channels by which Christian influence gradually penetrated the State.
The first striking phenomenon is the slowness with which an action
destined to be so prodigious became manifest. Going forth to all
nations, in many stages of civilisation and under almost every form of
government, Christianity had none of the character of a political
apostolate, and in its absorbing mission to individuals did not
challenge public authority. The early Christians avoided contact with
the State, abstained from the responsibilities of office, and were even
reluctant to serve in the army. Cherishing their citizenship of a
kingdom not of this world, they despaired of an empire which seemed too
powerful to be resisted and too corrupt to be converted, whose
institutions, the work and the pride of untold centuries of paganism,
drew their sanctions from the gods whom the Christians accounted devils,
which plunged its hands from age to age in the blood of martyrs, and was
beyond the hope of regeneration and foredoomed to perish. They were so
much overawed as to imagine that the fall of the State would be the end
of the Church and of the world, and no man dreamed of the boundless
future of spiritual and social influence that awaited their religion
among the race of destroyers that were bringing the empire of Augustus
and of Constantine to humiliation and ruin. The duties of government
were less in their thoughts than the private virtues and duties of
subjects; and it was long before they became aware of the burden of
power in their faith. Down almost to the time of Chrysostom, they shrank
from contemplating the obligation to emancipate the slaves.
Although the doctrine of self-reliance and self-denial, which is the
foundation of political economy, was written as legibly in the New
Testament as in the _Wealth of Nations_, it was not recognised until our
age. Tertullian boasts of the passive obedience of the Christians.
Melito writes to a pagan Emperor as if he were incapable of giving an
unjust command; and in Christian times Optatus thought that whoever
presumed to find fault with his sovereign exalted himself almost to the
level of a god. But this political quietism was not universal. Origen,
the ablest writer of early times, spoke with approval of conspiring for
the destruction of tyranny.
After the fourth century the declarations against slavery are earnest
and continual. And in a theological but yet pregnant sense, divines of
the second century insist on liberty, and divines of the fourth century
on equality. There was one essential and inevitable transformation in
politics. Popular governments had existed, and also mixed and federal
governments, but there had been no limited government, no State the
circumference of whose authority had been defined by a force external to
its own. That was the great problem which philosophy had raised, and
which no statesmanship had been able to solve. Those who proclaimed the
assistance of a higher authority had indeed drawn a metaphysical barrier
before the governments, but they had not known how to make it real. All
that Socrates could effect by way of protest against the tyranny of the
reformed democracy was to die for his convictions. The Stoics could only
advise the wise man to hold aloof from politics, keeping the unwritten
law in his heart. But when Christ said: "Render unto Caesar the things
that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's," those words,
spoken on His last visit to the Temple, three days before His death,
gave to the civil power, under the protection of conscience, a
sacredness it had never enjoyed, and bounds it had never acknowledged;
and they were the repudiation of absolutism and the inauguration of
freedom. For our Lord not only delivered the precept, but created the
force to execute it. To maintain the necessary immunity in one supreme
sphere, to reduce all political authority within defined limits, ceased
to be an aspiration of patient reasoners, and was made the perpetual
charge and care of the most energetic institution and the most universal
association in the world. The new law, the new spirit, the new
authority, gave to liberty a meaning and a value it had not possessed in
the philosophy or in the constitution of Greece or Rome before the
knowledge of the truth that makes us free.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 2: An address delivered to the members of the Bridgnorth
Institution at the Agricultural Hall, 26th February 1877.]
II
THE HISTORY OF FREEDOM IN CHRISTIANITY[3]
When Constantine the Great carried the seat of empire from Rome to
Constantinople he set up in the marketplace of the new capital a
porphyry pillar which had come from Egypt, and of which a strange tale
is told. In a vault beneath he secretly buried the seven sacred emblems
of the Roman State, which were guarded by the virgins in the temple of
Vesta, with the fire that might never be quenched. On the summit he
raised a statue of Apollo, representing himself, and enclosing a
fragment of the Cross; and he crowned it with a diadem of rays
consisting of the nails employed at the Crucifixion, which his mother
was believed to have found at Jerusalem.
The pillar still stands, the most significant monument that exists of
the converted empire; for the notion that the nails which had pierced
the body of Christ became a fit ornament for a heathen idol as soon as
it was called by the name of a living emperor indicates the position
designed for Christianity in the imperial structure of Constantine.
Diocletian's attempt to transform the Roman Government into a despotism
of the Eastern type had brought on the last and most serious persecution
of the Christians; and Constantine, in adopting their faith, intended
neither to abandon his predecessor's scheme of policy nor to renounce
the fascinations of arbitrary authority, but to strengthen his throne
with the support of a religion which had astonished the world by its
power of resistance, and to obtain that support absolutely and without a
drawback he fixed the seat of his government in the East, with a
patriarch of his own creation.
Nobody warned him that by promoting the Christian religion he was tying
one of his hands, and surrendering the prerogative of the Caesars. As the
acknowledged author of the liberty and superiority of the Church, he was
appealed to as the guardian of her unity. He admitted the obligation; he
accepted the trust; and the divisions that prevailed among the
Christians supplied his successors with many opportunities of extending
that protectorate, and preventing any reduction of the claims or of the
resources of imperialism.
Constantine declared his own will equivalent to a canon of the Church.
According to Justinian, the Roman people had formally transferred to the
emperors the entire plenitude of its authority, and, therefore, the
Emperor's pleasure, expressed by edict or by letter, had force of law.
Even in the fervent age of its conversion the Empire employed its
refined civilisation, the accumulated wisdom of ancient sages, the
reasonableness and subtlety of Roman law, and the entire inheritance of
the Jewish, the Pagan, and the Christian world, to make the Church serve
as a gilded crutch of absolutism. Neither an enlightened philosophy, nor
all the political wisdom of Rome, nor even the faith and virtue of the
Christians availed against the incorrigible tradition of antiquity.
Something was wanted beyond all the gifts of reflection and
experience--a faculty of self-government and self-control, developed
like its language in the fibre of a nation, and growing with its growth.
This vital element, which many centuries of warfare, of anarchy, of
oppression had extinguished in the countries that were still draped in
the pomp of ancient civilisation, was deposited on the soil of
Christendom by the fertilising stream of migration that overthrew the
empire of the West.
In the height of their power the Romans became aware of a race of men
that had not abdicated freedom in the hands of a monarch; and the ablest
writer of the empire pointed to them with a vague and bitter feeling
that, to the institutions of these barbarians, not yet crushed by
despotism, the future of the world belonged. Their kings, when they had
kings, did not preside at their councils; they were sometimes elective;
they were sometimes deposed; and they were bound by oath to act in
obedience with the general wish. They enjoyed real authority only in
war. This primitive Republicanism, which admits monarchy as an
occasional incident, but holds fast to the collective supremacy of all
free men, of the constituent authority over all constituted authorities,
is the remote germ of Parliamentary government. The action of the State
was confined to narrow limits; but, besides his position as head of the
State, the king was surrounded by a body of followers attached to him by
personal or political ties. In these, his immediate dependants,
disobedience or resistance to orders was no more tolerated than in a
wife, a child, or a soldier; and a man was expected to murder his own
father if his chieftain required it. Thus these Teutonic communities
admitted an independence of government that threatened to dissolve
society; and a dependence on persons that was dangerous to freedom. It
was a system very favourable to corporations, but offering no security
to individuals. The State was not likely to oppress its subjects; and
was not able to protect them.
The first effect of the great Teutonic migration into the regions
civilised by Rome was to throw back Europe many centuries to a condition
scarcely more advanced than that from which the institutions of Solon
had rescued Athens. Whilst the Greeks preserved the literature, the
arts, and the science of antiquity and all the sacred monuments of early
Christianity with a completeness of which the rended fragments that have
come down to us give no commensurate idea, and even the peasants of
Bulgaria knew the New Testament by heart, Western Europe lay under the
grasp of masters the ablest of whom could not write their names. The
faculty of exact reasoning, of accurate observation, became extinct for
five hundred years, and even the sciences most needful to society,
medicine and geometry, fell into decay, until the teachers of the West
went to school at the feet of Arabian masters. To bring order out of
chaotic ruin, to rear a new civilisation and blend hostile and unequal
races into a nation, the thing wanted was not liberty but force. And for
centuries all progress is attached to the action of men like Clovis,
Charlemagne, and William the Norman, who were resolute and peremptory,
and prompt to be obeyed.
The spirit of immemorial paganism which had saturated ancient society
could not be exorcised except by the combined influence of Church and
State; and the universal sense that their union was necessary created
the Byzantine despotism. The divines of the Empire who could not fancy
Christianity flourishing beyond its borders, insisted that the State is
not in the Church, but the Church in the State. This doctrine had
scarcely been uttered when the rapid collapse of the Western Empire
opened a wider horizon; and Salvianus, a priest at Marseilles,
proclaimed that the social virtues, which were decaying amid the
civilised Romans, existed in greater purity and promise among the Pagan
invaders. They were converted with ease and rapidity; and their
conversion was generally brought about by their kings.
Christianity, which in earlier times had addressed itself to the masses,
and relied on the principle of liberty, now made its appeal to the
rulers, and threw its mighty influence into the scale of authority. The
barbarians, who possessed no books, no secular knowledge, no education,
except in the schools of the clergy, and who had scarcely acquired the
rudiments of religious instruction, turned with childlike attachment to
men whose minds were stored with the knowledge of Scripture, of Cicero,
of St. Augustine; and in the scanty world of their ideas, the Church was
felt to be something infinitely vaster, stronger, holier than their
newly founded States. The clergy supplied the means of conducting the
new governments, and were made exempt from taxation, from the
jurisdiction of the civil magistrate, and of the political
administrator. They taught that power ought to be conferred by election;
and the Councils of Toledo furnished the framework of the Parliamentary
system of Spain, which is, by a long interval, the oldest in the world.
But the monarchy of the Goths in Spain, as well as that of the Saxons in
England, in both of which the nobles and the prelates surrounded the
throne with the semblance of free institutions, passed away; and the
people that prospered and overshadowed the rest were the Franks, who had
no native nobility, whose law of succession to the Crown became for one
thousand years the fixed object of an unchanging superstition, and under
whom the feudal system was developed to excess.
Feudalism made land the measure and the master of all things. Having no
other source of wealth than the produce of the soil, men depended on the
landlord for the means of escaping starvation; and thus his power became
paramount over the liberty of the subject and the authority of the
State. Every baron, said the French maxim, is sovereign in his own
domain. The nations of the West lay between the competing tyrannies of
local magnates and of absolute monarchs, when a force was brought upon
the scene which proved for a time superior alike to the vassal and his
lord.
In the days of the Conquest, when the Normans destroyed the liberties of
England, the rude institutions which had come with the Saxons, the
Goths, and the Franks from the forests of Germany were suffering decay,
and the new element of popular government afterwards supplied by the
rise of towns and the formation of a middle class was not yet active.
The only influence capable of resisting the feudal hierarchy was the
ecclesiastical hierarchy; and they came into collision, when the process
of feudalism threatened the independence of the Church by subjecting the
prelates severally to that form of personal dependence on the kings
which was peculiar to the Teutonic state.
To that conflict of four hundred years we owe the rise of civil liberty.
If the Church had continued to buttress the thrones of the kings whom it
anointed, or if the struggle had terminated speedily in an undivided
victory, all Europe would have sunk down under a Byzantine or Muscovite
despotism. For the aim of both contending parties was absolute
authority. But although liberty was not the end for which they strove,
it was the means by which the temporal and the spiritual power called
the nations to their aid. The towns of Italy and Germany won their
franchises, France got her States-General, and England her Parliament
out of the alternate phases of the contest; and as long as it lasted it
prevented the rise of divine right. A disposition existed to regard the
crown as an estate descending under the law of real property in the
family that possessed it. But the authority of religion, and especially
of the papacy, was thrown on the side that denied the indefeasible title
of kings. In France what was afterwards called the Gallican theory
maintained that the reigning house was above the law, and that the
sceptre was not to pass away from it as long as there should be princes
of the royal blood of St. Louis. But in other countries the oath of
fidelity itself attested that it was conditional, and should be kept
only during good behaviour; and it was in conformity with the public law
to which all monarchs were held subject, that King John was declared a
rebel against the barons, and that the men who raised Edward III. to the
throne from which they had deposed his father invoked the maxim _Vox
populi Vox Dei_.
And this doctrine of the divine right of the people to raise up and pull
down princes, after obtaining the sanctions of religion, was made to
stand on broader grounds, and was strong enough to resist both Church
and king. In the struggle between the House of Bruce and the House of
Plantagenet for the possession of Scotland and Ireland, the English
claim was backed by the censures of Rome. But the Irish and the Scots
refused it, and the address in which the Scottish Parliament informed
the Pope of their resolution shows how firmly the popular doctrine had
taken root. Speaking of Robert Bruce, they say: "Divine Providence, the
laws and customs of the country, which we will defend till death, and
the choice of the people, have made him our king. If he should ever
betray his principles, and consent that we should be subjects of the
English king, then we shall treat him as an enemy, as the subverter of
our rights and his own, and shall elect another in his place. We care
not for glory or for wealth, but for that liberty which no true man will
give up but with his life." This estimate of royalty was natural among
men accustomed to see those whom they most respected in constant strife
with their rulers. Gregory VII. had begun the disparagement of civil
authorities by saying that they are the work of the devil; and already
in his time both parties were driven to acknowledge the sovereignty of
the people, and appealed to it as the immediate source of power.
Two centuries later this political theory had gained both in
definiteness and in force among the Guelphs, who were the Church party,
and among the Ghibellines, or Imperialists. Here are the sentiments of
the most celebrated of all the Guelphic writers: "A king who is
unfaithful to his duty forfeits his claim to obedience. It is not
rebellion to depose him, for he is himself a rebel whom the nation has a
right to put down. But it is better to abridge his power, that he may be
unable to abuse it. For this purpose, the whole nation ought to have a
share in governing itself; the Constitution ought to combine a limited
and elective monarchy, with an aristocracy of merit, and such an
admixture of democracy as shall admit all classes to office, by popular
election. No government has a right to levy taxes beyond the limit
determined by the people. All political authority is derived from
popular suffrage, and all laws must be made by the people or their
representatives. There is no security for us as long as we depend on the
will of another man." This language, which contains the earliest
exposition of the Whig theory of the revolution, is taken from the works
of St. Thomas Aquinas, of whom Lord Bacon says that he had the largest
heart of the school divines. And it is worth while to observe that he
wrote at the very moment when Simon de Montfort summoned the Commons;
and that the politics of the Neapolitan friar are centuries in advance
of the English statesman's.
The ablest writer of the Ghibelline party was Marsilius of Padua.
"Laws," he said, "derive their authority from the nation, and are
invalid without its assent. As the whole is greater than any part, it is
wrong that any part should legislate for the whole; and as men are
equal, it is wrong that one should be bound by laws made by another. But
in obeying laws to which all men have agreed, all men, in reality,
govern themselves. The monarch, who is instituted by the legislature to
execute its will, ought to be armed with a force sufficient to coerce
individuals, but not sufficient to control the majority of the people.
He is responsible to the nation, and subject to the law; and the nation
that appoints him, and assigns him his duties, has to see that he obeys
the Constitution, and has to dismiss him if he breaks it. The rights of
citizens are independent of the faith they profess; and no man may be
punished for his religion." This writer, who saw in some respects
farther than Locke or Montesquieu, who, in regard to the sovereignty of
the nation, representative government, the superiority of the
legislature over the executive, and the liberty of conscience, had so
firm a grasp of the principles that were to sway the modern world, lived
in the reign of Edward II., five hundred and fifty years ago.
It is significant that these two writers should agree on so many of the
fundamental points which have been, ever since, the topic of
controversy; for they belonged to hostile schools, and one of them would
have thought the other worthy of death. St. Thomas would have made the
papacy control all Christian governments. Marsilius would have had the
clergy submit to the law of the land; and would have put them under
restrictions both as to property and numbers. As the great debate went
on, many things gradually made themselves clear, and grew into settled
convictions. For these were not only the thoughts of prophetic minds
that surpassed the level of contemporaries; there was some prospect that
they would master the practical world. The ancient reign of the barons
was seriously threatened. The opening of the East by the Crusades had
imparted a great stimulus to industry. A stream set in from the country
to the towns, and there was no room for the government of towns in the
feudal machinery. When men found a way of earning a livelihood without
depending for it on the good will of the class that owned the land, the
landowner lost much of his importance, and it began to pass to the
possessors of moveable wealth. The townspeople not only made themselves
free from the control of prelates and barons, but endeavoured to obtain
for their own class and interest the command of the State.
The fourteenth century was filled with the tumult of this struggle
between democracy and chivalry. The Italian towns, foremost in
intelligence and civilisation, led the way with democratic constitutions
of an ideal and generally an impracticable type. The Swiss cast off the
yoke of Austria. Two long chains of free cities arose, along the valley
of the Rhine, and across the heart of Germany. The citizens of Paris got
possession of the king, reformed the State, and began their tremendous
career of experiments to govern France. But the most healthy and
vigorous growth of municipal liberties was in Belgium, of all countries
on the Continent, that which has been from immemorial ages the most
stubborn in its fidelity to the principle of self-government. So vast
were the resources concentrated in the Flemish towns, so widespread was
the movement of democracy, that it was long doubtful whether the new
interest would not prevail, and whether the ascendency of the military
aristocracy would not pass over to the wealth and intelligence of the
men that lived by trade. But Rienzi, Marcel, Artevelde, and the other
champions of the unripe democracy of those days, lived and died in vain.
The upheaval of the middle class had disclosed the need, the passions,
the aspirations of the suffering poor below; ferocious insurrections in
France and England caused a reaction that retarded for centuries the
readjustment of power, and the red spectre of social revolution arose in
the track of democracy. The armed citizens of Ghent were crushed by the
French chivalry; and monarchy alone reaped the fruit of the change that
was going on in the position of classes, and stirred the minds of men.