The picture I have drawn of the inroads made in the first period of

asceticism upon the domestic affections, tells, I think, its own story,

and I shall only add a very few words of comment. That it is necessary for

many men who are pursuing a truly heroic course to break loose from the

trammels which those about them would cast over their actions or their

opinions, and that this severance often constitutes at once one of the

noblest and one of the most painful incidents in their career, are

unquestionable truths; but the examples of such occasional and exceptional

sacrifices, endured for some great unselfish end, cannot be compared with

the conduct of those who regarded the mortification of domestic love as in

itself a form of virtue, and whose ends were mainly or exclusively

selfish. The sufferings endured by the ascetic who fled from his relations

were often, no doubt, very great. Many anecdotes remain to show that warm

and affectionate hearts sometimes beat under the cold exterior of the

monk;(306) and St. Jerome, in one of his letters, remarked, with much

complacency and congratulation, that the very bitterest pang of captivity

is simply this irrevocable separation which the superstition he preached

induced multitudes to inflict upon themselves. But if, putting aside the

intrinsic excellence of an act, we attempt to estimate the nobility of the

agent, we must consider not only the cost of what he did, but also the

motive which induced him to do it. It is this last consideration which

renders it impossible for us to place the heroism of the ascetic on the

same level with that of the great patriots of Greece or Rome. A man may be

as truly selfish about the next world as about this. Where an overpowering

dread of future torments, or an intense realisation of future happiness,

is the leading motive of action, the theological virtue of faith may be

present, but the ennobling quality of disinterestedness is assuredly

absent. In our day, when pictures of rewards and punishments beyond the

grave act but feebly upon the imagination, a religious motive is commonly

an unselfish motive; but it has not always been so, and it was undoubtedly

not so in the first period of asceticism. The terrors of a future judgment

drove the monk into the desert, and the whole tenor of the ascetic life,

while isolating him from human sympathies, fostered an intense, though it

may be termed a religious, selfishness.

The effect of the mortification of the domestic affections upon the

general character was probably very pernicious. The family circle is the

appointed sphere, not only for the performance of manifest duties, but

also for the cultivation of the affections; and the extreme ferocity which

so often characterised the ascetic was the natural consequence of the

discipline he imposed upon himself. Severed from all other ties, the monks

clung with a desperate tenacity to their opinions and to their Church, and

hated those who dissented from them with all the intensity of men whose

whole lives were concentrated on a single subject, whose ignorance and

bigotry prevented them from conceiving the possibility of any good thing

in opposition to themselves, and who had made it a main object of their

discipline to eradicate all natural sympathies and affections. We may

reasonably attribute to the fierce biographer the words of burning hatred

of all heretics which St. Athanasius puts in the mouth of the dying

patriarch of the hermits;(307) but ecclesiastical history, and especially

the writings of the later Pagans, abundantly prove that the sentiment was

a general one. To the Christian bishops it is mainly due that the wide and

general, though not perfect, recognition of religious liberty in the Roman

legislation was replaced by laws of the most minute and stringent

intolerance. To the monks, acting as the executive of an omnipresent,

intolerant, and aggressive clergy, is due an administrative change,

perhaps even more important than the legislative change that had preceded

it. The system of conniving at, neglecting, or despising forms of worship

that were formally prohibited, which had been so largely practised by the

sceptical Pagans, and under the lax police system of the Empire, and which

is so important a fact in the history of the rise of Christianity, was

absolutely destroyed. Wandering in bands through the country, the monks

were accustomed to burn the temples, to break the idols, to overthrow the

altars, to engage in fierce conflicts with the peasants, who often

defended with desperate courage the shrines of their gods. It would be

impossible to conceive men more fitted for the task. Their fierce

fanaticism, their persuasion that every idol was tenanted by a literal

dæmon, and their belief that death incurred in this iconoclastic crusade

was a form of martyrdom, made them careless of all consequences to

themselves, while the reverence that attached to their profession rendered

it scarcely possible for the civil power to arrest them. Men who had

learnt to look with indifference on the tears of a broken-hearted mother,

and whose ideal was indissolubly connected with the degradation of the

body, were but little likely to be moved either by the pathos of old

associations, and of reverent, though mistaken, worship, or by the

grandeur of the Serapeum, or of the noble statues of Phidias and

Praxiteles. Sometimes the civil power ordered the reconstruction of Jewish

synagogues or heretical churches which had been illegally destroyed; but

the doctrine was early maintained that such a reconstruction was a deadly

sin. Under Julian some Christians suffered martyrdom sooner than be

parties to it; and St. Ambrose from the pulpit of Milan, and Simeon

Stylites from his desert pillar, united in denouncing Theodosius, who had

been guilty of issuing this command.

Another very important moral result to which asceticism largely

contributed was the depression and sometimes almost the extinction of the

civic virtues. A candid examination will show that the Christian

civilisations have been as inferior to the Pagan ones in civic and

intellectual virtues as they have been superior to them in the virtues of

humanity and of chastity. We have already seen that one remarkable feature

of the intellectual movement that preceded Christianity was the gradual

decadence of patriotism. In the early days both of Greece and Rome, the

first duty enforced was that of a man to his country. This was the

rudimentary or cardinal virtue of the moral type. It gave the tone to the

whole system of ethics, and different moral qualities were valued chiefly

in proportion to their tendency to form illustrious citizens. The

destruction of this spirit in the Roman Empire was due, as we have seen,

to two causes—one of them being political and the other intellectual. The

political cause was the amalgamation of the different nations in one great

despotism, which gave indeed an ample field for personal and intellectual

freedom, but extinguished the sentiment of nationality and closed almost

every sphere of political activity. The intellectual cause, which was by

no means unconnected with the political one, was the growing ascendancy of

Oriental philosophies, which dethroned the active Stoicism of the early

Empire, and placed its ideal of excellence in contemplative virtues and in

elaborate purifications. By this decline of the patriotic sentiment the

progress of the new faith was greatly aided. In all matters of religion

the opinions of men are governed much more by their sympathies than by

their judgments; and it rarely or never happens that a religion which is

opposed to a strong national sentiment, as Christianity was in Judea, as

Catholicism and Episcopalian Protestantism have been in Scotland, and as

Anglicanism is even now in Ireland, can win the acceptance of the people.

The relations of Christianity to the sentiment of patriotism were from the

first very unfortunate. While the Christians were, for obvious reasons,

completely separated from the national spirit of Judea, they found

themselves equally at variance with the lingering remnants of Roman

patriotism. Rome was to them the power of Antichrist, and its overthrow

the necessary prelude to the millennial reign. They formed an illegal

organisation, directly opposed to the genius of the Empire, anticipating

its speedy destruction, looking back with something more than despondency

to the fate of the heroes who adorned its past, and refusing resolutely to

participate in those national spectacles which were the symbols and the

expressions of patriotic feeling. Though scrupulously averse to all

rebellion, they rarely concealed their sentiments, and the whole tendency

of their teaching was to withdraw men as far as possible both from the

functions and the enthusiasm of public life. It was at once their

confession and their boast, that no interests were more indifferent to

them than those of their country.(308) They regarded the lawfulness of

taking arms as very questionable, and all those proud and aspiring

qualities that constitute the distinctive beauty of the soldier’s

character as emphatically unchristian. Their home and their interests were

in another world, and, provided only they were unmolested in their

worship, they avowed with frankness, long after the Empire had become

Christian, that it was a matter of indifference to them under what rule

they lived.(309) Asceticism, drawing all the enthusiasm of Christendom to

the desert life, and elevating as an ideal the extreme and absolute

abnegation of all patriotism,(310) formed the culmination of the movement,

and was undoubtedly one cause of the downfall of the Roman Empire.

There are, probably, few subjects on which popular judgments are commonly

more erroneous than upon the relations between positive religions and

moral enthusiasm. Religions have, no doubt, a most real power of evoking a

latent energy which, without their existence, would never have been called

into action; but their influence is on the whole probably more attractive

than creative. They supply the channel in which moral enthusiasm flows,

the banner under which it is enlisted, the mould in which it is cast, the

ideal to which it tends. The first idea which the phrase “a very good man”

would have suggested to an early Roman would probably have been that of

great and distinguished patriotism, and the passion and interest of such a

man in his country’s cause were in direct proportion to his moral

elevation. Ascetic Christianity decisively diverted moral enthusiasm into

another channel, and the civic virtues, in consequence, necessarily

declined. The extinction of all public spirit, the base treachery and

corruption pervading every department of the Government, the cowardice of

the army, the despicable frivolity of character that led the people of

Treves, when fresh from their burning city, to call for theatres and

circuses, and the people of Roman Carthage to plunge wildly into the

excitement of the chariot races, on the very day when their city succumbed

beneath the Vandal;(311) all these things coexisted with extraordinary

displays of ascetic and of missionary devotion. The genius and the virtue

that might have defended the Empire were engaged in fierce disputes about

the Pelagian controversy, at the very time when Alaric was encircling Rome

with his armies,(312) and there was no subtlety of theological metaphysics

which did not kindle a deeper interest in the Christian leaders than the

throes of their expiring country. The moral enthusiasm that in other days

would have fired the armies of Rome with an invincible valour, impelled

thousands to abandon their country and their homes, and consume the weary

hours in a long routine of useless and horrible macerations. When the

Goths had captured Rome, St. Augustine, as we have seen, pointed with a

just pride to the Christian Church, which remained an unviolated sanctuary

during the horrors of the sack, as a proof that a new spirit of sanctity

and of reverence had descended upon the world. The Pagan, in his turn,

pointed to what he deemed a not less significant fact—the golden statues

of Valour and of Fortune were melted down to pay the ransom to the

conquerors.(313) Many of the Christians contemplated with an indifference

that almost amounted to complacency what they regarded as the predicted

ruin of the city of the fallen gods.(314) When the Vandals swept over

Africa, the Donatists, maddened by the persecution of the orthodox,

received them with open arms, and contributed their share to that deadly

blow.(315) The immortal pass of Thermopylæ was surrendered without a

struggle to the Goths. A Pagan writer accused the monks of having betrayed

it.(316) It is more probable that they had absorbed or diverted the

heroism that in other days would have defended it. The conquest, at a

later date, of Egypt, by the Mohammedans, was in a great measure due to an

invitation from the persecuted Monophysites.(317) Subsequent religious

wars have again and again exhibited the same phenomenon. The treachery of

a religionist to his country no longer argued an absence of all moral

feeling. It had become compatible with the deepest religious enthusiasm,

and with all the courage of a martyr.

It is somewhat difficult to form a just estimate of how far the attitude

assumed by the Church towards the barbarian invaders has on the whole

proved beneficial to mankind. The Empire, as we have seen, had long been,

both morally and politically, in a condition of manifest decline; its

fall, though it might have been retarded, could scarcely have been

averted, and the new religion, even in its most superstitious form, while

it did much to displace, did also much to elicit moral enthusiasm. It is

impossible to deny that the Christian priesthood contributed very

materially, both by their charity and by their arbitration, to mitigate

the calamities that accompanied the dissolution of the Empire;(318) and it

is equally impossible to doubt that their political attitude greatly

increased their power for good. Standing between the conflicting forces,

almost indifferent to the issue, and notoriously exempt from the passions

of the combat, they obtained with the conqueror, and used for the benefit

of the conquered, a degree of influence they would never have possessed,

had they been regarded as Roman patriots. Their attitude, however, marked

a complete, and, as it has proved, a permanent, change in the position

assigned to patriotism in the moral scale. It has occasionally happened in

later times, that churches have found it for their interest to appeal to

this sentiment in their conflict with opposing creeds, or that patriots

have found the objects of churchmen in harmony with their own; and in

these cases a fusion of theological and patriotic feeling has taken place,

in which each has intensified the other. Such has been the effect of the

conflict between the Spaniards and the Moors, between the Poles and the

Russians, between the Scotch Puritans and the English Episcopalians,

between the Irish Catholics and the English Protestants. But patriotism

itself, as a duty, has never found any place in Christian ethics, and

strong theological feeling has usually been directly hostile to its

growth. Ecclesiastics have, no doubt, taken a very large share in

political affairs, but this has been in most cases solely with the object

of wresting them into conformity with ecclesiastical designs; and no other

body of men have so uniformly sacrificed the interests of their country to

the interests of their class. For the repugnance between the theological

and the patriotic spirit, three reasons may, I think, be assigned. The

first is that tendency of strong religious feeling to divert the mind from

all terrestrial cares and passions, of which the ascetic life was the

extreme expression, but which has always, under different forms, been

manifested in the Church. The second arises from the fact that each form

of theological opinion embodies itself in a visible and organised church,

with a government, interest, and policy of its own, and a frontier often

intersecting rather than following national boundaries; and these churches

attract to themselves the attachment and devotion that would naturally be

bestowed upon the country and its rulers. The third reason is, that the

saintly and the heroic characters, which represent the ideals of religion

and of patriotism, are generically different; for although they have no

doubt many common elements of virtue, the distinctive excellence of each

is derived from a proportion or disposition of qualities altogether

different from that of the other.(319)

Before dismissing this very important revolution in moral history, I may

add two remarks. In the first place, we may observe that the relation of

the two great schools of morals to active and political life has been

completely changed. Among the ancients, the Stoics, who regarded virtue

and vice as generically different from all other things, participated

actively in public life, and made this participation one of the first of

duties; while the Epicureans, who resolved virtue into utility, and

esteemed happiness its supreme motive, abstained from public life, and

taught their disciples to neglect it. Asceticism followed the Stoical

school in teaching that virtue and happiness are generically different

things; but it was at the same time eminently unfavourable to civic

virtue. On the other hand, that great industrial movement which has arisen

since the abolition of slavery, and which has always been essentially

utilitarian in its spirit, has been one of the most active and influential

elements of political progress. This change, though, as far as I know,

entirely unnoticed by historians, constitutes, I believe, one of the great

landmarks of moral history.

The second observation I would make relates to the estimate we form of the

value of patriotic actions. However much historians may desire to extend

their researches to the private and domestic virtues of a people, civic

virtues are always those which must appear most prominently in their

pages. History is concerned only with large bodies of men. The systems of

philosophy or religion which produce splendid results on the great theatre

of public life are fully and easily appreciated, and readers and writers

are both liable to give them very undue advantages over those systems

which do not favour civic virtues, but exercise their beneficial influence

in the more obscure fields of individual self-culture, domestic morals, or

private charity. If valued by the self-sacrifice they imply, or by their

effects upon human happiness, these last rank very high, but they scarcely

appear in history, and they therefore seldom obtain their due weight in

historical comparisons. Christianity has, I think, suffered peculiarly

from this cause. Its moral action has always been much more powerful upon

individuals than upon societies, and the spheres in which its superiority

over other religions is most incontestable, are precisely those which

history is least capable of realising.

In attempting to estimate the moral condition of the Roman and Byzantine

Empires during the Christian period, and before the old civilisation had

been dissolved by the barbarian or Mohammedan invasions, we must

continually bear this last consideration in mind. We must remember, too,

that Christianity had acquired an ascendancy among nations which were

already deeply tainted by the inveterate vices of a corrupt and decaying

civilisation, and also that many of the censors from whose pages we are

obliged to form our estimate of the age were men who judged human

frailties with all the fastidiousness of ascetics, and who expressed their

judgments with all the declamatory exaggeration of the pulpit. Modern

critics will probably not lay much stress upon the relapse of the

Christians into the ordinary dress and usages of the luxurious society

about them, upon the ridicule thrown by Christians on those who still

adhered to the primitive austerity of the sect, or upon the fact that

multitudes who were once mere nominal Pagans had become mere nominal

Christians. We find, too, a frequent disposition on the part of moralists

to single out some new form of luxury, or some trivial custom which they

regarded as indecorous, for the most extravagant denunciation, and to

magnify its importance in a manner which in a later age it is difficult

even to understand. Examples of this kind may be found both in Pagan and

in Christian writings, and they form an extremely curious page in the

history of morals. Thus Juvenal exhausts his vocabulary of invective in

denouncing the atrocious criminality of a certain noble, who in the very

year of his consulship did not hesitate—not, it is true, by day, but at

least in the sight of the moon and of the stars—with his own hand to drive

his own chariot along the public road.(320) Seneca was scarcely less

scandalised by the atrocious and, as he thought, unnatural luxury of those

who had adopted the custom of cooling different beverages by mixing them

with snow.(321) Pliny assures us that the most monstrous of all criminals

was the man who first devised the luxurious custom of wearing golden

rings.(322) Apuleius was compelled to defend himself for having eulogised

tooth-powder, and he did so, among other ways, by arguing that nature has

justified this form of propriety, for crocodiles were known periodically

to leave the waters of the Nile, and to lie with open jaws upon the banks,

while a certain bird proceeds with its beak to clean their teeth.(323) If

we were to measure the criminality of different customs by the vehemence

of the patristic denunciations, we might almost conclude that the most

atrocious offence of their day was the custom of wearing false hair, or

dyeing natural hair. Clement of Alexandria questioned whether the validity

of certain ecclesiastical ceremonies might not be affected by wigs; for,

he asked, when the priest is placing his hand on the head of the person

who kneels before him, if that hand is resting upon false hair, who is it

he is really blessing? Tertullian shuddered at the thought that Christians

might have the hair of those who were in hell upon their heads, and he

found in the tiers of false hair that were in use a distinct rebellion

against the assertion that no one can add to his stature, and, in the

custom of dyeing the hair, a contravention of the declaration that man

cannot make one hair white or black. Centuries rolled away. The Roman

Empire tottered to its fall, and floods of vice and sorrow overspread the

world; but still the denunciations of the Fathers were unabated. St.

Ambrose, St. Jerome, and St. Gregory Nazianzen continued with

uncompromising vehemence the war against false hair, which Tertullian and

Clement of Alexandria had begun.(324)

But although the vehemence of the Fathers on such trivial matters might

appear at first sight to imply the existence of a society in which grave

corruption was rare, such a conclusion would be totally untrue. After

every legitimate allowance has been made, the pictures of Roman society by

Ammianus Marcellinus, of the society of Marseilles, by Salvian, of the

society of Asia Minor, and of Constantinople, by Chrysostom, as well as

the whole tenor of the history, and innumerable incidental notices in the

writers, of the time, exhibit a condition of depravity, and especially of

degradation, which has seldom been surpassed.(325) The corruption had

reached classes and institutions that appeared the most holy. The Agapæ,

or love feasts, which formed one of the most touching symbols of Christian

unity, had become scenes of drunkenness and of riot. Denounced by the

Fathers, condemned by the Council of Laodicea in the fourth century, and

afterwards by the Council of Carthage, they lingered as a scandal and an

offence till they were finally suppressed by the Council of Trullo, at the

end of the seventh century.(326) The commemoration of the martyrs soon

degenerated into scandalous dissipation. Fairs were held on the occasion,

gross breaches of chastity were frequent, and the annual festival was

suppressed on account of the immorality it produced.(327) The ambiguous

position of the clergy with reference to marriage already led to grave

disorder. In the time of St. Cyprian, before the outbreak of the Decian

persecution, it had been common to find clergy professing celibacy, but

keeping, under various pretexts, their mistresses in their houses;(328)

and, after Constantine, the complaints on this subject became loud and

general.(329) Virgins and monks often lived together in the same house,

professing sometimes to share in chastity the same bed.(330) Rich widows

were surrounded by swarms of clerical sycophants, who addressed them in

tender diminutives, studied and consulted their every foible, and, under

the guise of piety, lay in wait for their gifts or bequests.(331) The evil

attained such a point that a law was made under Valentinian depriving the

Christian priests and monks of that power of receiving legacies which was

possessed by every other class of the community; and St. Jerome has

mournfully acknowledged that the prohibition was necessary.(332) Great

multitudes entered the Church to avoid municipal offices;(333) the deserts

were crowded with men whose sole object was to escape from honest labour,

and even soldiers used to desert their colours for the monasteries.(334)

Noble ladies, pretending a desire to lead a higher life, abandoned their

husbands to live with low-born lovers.(335) Palestine, which was soon

crowded with pilgrims, had become, in the time of St. Gregory of Nyssa, a

hotbed of debauchery.(336) The evil reputation of pilgrimages long

continued; and in the eighth century we find St. Boniface writing to the

Archbishop of Canterbury, imploring the bishops to take some measures to

restrain or regulate the pilgrimages of their fellow-countrywomen; for

there were few towns in central Europe, on the way to Rome, where English

ladies, who started as pilgrims, were not living in open

prostitution.(337) The luxury and ambition of the higher prelates, and the

passion for amusements of the inferior priests,(338) were bitterly

acknowledged. St. Jerome complained that the banquets of many bishops

eclipsed in splendour those of the provincial governors, and the intrigues

by which they obtained offices, and the fierce partisanship of their

supporters, appear in every page of ecclesiastical history.

In the lay world, perhaps the chief characteristic was extreme

childishness. The moral enthusiasm was greater than it had been in most

periods of Paganism, but, being drawn away to the desert, it had little

influence upon society. The simple fact that the quarrels between the

factions of the chariot races for a long period eclipsed all political,

intellectual, and even religious differences, filled the streets again and

again with bloodshed, and more than once determined great revolutions in

the State, is sufficient to show the extent of the decadence. Patriotism

and courage had almost disappeared, and, notwithstanding the rise of a

Belisarius or a Narses, the level of public men was extremely depressed.

The luxury of the court, the servility of the courtiers, and the

prevailing splendour of dress and of ornament, had attained an extravagant

height. The world grew accustomed to a dangerous alternation of extreme

asceticism and gross vice, and sometimes, as in the case of Antioch,(339)

the most vicious and luxurious cities produced the most numerous

anchorites. There existed a combination of vice and superstition which is

eminently prejudicial to the nobility, though not equally detrimental to

the happiness, of man. Public opinion was so low, that very many forms of

vice attracted little condemnation and punishment, while undoubted belief

in the absolving efficacy of superstitious rites calmed the imagination

and allayed the terrors of conscience. There was more falsehood and

treachery than under the Cæsars, but there was much less cruelty,

violence, and shamelessness. There was also less public spirit, less

independence of character, less intellectual freedom.

In some respects, however, Christianity had already effected a great

improvement. The gladiatorial games had disappeared from the West, and had

not been introduced into Constantinople. The vast schools of prostitution

which had grown up under the name of temples of Venus were suppressed.

Religion, however deformed and debased, was at least no longer a seedplot

of depravity, and under the influence of Christianity the effrontery of

vice had in a great measure disappeared. The gross and extravagant

indecency of representation, of which we have still examples in the

paintings on the walls, and the signs on many of the portals of Pompeii;

the banquets of rich patricians, served by naked girls; the hideous

excesses of unnatural lust, in which some of the Pagan emperors had

indulged with so much publicity, were no longer tolerated. Although

sensuality was very general, it was less obtrusive, and unnatural and

eccentric forms had become rare. The presence of a great Church, which,

amid much superstition and fanaticism, still taught a pure morality, and

enforced it by the strongest motives, was everywhere felt—controlling,

strengthening, or overawing. The ecclesiastics were a great body in the

State. The cause of virtue was strongly organised; it drew to itself the

best men, determined the course of vacillating but amiable natures, and

placed some restraint upon the vicious. A bad man might be insensible to

the moral beauties of religion, but he was still haunted by the

recollection of its threatenings. If he emancipated himself from its

influence in health and prosperity, its power returned in periods of

sickness or danger, or on the eve of the commission of some great crime.

If he had nerved himself against all its terrors, he was at least checked

and governed at every turn by the public opinion which it had created.

That total absence of all restraint, all decency, and all fear and

remorse, which had been evinced by some of the monsters of crime who

occupied the Pagan throne, and which proves most strikingly the decay of

the Pagan religion, was no longer possible. The virtue of the best Pagans

was perhaps of as high an order as that of the best Christians, though it

was of a somewhat different type, but the vice of the worst Pagans

certainly far exceeded that of the worst Christians. The pulpit had become

a powerful centre of attraction, and charities of many kinds were actively

developed.

The moral effects of the first great outburst of asceticism, so far as we

have yet traced them, appear almost unmingled evils. In addition to the

essentially distorted ideal of perfection it produced, the simple

withdrawal from active life of that moral enthusiasm, which is the leaven

of society, was extremely pernicious, and there can be little doubt that

to this cause we must in a great degree attribute the conspicuous failure

of the Church, for some centuries, to effect any more considerable

amelioration in the moral condition of Europe. There were, however, some

distinctive excellences springing even from the first phase of asceticism,

which, although they do not, as I conceive, suffice to counterbalance

these evils, may justly qualify our censure.

The first condition of all really great moral excellence is a spirit of

genuine self-sacrifice and self-renunciation. The habits of compromise,

moderation, reciprocal self-restraint, gentleness, courtesy, and

refinement, which are appropriate to luxurious or utilitarian

civilisations, are very favourable to the development of many secondary

virtues; but there is in human nature a capacity for a higher and more

heroic reach of excellence, which demands very different spheres for its

display, accustoms men to far nobler aims, and exercises a far greater

attractive influence upon mankind. Imperfect and distorted as was the

ideal of the anchorite; deeply, too, as it was perverted by the admixture

of a spiritual selfishness, still the example of many thousands, who, in

obedience to what they believed to be right, voluntarily gave up

everything that men hold dear, cast to the winds every compromise with

enjoyment, and made extreme self-abnegation the very principle of their

lives, was not wholly lost upon the world. At a time when increasing

riches had profoundly tainted the Church, they taught men “to love labour

more than rest, and ignominy more than glory, and to give more than to

receive.”(340) At a time when the passion for ecclesiastical dignities had

become the scandal of the Empire, they systematically abstained from them,

teaching, in their quaint but energetic language, that “there are two

classes a monk should especially avoid—bishops and women.”(341) The very

eccentricities of their lives, their uncouth forms, their horrible

penances, won the admiration of rude men, and the superstitious reverence

thus excited gradually passed to the charity and the self-denial which

formed the higher elements of the monastic character. Multitudes of

barbarians were converted to Christianity at the sight of St. Simeon

Stylites. The hermit, too, was speedily idealised by the popular

imagination. The more repulsive features of his life and appearance were

forgotten. He was thought of only as an old man with long white beard and

gentle aspect, weaving his mats beneath the palm-trees, while dæmons

vainly tried to distract him by their stratagems, and the wild beasts grew

tame in his presence, and every disease and every sorrow vanished at his

word. The imagination of Christendom, fascinated by this ideal, made it

the centre of countless legends, usually very childish, and occasionally,

as we have seen, worse than childish, yet full of beautiful touches of

human nature, and often conveying admirable moral lessons.(342) Nursery

tales, which first determine the course of the infant imagination, play no

inconsiderable part in the history of humanity. In the fable of

Psyche—that bright tale of passionate love with which the Greek mother

lulled her child to rest—Pagan antiquity has bequeathed us a single

specimen of transcendent beauty, and the lives of the saints of the desert

often exhibit an imagination different indeed in kind, but scarcely less

brilliant in its display. St. Antony, we are told, was thinking one night

that he was the best man in the desert, when it was revealed to him that

there was another hermit far holier than himself. In the morning he

started across the desert to visit this unknown saint. He met first of all

a centaur, and afterwards a little man with horns and goat’s feet, who

said that he was a faun; and these, having pointed out the way, he arrived

at last at his destination. St. Paul the hermit, at whose cell he stopped,

was one hundred and thirteen years old, and, having been living for a very

long period in absolute solitude, he at first refused to admit the

visitor, but at last consented, embraced him, and began, with a very

pardonable curiosity, to question him minutely about the world he had

left; “whether there was much new building in the towns, what empire ruled

the world, whether there were any idolaters remaining?” The colloquy was

interrupted by a crow, which came with a loaf of bread, and St. Paul,

observing that during the last sixty years his daily allowance had been

only half a loaf, declared that this was a proof that he had done right in

admitting Antony. The hermits returned thanks, and sat down together by

the margin of a glassy stream. But now a difficulty arose. Neither could

bring himself to break the loaf before the other. St. Paul alleged that

St. Antony, being his guest, should take the precedence; but St. Antony,

who was only ninety years old, dwelt upon the greater age of St. Paul. So

scrupulously polite were these old men, that they passed the entire

afternoon disputing on this weighty question, till at last, when the

evening was drawing in, a happy thought struck them, and, each holding one

end of the loaf, they pulled together. To abridge the story, St. Paul soon

died, and his companion, being a weak old man, was unable to bury him,

when two lions came from the desert and dug the grave with their paws,

deposited the body in it, raised a loud howl of lamentation, and then

knelt down submissively before St. Antony, to beg a blessing. The

authority for this history is no less a person than St. Jerome, who

relates it as literally true, and intersperses his narrative with severe

reflections on all who might question his accuracy.

The historian Palladius assures us that he heard from the lips of St.

Macarius of Alexandria an account of a pilgrimage which that saint had

made, under the impulse of curiosity, to visit the enchanted garden of

Jannes and Jambres, tenanted by dæmons. For nine days Macarius traversed

the desert, directing his course by the stars, and, from time to time,

fixing reeds in the ground, as landmarks for his return; but this

precaution proved useless, for the devils tore up the reeds, and placed

them during the night by the head of the sleeping saint. As he drew near

the garden, seventy dæmons of various forms came forth to meet him, and

reproached him for disturbing them in their home. St. Macarius promised

simply to walk round and inspect the wonders of the garden, and then

depart without doing it any injury. He fulfilled his promise, and a

journey of twenty days brought him again to his cell.(343) Other legends

are, however, of a less fantastic nature; and many of them display, though

sometimes in very whimsical forms, a spirit of courtesy which seems to

foreshadow the later chivalry, and some of them contain striking protests

against the very superstitions that were most prevalent. When St. Macarius

was sick, a bunch of grapes was once given to him; but his charity

impelled him to give them to another hermit, who in his turn refused to

keep them, and at last, having made the circuit of the entire desert, they

were returned to the saint.(344) The same saint, whose usual beverage was

putrid water, never failed to drink wine when set before him by the

hermits he visited, atoning privately for this relaxation, which he

thought the laws of courtesy required, by abstaining from water for as

many days as he had drunk glasses of wine.(345) One of his disciples once

meeting an idolatrous priest running in great haste across the desert,

with a great stick in his hand, cried out in a loud voice, “Where are you

going, dæmon?” The priest, naturally indignant, beat the Christian

severely, and was proceeding on his way, when he met St. Macarius, who

accosted him so courteously and so tenderly that the Pagan’s heart was

touched, he became a convert, and his first act of charity was to tend the

Christian whom he had beaten.(346) St. Avitus being on a visit to St.

Marcian, this latter saint placed before him some bread, which Avitus

refused to eat, saying that it was his custom never to touch food till

after sunset. St. Marcian, professing his own inability to defer his

repast, implored his guest for once to break this custom, and being

refused, exclaimed, “Alas! I am filled with anguish that you have come

here to see a wise man and a saint, and you see only a glutton.” St.

Avitus was grieved, and said, “he would rather even eat flesh than hear

such words,” and he sat down as desired. St. Marcian then confessed that

his own custom was the same as that of his brother saint; “but,” he added,

“we know that charity is better than fasting; for charity is enjoined by

the Divine law, but fasting is left in our own power and will.”(347) St.

Epiphanius having invited St. Hilarius to his cell, placed before him a

dish of fowl. “Pardon me, father,” said St. Hilarius, “but since I have

become a monk I have never eaten flesh.” “And I,” said St. Epiphanius,

“since I have become a monk have never suffered the sun to go down upon my

wrath.” “Your rule,” rejoined the other, “is more excellent than

mine.”(348) While a rich lady was courteously fulfilling the duties of

hospitality to a monk, her child, whom she had for this purpose left, fell

into a well. It lay unharmed upon the surface of the water, and afterwards

told its mother that it had seen the arms of the saint sustaining it

below.(349) At a time when it was the custom to look upon the marriage

state with profound contempt, it was revealed to St. Macarius of Egypt

that two married women in a neighbouring city were more holy than he was.

The saint immediately visited them, and asked their mode of life, but they

utterly repudiated the notion of their sanctity. “Holy father,” they said,

“suffer us to tell you frankly the truth. Even this very night we did not

shrink from sleeping with our husbands, and what good works, then, can you

expect from us?” The saint, however, persisted in his inquiries, and they

then told him their stories. “We are,” they said, “in no way related, but

we married two brothers. We have lived together for fifteen years, without

one licentious or angry word. We have entreated our husbands to let us

leave them, to join the societies of holy virgins, but they refused to

permit us, and we then promised before Heaven that no worldly word should

sully our lips.” “Of a truth,” cried St. Macarius, “I see that God regards

not whether one is virgin or married, whether one is in a monastery or in

the world. He considers only the disposition of the heart, and gives the

Spirit to all who desire to serve Him, whatever their condition may

be.”(350)

I have multiplied these illustrations to an extent that must, I fear, have

already somewhat taxed the patience of my readers; but the fact that,

during a long period of history, these saintly legends formed the ideals

guiding the imagination and reflecting the moral sentiment of the

Christian world, gives them an importance far beyond their intrinsic

value. Before dismissing the saints of the desert, there is one other

class of legends to which I desire to advert. I mean those which describe

the connection between saints and the animal world. These legends are, I

think, worthy of special notice in moral history, as representing the

first, and at the same time one of the most striking efforts ever made in

Christendom to inculcate a feeling of kindness and pity towards the brute

creation. In Pagan antiquity, considerable steps had been made to raise

this form of humanity to a recognised branch of ethics. The way had been

prepared by numerous anecdotes growing for the most part out of simple

ignorance of natural history, which all tended to diminish the chasm

between men and animals, by representing the latter as possessing to a

very high degree both moral and rational qualities. Elephants, it was

believed, were endowed not only with reason and benevolence, but also with

reverential feelings. They worshipped the sun and moon, and in the forests

of Mauritania they were accustomed to assemble every new moon, at a

certain river, to perform religious rites.(351) The hippopotamus taught

men the medicinal value of bleeding, being accustomed, when affected by

plethory, to bleed itself with a thorn, and afterwards close the wound

with slime.(352) Pelicans committed suicide to feed their young; and bees,

when they had broken the laws of their sovereign.(353) A temple was

erected at Sestos to commemorate the affection of an eagle which loved a

young girl, and upon her death cast itself in despair into the flames by

which her body was consumed.(354) Numerous anecdotes are related of

faithful dogs which refused to survive their masters, and one of these

had, it was said, been transformed into the dog-star.(355) The dolphin,

especially, became the subject of many beautiful legends, and its

affection for its young, for music, and above all for little children,

excited the admiration not only of the populace, but of the most

distinguished naturalists.(356) Many philosophers ascribed to animals a

rational soul, like that of man. According to the Pythagoreans, human

souls transmigrate after death into animals. According to the Stoics and

others, the souls of men and animals were alike parts of the all-pervading

Divine Spirit that animates the world.(357)

We may even find traces from an early period of a certain measure of

legislative protection for animals. By a very natural process, the ox, as

a principal agent in agriculture, and therefore a kind of symbol of

civilisation, was in many different countries regarded with a peculiar

reverence. The sanctity attached to it in Egypt is well known. That

tenderness to animals, which is one of the most beautiful features in the

Old Testament writings, shows itself, among other ways, in the command not

to muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn, or to yoke together the ox

and the ass.(358) Among the early Romans the same feeling was carried so

far, that for a long time it was actually a capital offence to slaughter

an ox, that animal being pronounced, in a special sense, the

fellow-labourer of man.(359) A similar law is said to have in early times

existed in Greece.(360) The beautiful passage in which the Psalmist

describes how the sparrow could find a shelter and a home in the altar of

the temple, was as applicable to Greece as to Jerusalem. The sentiment of

Xenocrates who, when a bird pursued by a hawk took refuge in his breast,

caressed and finally released it, saying to his disciples, that a good man

should never give up a suppliant,(361) was believed to be shared by the

gods, and it was regarded as an act of impiety to disturb the birds who

had built their nests beneath the porticoes of the temple.(362) A case is

related of a child who was even put to death on account of an act of

aggravated cruelty to birds.(363)

The general tendency of nations, as they advance from a rude and warlike

to a refined and peaceful condition, from the stage in which the realising

powers are faint and dull, to that in which they are sensitive and vivid,

is undoubtedly to become more gentle and humane in their actions; but

this, like all other general tendencies in history, may be counteracted or

modified by many special circumstances. The law I have mentioned about

oxen was obviously one of those that belong to a very early stage of

progress, when legislators are labouring to form agricultural habits among

a warlike and nomadic people.(364) The games in which the slaughter of

animals bore so large a part, having been introduced but a little before

the extinction of the republic, did very much to arrest or retard the

natural progress of humane sentiments. In ancient Greece, besides the

bull-fights of Thessaly, the combats of quails and cocks(365) were

favourite amusements, and were much encouraged by the legislators, as

furnishing examples of valour to the soldiers. The colossal dimensions of

the Roman games, the circumstances that favoured them, and the

overwhelming interest they speedily excited, I have described in a former

chapter. We have seen, however, that, notwithstanding the gladiatorial

shows, the standard of humanity towards men was considerably raised during

the Empire. It is also well worthy of notice that, notwithstanding the

passion for the combats of wild beasts, Roman literature and the later

literature of the nations subject to Rome abound in delicate touches

displaying in a very high degree a sensitiveness to the feelings of the

animal world. This tender interest in animal life is one of the most

distinctive features of the poetry of Virgil. Lucretius, who rarely struck

the chords of pathos, had at a still earlier period drawn a very beautiful

picture of the sorrows of the bereaved cow, whose calf had been sacrificed

upon the altar.(366) Plutarch mentions, incidentally, that he could never

bring himself to sell, in its old age, the ox which had served him

faithfully in the time of its strength.(367) Ovid expressed a similar

sentiment with an almost equal emphasis.(368) Juvenal speaks of a Roman

lady with her eyes filled with tears on account of the death of a

sparrow.(369) Apollonius of Tyana, on the ground of humanity, refused,

even when invited by a king, to participate in the chase.(370) Arrian, the

friend of Epictetus, in his book upon coursing, anticipated the beautiful

picture which Addison has drawn of the huntsman refusing to sacrifice the

life of the captured hare which had given him so much pleasure in its

flight.(371)

These touches of feeling, slight as they may appear, indicate, I think, a

vein of sentiment such as we should scarcely have expected to find

coexisting with the gigantic slaughter of the amphitheatre. The progress,

however, was not only one of sentiment—it was also shown in distinct and

definite teaching. Pythagoras and Empedocles were quoted as the founders

of this branch of ethics. The moral duty of kindness to animals was in the

first instance based upon a dogmatic assertion of the transmigration of

souls, and, the doctrine that animals are within the circle of human duty

being thus laid down, subsidiary considerations of humanity were alleged.

The rapid growth of the Pythagorean school, in the latter days of the

Empire, made these considerations familiar to the people.(372) Porphyry

elaborately advocated, and even Seneca for a time practised, abstinence

from flesh. But the most remarkable figure in this movement is

unquestionably Plutarch. Casting aside the dogma of transmigration, or at

least speaking of it only as a doubtful conjecture, he places the duty of

kindness to animals on the broad ground of the affections, and he urges

that duty with an emphasis and a detail to which no adequate parallel can,

I believe, be found in the Christian writings for at least seventeen

hundred years. He condemns absolutely the games of the amphitheatre,

dwells with great force upon the effect of such spectacles in hardening

the character, enumerates in detail, and denounces with unqualified

energy, the refined cruelties which gastronomic fancies had produced, and

asserts in the strongest language that every man has duties to the animal

world as truly as to his fellow-men.(373)

If we now pass to the Christian Church, we shall find that little or no

progress was at first made in this sphere. Among the Manicheans, it is

true, the mixture of Oriental notions was shown in an absolute prohibition

of animal food, and abstinence from this food was also frequently

practised upon totally different grounds by the orthodox. One or two of

the Fathers have also mentioned with approbation the humane counsels of

the Pythagoreans.(374) But, on the other hand, the doctrine of

transmigration was emphatically repudiated by the Catholics; the human

race was isolated, by the scheme of redemption, more than ever from all

other races; and in the range and circle of duties inculcated by the early

Fathers those to animals had no place. This is indeed the one form of

humanity which appears more prominently in the Old Testament than in the

New. The many beautiful traces of it in the former, which indicate a

sentiment,(375) even where they do not very strictly define a duty, gave

way before an ardent philanthropy which regarded human interests as the

one end, and the relations of man to his Creator as the one question, of

life, and dismissed somewhat contemptuously, as an idle sentimentalism,

notions of duty to animals.(376) A refined and subtle sympathy with animal

feeling is indeed rarely found among those who are engaged very actively

in the affairs of life, and it was not without a meaning or a reason that

Shakespeare placed that exquisitely pathetic analysis of the sufferings of

the wounded stag, which is perhaps its most perfect poetical expression,

in the midst of the morbid dreamings of the diseased and melancholy

Jacques.

But while what are called the rights of animals had no place in the ethics

of the Church, a feeling of sympathy with the irrational creation was in

some degree inculcated indirectly by the incidents of the hagiology. It

was very natural that the hermit, living in the lonely deserts of the

East, or in the vast forests of Europe, should come into an intimate

connection with the animal world, and it was no less natural that the

popular imagination, when depicting the hermit life, should make this

connection the centre of many picturesque and sometimes touching legends.

The birds, it was said, stooped in their flight at the old man’s call; the

lion and the hyena crouched submissively at his feet; his heart, which was

closed to all human interests, expanded freely at the sight of some

suffering animal; and something of his own sanctity descended to the

companions of his solitude and the objects of his miracles. The wild

beasts attended St. Theon when he walked abroad, and the saint rewarded

them by giving them drink out of his well. An Egyptian hermit had made a

beautiful garden in the desert, and used to sit beneath the palm-trees

while a lion ate fruit from his hand. When St. Pœmen was shivering in a

winter night, a lion crouched beside him, and became his covering. Lions

buried St. Paul the hermit and St. Mary of Egypt. They appear in the

legends of St. Jerome, St. Gerasimus, St. John the Silent, St. Simeon, and

many others. When an old and feeble monk, named Zosimas, was on his

journey to Cæsarea, with an ass which bore his possessions, a lion seized

and devoured the ass, but, at the command of the saint, the lion itself

carried the burden to the city gates. St. Helenus called a wild ass from

its herd to bear his burden through the wilderness. The same saint, as

well as St. Pachomius, crossed the Nile on the back of a crocodile, as St.

Scuthinus did the Irish Channel on a sea monster. Stags continually

accompanied saints upon their journeys, bore their burdens, ploughed their

fields, revealed their relics. The hunted stag was especially the theme of

many picturesque legends. A Pagan, named Branchion, was once pursuing an

exhausted stag, when it took refuge in a cavern, whose threshold no

inducement could persuade the hounds to cross. The astonished hunter

entered, and found himself in presence of an old hermit, who at once

protected the fugitive and converted the pursuer. In the legends of St.

Eustachius and St. Hubert, Christ is represented as having assumed the

form of a hunted stag, which turned upon its pursuer, with a crucifix

glittering on its brow, and, addressing him with a human voice, converted

him to Christianity. In the full frenzy of a chase, hounds and stag

stopped and knelt down together to venerate the relics of St. Fingar. On

the festival of St. Regulus, the wild stags assembled at the tomb of the

saint, as the ravens used to do at that of St. Apollinar of Ravenna. St.

Erasmus was the special protector of oxen, and they knelt down voluntarily

before his shrine. St. Antony was the protector of hogs, who were usually

introduced into his pictures. St. Bridget kept pigs, and a wild boar came

from the forest to subject itself to her rule. A horse foreshadowed by its

lamentations the death of St. Columba. The three companions of St. Colman

were a cock, a mouse, and a fly. The cock announced the hour of devotion,

the mouse bit the ear of the drowsy saint till he got up, and if in the

course of his studies he was afflicted by any wandering thoughts, or

called away to other business, the fly alighted on the line where he had

left off, and kept the place. Legends, not without a certain whimsical

beauty, described the moral qualities existing in animals. A hermit was

accustomed to share his supper with a wolf, which, one evening entering

the cell before the return of the master, stole a loaf of bread. Struck

with remorse, it was a week before it ventured again to visit the cell,

and when it did so, its head hung down, and its whole demeanour manifested

the most profound contrition. The hermit “stroked with a gentle hand its

bowed down head,” and gave it a double portion as a token of forgiveness.

A lioness knelt down with lamentations before another saint, and then led

him to its cub, which was blind, but which received its sight at the

prayer of the saint. Next day the lioness returned, bearing the skin of a

wild beast as a mark of its gratitude. Nearly the same thing happened to

St. Macarius of Alexandria; a hyena knocked at his door, brought its

young, which was blind, and which the saint restored to sight, and repaid

the obligation soon afterwards by bringing a fleece of wool. “O hyena!”

said the saint, “how did you obtain this fleece? you must have stolen and

eaten a sheep.” Full of shame, the hyena hung its head down, but persisted

in offering its gift, which, however, the holy man refused to receive till

the hyena “had sworn” to cease for the future to rob. The hyena bowed its

head in token of its acceptance of the oath, and St. Macarius afterwards

gave the fleece to St. Melania. Other legends simply speak of the sympathy

between saints and the irrational world. The birds came at the call of St.

Cuthbert, and a dead bird was resuscitated by his prayer. When St.

Aengussius, in felling wood, had cut his hand, the birds gathered round,

and with loud cries lamented his misfortune. A little bird, struck down

and mortally wounded by a hawk, fell at the feet of St. Kieranus, who shed

tears as he looked upon its torn breast, and offered up a prayer, upon

which the bird was instantly healed.(377)

Many hundreds, I should perhaps hardly exaggerate were I to say many

thousands, of legends of this kind exist in the lives of the saints.

Suggested in the first instance by that desert life which was at once the

earliest phase of monachism and one of the earliest sources of Christian

mythology, strengthened by the symbolism which represented different

virtues and vices under the forms of animals, and by the reminiscences of

the rites and the superstitions of Paganism, the connection between men

and animals became the keynote of an infinite variety of fantastic tales.

In our eyes they may appear extravagantly puerile, yet it will scarcely, I

hope, be necessary to apologise for introducing them into what purports to

be a grave work, when it is remembered that for many centuries they were

universally accepted by mankind, and were so interwoven with all local

traditions, and with all the associations of education, that they at once

determined and reflected the inmost feelings of the heart. Their tendency

to create a certain feeling of sympathy towards animals is manifest, and

this is probably the utmost the Catholic Church has done in that

direction.(378) A very few authentic instances may, indeed, be cited of

saints whose natural gentleness of disposition was displayed in kindness

to the animal world. Of St. James of Venice—an obscure saint of the

thirteenth century—it is told that he was accustomed to buy and release

the birds with which Italian boys used to play by attaching them to

strings, saying that “he pitied the little birds of the Lord,” and that

his “tender charity recoiled from all cruelty, even to the most diminutive

of animals.”(379) St. Francis of Assisi was a more conspicuous example of

the same spirit. “If I could only be presented to the emperor,” he used to

say, “I would pray him, for the love of God, and of me, to issue an edict

prohibiting any one from catching or imprisoning my sisters the larks, and

ordering that all who have oxen or asses should at Christmas feed them

particularly well.” A crowd of legends turning upon this theme were

related of him. A wolf, near Gubbio, being adjured by him, promised to

abstain from eating sheep, placed its paw in the hand of the saint to

ratify the promise, and was afterwards fed from house to house by the

inhabitants of the city. A crowd of birds, on another occasion, came to

hear the saint preach, as fish did to hear St. Antony of Padua. A falcon

awoke him at his hour of prayer. A grasshopper encouraged him by her

melody to sing praises to God. The noisy swallows kept silence when he

began to teach.(380)

On the whole, however, Catholicism has done very little to inculcate

humanity to animals. The fatal vice of theologians, who have always looked

upon others solely through the medium of their own special dogmatic views,

has been an obstacle to all advance in this direction. The animal world,

being altogether external to the scheme of redemption, was regarded as

beyond the range of duty, and the belief that we have any kind of

obligation to its members has never been inculcated—has never, I believe,

been even admitted—by Catholic theologians. In the popular legends, and in

the recorded traits of individual amiability, it is curious to observe how

constantly those who have sought to inculcate kindness to animals have

done so by endeavouring to associate them with something distinctively

Christian. The legends I have noticed glorified them as the companions of

the saints. The stag was honoured as especially commissioned to reveal the

relics of saints, and as the deadly enemy of the serpent. In the feast of

asses, that animal was led with veneration into the churches, and a rude

hymn proclaimed its dignity, because it had borne Christ in His flight to

Egypt, and in His entry into Jerusalem. St. Francis always treated lambs

with a peculiar tenderness, as being symbols of his Master. Luther grew

sad and thoughtful at a hare hunt, for it seemed to him to represent the

pursuit of souls by the devil. Many popular legends exist, associating

some bird or animal with some incident in the evangelical narrative, and

securing for them in consequence an unmolested life. But such influences

have never extended far. There are two distinct objects which may be

considered by moralists in this sphere. They may regard the character of

the men, or they may regard the sufferings of the animals. The amount of

callousness or of conscious cruelty displayed or elicited by amusements or

practices that inflict suffering on animals, bears no kind of proportion

to the intensity of that suffering. Could we follow with adequate

realisation the pangs of the wounded birds that are struck down in our

sports, or of the timid hare in the long course of its flight, we should

probably conclude that they were not really less than those caused by the

Spanish bull-fight, or by the English pastimes of the last century. But

the excitement of the chase refracts the imagination, and owing to the

diminutive size of the victim, and the undemonstrative character of its

suffering, these sports do not exercise that prejudicial influence upon

character which they would exercise if the sufferings of the animals were

vividly realised, and were at the same time accepted as an element of the

enjoyment. The class of amusements of which the ancient combats of wild

beasts form the type, have no doubt nearly disappeared from Christendom,

and it is possible that the softening power of Christian teaching may have

had some indirect influence in abolishing them; but a candid judgment will

confess that it has been very little. During the periods, and in the

countries, in which theological influence was supreme, they were

unchallenged.(381) They disappeared(382) at last, because a luxurious and

industrial civilisation involved a refinement of manners; because a

fastidious taste recoiled with a sensation of disgust from pleasures that

an uncultivated taste would keenly relish; because the drama, at once

reflecting and accelerating the change, gave a new form to popular

amusements, and because, in consequence of this revolution, the old

pastimes, being left to the dregs of society, became the occasions of

scandalous disorders.(383) In Protestant countries the clergy have, on the

whole, sustained this movement. In Catholic countries it has been much

more faithfully represented by the school of Voltaire and Beccaria. A

judicious moralist may, however, reasonably question whether amusements

which derive their zest from a display of the natural ferocious instincts

of animals, and which substitute death endured in the frenzy of combat for

death in the remote slaughter-house or by the slow process of decay, have

added in any appreciable degree to the sum of animal misery, and in these

cases he will dwell less upon the suffering inflicted than upon the

injurious influence the spectacle may sometimes exercise on the character

of the spectator. But there are forms of cruelty which must be regarded in

a different light. The horrors of vivisection, often so wantonly, so

needlessly practised,(384) the prolonged and atrocious tortures, sometimes

inflicted in order to procure some gastronomic delicacy, are so far

removed from the public gaze that they exercise little influence on the

character of men. Yet no humane man can reflect upon them without a

shudder. To bring these things within the range of ethics, to create the

notion of duties towards the animal world, has, so far as Christian

countries are concerned, been one of the peculiar merits of the last

century, and, for the most part, of Protestant nations. However fully we

may recognise the humane spirit transmitted to the world in the form of

legends from the saints of the desert, it must not be forgotten that the

inculcation of humanity to animals on a wide scale is mainly the work of a

recent and a secular age; that the Mohammedans and the Brahmins have in

this sphere considerably surpassed the Christians, and that Spain and

Southern Italy, in which Catholicism has most deeply planted its roots,

are even now, probably beyond all other countries in Europe, those in

which inhumanity to animals is most wanton and most unrebuked.

The influence the first form of monachism has exercised upon the world, so

far as it has been beneficial, has been chiefly through the imagination,

which has been fascinated by its legends. In the great periods of

theological controversy, the Eastern monks had furnished some leading

theologians; but in general, in Oriental lands, the hermit life

predominated, and extreme maceration was the chief merit of the saint. But

in the West, monachism assumed very different forms, and exercised far

higher functions. At first the Oriental saints were the ideals of Western

monks. The Eastern St. Athanasius had been the founder of Italian

monachism. St. Martin of Tours excluded labour from the discipline of his

monks, and he and they, like the Eastern saints, were accustomed to wander

abroad, destroying the idols of the temples.(385) But three great causes

conspired to direct the monastic spirit in the West into practical

channels. Conditions of race and climate have ever impelled the

inhabitants of these lands to active life, and have at the same time

rendered them constitutionally incapable of enduring the austerities or

enjoying the hallucinations of the sedentary Oriental. There arose, too,

in the sixth century, a great legislator, whose form may be dimly traced

through a cloud of fantastic legends, and the order of St. Benedict, with

that of St. Columba and some others, founded on substantially the same

principle, soon ramified through the greater part of Europe, tempered the

wild excesses of useless penances, and, making labour an essential part of

the monastic system, directed the movement to the purposes of general

civilisation. In the last place, the barbarian invasions, and the

dissolution of the Western Empire, dislocating the whole system of

government and almost resolving society into its primitive elements,

naturally threw upon the monastic corporations social, political, and

intellectual functions of the deepest importance.

It has been observed that the capture of Rome by Alaric, involving as it

did the destruction of the grandest religious monuments of Paganism, in

fact established in that city the supreme authority of Christianity.(386)

A similar remark may be extended to the general downfall of the Western

civilisation. In that civilisation Christianity had indeed been legally

enthroned; but the philosophies and traditions of Paganism, and the

ingrained habits of an ancient, and at the same time an effete society,

continually paralysed its energies. What Europe would have been without

the barbarian invasions, we may partly divine from the history of the

Lower Empire, which represented, in fact, the old Roman civilisation

prolonged and Christianised. The barbarian conquests, breaking up the old

organisation, provided the Church with a virgin soil, and made it, for a

long period, the supreme and indeed sole centre of civilisation.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the skill and courage displayed by the

ecclesiastics in this most trying period. We have already seen the noble

daring with which they interfered between the conqueror and the

vanquished, and the unwearied charity with which they sought to alleviate

the unparalleled sufferings of Italy, when the colonial supplies of corn

were cut off, and when the fairest plains were desolated by the

barbarians. Still more wonderful is the rapid conversion of the barbarian

tribes. Unfortunately this, which is one of the most important, is also

one of the most obscure pages in the history of the Church. Of whole

tribes or nations it may be truly said that we are absolutely ignorant of

the cause of their change. The Goths had already been converted by

Ulphilas, before the downfall of the Empire, and the conversion of the

Germans and of several northern nations was long posterior to it; but the

great work of Christianising the barbarian world was accomplished almost

in the hour when that world became supreme. Rude tribes, accustomed in

their own lands to pay absolute obedience to their priests, found

themselves in a foreign country, confronted by a priesthood far more

civilised and imposing than that which they had left, by gorgeous

ceremonies, well fitted to entice, and by threats of coming judgment, well

fitted to scare their imaginations. Disconnected from all their old

associations, they bowed before the majesty of civilisation, and the Latin

religion, like the Latin language, though with many adulterations, reigned

over the new society. The doctrine of exclusive salvation, and the

doctrine of dæmons, had an admirable missionary power. The first produced

an ardour of proselytising which the polytheist could never rival; while

the Pagan, who was easily led to recognise the Christian God, was menaced

with eternal fire if he did not take the further step of breaking off from

his old divinities. The second dispensed the convert from the perhaps

impossible task of disbelieving his former religion, for it was only

necessary for him to degrade it, attributing its prodigies to infernal

beings. The priests, in addition to their noble devotion, carried into

their missionary efforts the most masterly judgment. The barbarian tribes

usually followed without enquiry the religion of their sovereign; and it

was to the conversion of the king, and still more to the conversion of the

queen, that the Christians devoted all their energies. Clotilda, the wife

of Clovis, Bertha, the wife of Ethelbert, and Theodolinda, the wife of

Lothaire, were the chief instruments in converting their husbands and

their nations. Nothing that could affect the imagination was neglected. It

is related of Clotilda, that she was careful to attract her husband by the

rich draperies of the ecclesiastical ceremonies.(387) In another case, the

first work of proselytising was confided to an artist, who painted before

the terrified Pagans the last judgment and the torments of hell.(388) But

especially the belief, which was sincerely held, and sedulously

inculcated, that temporal success followed in the train of Christianity,

and that every pestilence, famine, or military disaster was the penalty of

idolatry, heresy, sacrilege, or vice, assisted the movement. The theory

was so wide, that it met every variety of fortune, and being taught with

consummate skill, to barbarians who were totally destitute of all critical

power, and strongly predisposed to accept it, it proved extremely

efficacious; and hope, fear, gratitude, and remorse drew multitudes into

the Church. The transition was softened by the substitution of Christian

ceremonies and saints for the festivals and the divinities of the

Pagans.(389) Besides the professed missionaries, the Christian captives

zealously diffused their faith among their Pagan masters. When the

chieftain had been converted, and the army had followed his profession, an

elaborate monastic and ecclesiastical organisation grew up to consolidate

the conquest, and repressive laws soon crushed all opposition to the

faith.

In these ways the victory of Christianity over the barbarian world was

achieved. But that victory, though very great, was less decisive than

might appear. A religion which professed to be Christianity, and which

contained many of the ingredients of pure Christianity, had risen into the

ascendant, but it had undergone a profound modification through the

struggle. Religions, as well as worshippers, had been baptised. The

festivals, images, and names of saints had been substituted for those of

the idols, and the habits of thought and feeling of the ancient faith

reappeared in new forms and a new language. The tendency to a material,

idolatrous, and polytheistic faith, which had long been encouraged by the

monks, and which the heretics Jovinian, Vigilantius, and Aerius had vainly

resisted, was fatally strengthened by the infusion of a barbarian element

into the Church, by the general depression of intellect in Europe, and by

the many accommodations that were made to facilitate conversion. Though

apparently defeated and crushed, the old gods still retained, under a new

faith, no small part of their influence over the world.

To this tendency the leaders of the Church made in general no resistance,

though in another form they were deeply persuaded of the vitality of the

old gods. Many curious and picturesque legends attest the popular belief

that the old Roman and the old barbarian divinities, in their capacity of

dæmons, were still waging an unrelenting war against the triumphant faith.

A great Pope of the sixth century relates how a Jew, being once benighted

on his journey, and finding no other shelter for the night, lay down to

rest in an abandoned temple of Apollo. Shuddering at the loneliness of the

building, and fearing the dæmons who were said to haunt it, he determined,

though not a Christian, to protect himself by the sign of the cross, which

he had often heard possessed a mighty power against spirits. To that sign

he owed his safety. For at midnight the temple was filled with dark and

threatening forms. The god Apollo was holding his court at his deserted

shrine, and his attendant dæmons were recounting the temptations they had

devised against the Christians.(390) A newly married Roman, when one day

playing ball, took off his wedding-ring, which he found an impediment in

the game, and he gaily put it on the finger of a statue of Venus, that was

standing near. When he returned, the marble finger had bent so that it was

impossible to withdraw the ring, and that night the goddess appeared to

him in a dream, and told him that she was now his wedded wife, and that

she would abide with him for ever.(391) When the Irish missionary St. Gall

was fishing one night upon a Swiss lake, near which he had planted a

monastery, he heard strange voices sweeping over the lonely deep. The

Spirit of the Water and the Spirit of the Mountains were consulting

together how they could expel the intruder who had disturbed their ancient

reign.(392)

The details of the rapid propagation of Western monachism have been amply

treated by many historians, and the causes of its success are sufficiently

manifest. Some of the reasons I have assigned for the first spread of

asceticism continued to operate, while others of a still more powerful

kind had arisen. The rapid decomposition of the entire Roman Empire by

continuous invasions of barbarians rendered the existence of an inviolable

asylum and centre of peaceful labour a matter of transcendent importance,

and the monastery as organised by St. Benedict soon combined the most

heterogeneous elements of attraction. It was at once eminently

aristocratic and intensely democratic. The power and princely position of

the abbot were coveted, and usually obtained, by members of the most

illustrious families; while emancipated serfs, or peasants who had lost

their all in the invasions, or were harassed by savage nobles, or had fled

from military service, or desired to lead a more secure and easy life,

found in the monastery an unfailing refuge. The institution exercised all

the influence of great wealth, expended for the most part with great

charity, while the monk himself was invested with the aureole of a sacred

poverty. To ardent and philanthropic natures, the profession opened

boundless vistas of missionary, charitable, and civilising activity. To

the superstitious it was the plain road to heaven. To the ambitious it was

the portal to bishoprics, and, after the monk St. Gregory, not

unfrequently to the Popedom. To the studious it offered the only

opportunity then existing in the world of seeing many books and passing a

life of study. To the timid and retiring it afforded the most secure, and

probably the least laborious life a poor peasant could hope to find. Vast

as were the multitudes that thronged the monasteries, the means for their

support were never wanting. The belief that gifts or legacies to a

monastery opened the doors of heaven was in a superstitious age sufficient

to secure for the community an almost boundless wealth, which was still

further increased by the skill and perseverance with which the monks

tilled the waste lands, by the exemption of their domains from all

taxation, and by the tranquillity which in the most turbulent ages they

usually enjoyed. In France, the Low Countries, and Germany they were

pre-eminently agriculturists. Gigantic forests were felled, inhospitable

marshes reclaimed, barren plains cultivated by their hands. The monastery

often became the nucleus of a city. It was the centre of civilisation and

industry, the symbol of moral power in an age of turbulence and war.

It must be observed, however, that the beneficial influence of the

monastic system was necessarily transitional, and the subsequent

corruption the normal and inevitable result of its constitution. Vast

societies living in enforced celibacy, exercising an unbounded influence,

and possessing enormous wealth, must necessarily have become hotbeds of

corruption when the enthusiasm that had created them expired. The services

they rendered as the centres of agriculture, the refuge of travellers, the

sanctuaries in war, the counterpoise of the baronial castle, were no

longer required when the convulsions of invasion had ceased and when civil

society was definitely organised. And a similar observation may be

extended even to their moral type. Thus, while it is undoubtedly true that

the Benedictine monks, by making labour an essential element of their

discipline, did very much to efface the stigma which slavery had affixed

upon it, it is also true that, when industry had passed out of its initial

stage, the monastic theories of the sanctity of poverty, and the evil of

wealth, were its most deadly opponents. The dogmatic condemnation by

theologians of loans at interest, which are the basis of industrial

enterprise, was the expression of a far deeper antagonism of tendencies

and ideals.

In one important respect, the transition from the eremite to the monastic

life involved not only a change of circumstances, but also a change of

character. The habit of obedience, and the virtue of humility, assumed a

position which they had never previously occupied. The conditions of the

hermit life contributed to develop to a very high degree a spirit of

independence and spiritual pride, which was still further increased by a

curious habit that existed in the Church of regarding each eminent hermit

as the special model or professor of some particular virtue, and making

pilgrimages to him, in order to study this aspect of his character.(393)

These pilgrimages, combined with the usually solitary and self-sufficing

life of the hermit, and also with the habit of measuring progress almost

entirely by the suppression of a physical appetite, which it is quite

possible wholly to destroy, very naturally produced an extreme

arrogance.(394) But in the highly organised and disciplined monasteries of

the West, passive obedience and humility were the very first things that

were inculcated. The monastery, beyond all other institutions, was the

school for their exercise; and as the monk represented the highest moral

ideal of the age, obedience and humility acquired a new value in the minds

of men. Nearly all the feudal and other organisations that arose out of

the chaos that followed the destruction of the Roman Empire were

intimately related to the Church, not simply because the Church was the

strongest power in Christendom, and supplied in itself an admirable model

of an organised body, but also because it had done much to educate men in

habits of obedience. The special value of this education depended upon the

peculiar circumstances of the time. The ancient civilisations, and

especially that of Rome, had been by no means deficient in those habits;

but it was in the midst of the dissolution of an old society, and of the

ascendancy of barbarians, who exaggerated to the highest degree their

personal independence, that the Church proposed to the reverence of

mankind a life of passive obedience as the highest ideal of virtue.

The habit of obedience was no new thing in the world, but the disposition

of humility was pre-eminently and almost exclusively a Christian virtue;

and there has probably never been any sphere in which it has been so

largely and so successfully inculcated as in the monastery. The whole

penitential discipline, the entire mode or tenor of the monastic life, was

designed to tame every sentiment of pride, and to give humility a foremost

place in the hierarchy of virtues. We have here one great source of the

mollifying influence of Catholicism. The gentler virtues—benevolence and

amiability—may, and in an advanced civilisation often do, subsist in

natures that are completely devoid of genuine humility; but, on the other

hand, it is scarcely possible for a nature to be pervaded by a deep

sentiment of humility without this sentiment exercising a softening

influence over the whole character. To transform a fierce warlike nature

into a character of a gentler type, the first essential is to awaken this

feeling. In the monasteries, the extinction of social and domestic

feelings, the narrow corporate spirit, and, still more, the atrocious

opinions that were prevalent concerning the guilt of heresy, produced in

many minds an extreme and most active ferocity; but the practice of

charity, and the ideal of humility, never failed to exercise some

softening influence upon Christendom.

But, however advantageous the temporary pre-eminence of this moral type

may have been, it was obviously unsuited for a later stage of

civilisation. Political liberty is almost impossible where the monastic

system is supreme, not merely because the monasteries divert the energies

of the nation from civic to ecclesiastical channels, but also because the

monastic ideal is the very apotheosis of servitude. Catholicism has been

admirably fitted at once to mitigate and to perpetuate despotism. When men

have learnt to reverence a life of passive, unreasoning obedience as the

highest type of perfection, the enthusiasm and passion of freedom

necessarily decline. In this respect there is an analogy between the

monastic and the military spirit, both of which promote and glorify

passive obedience, and therefore prepare the minds of men for despotic

rule; but, on the whole, the monastic spirit is probably more hostile to

freedom than the military spirit, for the obedience of the monk is based

upon humility, while the obedience of the soldier coexists with pride.

Now, a considerable measure of pride, or self-assertion, is an invariable

characteristic of free communities.

The ascendancy which the monastic system gave to the virtue of humility

has not continued. This virtue is indeed the crowning grace and beauty of

the most perfect characters of the saintly type; but experience has shown

that among common men humility is more apt to degenerate into servility

than pride into arrogance; and modern moralists have appealed more

successfully to the sense of dignity than to the opposite feeling. Two of

the most important steps of later moral history have consisted of the

creation of a sentiment of pride as the parent and the guardian of many

virtues. The first of these encroachments on the monastic spirit was

chivalry, which called into being a proud and jealous military honour that

has never since been extinguished. The second was the creation of that

feeling of self-respect which is one of the most remarkable

characteristics that distinguish Protestant from the most Catholic

populations, and which has proved among the former an invaluable moral

agent, forming frank and independent natures, and checking every servile

habit and all mean and degrading vice.(395) The peculiar vigour with which

it has been developed in Protestant countries may be attributed to the

suppression of monastic institutions and habits; to the stigma

Protestantism has attached to mendicancy, which Catholicism has usually

glorified and encouraged; to the high place Protestantism has accorded to

private judgment and personal responsibility; and lastly, to the action of

free political institutions, which have taken deepest root where the

principles of the Reformation have been accepted.

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

The relation of the monasteries to the intellectual virtues, which we have

next to examine, opens out a wide field of discussion; and, in order to

appreciate it, it will be necessary to revert briefly to a somewhat

earlier stage of ecclesiastical history. And in the first place, it may be

observed, that the phrase intellectual virtue, which is often used in a

metaphorical sense, is susceptible of a strictly literal interpretation.

If a sincere and active desire for truth be a moral duty, the discipline

and the dispositions that are plainly involved in every honest search fall

rigidly within the range of ethics. To love truth sincerely means to

pursue it with an earnest, conscientious, unflagging zeal. It means to be

prepared to follow the light of evidence even to the most unwelcome

conclusions; to labour earnestly to emancipate the mind from early

prejudices; to resist the current of the desires, and the refracting

influence of the passions; to proportion on all occasions conviction to

evidence, and to be ready, if need be, to exchange the calm of assurance

for all the suffering of a perplexed and disturbed mind. To do this is

very difficult and very painful; but it is clearly involved in the notion

of earnest love of truth. If, then, any system stigmatises as criminal the

state of doubt, denounces the examination of some one class of arguments

or facts, seeks to introduce the bias of the affections into the enquiries

of the reason, or regards the honest conclusion of an upright investigator

as involving moral guilt, that system is subversive of intellectual

honesty.

Among the ancients, although the methods of enquiry were often very

faulty, and generalisations very hasty, a respect for the honest search

after truth was widely diffused.(396) There were, as we have already seen,

instances in which certain religious practices which were regarded as

attestations of loyalty, or as necessary to propitiate the gods in favour

of the State, were enforced by law; there were even a few instances of

philosophies, which were believed to lead directly to immoral results or

social convulsions, being suppressed; but, as a general rule, speculation

was untrammelled, the notion of there being any necessary guilt in

erroneous opinion was unknown, and the boldest enquirers were regarded

with honour and admiration. The religious theory of Paganism had in this

respect some influence. Polytheism, with many faults, had three great

merits. It was eminently poetical, eminently patriotic, and eminently

tolerant. The conception of a vast hierarchy of beings more glorious than,

but not wholly unlike, men, presiding over all the developments of nature,

and filling the universe with their deeds, supplied the chief nutriment of

the Greek imagination. The national religions, interweaving religious

ceremonies and associations with all civic life, concentrated and

intensified the sentiment of patriotism, and the notion of many distinct

groups of gods led men to tolerate many forms of worship and great variety

of creeds. In that colossal amalgam of nations of which Rome became the

metropolis, intellectual liberty still further advanced; the vast variety

of philosophies and beliefs expatiated unmolested; the search for truth

was regarded as an important element of virtue, and the relentless and

most sceptical criticism which Socrates had applied in turn to all the

fundamental propositions of popular belief remained as an example to his

successors.

We have already seen that one leading cause of the rapid progress of the

Church was that its teachers enforced their distinctive tenets as

absolutely essential to salvation, and thus assailed at a great advantage

the supporters of all other creeds which did not claim this exclusive

authority. We have seen, too, that in an age of great and growing

credulity they had been conspicuous for their assertion of the duty of

absolute, unqualified, and unquestioning belief. The notion of the guilt

both of error and of doubt grew rapidly, and, being soon regarded as a

fundamental tenet, it determined the whole course and policy of the

Church.

And here, I think, it will not be unadvisable to pause for a moment, and

endeavour to ascertain what misconceived truth lay at the root of this

fatal tenet. Considered abstractedly and by the light of nature, it is as

unmeaning to speak of the immorality of an intellectual mistake as it

would be to talk of the colour of a sound. If a man has sincerely

persuaded himself that it is possible for parallel lines to meet, or for

two straight lines to enclose a space, we pronounce his judgment to be

absurd; but it is free from all tincture of immorality. And if, instead of

failing to appreciate a demonstrable truth, his error consisted in a false

estimate of the conflicting arguments of an historical problem, this

mistake—assuming always that the enquiry was an upright one—is still

simply external to the sphere of morals. It is possible that his

conclusion, by weakening some barrier against vice, may produce vicious

consequences, like those which might ensue from some ill-advised

modification of the police force; but it in no degree follows from this

that the judgment is in itself criminal. If a student applies himself with

the same dispositions to Roman and Jewish histories, the mistakes he may

make in the latter are no more immoral than those which he may make in the

former.

There are, however, two cases in which an intellectual error may be justly

said to involve, or at least to represent, guilt. In the first place,

error very frequently springs from the partial or complete absence of that

mental disposition which is implied in a real love of truth. Hypocrites,

or men who through interested motives profess opinions which they do not

really believe, are probably rarer than is usually supposed; but it would

be difficult to over-estimate the number of those whose genuine

convictions are due to the unresisted bias of their interests. By the term

interests, I mean not only material well-being, but also all those mental

luxuries, all those grooves or channels for thought, which it is easy and

pleasing to follow, and painful and difficult to abandon. Such are the

love of ease, the love of certainty, the love of system, the bias of the

passions, the associations of the imagination, as well as the coarser

influences of social position, domestic happiness, professional interest,

party feeling, or ambition. In most men, the love of truth is so languid,

and the reluctance to encounter mental suffering is so great, that they

yield their judgments without an effort to the current, withdraw their

minds from all opinions or arguments opposed to their own, and thus

speedily convince themselves of the truth of what they wish to believe. He

who really loves truth is bound at least to endeavour to resist these

distorting influences, and in as far as his opinions are the result of his

not having done so, in so far they represent a moral failing.

In the next place, it must be observed that every moral disposition brings

with it an intellectual bias which exercises a great and often a

controlling and decisive influence even upon the most earnest enquirer. If

we know the character or disposition of a man, we can usually predict with

tolerable accuracy many of his opinions. We can tell to what side of

politics, to what canons of taste, to what theory of morals he will

naturally incline. Stern, heroic, and haughty natures tend to systems in

which these qualities occupy the foremost position in the moral type,

while gentle natures will as naturally lean towards systems in which the

amiable virtues are supreme. Impelled by a species of moral gravitation,

the enquirer will glide insensibly to the system which is congruous to his

disposition, and intellectual difficulties will seldom arrest him. He can

have observed human nature with but little fruit who has not remarked how

constant is this connection, and how very rarely men change fundamentally

the principles they had deliberately adopted on religious, moral, or even

political questions, without the change being preceded, accompanied, or

very speedily followed, by a serious modification of character. So, too, a

vicious and depraved nature, or a nature which is hard, narrow, and

unsympathetic, will tend, much less by calculation or indolence than by

natural affinity, to low and degrading views of human nature. Those who

have never felt the higher emotions will scarcely appreciate them. The

materials with which the intellect builds are often derived from the

heart, and a moral disease is therefore not unfrequently at the root of an

erroneous judgment.

Of these two truths the first cannot, I think, be said to have had any

influence in the formation of the theological notion of the guilt of

error. An elaborate process of mental discipline, with a view to

strengthening the critical powers of the mind, is utterly remote from the

spirit of theology; and this is one of the great reasons why the growth of

an inductive and scientific spirit is invariably hostile to theological

interests. To raise the requisite standard of proof, to inculcate hardness

and slowness of belief, is the first task of the inductive reasoner. He

looks with great favour upon the condition of a suspended judgment; he

encourages men rather to prolong than to abridge it; he regards the

tendency of the human mind to rapid and premature generalisations as one

of its most fatal vices; he desires especially that that which is believed

should not be so cherished that the mind should be indisposed to admit

doubt, or, on the appearance of new arguments, to revise with impartiality

its conclusions. Nearly all the greatest intellectual achievements of the

last three centuries have been preceded and prepared by the growth of

scepticism. The historic scepticism which Vico, Beaufort, Pouilly, and

Voltaire in the last century, and Niebuhr and Lewis in the present

century, applied to ancient history, lies at the root of all the great

modern efforts to reconstruct the history of mankind. The splendid

discoveries of physical science would have been impossible but for the

scientific scepticism of the school of Bacon, which dissipated the old

theories of the universe, and led men to demand a severity of proof

altogether unknown to the ancients. The philosophic scepticism with which

the system of Hume ended and the system of Kant began, has given the

greatest modern impulse to metaphysics and ethics. Exactly in proportion,

therefore, as men are educated in the inductive school, they are alienated

from those theological systems which represent a condition of doubt as

sinful, seek to govern the reason by the interests and the affections, and

make it a main object to destroy the impartiality of the judgment.

But although it is difficult to look upon Catholicism in any other light

than as the most deadly enemy of the scientific spirit, it has always

cordially recognised the most important truth, that character in a very

great measure determines opinions. To cultivate the moral type that is

most congenial to the opinions it desires to recommend has always been its

effort, and the conviction that a deviation from that type has often been

the predisposing cause of intellectual heresy, had doubtless a large share

in the first persuasion of the guilt of error. But priestly and other

influences soon conspired to enlarge this doctrine. A crowd of

speculative, historical, and administrative propositions were asserted as

essential to salvation, and all who rejected them were wholly external to

the bond of Christian sympathy.

If, indeed, we put aside the pure teaching of the Christian founders, and

consider the actual history of the Church since Constantine, we shall find

no justification for the popular theory that beneath its influence the

narrow spirit of patriotism faded into a wide and cosmopolitan

philanthropy. A real though somewhat languid feeling of universal

brotherhood had already been created in the world by the universality of

the Roman Empire. In the new faith the range of genuine sympathy was

strictly limited by the creed. According to the popular belief, all who

differed from the teaching of the orthodox lived under the hatred of the

Almighty, and were destined after death for an eternity of anguish. Very

naturally, therefore, they were wholly alienated from the true believers,

and no moral or intellectual excellence could atone for their crime in

propagating error. The eighty or ninety sects,(397) into which

Christianity speedily divided, hated one another with an intensity that

extorted the wonder of Julian and the ridicule of the Pagans of

Alexandria, and the fierce riots and persecutions that hatred produced

appear in every page of ecclesiastical history. There is, indeed,

something at once grotesque and ghastly in the spectacle. The Donatists,

having separated from the orthodox simply on the question of the validity

of the consecration of a certain bishop, declared that all who adopted the

orthodox view must be damned, refused to perform their rites in the

orthodox churches which they had seized, till they had burnt the altar and

scraped the wood, beat multitudes to death with clubs, blinded others by

anointing their eyes with lime, filled Africa, during nearly two

centuries, with war and desolation, and contributed largely to its final

ruin.(398) The childish and almost unintelligible quarrels between the

Homoiousians and the Homoousians, between those who maintained that the

nature of Christ was like that of the Father and those who maintained that

it was the same, filled the world with riot and hatred. The Catholics tell

how an Arian Emperor caused eighty orthodox priests to be drowned on a

single occasion;(399) how three thousand persons perished in the riots

that convulsed Constantinople when the Arian Bishop Macedonius superseded

the Athanasian Paul;(400) how George of Cappadocia, the Arian Bishop of

Alexandria, caused the widows of the Athanasian party to be scourged on

the soles of their feet, the holy virgins to be stripped naked, to be

flogged with the prickly branches of palm-trees, or to be slowly scorched

over fires till they abjured their creed.(401) The triumph of the

Catholics in Egypt was accompanied (if we may believe the solemn

assertions of eighty Arian Bishops) by every variety of plunder, murder,

sacrilege, and outrage,(402) and Arius himself was probably poisoned by

Catholic hands.(403) The followers of St. Cyril of Alexandria, who were

chiefly monks, filled their city with riot and bloodshed, wounded the

prefect Orestes, dragged the pure and gifted Hypatia into one of their

churches, murdered her, tore the flesh from her bones with sharp shells,

and, having stripped her body naked, flung her mangled remains into the

flames.(404) In Ephesus, during the contest between St. Cyril and the

Nestorians, the cathedral itself was the theatre of a fierce and bloody

conflict.(405) Constantinople, on the occasion of the deposition of St.

Chrysostom, was for several days in a condition of absolute anarchy.(406)

After the Council of Chalcedon, Jerusalem and Alexandria were again

convulsed, and the bishop of the latter city was murdered in his

baptistery.(407) About fifty years later, when the Monophysite controversy

was at its height, the palace of the emperor at Constantinople was

blockaded, the churches were besieged, and the streets commanded by

furious bands of contending monks.(408) Repressed for a time, the riots

broke out two years after with an increased ferocity, and almost every

leading city of the East was filled by the monks with bloodshed and with

outrage.(409) St. Augustine himself is accused of having excited every

kind of popular persecution against the Semi-Pelagians.(410) The Councils,

animated by an almost frantic hatred, urged on by their anathemas the

rival sects.(411) In the “Robber Council” of Ephesus, Flavianus, the

Bishop of Constantinople, was kicked and beaten by the Bishop of

Alexandria, or at least by his followers, and a few days later died from

the effect of the blows.(412) In the contested election that resulted in

the election of St. Damasus as Pope of Rome, though no theological

question appears to have been at issue, the riots were so fierce that one

hundred and thirty-seven corpses were found in one of the churches.(413)

The precedent of the Jewish persecutions of idolatry having been adduced

by St. Cyprian, in the third century, in favour of excommunication,(414)

was urged by Optatus, in the reign of Constantine, in favour of

persecuting the Donatists;(415) in the next reign we find a large body of

Christians presenting to the emperor a petition, based upon this

precedent, imploring him to destroy by force the Pagan worship.(416) About

fifteen years later, the whole Christian Church was prepared, on the same

grounds, to support the persecuting policy of St. Ambrose,(417) the

contending sects having found, in the duty of crushing religious liberty,

the solitary tenet on which they were agreed. The most unaggressive and

unobtrusive forms of Paganism were persecuted with the same ferocity.(418)

To offer a sacrifice was to commit a capital offence; to hang up a simple

chaplet was to incur the forfeiture of an estate. The noblest works of

Asiatic architecture and of Greek sculpture perished by the same

iconoclasm that shattered the humble temple at which the peasant loved to

pray, or the household gods which consecrated his home. There were no

varieties of belief too minute for the new intolerance to embitter. The

question of the proper time of celebrating Easter was believed to involve

the issue of salvation or damnation;(419) and when, long after, in the

fourteenth century, the question of the nature of the light at the

transfiguration was discussed at Constantinople, those who refused to

admit that that light was uncreated, were deprived of the honours of

Christian burial.(420)

Together with these legislative and ecclesiastical measures, a literature

arose surpassing in its mendacious ferocity any other the world had known.

The polemical writers habitually painted as dæmons those who diverged from

the orthodox belief, gloated with a vindictive piety over the sufferings

of the heretic upon earth, as upon a Divine punishment, and sometimes,

with an almost superhuman malice, passing in imagination beyond the

threshold of the grave, exulted in no ambiguous terms on the tortures

which they believed to be reserved for him for ever. A few men, such as

Synesius, Basil, or Salvian, might still find some excellence in Pagans or

heretics, but their candour was altogether exceptional; and he who will

compare the beautiful pictures the Greek poets gave of their Trojan

adversaries, or the Roman historians of the enemies of their country, with

those which ecclesiastical writers, for many centuries, almost invariably

gave of all who were opposed to their Church, may easily estimate the

extent to which cosmopolitan sympathy had retrograded.

At the period, however, when the Western monasteries began to discharge

their intellectual functions, the supremacy of Catholicism was nearly

established, and polemical ardour had begun to wane. The literary zeal of

the Church took other forms, but all were deeply tinged by the monastic

spirit. It is difficult or impossible to conceive what would have been the

intellectual future of the world had Catholicism never arisen—what

principles or impulses would have guided the course of the human mind, or

what new institutions would have been created for its culture. Under the

influence of Catholicism, the monastery became the one sphere of

intellectual labour, and it continued during many centuries to occupy that

position. Without entering into anything resembling a literary history,

which would be foreign to the objects of the present work, I shall

endeavour briefly to estimate the manner in which it discharged its

functions.

The first idea that is naturally suggested by the mention of the

intellectual services of monasteries is the preservation of the writings

of the Pagans. I have already observed that among the early Christians

there was a marked difference on the subject of their writings. The school

which was represented by Tertullian regarded them with abhorrence; while

the Platonists, who were represented by Justin Martyr, Clement of

Alexandria, and Origen, not merely recognised with great cordiality their

beauties, but even imagined that they could detect in them both the traces

of an original Divine inspiration, and plagiarisms from the Jewish

writings. While avoiding, for the most part, these extremes, St.

Augustine, the great organiser of Western Christianity, treats the Pagan

writings with appreciative respect. He had himself ascribed his first

conversion from a course of vice to the ’Hortensius’ of Cicero, and his

works are full of discriminating, and often very beautiful, applications

of the old Roman literature. The attempt of Julian to prevent the

Christians from teaching the classics, and the extreme resentment which

that attempt elicited, show how highly the Christian leaders of that

period valued this form of education; and it was naturally the more

cherished on account of the contest. The influence of Neoplatonism, the

baptism of multitudes of nominal Christians after Constantine, and the

decline of zeal which necessarily accompanied prosperity, had all in

different ways the same tendency. In Synesius we have the curious

phenomenon of a bishop who, not content with proclaiming himself the

admiring friend of the Pagan Hypatia, openly declared his complete

disbelief in the resurrection of the body, and his firm adhesion to the

Platonic doctrine of the pre-existence of souls.(421) Had the

ecclesiastical theory prevailed which gave such latitude even to the

leaders of the Church, the course of Christianity would have been very

different. A reactionary spirit, however, arose at Rome. The doctrine of

exclusive salvation supplied its intellectual basis; the political and

organising genius of the Roman ecclesiastics impelled them to reduce

belief into a rigid form; the genius of St. Gregory guided the

movement,(422) and a series of historical events, of which the

ecclesiastical and political separation of the Western empire from the

speculative Greeks, and the invasion and conversion of the barbarians,

were the most important, definitely established the ascendancy of the

Catholic type. In the convulsions that followed the barbarian invasions,

intellectual energy of a secular kind almost absolutely ceased. A parting

gleam issued, indeed, in the sixth century, from the Court of Theodoric,

at Ravenna, which was adorned by the genius of Boëthius, and the talent of

Cassiodorus and Symmachus, but after this time, for a long period,

literature consisted almost exclusively of sermons and lives of saints,

which were composed in the monasteries.(423) Gregory of Tours was

succeeded as an annalist by the still feebler Fredegarius, and there was

then a long and absolute blank. A few outlying countries showed some faint

animation. St. Leander and St. Isidore planted at Seville a school, which

flourished in the seventh century, and the distant monasteries of Ireland

continued somewhat later to be the receptacles of learning; but the rest

of Europe sank into an almost absolute torpor, till the rationalism of

Abelard, and the events that followed the crusades, began the revival of

learning. The principal service which Catholicism rendered during this

period to Pagan literature was probably the perpetuation of Latin as a

sacred language. The complete absence of all curiosity about that

literature is shown by the fact that Greek was suffered to become almost

absolutely extinct, though there was no time when the Western nations had

not some relations with the Greek empire, or when pilgrimages to the Holy

Land altogether ceased. The study of the Latin classics was for the most

part positively discouraged. The writers, it was believed, were burning in

hell; the monks were too inflated with their imaginary knowledge to regard

with any respect a Pagan writer, and periodical panics about the

approaching termination of the world continually checked any desire for

secular learning.(424) It was the custom among some monks, when they were

under the discipline of silence, and desired to ask for Virgil, Horace, or

any other Gentile work, to indicate their wish by scratching their ears

like a dog, to which animal it was thought the Pagans might be reasonably

compared.(425) The monasteries contained, it is said, during some time,

the only libraries in Europe, and were therefore the sole receptacles of

the Pagan manuscripts; but we cannot infer from this that, if the

monasteries had not existed, similar libraries would not have been called

into being in their place. To the occasional industry of the monks, in

copying the works of antiquity, we must oppose the industry they

displayed, though chiefly at a somewhat later period, in scraping the

ancient parchments, in order that, having obliterated the writing of the

Pagans, they might cover them with their own legends.(426)

There are some aspects, however, in which the monastic period of

literature appears eminently beautiful. The fretfulness and impatience and

extreme tension of modern literary life, the many anxieties that paralyse,

and the feverish craving for applause that perverts, so many noble

intellects, were then unknown. Severed from all the cares of active life,

in the deep calm of the monastery, where the turmoil of the outer world

could never come, the monkish scholar pursued his studies in a spirit

which has now almost faded from the world. No doubt had ever disturbed his

mind. To him the problem of the universe seemed solved. Expatiating for

ever with unfaltering faith upon the unseen world, he had learnt to live

for it alone. His hopes were not fixed upon human greatness or fame, but

upon the pardon of his sins, and the rewards of a happier world. A crowd

of quaint and often beautiful legends illustrate the deep union that

subsisted between literature and religion. It is related of Cædmon, the

first great poet of the Anglo-Saxons, that he found in the secular life no

vent for his hidden genius. When the warriors assembled at their banquets,

sang in turn the praises of war or beauty, as the instrument passed to

him, he rose and went out with a sad heart, for he alone was unable to

weave his thoughts in verse. Wearied and desponding he lay down to rest,

when a figure appeared to him in his dream and commanded him to sing the

Creation of the World. A transport of religious fervour thrilled his

brain, his imprisoned intellect was unlocked, and he soon became the

foremost poet of his land.(427) A Spanish boy, having long tried in vain

to master his task, and driven to despair by the severity of his teacher,

ran away from his father’s home. Tired with wandering, and full of anxious

thoughts, he sat down to rest by the margin of a well, when his eye was

caught by the deep furrow in the stone. He asked a girl who was drawing

water to explain it, and she told him that it had been worn by the

constant attrition of the rope. The poor boy, who was already full of

remorse for what he had done, recognised in the reply a Divine intimation.

“If,” he thought, “by daily use the soft rope could thus penetrate the

hard stone, surely a long perseverance could overcome the dulness of my

brain.” He returned to his father’s house; he laboured with redoubled

earnestness, and he lived to be the great St. Isidore of Spain.(428) A

monk who had led a vicious life was saved, it is said, from hell, because

it was found that his sins, though very numerous, were just outnumbered by

the letters of a ponderous and devout book he had written.(429) The Holy

Spirit, in the shape of a dove, had been seen to inspire St. Gregory; and

the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, and of several other theologians, had

been expressly applauded by Christ or by his saints. When, twenty years

after death, the tomb of a certain monkish writer was opened, it was found

that, although the remainder of the body had crumbled into dust, the hand

that had held the pen remained flexible and undecayed.(430) A young and

nameless scholar was once buried near a convent at Bonn. The night after

his funeral, a nun whose cell overlooked the cemetery was awakened by a

brilliant light that filled the room. She started up, imagining that the

day had dawned, but on looking out she found that it was still night,

though a dazzling splendour was around. A female form of matchless

loveliness was bending over the scholar’s grave. The effluence of her

beauty filled the air with light, and she clasped to her heart a

snow-white dove that rose to meet her from the tomb. It was the Mother of

God come to receive the soul of the martyred scholar; “for scholars too,”

adds the old chronicler, “are martyrs if they live in purity and labour

with courage.”(431)