There is a valuable class of books on great subjects which have something
of the character and functions of good popular lecturing. They are not
original, not subtle, not of close logical texture, not exquisite either
in thought or style; but by virtue of these negatives they are all the
more fit to act on the average intelligence. They have enough of
organizing purpose in them to make their facts illustrative, and to leave
a distinct result in the mind even when most of the facts are forgotten;
and they have enough of vagueness and vacillation in their theory to win
them ready acceptance from a mixed audience. The vagueness and
vacillation are not devices of timidity; they are the honest result of
the writer’s own mental character, which adapts him to be the instructor
and the favorite of “the general reader.” For the most part, the general
reader of the present day does not exactly know what distance he goes; he
only knows that he does not go “too far.” Of any remarkable thinker,
whose writings have excited controversy, he likes to have it said that
“his errors are to be deplored,” leaving it not too certain what those
errors are; he is fond of what may be called disembodied opinions, that
float in vapory phrases above all systems of thought or action; he likes
an undefined Christianity which opposes itself to nothing in particular,
an undefined education of the people, an undefined amelioration of all
things: in fact, he likes sound views—nothing extreme, but something
between the excesses of the past and the excesses of the present. This
modern type of the general reader may be known in conversation by the
cordiality with which he assents to indistinct, blurred statements: say
that black is black, he will shake his head and hardly think it; say that
black is not so very black, he will reply, “Exactly.” He has no
hesitation, if you wish it, even to get up at a public meeting and
express his conviction that at times, and within certain limits, the
radii of a circle have a tendency to be equal; but, on the other hand, he
would urge that the spirit of geometry may be carried a little too far.
His only bigotry is a bigotry against any clearly defined opinion; not in
the least based on a scientific scepticism, but belonging to a lack of
coherent thought—a spongy texture of mind, that gravitates strongly to
nothing. The one thing he is staunch for is, the utmost liberty of
private haziness.
But precisely these characteristics of the general reader, rendering him
incapable of assimilating ideas unless they are administered in a highly
diluted form, make it a matter of rejoicing that there are clever,
fair-minded men, who will write books for him—men very much above him in
knowledge and ability, but not too remote from him in their habits of
thinking, and who can thus prepare for him infusions of history and
science that will leave some solidifying deposit, and save him from a
fatal softening of the intellectual skeleton. Among such serviceable
writers, Mr. Lecky’s “History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of
Rationalism in Europe” entitles him to a high place. He has prepared
himself for its production by an unusual amount of well-directed reading;
he has chosen his facts and quotations with much judgment; and he gives
proof of those important moral qualifications, impartiality, seriousness,
and modesty. This praise is chiefly applicable to the long chapter on
the history of Magic and Witchcraft, which opens the work, and to the two
chapters on the antecedents and history of Persecution, which occur, the
one at the end of the first volume, the other at the beginning of the
second. In these chapters Mr. Lecky has a narrower and better-traced
path before him than in other portions of his work; he is more occupied
with presenting a particular class of facts in their historical sequence,
and in their relation to certain grand tide-marks of opinion, than with
disquisition; and his writing is freer than elsewhere from an apparent
confusedness of thought and an exuberance of approximative phrases, which
can be serviceable in no other way than as diluents needful for the sort
of reader we have just described.
The history of magic and witchcraft has been judiciously chosen by Mr.
Lecky as the subject of his first section on the Declining Sense of the
Miraculous, because it is strikingly illustrative of a position with the
truth of which he is strongly impressed, though he does not always treat
of it with desirable clearness and precision, namely, that certain
beliefs become obsolete, not in consequence of direct arguments against
them, but because of their incongruity with prevalent habits of thought.
Here is his statement of the two “classes of influences” by which the
mass of men, in what is called civilized society, get their beliefs
gradually modified:
“If we ask why it is that the world has rejected what was once so
universally and so intensely believed, why a narrative of an old
woman who had been seen riding on a broomstick, or who was proved to
have transformed herself into a wolf, and to have devoured the flocks
of her neighbors, is deemed so entirely incredible, most persons
would probably be unable to give a very definite answer to the
question. It is not because we have examined the evidence and found
it insufficient, for the disbelief always precedes, when it does not
prevent, examination. It is rather because the idea of absurdity is
so strongly attached to such narratives, that it is difficult even to
consider them with gravity. Yet at one time no such improbability
was felt, and hundreds of persons have been burnt simply on the two
grounds I have mentioned.
“When so complete a change takes place in public opinion, it may be
ascribed to one or other of two causes. It may be the result of a
controversy which has conclusively settled the question, establishing
to the satisfaction of all parties a clear preponderance of argument
or fact in favor of one opinion, and making that opinion a truism
which is accepted by all enlightened men, even though they have not
themselves examined the evidence on which it rests. Thus, if any one
in a company of ordinarily educated persons were to deny the motion
of the earth, or the circulation of the blood, his statement would be
received with derision, though it is probable that some of his
audience would be unable to demonstrate the first truth, and that
very few of them could give sufficient reasons for the second. They
may not themselves be able to defend their position; but they are
aware that, at certain known periods of history, controversies on
those subjects took place, and that known writers then brought
forward some definite arguments or experiments, which were ultimately
accepted by the whole learned world as rigid and conclusive
demonstrations. It is possible, also, for as complete a change to be
effected by what is called the spirit of the age. The general
intellectual tendencies pervading the literature of a century
profoundly modify the character of the public mind. They form a new
tone and habit of thought. They alter the measure of probability.
They create new attractions and new antipathies, and they eventually
cause as absolute a rejection of certain old opinions as could be
produced by the most cogent and definite arguments.”
Mr. Lecky proceeds to some questionable views concerning the evidences of
witchcraft, which seem to be irreconcilable even with his own remarks
later on; but they lead him to the statement, thoroughly made out by his
historical survey, that “movement was mainly silent, unargumentative, and
insensible; that men came gradually to disbelieve in witchcraft, because
they came gradually to look upon it as absurd; and that this new tone of
thought appeared, first of all, in those who were least subject to
theological influences, and soon spread through the educated laity, and,
last of all, took possession of the clergy.”
We have rather painful proof that this “second class of influences,” with
a vast number go hardly deeper than Fashion, and that witchcraft to many
of us is absurd only on the same ground that our grandfathers’ gigs are
absurd. It is felt preposterous to think of spiritual agencies in
connection with ragged beldames soaring on broomsticks, in an age when it
is known that mediums of communication with the invisible world are
usually unctuous personages dressed in excellent broadcloth, who soar
above the curtain-poles without any broomstick, and who are not given to
unprofitable intrigues. The enlightened imagination rejects the figure
of a witch with her profile in dark relief against the moon and her
broomstick cutting a constellation. No undiscovered natural laws, no
names of “respectable” witnesses, are invoked to make us feel our
presumption in questioning the diabolic intimacies of that obsolete old
woman, for it is known now that the undiscovered laws, and the witnesses
qualified by the payment of income tax, are all in favor of a different
conception—the image of a heavy gentleman in boots and black coat-tails
foreshortened against the cornice. Yet no less a person than Sir Thomas
Browne once wrote that those who denied there were witches, inasmuch as
they thereby denied spirits also, were “obliquely and upon consequence a
sort, not of infidels, but of atheists.” At present, doubtless, in
certain circles, unbelievers in heavy gentlemen who float in the air by
means of undiscovered laws are also taxed with atheism; illiberal as it
is not to admit that mere weakness of understanding may prevent one from
seeing how that phenomenon is necessarily involved in the Divine origin
of things. With still more remarkable parallelism, Sir Thomas Browne
goes on: “Those that, to refute their incredulity, desire to see
apparitions, shall questionless never behold any, nor have the power to
be so much as witches. The devil hath made them already in a heresy as
capital as witchcraft, _and to appear to them were but to convert them_.”
It would be difficult to see what has been changed here, but the mere
drapery of circumstance, if it were not for this prominent difference
between our own days and the days of witchcraft, that instead of
torturing, drowning, or burning the innocent, we give hospitality and
large pay to—the highly distinguished medium. At least we are safely rid
of certain horrors; but if the multitude—that “farraginous concurrence of
all conditions, tempers, sexes, and ages”—do not roll back even to a
superstition that carries cruelty in its train, it is not because they
possess a cultivated reason, but because they are pressed upon and held
up by what we may call an external reason—the sum of conditions resulting
from the laws of material growth, from changes produced by great
historical collisions shattering the structures of ages and making new
highways for events and ideas, and from the activities of higher minds no
longer existing merely as opinions and teaching, but as institutions and
organizations with which the interests, the affections, and the habits of
the multitude are inextricably interwoven. No undiscovered laws
accounting for small phenomena going forward under drawing-room tables
are likely to affect the tremendous facts of the increase of population,
the rejection of convicts by our colonies, the exhaustion of the soil by
cotton plantations, which urge even upon the foolish certain questions,
certain claims, certain views concerning the scheme of the world, that
can never again be silenced. If right reason is a right representation
of the co-existence and sequences of things, here are co-existences and
sequences that do not wait to be discovered, but press themselves upon us
like bars of iron. No séances at a guinea a head for the sake of being
pinched by “Mary Jane” can annihilate railways, steamships, and electric
telegraphs, which are demonstrating the interdependence of all human
interests, and making self-interest a duct for sympathy. These things
are part of the external Reason to which internal silliness has
inevitably to accommodate itself.
Three points in the history of magic and witchcraft are well brought out
by Mr. Lecky. First, that the cruelties connected with it did not begin
until men’s minds had ceased to repose implicitly in a sacramental system
which made them feel well armed against evil spirits; that is, until the
eleventh century, when there came a sort of morning dream of doubt and
heresy, bringing on the one side the terror of timid consciences, and on
the other the terrorism of authority or zeal bent on checking the rising
struggle. In that time of comparative mental repose, says Mr. Lecky,
“All those conceptions of diabolical presence; all that
predisposition toward the miraculous, which acted so fearfully upon
the imaginations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, existed;
but the implicit faith, the boundless and triumphant credulity with
which the virtue of ecclesiastical rites was accepted, rendered them
comparatively innocuous. If men had been a little less
superstitious, the effects of their superstition would have been much
more terrible. It was firmly believed that any one who deviated from
the strict line of orthodoxy must soon succumb beneath the power of
Satan; but as there was no spirit of rebellion or doubt, this
persuasion did not produce any extraordinary terrorism.”
The Church was disposed to confound heretical opinion with sorcery; false
doctrine was especially the devil’s work, and it was a ready conclusion
that a denier or innovator had held consultation with the father of lies.
It is a saying of a zealous Catholic in the sixteenth century, quoted by
Maury in his excellent work, “De la Magie”—“_Crescit cum magia hæresis_,
_cum hæresi magia_.” Even those who doubted were terrified at their
doubts, for trust is more easily undermined than terror. Fear is earlier
born than hope, lays a stronger grasp on man’s system than any other
passion, and remains master of a larger group of involuntary actions. A
chief aspect of man’s moral development is the slow subduing of fear by
the gradual growth of intelligence, and its suppression as a motive by
the presence of impulses less animally selfish; so that in relation to
invisible Power, fear at last ceases to exist, save in that interfusion
with higher faculties which we call awe.
Secondly, Mr. Lecky shows clearly that dogmatic Protestantism, holding
the vivid belief in Satanic agency to be an essential of piety, would
have felt it shame to be a whit behind Catholicism in severity against
the devil’s servants. Luther’s sentiment was that he would not suffer a
witch to live (he was not much more merciful to Jews); and, in spite of
his fondness for children, believing a certain child to have been
begotten by the devil, he recommended the parents to throw it into the
river. The torch must be turned on the worst errors of heroic minds—not
in irreverent ingratitude, but for the sake of measuring our vast and
various debt to all the influences which have concurred, in the
intervening ages, to make us recognize as detestable errors the honest
convictions of men who, in mere individual capacity and moral force, were
very much above us. Again, the Scotch Puritans, during the comparatively
short period of their ascendency, surpassed all Christians before them in
the elaborate ingenuity of the tortures they applied for the discovery of
witchcraft and sorcery, and did their utmost to prove that if Scotch
Calvinism was the true religion, the chief “note” of the true religion
was cruelty. It is hardly an endurable task to read the story of their
doings; thoroughly to imagine them as a past reality is already a sort of
torture. One detail is enough, and it is a comparatively mild one. It
was the regular profession of men called “prickers” to thrust long pins
into the body of a suspected witch in order to detect the insensible spot
which was the infallible sign of her guilt. On a superficial view one
would be in danger of saying that the main difference between the
teachers who sanctioned these things and the much-despised ancestors who
offered human victims inside a huge wicker idol, was that they arrived at
a more elaborate barbarity by a longer series of dependent propositions.
We do not share Mr. Buckle’s opinion that a Scotch minister’s groans were
a part of his deliberate plan for keeping the people in a state of
terrified subjection; the ministers themselves held the belief they
taught, and might well groan over it. What a blessing has a little false
logic been to the world! Seeing that men are so slow to question their
premises, they must have made each other much more miserable, if pity had
not sometimes drawn tender conclusions not warranted by Major and Minor;
if there had not been people with an amiable imbecility of reasoning
which enabled them at once to cling to hideous beliefs, and to be
conscientiously inconsistent with them in their conduct. There is
nothing like acute deductive reasoning for keeping a man in the dark: it
might be called the _technique_ of the intellect, and the concentration
of the mind upon it corresponds to that predominance of technical skill
in art which ends in degradation of the artist’s function, unless new
inspiration and invention come to guide it.
And of this there is some good illustration furnished by that third node
in the history of witchcraft, the beginning of its end, which is treated
in an interesting manner by Mr. Lecky. It is worth noticing, that the
most important defences of the belief in witchcraft, against the growing
scepticism in the latter part of the sixteenth century and in the
seventeenth, were the productions of men who in some departments were
among the foremost thinkers of their time. One of them was Jean Bodin,
the famous writer on government and jurisprudence, whose “Republic,”
Hallam thinks, had an important influence in England, and furnished “a
store of arguments and examples that were not lost on the thoughtful
minds of our countrymen.” In some of his views he was original and bold;
for example, he anticipated Montesquieu in attempting to appreciate the
relations of government and climate. Hallam inclines to the opinion that
he was a Jew, and attached Divine authority only to the Old Testament.
But this was enough to furnish him with his chief data for the existence
of witches and for their capital punishment; and in the account of his
“Republic,” given by Hallam, there is enough evidence that the sagacity
which often enabled him to make fine use of his learning was also often
entangled in it, to temper our surprise at finding a writer on political
science of whom it could be said that, along with Montesquieu, he was
“the most philosophical of those who had read so deeply, the most learned
of those who had thought so much,” in the van of the forlorn hope to
maintain the reality of witchcraft. It should be said that he was
equally confident of the unreality of the Copernican hypothesis, on the
ground that it was contrary to the tenets of the theologians and
philosophers and to common-sense, and therefore subversive of the
foundations of every science. Of his work on witchcraft, Mr. Lecky says:
“The ‘Démonomanie des Sorciers’ is chiefly an appeal to authority,
which the author deemed on this subject so unanimous and so
conclusive, that it was scarcely possible for any sane man to resist
it. He appealed to the popular belief in all countries, in all ages,
and in all religions. He cited the opinions of an immense multitude
of the greatest writers of pagan antiquity, and of the most
illustrious of the Fathers. He showed how the laws of all nations
recognized the existence of witchcraft; and he collected hundreds of
cases which had been investigated before the tribunals of his own or
of other countries. He relates with the most minute and
circumstantial detail, and with the most unfaltering confidence, all
the proceedings at the witches’ Sabbath, the methods which the
witches employed in transporting themselves through the air, their
transformations, their carnal intercourse with the devil, their
various means of injuring their enemies, the signs that lead to their
detection, their confessions when condemned, and their demeanor at
the stake.”
Something must be allowed for a lawyer’s affection toward a belief which
had furnished so many “cases.” Bodin’s work had been immediately
prompted by the treatise “De Prestigiis Dænionum,” written by John Wier,
a German physician, a treatise which is worth notice as an example of a
transitional form of opinion for which many analogies may be found in the
history both of religion and science. Wier believed in demons, and in
possession by demons, but his practice as a physician had convinced him
that the so-called witches were patients and victims, that the devil took
advantage of their diseased condition to delude them, and that there was
no consent of an evil will on the part of the women. He argued that the
word in Leviticus translated “witch” meant “poisoner,” and besought the
princes of Europe to hinder the further spilling of innocent blood.
These heresies of Wier threw Bodin into such a state of amazed
indignation that if he had been an ancient Jew instead of a modern
economical one, he would have rent his garments. “No one had ever heard
of pardon being accorded to sorcerers;” and probably the reason why
Charles IX. died young was because he had pardoned the sorcerer, Trios
Echelles! We must remember that this was in 1581, when the great
scientific movement of the Renaissance had hardly begun—when Galileo was
a youth of seventeen, and Kepler a boy of ten.
But directly afterward, on the other side, came Montaigne, whose
sceptical acuteness could arrive at negatives without any apparatus of
method. A certain keen narrowness of nature will secure a man from many
absurd beliefs which the larger soul, vibrating to more manifold
influences, would have a long struggle to part with. And so we find the
charming, chatty Montaigne—in one of the brightest of his essays, “Des
Boiteux,” where he declares that, from his own observation of witches and
sorcerers, he should have recommended them to be treated with curative
hellebore—stating in his own way a pregnant doctrine, since taught more
gravely. It seems to him much less of a prodigy that men should lie, or
that their imaginations should deceive them, than that a human body
should be carried through the air on a broomstick, or up a chimney by
some unknown spirit. He thinks it a sad business to persuade oneself
that the test of truth lies in the multitude of believers—“en une prosse
où les fols surpassent de tant les sages en nombre.” Ordinarily, he has
observed, when men have something stated to them as a fact, they are more
ready to explain it than to inquire whether it is real: “ils passent
pardessus les propositions, mais ils examinent les conséquences; _ils
laissent les choses_, _et courent aux causes_.” There is a sort of
strong and generous ignorance which is as honorable and courageous as
science—“ignorance pour laquelle concevoir il n’y a pas moins de science
qu’à concevoir la science.” And _à propos_ of the immense traditional
evidence which weighed with such men as Bodin, he says—“As for the proofs
and arguments founded on experience and facts, I do not pretend to
unravel these. What end of a thread is there to lay hold of? I often
cut them as Alexander did his knot. _Après tout_, _c’est mettre ses
conjectures â bien haut prix_, _que d’en faire cuire un homme tout dif_.”
Writing like this, when it finds eager readers, is a sign that the
weather is changing; yet much later, namely, after 1665, when the Royal
Society had been founded, our own Glanvil, the author of the “Scepsis
Scientifica,” a work that was a remarkable advance toward the true
definition of the limits of inquiry, and that won him his election as
fellow of the society, published an energetic vindication of the belief
in witchcraft, of which Mr. Lecky gives the following sketch:
“The ‘Sadducismus Triumphatus,’ which is probably the ablest book
ever published in defence of the superstition, opens with a striking
picture of the rapid progress of the scepticism in England.
Everywhere, a disbelief in witchcraft was becoming fashionable in the
upper classes; but it was a disbelief that arose entirely from a
strong sense of its antecedent improbability. All who were opposed
to the orthodox faith united in discrediting witchcraft. They
laughed at it, as palpably absurd, as involving the most grotesque
and ludicrous conceptions, as so essentially incredible that it would
be a waste of time to examine it. This spirit had arisen since the
Restoration, although the laws were still in force, and although
little or no direct reasoning had been brought to bear upon the
subject. In order to combat it, Glanvil proceeded to examine the
general question of the credibility of the miraculous. He saw that
the reason why witchcraft was ridiculed was, because it was a phase
of the miraculous and the work of the devil; that the scepticism was
chiefly due to those who disbelieved in miracles and the devil; and
that the instances of witchcraft or possession in the Bible were
invariably placed on a level with those that were tried in the law
courts of England. That the evidence of the belief was overwhelming,
he firmly believed; and this, indeed, was scarcely disputed; but,
until the sense of _à priori_ improbability was removed, no possible
accumulation of facts would cause men to believe it. To that task he
accordingly addressed himself. Anticipating the idea and almost the
words of modern controversialists, he urged that there was such a
thing as a credulity of unbelief; and that those who believed so
strange a concurrence of delusions, as was necessary on the
supposition of the unreality of witchcraft, were far more credulous
than those who accepted the belief. He made his very scepticism his
principal weapon; and, analyzing with much acuteness the _à priori_
objections, he showed that they rested upon an unwarrantable
confidence in our knowledge of the laws of the spirit world; that
they implied the existence of some strict analogy between the
faculties of men and of spirits; and that, as such analogy most
probably did not exist, no reasoning based on the supposition could
dispense men from examining the evidence. He concluded with a large
collection of cases, the evidence of which was, as he thought,
incontestable.”
We have quoted this sketch because Glanvil’s argument against the _à
priori_ objection of absurdity is fatiguingly urged in relation to other
alleged marvels which, to busy people seriously occupied with the
difficulties of affairs, of science, or of art, seem as little worthy of
examination as aëronautic broomsticks. And also because we here see
Glanvil, in combating an incredulity that does not happen to be his own,
wielding that very argument of traditional evidence which he had made the
subject of vigorous attack in his “Scepsis Scientifica.” But perhaps
large minds have been peculiarly liable to this fluctuation concerning
the sphere of tradition, because, while they have attacked its
misapplications, they have been the more solicited by the vague sense
that tradition is really the basis of our best life. Our sentiments may
be called organized traditions; and a large part of our actions gather
all their justification, all their attraction and aroma, from the memory
of the life lived, of the actions done, before we were born. In the
absence of any profound research into psychological functions or into the
mysteries of inheritance, in the absence of any comprehensive view of
man’s historical development and the dependence of one age on another, a
mind at all rich in sensibilities must always have had an indefinite
uneasiness in an undistinguishing attack on the coercive influence of
tradition. And this may be the apology for the apparent inconsistency of
Glanvil’s acute criticism on the one side, and his indignation at the
“looser gentry,” who laughed at the evidences for witchcraft on the
other. We have already taken up too much space with this subject of
witchcraft, else we should be tempted to dwell on Sir Thomas Browne, who
far surpassed Glanvil in magnificent incongruity of opinion, and whose
works are the most remarkable combination existing, of witty sarcasm
against ancient nonsense and modern obsequiousness, with indications of a
capacious credulity. After all, we may be sharing what seems to us the
hardness of these men, who sat in their studies and argued at their ease
about a belief that would be reckoned to have caused more misery and
bloodshed than any other superstition, if there had been no such thing as
persecution on the ground of religious opinion.
On this subject of Persecution, Mr. Lecky writes his best: with clearness
of conception, with calm justice, bent on appreciating the necessary
tendency of ideas, and with an appropriateness of illustration that could
be supplied only by extensive and intelligent reading. Persecution, he
shows, is not in any sense peculiar to the Catholic Church; it is a
direct sequence of the doctrines that salvation is to be had only within
the Church, and that erroneous belief is damnatory—doctrines held as
fully by Protestant sects as by the Catholics; and in proportion to its
power, Protestantism has been as persecuting as Catholicism. He
maintains, in opposition to the favorite modern notion of persecution
defeating its own object, that the Church, holding the dogma of exclusive
salvation, was perfectly consequent, and really achieved its end of
spreading one belief and quenching another, by calling in the aid of the
civil arm. Who will say that governments, by their power over
institutions and patronage, as well as over punishment, have not power
also over the interests and inclinations of men, and over most of those
external conditions into which subjects are born, and which make them
adopt the prevalent belief as a second nature? Hence, to a sincere
believer in the doctrine of exclusive salvation, governments had it in
their power to save men from perdition; and wherever the clergy were at
the elbow of the civil arm, no matter whether they were Catholic or
Protestant, persecution was the result. “Compel them to come in” was a
rule that seemed sanctioned by mercy, and the horrible sufferings it led
men to inflict seemed small to minds accustomed to contemplate, as a
perpetual source of motive, the eternal unmitigated miseries of a hell
that was the inevitable destination of a majority among mankind.
It is a significant fact, noted by Mr. Lecky, that the only two leaders
of the Reformation who advocated tolerance were Zuinglius and Socinus,
both of them disbelievers in exclusive salvation. And in corroboration
of other evidence that the chief triumphs of the Reformation were due to
coercion, he commends to the special attention of his readers the
following quotation from a work attributed without question to the famous
Protestant theologian, Jurieu, who had himself been hindered, as a
Protestant, from exercising his professional functions in France, and was
settled as pastor at Rotterdam. It should be remembered that Jurieu’s
labors fell in the latter part of the seventeenth century and in the
beginning of the eighteenth, and that he was the contemporary of Bayle,
with whom he was in bitter controversial hostility. He wrote, then, at a
time when there was warm debate on the question of Toleration; and it was
his great object to vindicate himself and his French fellow-Protestants
from all laxity on this point.
“Peut on nier que le panganisme est tombé dans le monde par
l’autorité des empereurs Romains? On peut assurer sans temerité que
le paganisme seroit encore debout, et que les trois quarts de
l’Europe seroient encore payens si Constantin et ses successeurs
n’avaient employé leur autorité pour l’abolir. Mais, je vous prie,
de quelles voies Dieu s’est il servi dans ces derniers siècles pour
rétablir la veritable religion dans l’Occident? _Les rois de Suède_,
_ceux de Danemarck_, _ceux d’Angleterre_, _les magistrats souverains
de Suisse_, _des Païs Bas_, _des villes livres d’Allemagne_, _les
princes électeurs_, _et autres princes souverains de l’empire_,
_n’ont ils pas emploié leur autorité pour abbattre le Papisme_?”
Indeed, wherever the tremendous alternative of everlasting torments is
believed in—believed in so that it becomes a motive determining the
life—not only persecution, but every other form of severity and gloom are
the legitimate consequences. There is much ready declamation in these
days against the spirit of asceticism and against zeal for doctrinal
conversion; but surely the macerated form of a Saint Francis, the fierce
denunciations of a Saint Dominic, the groans and prayerful wrestlings of
the Puritan who seasoned his bread with tears and made all pleasurable
sensation sin, are more in keeping with the contemplation of unending
anguish as the destiny of a vast multitude whose nature we share, than
the rubicund cheerfulness of some modern divines, who profess to unite a
smiling liberalism with a well-bred and tacit but unshaken confidence in
the reality of the bottomless pit. But, in fact, as Mr. Lecky maintains,
that awful image, with its group of associated dogmas concerning the
inherited curse, and the damnation of unbaptized infants, of heathens,
and of heretics, has passed away from what he is fond of calling “the
realizations” of Christendom. These things are no longer the objects of
practical belief. They may be mourned for in encyclical letters; bishops
may regret them; doctors of divinity may sign testimonials to the
excellent character of these decayed beliefs; but for the mass of
Christians they are no more influential than unrepealed but forgotten
statutes. And with these dogmas has melted away the strong basis for the
defence of persecution. No man now writes eager vindications of himself
and his colleagues from the suspicion of adhering to the principle of
toleration. And this momentous change, it is Mr. Lecky’s object to show,
is due to that concurrence of conditions which he has chosen to call “the
advance of the Spirit of Rationalism.”
In other parts of his work, where he attempts to trace the action of the
same conditions on the acceptance of miracles and on other chief phases
of our historical development, Mr. Lecky has laid himself open to
considerable criticism. The chapters on the “Miracles of the Church,”
the æsthetic, scientific, and moral development of Rationalism, the
Secularization of Politics, and the Industrial History of Rationalism,
embrace a wide range of diligently gathered facts; but they are nowhere
illuminated by a sufficiently clear conception and statement of the
agencies at work, or the mode of their action, in the gradual
modification of opinion and of life. The writer frequently impresses us
as being in a state of hesitation concerning his own standing-point,
which may form a desirable stage in private meditation but not in
published exposition. Certain epochs in theoretic conception, certain
considerations, which should be fundamental to his survey, are introduced
quite incidentally in a sentence or two, or in a note which seems to be
an afterthought. Great writers and their ideas are touched upon too
slightly and with too little discrimination, and important theories are
sometimes characterized with a rashness which conscientious revision will
correct. There is a fatiguing use of vague or shifting phrases, such as
“modern civilization,” “spirit of the age,” “tone of thought,”
“intellectual type of the age,” “bias of the imagination,” “habits of
religious thought,” unbalanced by any precise definition; and the spirit
of rationalism is sometimes treated of as if it lay outside the specific
mental activities of which it is a generalized expression. Mr. Curdle’s
famous definition of the dramatic unities as “a sort of a general
oneness,” is not totally false; but such luminousness as it has could
only be perceived by those who already knew what the unities were. Mr.
Lecky has the advantage of being strongly impressed with the great part
played by the emotions in the formation of opinion, and with the high
complexity of the causes at work in social evolution; but he frequently
writes as if he had never yet distinguished between the complexity of the
conditions that produce prevalent states of mind and the inability of
particular minds to give distinct reasons for the preferences or
persuasions produced by those states. In brief, he does not
discriminate, or does not help his reader to discriminate, between
objective complexity and subjective confusion. But the most
muddle-headed gentleman who represents the spirit of the age by
observing, as he settles his collar, that the development theory is quite
“the thing” is a result of definite processes, if we could only trace
them. “Mental attitudes,” and “predispositions,” however vague in
consciousness, have not vague causes, any more than the “blind motions of
the spring” in plants and animals.
The word “Rationalism” has the misfortune, shared by most words in this
gray world, of being somewhat equivocal. This evil may be nearly
overcome by careful preliminary definition; but Mr. Lecky does not supply
this, and the original specific application of the word to a particular
phase of biblical interpretation seems to have clung about his use of it
with a misleading effect. Through some parts of his book he appears to
regard the grand characteristic of modern thought and civilization,
compared with ancient, as a radiation in the first instance from a change
in religious conceptions. The supremely important fact, that the gradual
reduction of all phenomena within the sphere of established law, which
carries as a consequence the rejection of the miraculous, has its
determining current in the development of physical science, seems to have
engaged comparatively little of his attention; at least, he gives it no
prominence. The great conception of universal regular sequence, without
partiality and without caprice—the conception which is the most potent
force at work in the modification of our faith, and of the practical form
given to our sentiments—could only grow out of that patient watching of
external fact, and that silencing of preconceived notions, which are
urged upon the mind by the problems of physical science.
There is not room here to explain and justify the impressions of
dissatisfaction which have been briefly indicated, but a serious writer
like Mr. Lecky will not find such suggestions altogether useless. The
objections, even the misunderstandings, of a reader who is not careless
or ill-disposed, may serve to stimulate an author’s vigilance over his
thoughts as well as his style. It would be gratifying to see some future
proof that Mr. Lecky has acquired juster views than are implied in the
assertion that philosophers of the sensational school “can never rise to
the conception of the disinterested;” and that he has freed himself from
all temptation to that mingled laxity of statement and ill-pitched
elevation of tone which are painfully present in the closing pages of his
second volume.