E-text prepared by Suzanne Lybarger, Brian Janes, Leonard Johnson, and the
Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
(http://www.pgdp.net)
Note: Project Gutenberg also has Volumes I and II of this work
in text file format only. See
Volume I: https://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2332
Volume II: https://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2333
CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL ESSAYS
by
LORD MACAULAY
In Three Volumes
[Illustration: The Riverside Press logo.]
VOLUME III
Boston and New York
Houghton Mifflin Company
The Riverside Press Cambridge
Copyright, 1899, by Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
All Rights Reserved
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
RANKE'S HISTORY OF THE POPES 1
LEIGH HUNT'S COMIC DRAMATISTS OF THE RESTORATION 47
LORD HOLLAND 101
WARREN HASTINGS 114
FREDERIC THE GREAT 243
DIARY AND LETTERS OF MADAME D'ARBLAY 331
THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ADDISON 396
BARERE 487
THE EARL OF CHATHAM 591
INDEX TO THE ESSAYS 689
CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL ESSAYS
III
RANKE'S HISTORY OF THE POPES[1]
_The Edinburgh Review_, October, 1840
It is hardly necessary for us to say that this is an excellent book
excellently translated. The original work of Professor Ranke is known
and esteemed wherever German literature is studied, and has been found
interesting even in a most inaccurate and dishonest French version. It
is, indeed, the work of a mind fitted both for minute researches and for
large speculations. It is written also in an admirable spirit, equally
remote from levity and bigotry, serious and earnest, yet tolerant and
impartial. It is, therefore, with the greatest pleasure that we now see
this book take its place among the English classics. Of the translation
we need only say that it is such as might be expected from the skill,
the taste, and the scrupulous integrity of the accomplished lady who, as
an interpreter between the mind of Germany and the mind of Britain, has
already deserved so well of both countries.
The subject of this book has always appeared to us singularly
interesting. How it was that Protestantism did so much, yet did no more,
how it was that the Church of Rome, having lost a large part of Europe,
not only ceased to lose, but actually regained nearly half of what she
had lost, is certainly a most curious and important question; and on
this question Professor Ranke has thrown far more light than any other
person who has written on it.
There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy
so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The
history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human
civilization. No other institution is left standing which carries the
mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the
Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian
amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday, when
compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace back
in an unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the
nineteenth century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far
beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in
the twilight of fable. The republic of Venice came next in antiquity.
But the republic of Venice was modern when compared with the Papacy; and
the republic of Venice is gone, and the Papacy remains. The Papacy
remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and youthful
vigor. The Catholic Church is still sending forth to the farthest ends
of the world missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with
Augustine, and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with
which she confronted Attila. The number of her children is greater than
in any former age. Her acquisitions in the New World have more than
compensated for what she has lost in the Old. Her spiritual ascendency
extends over the vast countries which lie between the plains of the
Missouri and Cape Horn, countries which, a century hence, may not
improbably contain a population as large as that which now inhabits
Europe. The members of her communion are certainly not fewer than a
hundred and fifty millions; and it will be difficult to show that all
other Christian sects united amount to a hundred and twenty millions.
Nor do we see any sign which indicates that the term of her long
dominion is approaching. She saw the commencement of all the governments
and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the
world; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end
of them all. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot
on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian
eloquence still flourished in Antioch, when idols were still worshipped
in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigor
when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast
solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the
ruins of St. Paul's.
We often hear it said that the world is constantly becoming more and
more enlightened, and that this enlightening must be favorable to
Protestantism and unfavorable to Catholicism. We wish that we could
think so. But we see great reason to doubt whether this be a
well-founded expectation. We see that during the last two hundred and
fifty years the human mind has been in the highest degree active, that
it has made great advances in every branch of natural philosophy, that
it has produced innumerable inventions tending to promote the
convenience of life, that medicine, surgery, chemistry, engineering,
have been very greatly improved, that government, police, and law have
been improved, though not to so great an extent as the physical
sciences. But we see that, during these two hundred and fifty years,
Protestantism has made no conquests worth speaking of. Nay, we believe
that, as far as there has been a change, that change has, on the whole,
been in favor of the Church of Rome. We cannot, therefore, feel
confident that the progress of knowledge will necessarily be fatal to a
system which has, to say the least, stood its ground in spite of the
immense progress made by the human race in knowledge since the days of
Queen Elizabeth.
Indeed, the argument which we are considering seems to us to be founded
on an entire mistake. There are branches of knowledge with respect to
which the law of the human mind is progress. In mathematics, when once a
proposition has been demonstrated, it is never afterwards contested.
Every fresh story is as solid a basis for a new superstructure as the
original foundation was. Here, therefore, there is a constant addition
to the stock of truth. In the inductive sciences again, the law is
progress. Every day furnishes new facts, and thus brings theory nearer
and nearer to perfection. There is no chance that, either in the purely
demonstrative or in the purely experimental sciences, the world will
ever go back or even remain stationary. Nobody ever heard of a reaction
against Taylor's theorem, or of a reaction against Harvey's doctrine of
the circulation of the blood.
But with theology the case is very different. As respects natural
religion,--revelation being for the present altogether left out of the
question,--it is not easy to see that a philosopher of the present day
is more favorably situated than Thales or Simonides. He has before him
just the same evidences of design in the structure of the universe which
the early Greeks had. We say just the same; for the discoveries of
modern astronomers and anatomists have really added nothing to the force
of that argument which a reflecting mind finds in every beast, bird,
insect, fish, leaf, flower, and shell. The reasoning by which Socrates,
in Xenophon's hearing, confuted the little atheist Aristodemus, is
exactly the reasoning of Paley's Natural Theology. Socrates makes
precisely the same use of the statues of Polycletus and the pictures of
Zeuxis which Paley makes of the watch. As to the other great question,
the question what becomes of man after death, we do not see that a
highly educated European, left to his unassisted reason, is more likely
to be in the right than a Blackfoot Indian. Not a single one of the many
sciences in which we surpass the Blackfoot Indians throws the smallest
light on the state of the soul after the animal life is extinct. In
truth all the philosophers, ancient and modern, who have attempted,
without the help of revelation, to prove the immortality of man, from
Plato down to Franklin, appear to us to have failed deplorably.
Then, again, all the great enigmas which perplex the natural theologian
are the same in all ages. The ingenuity of a people just emerging from
barbarism is quite sufficient to propound those enigmas. The genius of
Locke or Clarke is quite unable to solve them. It is a mistake to
imagine that subtle speculations touching the divine attributes, the
origin of evil, the necessity of human actions, the foundation of moral
obligation, imply any high degree of intellectual culture. Such
speculations, on the contrary, are in a peculiar manner the delight of
intelligent children and of half-civilized men. The number of boys is
not small who, at fourteen, have thought enough on these questions to be
fully entitled to the praise which Voltaire gives to Zadig. "Il en
savait ce qu'on en a su dans tous les ages; c'est-a-dire, fort peu de
chose." The Book of Job shows that, long before letters and arts were
known to Ionia, these vexing questions were debated with no common skill
and eloquence, under the tents of the Idumean Emirs; nor has human
reason, in the course of three thousand years, discovered any
satisfactory solution of the riddles which perplexed Eliphaz and Zophar.
Natural theology, then, is not a progressive science. That knowledge of
our origin and of our destiny which we derive from revelation is indeed
of very different clearness, and of very different importance. But
neither is revealed religion of the nature of a progressive science. All
divine truth is, according to the doctrine of the Protestant churches,
recorded in certain books. It is equally open to all who, in any age,
can read those books; nor can all the discoveries of all the
philosophers in the world add a single verse to any of those books. It
is plain, therefore, that in divinity there cannot be a progress
analogous to that which is constantly taking place in pharmacy, geology,
and navigation. A Christian of the fifth century with a Bible is neither
better nor worse situated than a Christian of the nineteenth century
with a Bible, candor and natural acuteness being, of course, supposed
equal. It matters not at all that the compass, printing, gunpowder,
steam, gas, vaccination, and a thousand other discoveries and
inventions, which were unknown in the fifth century, are familiar to the
nineteenth. None of these discoveries and inventions has the smallest
bearing on the question whether man is justified by faith alone, or
whether the invocation of saints is an orthodox practice. It seems to
us, therefore, that we have no security for the future against the
prevalence of any theological error that ever has prevailed in time past
among Christian men. We are confident that the world will never go back
to the solar system of Ptolemy; nor is our confidence in the least
shaken by the circumstance that even so great a man as Bacon rejected
the theory of Galileo with scorn; for Bacon had not all the means of
arriving at a sound conclusion which are within our reach, and which
secure people who would not have been worthy to mend his pens from
falling into his mistakes. But when we reflect that Sir Thomas More was
ready to die for the doctrine of transubstantiation, we cannot but feel
some doubt whether the doctrine of transubstantiation may not triumph
over all opposition. More was a man of eminent talents. He had all the
information on the subject that we have, or that, while the world lasts,
any human being will have. The text, "This is my body," was in his New
Testament as it is in ours. The absurdity of the literal interpretation
was as great and as obvious in the sixteenth century as it is now. No
progress that science has made, or will make, can add to what seems to
us the overwhelming force of the argument against the real presence. We
are, therefore, unable to understand why what Sir Thomas More believed
respecting transubstantiation may not be believed to the end of time by
men equal in abilities and honesty to Sir Thomas More. But Sir Thomas
More is one of the choice specimens of human wisdom and virtue; and the
doctrine of transubstantiation is a kind of proof charge. A faith which
stands that test will stand any test. The prophecies of Brothers and the
miracles of Prince Hohenlohe sink to trifles in the comparison.
One reservation, indeed, must be made. The books and traditions of a
sect may contain, mingled with propositions strictly theological, other
propositions, purporting to rest on the same authority, which relate to
physics. If new discoveries should throw discredit on the physical
propositions, the theological propositions, unless they can be separated
from the physical propositions, will share in that discredit. In this
way, undoubtedly, the progress of science may indirectly serve the cause
of religious truth. The Hindoo mythology, for example, is bound up with
a most absurd geography. Every young Brahmin, therefore, who learns
geography in our colleges learns to smile at the Hindoo mythology. If
Catholicism has not suffered to an equal degree from the papal decision
that the sun goes round the earth, this is because all intelligent
Catholics now hold, with Pascal, that, in deciding the point at all, the
Church exceeded her powers, and was, therefore, justly left destitute of
that supernatural assistance which, in the exercise of her legitimate
functions, the promise of her Founder authorized her to expect.
This reservation affects not at all the truth of our proposition, that
divinity, properly so called, is not a progressive science. A very
common knowledge of history, a very little observation of life, will
suffice to prove that no learning, no sagacity, affords a security
against the greatest errors on subjects relating to the invisible world.
Bayle and Chillingworth, two of the most skeptical of mankind, turned
Catholics from sincere conviction. Johnson, incredulous on all other
points, was a ready believer in miracles and apparitions. He would not
believe in Ossian; but he was willing to believe in the second sight. He
would not believe in the earthquake of Lisbon; but he was willing to
believe in the Cock Lane ghost.
For these reasons we have ceased to wonder at any vagaries of
superstition. We have seen men, not of mean intellect or neglected
education, but qualified by their talents and acquirements to attain
eminence either in active or speculative pursuits, well-read scholars,
expert logicians, keen observers of life and manners, prophesying,
interpreting, talking unknown tongues, working miraculous cures, coming
down with messages from God to the House of Commons. We have seen an old
woman, with no talents beyond the cunning of a fortuneteller, and with
the education of a scullion, exalted into a prophetess, and surrounded
by tens of thousands of devoted followers, many of whom were, in station
and knowledge, immeasurably her superiors; and all this in the
nineteenth century; and all this in London. Yet why not? For of the
dealings of God with man no more has been revealed to the nineteenth
century than to the first, or to London than to the wildest parish in
the Hebrides. It is true that, in those things which concern this life
and this world, man constantly becomes wiser and wiser. But it is no
less true that, as respects a higher power and a future state, man, in
the language of Goethe's scoffing fiend,
"bleibt stets von gleichem Schlag,
Und ist so wunderlich als wie am ersten Tag."
The history of Catholicism strikingly illustrates these observations.
During the last seven centuries the public mind of Europe has made
constant progress in every department of secular knowledge. But in
religion we can trace no constant progress. The ecclesiastical history
of that long period is a history of movement to and fro. Four times,
since the authority of the Church of Rome was established in Western
Christendom, has the human intellect risen up against her yoke. Twice
that Church remained completely victorious. Twice she came forth from
the conflict bearing the marks of cruel wounds, but with the principle
of life still strong within her. When we reflect on the tremendous
assaults which she has survived, we find it difficult to conceive in
what way she is to perish.
The first of these insurrections broke out in the region where the
beautiful language of _Oc_ was spoken. That country, singularly favored
by nature, was, in the twelfth century, the most flourishing and
civilized portion of Western Europe. It was in no wise a part of France.
It had a distinct political existence, a distinct national character,
distinct usages, and a distinct speech. The soil was fruitful and well
cultivated; and amidst the cornfields and vineyards rose many rich
cities, each of which was a little republic, and many stately castles,
each of which contained a miniature of an imperial court. It was there
that the spirit of chivalry first laid aside its terrors, first took a
humane and graceful form, first appeared as the inseparable associate of
art and literature, of courtesy and love. The other vernacular dialects
which, since the fifth century, had sprung up in the ancient provinces
of the Roman empire, were still rude and imperfect. The sweet Tuscan,
the rich and energetic English, were abandoned to artisans and
shepherds. No clerk had ever condescended to use such barbarous jargon
for the teaching of science, for the recording of great events, or for
the painting of life and manners. But the language of Provence was
already the language of the learned and polite, and was employed by
numerous writers, studious of all the arts of composition and
versification. A literature rich in ballads, in war-songs, in satire,
and, above all, in amatory poetry, amused the leisure of the knights and
ladies whose fortified mansions adorned the banks of the Rhone and
Garonne. With civilization had come freedom of thought. Use had taken
away the horror with which misbelievers were elsewhere regarded. No
Norman or Breton ever saw a Mussulman, except to give and receive blows
on some Syrian field of battle. But the people of the rich countries
which lay under the Pyrenees lived in habits of courteous and profitable
intercourse with the Moorish kingdoms of Spain, and gave a hospitable
welcome to skilful leeches and mathematicians who, in the schools of
Cordova and Granada, had become versed in all the learning of the
Arabians. The Greek, still preserving, in the midst of political
degradation, the ready wit and the inquiring spirit of his fathers,
still able to read the most perfect of human compositions, still
speaking the most powerful and flexible of human languages, brought to
the marts of Narbonne and Toulouse, together with the drugs and silks of
remote climates, bold and subtle theories long unknown to the ignorant
and credulous West. The Paulician theology, a theology in which, as it
should seem, many of the doctrines of the modern Calvinists were mingled
with some doctrines derived from the ancient Manichees, spread rapidly
through Provence and Languedoc. The clergy of the Catholic Church were
regarded with loathing and contempt. "Viler than a priest," "I would as
soon be a priest," became proverbial expressions. The Papacy had lost
all authority with all classes, from the great feudal princes down to
the cultivators of the soil.
The danger to the hierarchy was indeed formidable. Only one transalpine
nation had emerged from barbarism; and that nation had thrown off all
respect for Rome. Only one of the vernacular languages of Europe had
yet been extensively employed for literary purposes; and that language
was a machine in the hands of heretics. The geographical position of the
sectaries made the danger peculiarly formidable. They occupied a central
region communicating directly with France, with Italy, and with Spain.
The provinces which were still untainted were separated from each other
by this infected district. Under these circumstances, it seemed probable
that a single generation would suffice to spread the reformed doctrine
to Lisbon, to London, and to Naples. But this was not to be. Rome cried
for help to the warriors of northern France. She appealed at once to
their superstition and to their cupidity. To the devout believer she
promised pardons as ample as those with which she had rewarded the
deliverers of the Holy Sepulchre. To the rapacious and profligate she
offered the plunder of fertile plains and wealthy cities. Unhappily, the
ingenious and polished inhabitants of the Languedocian provinces were
far better qualified to enrich and embellish their country than to
defend it. Eminent in the arts of peace, unrivalled in the "gay
science," elevated above many vulgar superstitions, they wanted that
iron courage, and that skill in martial exercises, which distinguished
the chivalry of the region beyond the Loire, and were ill fitted to face
enemies who, in every country from Ireland to Palestine, had been
victorious against tenfold odds. A war, distinguished even among wars of
religion by merciless atrocity, destroyed the Albigensian heresy, and
with that heresy the prosperity, the civilization, the literature, the
national existence, of what was once the most opulent and enlightened
part of the great European family. Rome, in the meantime, warned by that
fearful danger from which the exterminating swords of her crusaders had
narrowly saved her, proceeded to revise and to strengthen her whole
system of polity. At this period were instituted the Order of Francis,
the Order of Dominic, the Tribunal of the Inquisition. The new
spiritual police was everywhere. No alley in a great city, no hamlet on
a remote mountain, was unvisited by the begging friar. The simple
Catholic, who was content to be no wiser than his fathers, found,
wherever he turned, a friendly voice to encourage him. The path of the
heretic was beset by innumerable spies; and the Church, lately in danger
of utter subversion, now appeared to be impregnably fortified by the
love, the reverence, and the terror of mankind.
A century and a half passed away; and then came the second great rising
up of the human intellect against the spiritual domination of Rome.
During the two generations which followed the Albigensian crusade, the
power of the Papacy had been at the height. Frederic the Second, the
ablest and most accomplished of the long line of German Caesars, had in
vain exhausted all the resources of military and political skill in the
attempt to defend the rights of the civil power against the
encroachments of the Church. The vengeance of the priesthood had pursued
his house to the third generation. Manfred had perished on the field of
battle, Conradin on the scaffold. Then a turn took place. The secular
authority, long unduly depressed, regained the ascendant with startling
rapidity. The change is doubtless to be ascribed chiefly to the general
disgust excited by the way in which the Church had abused its power and
its success. But something must be attributed to the character and
situation of individuals. The man who bore the chief part in effecting
this revolution was Philip the Fourth of France, surnamed the Beautiful,
a despot by position, a despot by temperament, stern, implacable, and
unscrupulous, equally prepared for violence and for chicanery, and
surrounded by a devoted band of men of the sword and of men of law. The
fiercest and most high-minded of the Roman Pontiffs, while bestowing
kingdoms and citing great princes to his judgment-seat, was seized in
his palace by armed men, and so foully outraged that he died mad with
rage and terror. "Thus," sang the great Florentine poet, "was Christ, in
the person of his vicar, a second time seized by ruffians, a second time
mocked, a second time drenched with the vinegar and the gall." The seat
of the papal court was carried beyond the Alps, and the Bishops of Rome
became dependents of France. Then came the great schism of the West. Two
Popes, each with a doubtful title, made all Europe ring with their
mutual invectives and anathemas. Rome cried out against the corruptions
of Avignon; and Avignon, with equal justice, recriminated on Rome. The
plain Christian people, brought up in the belief that it was a sacred
duty to be in communion with the head of the Church, were unable to
discover, amidst conflicting testimonies and conflicting arguments, to
which of the two worthless priests, who were cursing and reviling each
other, the headship of the Church rightfully belonged. It was nearly at
this juncture that the voice of John Wickliffe began to make itself
heard. The public mind of England was soon stirred to its inmost depths;
and the influence of the new doctrines was soon felt, even in the
distant kingdom of Bohemia. In Bohemia, indeed, there had long been a
predisposition to heresy. Merchants from the Lower Danube were often
seen in the fairs of Prague; and the Lower Danube was peculiarly the
seat of the Paulician theology. The Church, torn by schism, and fiercely
assailed at once in England and in the German empire, was in a situation
scarcely less perilous than at the crisis which preceded the Albigensian
crusade.
But this danger also passed by. The civil power gave its strenuous
support to the Church; and the Church made some show of reforming
itself. The Council of Constance put an end to the schism. The whole
Catholic world was again united under a single chief; and rules were
laid down which seemed to make it improbable that the power of that
chief would be grossly abused. The most distinguished teachers of the
new doctrine were slaughtered. The English government put down the
Lollards with merciless rigor; and, in the next generation, scarcely one
trace of the second great revolt against the Papacy could be found,
except among the rude population of the mountains of Bohemia.
Another century went by; and then began the third and the most memorable
struggle for spiritual freedom. The times were changed. The great
remains of Athenian and Roman genius were studied by thousands. The
Church had no longer a monopoly of learning. The powers of the modern
languages had at length been developed. The invention of printing had
given new facilities to the intercourse of mind with mind. With such
auspices commenced the great Reformation.
We will attempt to lay before our readers, in a short compass, what
appears to us to be the real history of the contest which began with the
preaching of Luther against the Indulgences, and which may, in one
sense, be said to have been terminated, a hundred and thirty years
later, by the treaty of Westphalia.
In the northern parts of Europe, the victory of Protestantism was rapid
and decisive. The dominion of the Papacy was felt by the nations of
Teutonic blood as the dominion of Italians, of foreigners, of men who
were aliens in language, manners, and intellectual constitution. The
large jurisdiction exercised by the spiritual tribunals of Rome seemed
to be a degrading badge of servitude. The sums which, under a thousand
pretexts, were exacted by a distant court, were regarded both as a
humiliating and as a ruinous tribute. The character of that court
excited the scorn and disgust of a grave, earnest, sincere, and devout
people. The new theology spread with a rapidity never known before. All
ranks, all varieties of character, joined the ranks of the innovators.
Sovereigns impatient to appropriate to themselves the prerogatives of
the Pope, nobles desirous to share the plunder of abbeys, suitors
exasperated by the extortions of the Roman Camera, patriots impatient of
a foreign rule, good men scandalized by the corruptions of the Church,
bad men desirous of the license inseparable from great moral
revolutions, wise men eager in the pursuit of truth, weak men allured by
the glitter of novelty, all were found on one side. Alone among the
northern nations the Irish adhered to the ancient faith: and the cause
of this seems to have been that the national feeling which, in happier
countries, was directed against Rome, was in Ireland directed against
England. Within fifty years from the day on which Luther publicly
renounced communion with the Papacy, and burned the bull of Leo before
the gates of Wittenberg, Protestantism attained its highest ascendency,
an ascendency which it soon lost, and which it has never regained.
Hundreds, who could well remember Brother Martin a devout Catholic,
lived to see the revolution of which he was the chief author, victorious
in half the states of Europe. In England, Scotland, Denmark, Sweden,
Livonia, Prussia, Saxony, Hesse, Wurtemburg, the Palatinate, in several
cantons of Switzerland, in the Northern Netherlands, the Reformation had
completely triumphed; and in all the other countries on this side of the
Alps and the Pyrenees, it seemed on the point of triumphing.
But while this mighty work was proceeding in the north of Europe, a
revolution of a very different kind had taken place in the south. The
temper of Italy and Spain was widely different from that of Germany and
England. As the national feeling of the Teutonic nations impelled them
to throw off the Italian supremacy, so the national feeling of the
Italians impelled them to resist any change which might deprive their
country of the honors and advantages which she enjoyed as the seat of
the government of the Universal Church. It was in Italy that the
tributes were spent of which foreign nations so bitterly complained. It
was to adorn Italy that the traffic in Indulgences had been carried to
that scandalous excess which had roused the indignation of Luther. There
was among the Italians both much piety and much impiety; but, with very
few exceptions, neither the piety nor the impiety took the turn of
Protestantism. The religious Italians desired a reform of morals and
discipline, but not a reform of doctrine, and least of all a schism. The
irreligious Italians simply disbelieved Christianity, without hating it.
They looked at it as artists or as statesmen; and, so looking at it,
they liked it better in the established form than in any other. It was
to them what the old Pagan worship was to Trajan and Pliny. Neither the
spirit of Savonarola nor the spirit of Machiavelli had anything in
common with the spirit of the religious or political Protestants of the
North.
Spain again was, with respect to the Catholic Church, in a situation
very different from that of the Teutonic nations. Italy was, in truth, a
part of the empire of Charles the Fifth; and the Court of Rome was, on
many important occasions, his tool. He had not, therefore, like the
distant princes of the North, a strong selfish motive for attacking the
Papacy. In fact, the very measures which provoked the Sovereign of
England to renounce all connection with Rome were dictated by the
Sovereign of Spain. The feeling of the Spanish people concurred with the
interest of the Spanish government. The attachment of the Castilian to
the faith of his ancestors was peculiarly strong and ardent. With that
faith were inseparably bound up the institutions, the independence, and
the glory of his country. Between the day when the last Gothic King was
vanquished on the banks of the Xeres, and the day when Ferdinand and
Isabella entered Granada in triumph, near eight hundred years had
elapsed; and during those years the Spanish nation had been engaged in a
desperate struggle against misbelievers. The Crusades had been merely an
episode in the history of other nations. The existence of Spain had
been one long Crusade. After fighting Mussulmans in the Old World, she
began to fight heathens in the New. It was under the authority of a
papal bull that her children steered into unknown seas. It was under the
standard of the cross that they marched fearlessly into the heart of
great kingdoms. It was with the cry of "St. James for Spain" that they
charged armies which outnumbered them a hundredfold. And men said that
the Saint had heard the call, and had himself, in arms, on a gray
war-horse, led the onset before which the worshippers of false gods had
given way. After the battle, every excess of rapacity or cruelty was
sufficiently vindicated by the plea that the sufferers were unbaptized.
Avarice stimulated zeal. Zeal consecrated avarice. Proselytes and gold
mines were sought with equal ardor. In the very year in which the
Saxons, maddened by the exactions of Rome, broke loose from her yoke,
the Spaniards, under the authority of Rome, made themselves masters of
the empire and of the treasures of Montezuma. Thus Catholicism which, in
the public mind of Northern Europe, was associated with spoliation and
oppression, was in the public mind of Spain associated with liberty,
victory, dominion, wealth, and glory.
It is not, therefore, strange that the effect of the great outbreak of
Protestantism in one part of Christendom should have been to produce an
equally violent outbreak of Catholic zeal in another. Two reformations
were pushed on at once with equal energy and effect, a reformation of
doctrine in the North, a reformation of manners and discipline in the
South. In the course of a single generation, the whole spirit of the
Church of Rome underwent a change. From the halls of the Vatican to the
most secluded hermitage of the Apennines, the great revival was
everywhere felt and seen. All the institutions anciently devised for the
propagation and defence of the faith were furbished up and made
efficient. Fresh engines of still more formidable power were
constructed. Everywhere old religious communities were remodelled and
new religious communities called into existence. Within a year after the
death of Leo, the order of Camaldoli was purified. The Capuchins
restored the old Franciscan discipline, the midnight prayer and the life
of silence. The Barnabites and the society of Somasca devoted themselves
to the relief and education of the poor. To the Theatine order a still
higher interest belongs. Its great object was the same with that of our
early Methodists, namely, to supply the deficiencies of the parochial
clergy. The Church of Rome, wiser than the Church of England, gave every
countenance to the good work. The members of the new brotherhood
preached to great multitudes in the streets and in the fields, prayed by
the beds of the sick, and administered the last sacraments to the dying.
Foremost among them in zeal and devotion was Gian Pietro Caraffa,
afterwards Pope Paul the Fourth. In the convent of the Theatines at
Venice, under the eye of Caraffa, a Spanish gentleman took up his abode,
tended the poor in the hospitals, went about in rags, starved himself
almost to death, and often sallied into the streets, mounted on stones,
and, waving his hat to invite the passers-by, began to preach in a
strange jargon of mingled Castilian and Tuscan. The Theatines were among
the most zealous and rigid of men; but to this enthusiastic neophyte
their discipline seemed lax, and their movements sluggish; for his own
mind, naturally passionate and imaginative, had passed through a
training which had given to all its peculiarities a morbid intensity and
energy. In his early life he had been the very prototype of the hero of
Cervantes. The single study of the young Hidalgo had been chivalrous
romance; and his existence had been one gorgeous day-dream of princesses
rescued and infidels subdued. He had chosen a Dulcinea, "no countess, no
duchess,"--these are his own words,--"but one of far higher station;"
and he flattered himself with the hope of laying at her feet the keys of
Moorish castles and the jewelled turbans of Asiatic kings. In the midst
of these visions of martial glory and prosperous love, a severe wound
stretched him on a bed of sickness. His constitution was shattered and
he was doomed to be a cripple for life. The palm of strength, grace, and
skill in knightly exercises was no longer for him. He could no longer
hope to strike down gigantic soldans, or to find favor in the sight of
beautiful women. A new vision then arose in his mind, and mingled itself
with his old delusions in a manner which to most Englishmen must seem
singular, but which those who know how close was the union between
religion and chivalry in Spain will be at no loss to understand. He
would still be a soldier, he would still be a knight errant; but the
soldier and knight errant of the spouse of Christ. He would smite the
Great Red Dragon. He would be the champion of the Woman clothed with the
Sun. He would break the charm under which false prophets held the souls
of men in bondage. His restless spirit led him to the Syrian deserts,
and to the chapel of the Holy Sepulchre. Thence he wandered back to the
farthest West, and astonished the convents of Spain and the schools of
France by his penances and vigils. The same lively imagination which had
been employed in picturing the tumult of unreal battles, and the charms
of unreal queens, now peopled his solitude with saints and angels. The
Holy Virgin descended to commune with him. He saw the Saviour face to
face with the eye of flesh. Even those mysteries of religion which are
the hardest trial of faith were in his case palpable to sight. It is
difficult to relate without a pitying smile that, in the sacrifice of
the mass, he saw transubstantiation take place, and that, as he stood
praying on the steps of the Church of St. Dominic, he saw the Trinity in
Unity, and wept aloud with joy and wonder. Such was the celebrated
Ignatius Loyola, who, in the great Catholic reaction, bore the same
part which Luther bore in the great Protestant movement.
Dissatisfied with the system of the Theatines, the enthusiastic Spaniard
turned his face towards Rome. Poor, obscure, without a patron, without
recommendations, he entered the city where now two princely temples,
rich with painting and many-colored marble, commemorate his great
services to the Church; where his form stands sculptured in massive
silver; where his bones, enshrined amidst jewels, are placed beneath the
altar of God. His activity and zeal bore down all opposition; and under
his rule the Order of Jesuits began to exist, and grew rapidly to the
full measure of his gigantic powers. With what vehemence, with what
policy, with what exact discipline, with what dauntless courage, with
what self-denial, with what forgetfulness of the dearest private ties,
with what intense and stubborn devotion to a single end, with what
unscrupulous laxity and versatility in the choice of means, the Jesuits
fought the battle of their Church, is written in every page of the
annals of Europe during several generations. In the Order of Jesus was
concentrated the quintessence of the Catholic spirit; and the history of
the Order of Jesus is the history of the great Catholic reaction. That
order possessed itself at once of all the strongholds which command the
public mind, of the pulpit, of the press, of the confessional, of the
academies. Wherever the Jesuit preached, the church was too small for
the audience. The name of Jesuit on a title-page secured the circulation
of a book. It was in the ears of the Jesuit that the powerful, the
noble, and the beautiful, breathed the secret history of their lives. It
was at the feet of the Jesuit that the youth of the higher and middle
classes were brought up from childhood to manhood, from the first
rudiments to the courses of rhetoric and philosophy. Literature and
science, lately associated with infidelity or with heresy, now became
the allies of orthodoxy. Dominant in the south of Europe, the great
order soon went forth conquering and to conquer. In spite of oceans and
deserts, of hunger and pestilence, of spies and penal laws, of dungeons
and racks, of gibbets and quartering blocks, Jesuits were to be found
under every disguise, and in every country; scholars, physicians,
merchants, serving-men; in the hostile court of Sweden, in the old manor
houses of Cheshire, among the hovels of Connaught; arguing, instructing,
consoling, stealing away the hearts of the young, animating the courage
of the timid, holding up the crucifix before the eyes of the dying. Nor
was it less their office to plot against the thrones and lives of
apostate kings, to spread evil rumors, to raise tumults, to inflame
civil wars, to arm the hand of the assassin. Inflexible in nothing but
in their fidelity to the Church, they were equally ready to appeal in
her cause to the spirit of loyalty and to the spirit of freedom. Extreme
doctrines of obedience and extreme doctrines of liberty, the right of
rulers to misgovern the people, the right of every one of the people to
plunge his knife in the heart of a bad ruler, were inculcated by the
same man, according as he addressed himself to the subject of Philip or
to the subject of Elizabeth. Some described these divines as the most
rigid, others as the most indulgent of spiritual directors; and both
descriptions were correct. The truly devout listened with awe to the
high and saintly morality of the Jesuit. The gay cavalier who had run
his rival through the body, the frail beauty who had forgotten her
marriage-vow, found in the Jesuit an easy, well-bred man of the world,
who knew how to make allowance for the little irregularities of people
of fashion. The confessor was strict or lax, according to the temper of
the penitent. The first object was to drive no person out of the pale of
the Church. Since there were bad people, it was better that they should
be bad Catholics than bad Protestants. If a person was so unfortunate as
to be a bravo, a libertine, or a gambler, that was no reason for making
him a heretic too.
The Old World was not wide enough for this strange activity. The Jesuits
invaded all the countries which the great maritime discoveries of the
preceding age had laid open to European enterprise. They were to be
found in the depths of the Peruvian mines, at the marts of the African
slave-caravans, on the shores of the Spice Islands, in the observatories
of China. They made converts in regions which neither avarice nor
curiosity had tempted any of their countrymen to enter; and preached and
disputed in tongues of which no other native of the West understood a
word.
The spirit which appeared so eminently in this order animated the whole
Catholic world. The Court of Rome itself was purified. During the
generation which preceded the Reformation, that court had been a scandal
to the Christian name. Its annals are black with treason, murder, and
incest. Even its more respectable members were utterly unfit to be
ministers of religion. They were men like Leo the Tenth; men who, with
the Latinity of the Augustan age, had acquired its atheistical and
scoffing spirit. They regarded those Christian mysteries, of which they
were stewards, just as the Augur Cicero and the High Pontiff Caesar
regarded the Sibylline books and the pecking of the sacred chickens.
Among themselves, they spoke of the Incarnation, the Eucharist, and the
Trinity, in the same tone in which Cotta and Velleius talked of the
oracle of Delphi or of the voice of Faunus in the mountains. Their years
glided by in a soft dream of sensual and intellectual voluptuousness.
Choice cookery, delicious wines, lovely women, hounds, falcons, horses,
newly discovered manuscripts of the classics, sonnets and burlesque
romances in the sweetest Tuscan, just as licentious as a fine sense of
the graceful would permit, plate from the hand of Benvenuto, designs for
palaces by Michael Angelo, frescoes by Raphael, busts, mosaics, and gems
just dug up from among the ruins of ancient temples and villas, these
things were the delight and even the serious business of their lives.
Letters and the fine arts undoubtedly owe much to this not inelegant
sloth. But when the great stirring of the mind of Europe began, when
doctrine after doctrine was assailed, when nation after nation withdrew
from communion with the successor of St. Peter, it was felt that the
Church could not be safely confided to chiefs whose highest praise was
that they were good judges of Latin compositions, of paintings, and of
statues, whose severest studies had a Pagan character, and who were
suspected of laughing in secret at the sacraments which they
administered, and of believing no more of the Gospel than of the
Morgante Maggiore. Men of a very different class now rose to the
direction of ecclesiastical affairs, men whose spirit resembled that of
Dunstan and of Becket. The Roman Pontiffs exhibited in their own persons
all the austerity of the early anchorites of Syria. Paul the Fourth
brought to the papal throne the same fervent zeal which had carried him
into the Theatine convent. Pius the Fifth, under his gorgeous vestments,
wore day and night the hair shirt of a simple friar, walked barefoot in
the streets at the head of processions, found, even in the midst of his
most pressing avocations, time for private prayer, often regretted that
the public duties of his station were unfavorable to growth in holiness,
and edified his flock by innumerable instances of humility, charity, and
forgiveness of personal injuries, while, at the same time, he upheld the
authority of his see, and the unadulterated doctrines of his Church,
with all the stubbornness and vehemence of Hildebrand. Gregory the
Thirteenth exerted himself not only to imitate but to surpass Pius in
the severe virtues of his sacred profession. As was the head, such were
the members. The change in the spirit of the Catholic world may be
traced in every walk of literature and of art. It will be at once
perceived by every person who compares the poem of Tasso with that of
Ariosto, or the monuments of Sixtus the Fifth with those of Leo the
Tenth.
But it was not on moral influence alone that the Catholic Church relied.
The civil sword in Spain and Italy was unsparingly employed in her
support. The Inquisition was armed with new powers and inspired with a
new energy. If Protestantism, or the semblance of Protestantism, showed
itself in any quarter, it was instantly met, not by petty, teasing
persecution, but by persecution of that sort which bows down and crushes
all but a very few select spirits. Whoever was suspected of heresy,
whatever his rank, his learning, or his reputation, knew that he must
purge himself to the satisfaction of a severe and vigilant tribunal, or
die by fire. Heretical books were sought out and destroyed with similar
rigor. Works which were once in every house were so effectually
suppressed that no copy of them is now to be found in the most extensive
libraries. One book in particular, entitled Of the Benefits of the Death
of Christ, had this fate. It was written in Tuscan, was many times
reprinted, and was eagerly read in every part of Italy. But the
inquisitors detected in it the Lutheran doctrine of justification by
faith alone. They proscribed it; and it is now as hopelessly lost as the
second decade of Livy.