been deluged, has been gained for mankind beyond what we have found

in this Book of Job, how far all this has advanced us in the 'progress

of humanity,' it were hard, or rather it is easy, to answer. How far we

have fallen below, let Paley and the rest bear witness. But what moral

question can be asked which admits now of a grander solution than was

offered two, perhaps three, thousand years ago? The world has not been

standing still; experience of man and life has increased; questions have

multiplied on questions, while the answers of the established teachers

to them have been growing every day more and more incredible. What other

answers have there been? Of all the countless books which have appeared,

there has been only one of enduring importance, in which an attempt is

made to carry on the solution of the great problem. Job is given over

into Satan's hand to be tempted; and though he shakes, he does not fall.

Taking the temptation of Job for his model, Goethe has similarly

exposed his Faust to trial, and with him the tempter succeeds. His hero

falls from sin to sin, from crime to crime; he becomes a seducer, a

murderer, a betrayer, following recklessly his evil angel wherever he

chooses to lead him; and yet, with all this, he never wholly forfeits

our sympathy. In spite of his weakness, his heart is still true to his

higher nature; sick and restless, even in the delirium of enjoyment he

always longs for something better, and he never can be brought to say of

evil that it is good. And therefore, after all, the devil is balked of

his prey; in virtue of this one fact, that the evil in which he steeped

himself remained to the last hateful to him, Faust is saved by the

angels.... It will be eagerly answered for the established belief, that

such cases are its especial province. All men are sinners, and _it_

possesses the blessed remedy for sin. But, among the countless numbers

of those characters so strangely mixed among us, in which the dark and

the bright fibres cross like a meshwork; characters at one moment

capable of acts of heroic greatness, at another hurried by temptation

into actions which even common men may deplore, how many are there who

have never availed themselves of the conditions of reconciliation as

orthodoxy proffers them, and of such men what is to be said? It was said

once of a sinner that to her 'much was forgiven, for she loved much.'

But this is language which theology has as little appropriated as the

Jews could appropriate the language of Job. It cannot recognise the

power of the human heart. It has no balance in which to weigh the good

against the evil; and when a great Burns or a Mirabeau comes before it,

it can but tremblingly count up the offences committed, and then,

looking to the end, and finding its own terms not to have been complied

with, it faintly mutters its anathema. Sin only it can apprehend and

judge; and for the poor acts of struggling heroism, 'Forasmuch as they

were not done,' &c., &c., it doubts not but they have the nature of

sin.[M]

Something of the difficulty has been met by Goethe, but it cannot be

said that he has resolved it; or at least that he has furnished others

with a solution which may guide their judgment. In the writer of the

Book of Job there is an awful moral earnestness before which we bend as

in the presence of a superior being. The orthodoxy against which he

contended is not set aside or denied; he sees what truth is in it; only

he sees more than it, and over it, and through it. But in Goethe, who

needed it more, inasmuch as his problem was more delicate and difficult,

the moral earnestness is not awful, is not even high. We cannot feel

that in dealing with sin he entertains any great horror of it; he looks

on it as a mistake, as undesirable, but scarcely as more. Goethe's great

powers are of another kind; and this particular question, though in

appearance the primary subject of the poem, is really only secondary. In

substance, Faust is more like Ecclesiastes than it is like Job, and

describes rather the restlessness of a largely-gifted nature which,

missing the guidance of the heart, plays experiments with life, trying

knowledge, pleasure, dissipation, one after another, and hating them

all; and then hating life itself as a weary, stale, flat, unprofitable

mockery. The temper exhibited here will probably be perennial in the

world. But the remedy for it will scarcely be more clear under other

circumstances than it is at present, and lies in the disposition of the

emotions, and not in any propositions which can be addressed to the

understanding.

For that other question--how rightly to estimate a human being; what

constitutes a real vitiation of character, and how to distinguish,

without either denying the good or making light of the evil; how to be

just to the popular theories, and yet not to blind ourselves to their

shallowness and injustice--that is a problem for us, for the solution of

which we are at present left to our ordinary instinct, without any

recognised guidance whatsoever.

Nor is this the only problem which is in the same situation. There can

scarcely be a more startling contrast between fact and theory than the

conditions under which, practically, positions of power and influence

are distributed among us--between the theory of human worth which the

necessities of life oblige us to act upon, and the theory which we

believe that we believe. As we look around among our leading men, our

statesmen, our legislators, the judges on our bench, the commanders of

our armies, the men to whom this English nation commits the conduct of

its best interests, profane and sacred, what do we see to be the

principles which guide our selection? How entirely do they lie beside

and beyond the negative tests! and how little respect do we pay to the

breach of this or that commandment in comparison with ability! So wholly

impossible is it to apply the received opinions on such matters to

practice--to treat men known to be guilty of what theology calls deadly

sins, as really guilty of them, that it would almost seem we had fallen

into a moral anarchy; that ability _alone_ is what we regard, without

any reference at all, except in glaring and outrageous cases, to moral

disqualifications. It is invidious to mention names of living men; it is

worse than invidious to drag out of their graves men who have gone down

into them with honour, to make a point for an argument. But we know, all

of us, that among the best servants of our country there have been, and

there are, many whose lives will not stand scrutiny by the negative

tests, and who do not appear very greatly to repent, or to have

repented, of their sins according to recognised methods.

Once more: among our daily or weekly confessions, which we are supposed

to repeat as if we were all of us at all times in precisely the same

moral condition, we are made to say that we have done those things which

we ought not to have done, and to have left undone those things which we

ought to have done. An earthly father to whom his children were day

after day to make this acknowledgment would be apt to enquire whether

they were trying to do better--whether, at any rate, they were

endeavouring to learn; and if he were told that although they had made

some faint attempts to understand the negative part of their duty, yet

that of the positive part, of those things which they ought to do, they

had no notions at all, and had no idea that they were under obligation

to form any, he would come to rather strange conclusions about them.

But, really and truly, what practical notions of duty have we beyond

that of abstaining from committing sins? Not to commit sin, we suppose,

covers but a small part of what is expected of us. Through the entire

tissue of our employments there runs a good and a bad. Bishop Butler

tells us, for instance, that even of our time there is a portion which

is ours, and a portion which is our neighbour's; and if we spend more of

it on personal interests than our own share, we are stealing. This

sounds strange doctrine; we prefer making vague acknowledgments, and

shrink from pursuing them into detail. We say vaguely, that in all we

do we should consecrate ourselves to God, and our own lips condemn us;

for which among us cares to learn the way to do it? The _devoir_ of a

knight was understood in the courts of chivalry; the lives of heroic

men, Pagan and Christian, were once held up before the world as patterns

of detailed imitation; and now, when such ideals are wanted more than

ever, Protestantism stands with a drawn sword on the threshold of the

enquiry, and tells us that it is impious. The law, we are told, has been

fulfilled for us in condescension to our inherent worthlessness, and our

business is to appropriate another's righteousness, and not, like

Titans, to be scaling heaven by profane efforts of our own. Protestants,

we know very well, will cry out in tones loud enough at such a

representation of their doctrines. But we know also that unless men may

feel a cheerful conviction that they can do right if they try,--that

they can purify themselves, can live noble and worthy lives,--unless

this is set before them as _the_ thing which they are to do, and _can_

succeed in doing, they will not waste their energies on what they know

beforehand will end in failure; and if they may not live for God, they

will live for themselves.

And all this while the whole complex frame of society is a meshwork of

duty woven of living fibre, and the condition of its remaining sound is,

that every thread of it, of its own free energy, shall do what it ought.

The penalties of duties neglected are to the full as terrible as those

of sins committed; more terrible, perhaps, because more palpable and

sure. A lord of the land, or an employer of labour, supposes that he has

no duty except to keep what he calls the commandments in his own person,

to go to church, and to do what he will with his own,--and Irish famines

follow, and trade strikes, and chartisms, and Paris revolutions. We look

for a remedy in impossible legislative enactments, and there is but one

remedy which will avail--that the thing which we call public opinion

learn something of the meaning of human obligation, and demand some

approximation to it. As things are, we have no idea of what a human

being ought to be. After the first rudimental conditions we pass at once

into meaningless generalities; and with no knowledge to guide our

judgment, we allow it to be guided by meaner principles; we respect

money, we respect rank, we respect ability--character is as if it had no

existence.

In the midst of this loud talk of progress, therefore, in which so many

of us at present are agreed to believe, which is, indeed, the common

meeting point of all the thousand sects into which we are split, it is

with saddened feelings that we see so little of it in so large a matter.

Progress there is in knowledge; and science has enabled the number of

human beings capable of existing upon this earth to be indefinitely

multiplied. But this is but a small triumph if the ratio of the good and

bad, the wise and the foolish, the full and the hungry, remains

unaffected. And we cheat ourselves with words when we conclude out of

our material splendour an advance of the race.

In two things there is progress--progress in knowledge of the outward

world, and progress in material wealth. This last, for the present,

creates, perhaps, more evils than it relieves; but suppose this

difficulty solved--suppose the wealth distributed, and every peasant

living like a peer--what then? If this is all, one noble soul outweighs

the whole of it. Let us follow knowledge to the outer circle of the

universe--the eye will not be satisfied with seeing, nor the ear with

hearing. Let us build our streets of gold, and they will hide as many

aching hearts as hovels of straw. The well-being of mankind is not

advanced a single step. Knowledge is power, and wealth is power; and

harnessed, as in Plato's fable, to the chariot of the soul, and guided

by wisdom, they may bear it through the circle of the stars; but left to

their own guidance, or reined by a fool's hand, the wild horses may

bring the poor fool to Phaeton's end, and set a world on fire.

FOOTNOTES:

[G] _Westminster Review_, 1853.

[H] 1. _Die poetischen Bücher des Alten Bundes._ Erklärt von Heinrich

Ewald. Göttingen: bei Vanderhoeck und Ruprecht. 1836.

2. _Kurz gefasstes exegetisches Handbuch zum Alten Testament._ Zweite

Lieferung. _Hiob._ Von Ludwig Hirzel. Zweite Auflage, durchgesehen von

Dr. Justus Olshausen. Leipzig. 1852.

3. _Quæstionum in Jobeidos locos vexatos Specimen._ Von D. Hermannus

Hupfeld. Halis Saxonum. 1853.

[I] Or rather by St. Jerome, whom our translators have followed.

[J] See Ewald on Job ix. 13, and xxvi. 14.

[K] An allusion, perhaps, to the old bird auguries. The birds, as the

inhabitants of the air, were supposed to be the messengers between

heaven and earth.

[L] The speech of Elihu, which lies between Job's last words and God's

appearance, is now decisively pronounced by Hebrew scholars not to be

genuine. The most superficial reader will have been perplexed by the

introduction of a speaker to whom no allusion is made, either in the

prologue or the epilogue; by a long dissertation, which adds nothing to

the progress of the argument, proceeding evidently on the false

hypothesis of the three friends, and betraying not the faintest

conception of the real cause of Job's sufferings. And the suspicions

which such an anomaly would naturally suggest, are now made certainties

by a fuller knowledge of the language, and the detection of a different

hand. The interpolator has unconsciously confessed the feeling which

allowed him to take so great a liberty. He, too, possessed with the old

Jew theory, was unable to accept in its fulness so great a contradiction

to it: and, missing the spirit of the poem, he believed that God's

honour could still be vindicated in the old way. 'His wrath was kindled'

against the friends, because they could not answer Job; and against Job,

because he would not be answered; and conceiving himself 'full of

matter,' and 'ready to burst like new bottles,' he could not contain

himself, and delivered into the text a sermon on the _Theodice_, such,

we suppose, as formed the current doctrine of the time in which he

lived.

[M] See the Thirteenth Article.

SPINOZA.[N]

_Benedicti de Spinoza Tractatus de Deo et Homine ejusque Felicitate

Lineamenta. Atque Annotationes ad Tractatum Theologico-Politicum._

Edidit et illustravit EDWARDUS BOEHMER. Halæ ad Salam. J. F. Lippert.

1852.

This little volume is one evidence among many of the interest which

continues to be felt by the German students in Spinoza. The actual merit

of the book itself is little or nothing; but it shows the industry with

which they are gleaning among the libraries of Holland for any traces of

him which they can recover; and the smallest fragments of his writings

are acquiring that factitious importance which attaches to the most

insignificant relics of acknowledged greatness. Such industry cannot be

otherwise than laudable, but we do not think it at present altogether

wisely directed. Nothing is likely to be brought to light which will

further illustrate Spinoza's philosophy. He himself spent the better

part of his life in clearing his language of ambiguities; and such

earlier sketches of his system as are supposed still to be extant in

MS., and a specimen of which M. Boehmer believes himself to have

discovered, contribute only obscurity to what is in no need of

additional difficulty. Of Spinoza's private history, on the contrary,

rich as it must have been, and abundant traces of it as must be extant

somewhere in his own and his friends' correspondence, we know only

enough to feel how vast a chasm remains to be filled. It is not often

that any man in this world lives a life so well worth writing as Spinoza

lived; not for striking incidents or large events connected with it, but

because (and no sympathy with his peculiar opinions disposes us to

exaggerate his merit) he was one of the very best men whom these modern

times have seen. Excommunicated, disinherited, and thrown upon the world

when a mere boy to seek his livelihood, he resisted the inducements

which on all sides were urged upon him to come forward in the world. He

refused pensions, legacies, money in many forms; he maintained himself

with grinding glasses for optical instruments, an art which he had been

taught in early life, and in which he excelled the best workmen in

Holland; and when he died, which was at the early age of forty-four, the

affection with which he was regarded showed itself singularly in the

endorsement of a tradesman's bill which was sent in to his executors, in

which he was described as M. Spinoza of 'blessed memory.'

The account which remains of him we owe, not to an admiring disciple,

but to a clergyman to whom his theories were detestable; and his

biographer allows that the most malignant scrutiny had failed to detect

a blemish in his character--that, except so far as his opinions were

blameable, he had lived to outward appearance free from fault. We

desire, in what we are going to say of him, to avoid offensive collision

with popular prejudices; still less shall we place ourselves in

antagonism with the earnest convictions of serious persons: our business

is to relate what Spinoza was, and leave others to form their own

conclusions. But one lesson there does seem to lie in such a life of

such a man,--a lesson which he taught equally by example and in

word,--that wherever there is genuine and thorough love for good and

goodness, no speculative superstructure of opinion can be so extravagant

as to forfeit those graces which are promised, not to clearness of

intellect, but to purity of heart. In Spinoza's own beautiful

language,--'Justitia et caritas unicum et certissimum veræ fidei

Catholicæ signum est, et veri Spiritûs Sancti fructus: et ubicumque hæc

reperiuntur, ibi Christus re verâ est, et ubicumque hæc desunt deest

Christus: solo namque Christi Spiritu duci possumus in amorem justitiæ

et caritatis.' We may deny his conclusions; we may consider his system

of thought preposterous and even pernicious; but we cannot refuse him

the respect which is the right of all sincere and honourable men.

Wherever and on whatever questions good men are found ranged on opposite

sides, one of three alternatives is always true:--either the points of

disagreement are purely speculative and of no moral importance--or

there is a misunderstanding of language, and the same thing is meant

under a difference of words--or else the real truth is something

different from what is held by any of the disputants, and each is

representing some important element which the others ignore or forget.

In either case, a certain calmness and good temper is necessary, if we

would understand what we disagree with, or would oppose it with success;

Spinoza's influence over European thought is too great to be denied or

set aside; and if his doctrines be false in part, or false altogether,

we cannot do their work more surely than by calumny or

misrepresentation--a most obvious truism, which no one now living will

deny in words, and which a century or two hence perhaps will begin to

produce some effect upon the popular judgment.

Bearing it in mind, then, ourselves, as far as we are able, we propose

to examine the Pantheistic philosophy in the first and only logical form

which as yet it has assumed. Whatever may have been the case with

Spinoza's disciples, in the author of this system there was no

unwillingness to look closely at it, or to follow it out to its

conclusions; and whatever other merits or demerits belong to him, at

least he has done as much as with language can be done to make himself

thoroughly understood.

And yet, both in friend and enemy alike, there has been a reluctance to

see Spinoza as he really was. The Herder and Schleiermacher school have

claimed him as a Christian--a position which no little disguise was

necessary to make tenable; the orthodox Protestants and Catholics have

called him an Atheist--which is still more extravagant; and even a man

like Novalis, who, it might have been expected, would have had something

reasonable to say, could find no better name for him than a _Gott

trunkner Mann_--a God intoxicated man: an expression which has been

quoted by everybody who has since written upon the subject, and which is

about as inapplicable as those laboriously pregnant sayings usually are.

With due allowance for exaggeration, such a name would describe

tolerably the Transcendental mystics, a Toler, a Boehmen, or a

Swedenborg; but with what justice can it be applied to the cautious,

methodical Spinoza, who carried his thoughts about with him for twenty

years, deliberately shaping them, and who gave them at last to the world

in a form more severe than with such subjects had ever been so much as

attempted before? With him, as with all great men, there was no effort

after sublime emotions. He was a plain, practical person; his object in

philosophy was only to find a rule by which to govern his own actions

and his own judgment; and his treatises contain no more than the

conclusions at which he arrived in this purely personal search, with the

grounds on which he rested them.

We cannot do better than follow his own account of himself as he has

given it in the opening of his unfinished Tract, 'De Emendatione

Intellectûs.' His language is very beautiful, but it is elaborate and

full; and, as we have a long journey before us, we must be content to

epitomise it.

Looking round him on his entrance into life, and asking himself what was

his place and business there, he turned for examples to his fellow-men,

and found little that he could venture to imitate. He observed them all

in their several ways governing themselves by their different notions of

what they thought desirable; while these notions themselves were resting

on no more secure foundation than a vague, inconsistent experience: the

experience of one was not the experience of another, and thus men were

all, so to say, rather playing experiments with life than living, and

the larger portion of them miserably failing. Their mistakes arose, as

it seemed to Spinoza, from inadequate knowledge; things which at one

time looked desirable, disappointed expectation when obtained, and the

wiser course concealed itself often under an uninviting exterior. He

desired to substitute certainty for conjecture, and to endeavour to

find, by some surer method, where the real good of man actually lay. We

must remember that he had been brought up a Jew, and had been driven out

of the Jews' communion; his mind was therefore in contact with the bare

facts of life, with no creed or system lying between them and himself as

the interpreter of experience. He was thrown on his own resources to

find his way for himself, and the question was, how to find it. Of all

forms of human thought, one only, he reflected, would admit of the

certainty which he required. If certain knowledge were attainable at

all, it must be looked for under the mathematical or demonstrative

method; by tracing from ideas clearly conceived the consequences which

were formally involved in them. What, then, were these ideas--these

_veræ ideæ_, as he calls them--and how were they to be obtained? If

they were to serve as the axioms of his system, they must be

self-evident truths, of which no proof was required; and the

illustration which he gives of the character of such ideas is ingenious

and Platonic.

In order to produce any mechanical instrument, Spinoza says, we require

others with which to manufacture it; and others again to manufacture

those; and it would seem thus as if the process must be an infinite one,

and as if nothing could ever be made at all. Nature, however, has

provided for the difficulty in creating of her own accord certain rude

instruments, with the help of which we can make others better; and

others again with the help of those. And so he thinks it must be with

the mind; there must be somewhere similar original instruments provided

also as the first outfit of intellectual enterprise. To discover these,

he examines the various senses in which men are said to know anything,

and he finds that they resolve themselves into three, or, as he

elsewhere divides it, four.

We know a thing--

1. i. _Ex mero auditu_: because we have heard it from some

person or persons whose veracity we have no reason to

question.

ii. _Ab experientiâ vagâ_: from general experience: for

instance, all facts or phenomena which come to us through

our senses as phenomena, but of the causes of which we

are ignorant.

2. We know a thing as we have correctly conceived the laws

of its phenomena, and see them following in their

sequence in the order of nature.

3. Finally, we know a thing, _ex scientiâ intuitivâ_, which

alone is absolutely clear and certain.

To illustrate these divisions, suppose it be required to find a fourth

proportional which shall stand to the third of three numbers as the

second does to the first. The merchant's clerk knows his rule; he

multiplies the second into the third and divides by the first. He

neither knows nor cares to know why the result is the number which he

seeks, but he has learnt the fact that it is so, and he remembers it.

A person a little wiser has tried the experiment in a variety of simple

cases; he has discovered the rule by induction, but still does not

understand it.

A third has mastered the laws of proportion mathematically, as he has

found them in Euclid or other geometrical treatise.

A fourth, with the plain numbers of 1, 2, and 3, sees for himself by

simple intuitive force that 1:2=3:6.

Of these several kinds of knowledge the third and fourth alone deserve

to be called knowledge, the others being no more than opinions more or

less justly founded. The last is the only real insight, although the

third, being exact in its form, may be depended upon as a basis of

certainty. Under this last, as Spinoza allows, nothing except the very

simplest truths, _non nisi simplicissimæ veritates_, can be perceived;

but, such as they are, they are the foundation of all after-science; and

the true ideas, the _veræ ideæ_, which are apprehended by this faculty

of intuition, are the primitive instruments with which nature has

furnished us. If we ask for a test by which to distinguish them, he has

none to give us. 'Veritas,' he says to his friends, in answer to their

question, 'veritas index sui est et falsi. Veritas se ipsam patefacit.'

All original truths are of such a kind that they cannot without

absurdity even be conceived to be false; the opposites of them are

contradictions in terms.--'Ut sciam me scire, necessario debeo prius

scire. Hinc patet quod certitudo nihil est præter ipsam essentiam

objectivam.... Cum itaque veritas nullo egeat signo, sed sufficiat

habere essentiam rerum objectivam, aut quod idem est ideas, ut omne

tollatur dubium; hinc sequitur quod vera non est methodus, signum

veritatis quærere post acquisitionem idearum; sed quod vera methodus est

via, ut ipsa veritas, aut essentiæ objectivæ rerum, aut ideæ (omnia illa

idem significant) debito ordine quærantur.' (_De Emend. Intell._)

Spinoza will scarcely carry with him the reasoner of the nineteenth

century in arguments like these. When we remember the thousand

conflicting opinions, the truth of which their several advocates have as

little doubted as they have doubted their own existence, we require some

better evidence than a mere feeling of certainty; and Aristotle's less

pretending canon promises a safer road. [Greek: Ho pasi dokei], 'what all

men think,' says Aristotle, [Greek: touto einai phamen] 'this we say

_is_,'--'and if you will not have this to be a fair ground of

conviction, you will scarcely find one which will serve you better.' We

are to see, however, what these _ideæ_ are which are offered to us as

self-evident. Of course, if they are self-evident, if they do produce

conviction, nothing more is to be said; but it does, indeed, appear

strange to us that Spinoza was not staggered as to the validity of his

canon, when his friends, everyone of them, so floundered and stumbled

among what he regarded as his simplest propositions; when he found them,

in spite of all that he could say, requiring endless _signa veritatis_,

and unable for a long time even to understand their meaning, far less to

'recognise them as elementary certainties.' Modern readers may, perhaps,

be more fortunate. We produce at length the definitions and axioms of

the first book of the 'Ethica,' and they may judge for themselves:--

DEFINITIONS.

1. By a thing which is _causa sui_, its own cause, I mean a thing

the essence of which involves the existence of it, or a thing which

cannot be conceived except as existing.

2. I call a thing finite, _suo genere_, when it can be limited by

another (or others) of the same nature--_e.g._ a given body is

called finite, because we can always conceive another body

enveloping it; but body is not limited by thought, nor thought by

body.

3. By substance I mean what exists in itself and is conceived by

itself; the conception of which, that is, does not involve the

conception of anything else as the cause of it.

4. By attribute I mean whatever the intellect perceives of substance

as constituting the essence of substance.

5. Mode is an affection of substance, or is that which is in

something else, by and through which it is conceived.

6. God is a being absolutely infinite; a substance consisting of

infinite attributes, each of which expresses his eternal and

infinite essence.

EXPLANATION.

I say _absolutely_ infinite, not infinite _suo genere_--for of what

is infinite _suo genere_ only, the attributes are not infinite but

finite; whereas what is infinite absolutely contains in its own

essence everything by which substance can be expressed, and which

involves no impossibility.

7. That thing is 'free' which exists by the sole necessity of its

own nature, and is determined in its operation by itself only. That

is 'not free' which is called into existence by something else, and

is determined in its operation according to a fixed and definite