some degree obstructed the promotion of Milman in the Church, but he
had no reason to regret it. Of all men, he once said, he thought he
owed most to Bishop Blomfield, for there was once a question of
offering him a bishopric, and it was a remonstrance of the Bishop of
London that prevented it. 'I am _afraid_,' he said, 'that if it had
been offered me I should have accepted it, and I should then never
have written my "Latin Christianity."' But, though he escaped the fate
which has cut short the best work of more than one distinguished
historian, his conspicuous position among the scholars and writers in
the Church was widely recognised, and he was soon transferred from a
provincial town to a central position in the Metropolis. In 1835 Sir
Robert Peel made him Rector of St. Margaret's, Westminster, and
Prebendary in the Abbey. Though continuing without intermission his
historical work, he appears to have discharged with exemplary vigour
the duties of a large and poor parish until 1849, when Lord John
Russell appointed him Dean of St. Paul's. The position was exactly
suited to him. It was one of much dignity, but also of much leisure,
and it gave him ample opportunities of pursuing the studies which were
the true work of his life.
The great subject of the history of Christianity was, indeed,
continually before him. Among other things, he studied minutely both
the text and the authorities of Gibbon, for whom he had a deep and
growing admiration. An excellent edition of Gibbon was one of the
first results. Milman's notes have been included in Smith's later
edition, and, though a large proportion of them were naturally
somewhat controversial, being devoted to refuting some of the
conclusions of the fifteenth and sixteenth chapters, it is impossible
to read them without recognising the candour as well as the learning
and the acumen of the critic. Few things that Milman has written are
finer than the preface in which, in ten or twelve masterly pages, he
sums up his estimate of his great predecessor.
The three volumes of the 'History of Christianity,' dealing with its
early history up to the period of the abolition of Paganism in the
Roman Empire, appeared in 1840, and they were followed by the six
large volumes of the 'History of Latin Christianity,' carrying the
history of the Western Church to the end of the Pontificate of
Nicholas V. in 1455. This great work was published in two
instalments--the first three volumes in 1854, and the remaining three
in the following year--and it gave its author indisputably the first
place among the ecclesiastical historians of England and a high place
among the historians of the nineteenth century. He possessed, indeed,
in an eminent degree some of the qualities that are most rare, and at
the same time most valuable, in ecclesiastical history. A large
proportion of the most learned ecclesiastical historians have been men
who have devoted their whole lives to this single department of
knowledge, who derived from it all their measures of probability and
canons of criticism, and who, treating it as an isolated and mainly
supernatural thing, have taken very little account of the intellectual
and political secular influences that have largely shaped its course.
Most of them also have been men who undertook their task with
convictions and habits of thought that were absolutely incompatible
with real independence and impartiality of judgment in estimating
either the events or the characters they described. Milman was wholly
free from these defects. His wide knowledge, his cool, critical,
admirably trained judgment, were never better shown than in the many
pages in which he has pointed out the analogies or resemblances
between Jewish and other Oriental beliefs; the manner in which
national characteristics or secular intellectual tendencies affected
theological types; the countless modifications in belief or practice
which grew up, as the Church accommodated itself to the conditions of
successive ages and entered into alliance or conflict with different
political systems; the many indirect, subtle, far-reaching ways in
which the world and the Church interacted upon each other in all the
great departments of speculation, art, industry, social and political
life. A certain aloofness and coldness of judgment in dealing with
sacred subjects was the reproach which was most frequently brought
against him. As he himself said, he wrote rather as an historian than
a religious instructor, and he dealt with his subject chiefly in its
temporal, social, and political aspects. Justice and impartiality of
judgment to friend and foe he deemed one of the first moral duties of
an historian, and Dean Church was not wrong in ascribing to him a
quite 'unusual combination of the strongest feeling about right and
wrong with the largest equity.' 'What a delightful book, so tolerant
of the intolerant!' was his characteristic eulogy of the work of
another writer, and it truly reflects the turn of his own mind.
Provost Hawtrey, who was no mean judge of men, said, after an intimacy
of nearly fifty years, that he had never known a man who possessed in
a greater degree than Milman the virtue of Christian charity in its
highest and rarest form. It was a gift which stood him in good stead
in dealing with the very blended characters, the tangled politics, the
often misguided enthusiasms of ecclesiastical history. While he was
constitutionally extremely averse to the moral casuistry which
confuses the boundaries of right and wrong, he had too sound a grasp
of the evolution of history to fall into the common error of judging
the acts of one age by the moral standards of another. His history was
eminently a history of large lines and broad tendencies. The growth,
influence, and decline of the Papacy--the distinctive characteristics
of Latin and Teutonic Christianity; the effect of Christianity on
jurisprudence; the monastic system in its various phases; the rise and
conquests of Mohammedanism; the severance of Greek from Latin
Christianity; Charlemagne, Hildebrand, the Crusades, the Templars, the
Great Councils; the decay of Latin and the rise of modern languages;
the influence of the Church on literature, painting, sculpture, and
architecture--are but a few of the great subjects he has treated,
always with knowledge and intelligence, often with conspicuous
brilliancy.
In so vast a field there were, no doubt, many subjects which have been
treated with a greater fulness and completeness by other writers.
There are some in which subsequent research has gone far to supersede
what Milman has written, and inaccuracies of detail not unfrequently
crept into his work; but in the truthfulness of its broad lines, in
the sagacity of its estimates both of men and events, it holds a high
place among the histories of the world. Very few historians have
combined in a larger measure the three great requisites of knowledge,
soundness of judgment, and inexorable love of truth. The growth and
modifications of doctrines and the minutiæ of religious controversies
were, however, subjects in which he took little interest, and though
they could not be excluded from an ecclesiastical history, they are
dealt with only in a slight and cursory manner. Those who desire to
study in detail this side of ecclesiastical history will find other
histories much more useful. It has been said that his work is
imperfect as a book of reference, for while the great events and
personages are discussed with a fulness that leaves little to be
desired, many of the more insignificant transactions or more obscure
periods are passed over or barely noticed. Critics of different
religious schools have also complained that his mind was essentially
secular; that he had a low sense of the certainty and the importance
of dogma; that there were some classes of ecclesiastical writers who
have been deeply revered in the Church with whom he had no real
sympathy; that the spirit of criticism was stronger in his book than
the spirit of reverence; that he did not do full justice to the
spiritual and inner side of the religion he described. He looked upon
it, they said, too externally. He valued it as a moral revolution, the
introduction of new principles of virtue and new rules for individual
and social happiness. Much of this criticism would probably have been
accepted with but little qualification by Milman himself. He would
have said that what these writers complained of was in the main
inseparable from an historical as distinguished from a devotional
treatment of his subject. He would have added that no form of human
history reveals so clearly as ecclesiastical history the fallibility,
the credulity, the intolerance of the human mind, or requires more
imperatively the constant exercise of independent judgment and of
fearless and unsparing criticism, and that, if the history of the
Church is ever to be written with profit, it must be written in such a
spirit. Of his own deeper convictions he seldom spoke; but in the
concluding page of his 'Latin Christianity' there is a passage of
profound interest. Leaving it, as he says, to the future historian of
religion to say what part of the ancient dogmatic system may be
allowed to fall silently into disuse, and what transformations the
interpretation of the Sacred Writings may still undergo, he adds these
significant words:
'As it is my own confident belief that the words of Christ, and his
words alone (the primal indefeasible truths of Christianity), shall
not pass away, so I cannot presume to say that men may not attain to a
clearer, at the same time more full, comprehensive, and balanced sense
of those words, than has as yet been generally received in the
Christian world. As all else is transient and mutable, these only
eternal and universal, assuredly whatever light may be thrown on the
mental constitution of man, even on the constitution of nature and the
laws which govern the world, will be concentered so as to give a more
penetrating vision of those undying truths.... Christianity may yet
have to exercise a far wider, even if more silent and untraceable
influence, through its primary, all-pervading principles, on the
civilisation of mankind.'
Macaulay, speaking of the 'History of Latin Christianity' in his
Journal, says, 'I was more impressed than ever by the contrast between
the substance and the style: the substance is excellent; the style
very much otherwise.' Looking at it from a purely literary point of
view it had undoubtedly great merits. Milman had an admirable sense of
proportion--a rare quality in history. He was invariably lucid, and it
is easy to cull from his history many characters excellently drawn,
many pages of vivid narrative, or terse and weighty criticism. Still,
on the whole his historic style is on a lower level than that of
Macaulay, Buckle, and Froude, though it will compare, I think, not
unfavourably with that of Hallam and Grote. The points of controversy
are usually relegated to his notes, which contain a great mass of
curious learning and excellent criticism. The reader who turns to them
from works of the German school will be struck by his strong English
common-sense and grasp of facts, and his dislike of subtle far-fetched
ingenuities of explanation. He has the crowning merit of being always
readable, and his strong sane moral sense never left him. He was
probably at his best in the later volumes, when he could treat his
subject like secular history and was free from the embarrassing
theological difficulties of the earlier portion, and he is especially
admirable in those chapters which give scope to his wide literary and
artistic sympathies. He was an excellent Italian scholar and keenly
sensible of the beauties of Italian literature, and his love of the
ancient classics never left him. There was something at once
characteristic and amusing in the delight which he again and again
expressed, after the termination of his History, at being able to
return to them after spending so many years in reading bad Latin and
Greek. In taste and character he was indeed pre-eminently a man of
letters, and as such he ranks in the first line among his
contemporaries.
The outburst of indignation that in some quarters had greeted the
first appearance of the 'History of the Jews' was not repeated when
that work was republished in an enlarged form. Nor does it appear to
have arisen on the appearance of the two later histories. Newman
reviewed the 'History of Early Christianity' at great length, speaking
with much personal respect of the writer, though he was naturally
extremely hostile to its spirit. The difference between the High
Church sentiment and the mind of Milman was indeed organic. Milman's
own type of thought was formed before the Tractarian movement had
begun; the sacerdotal spirit was thoroughly alien to him, and his
profound study of ecclesiastical history had certainly not tended to
attract him to it. He fully recognised both the abilities and the
piety of Newman, and he described his secession as perhaps the
greatest loss the Church of England had experienced since the
Reformation; but he disliked his opinions, he profoundly distrusted
the whole character of his mind and reasonings, and he early foresaw
that he could never find a permanent resting-place in the English
Church. In the posthumous volume of Essays there will be found a full
and most searching examination of Newman's 'Essay on Development,' in
which these points of difference are clearly shown. For Keble, Milman
entertained warmer feelings. They were contemporaries, and at one time
most intimate friends. In the field of sacred poetry they had been
fellow-labourers. Keble had succeeded Milman as professor of poetry,
and Milman had been one of the few persons who had read the 'Christian
Year' in manuscript. When, after Keble's death, a committee was
appointed to erect a memorial to his memory, Milman was much hurt at
finding that it was determined to give it a distinctly Tractarian
character, and that his own name was deliberately excluded. In
Milman's last years the Oxford movement had begun to assume its
ritualistic form, and questions of vestments and ceremonies and
candles came to the forefront. With all this Milman had no sympathy.
'After the drama,' he said of it, 'the melodrama!'
It was a remarkable coincidence that for some years the two deaneries
of London were both held by brilliant men of letters and by men with
the strongest theological sympathy. A feeling of warm personal
affection united Milman and Stanley, and there was something
peculiarly touching in the almost filial attitude which Stanley
assumed towards his older colleague. In one point, however, they
differed greatly. Stanley was a keen fighter. He threw himself into
the forefront of ecclesiastical controversies, and was never seen to
greater advantage than when leading a small minority, defying
inveterate prejudice, defending an unpopular cause. Milman could
seldom be tempted to follow his example. He pleaded old age and
declining strength, but, in truth, though he never flinched from the
avowal of his own opinions, he had a deep and increasing distaste for
religious controversies and Church politics. He was rarely seen in
Convocation, and he always regarded its revival as a misfortune. He
proposed, however, in it a petition for the discontinuance of the use
of the State services commemorating the martyrdom of Charles I., the
restoration of Charles II., the discovery of the gunpowder plot, and
the Revolution of 1688; and Parliament soon after adopted his view. He
also sat on the Royal Commission in 1864 for considering the subject
of clerical subscription. He took on this occasion a characteristic
line, advocating a complete abolition of the subscription of the
Articles, and desiring that the sole test of membership of the Church
should be the acceptance of the Liturgy and the Creeds. In 1865 he
received an invitation, which greatly gratified him, to preach before
the University of Oxford the annual sermon on Hebrew prophecy. The
sermon was delivered in the pulpit of St. Mary's, where many years
before he had been so vehemently condemned for views on the same
subject, no one of which, as he truly said, he had either recanted or
modified. His sermon was afterwards printed, and would form a worthy
chapter of his 'History of the Jews.' In the Colenso controversy he
had no great sympathy with either side. Many of Bishop Colenso's
arguments appeared to him crude or exaggerated, and he dissented from
many of his conclusions, but he considered that he had been treated
with gross injustice and intolerance, and he accordingly subscribed to
his defence fund. For the rest, he confined his ecclesiastical life as
much as possible to his own cathedral, where he presided over the
State funeral of the Duke of Wellington, and where he introduced the
custom of throwing open the nave to evening services. His last and
unfinished work was his 'Annals of St. Paul's,' investigating its
history and portraying with his old learning and with much of his old
felicity the lives of his predecessors.
It was however in secular literary society that he was most fitted to
shine, and there he passed many of his happiest hours. The usual
honours of a distinguished man of letters clustered thickly around
him. He was a trustee of the British Museum; an honorary member of the
Royal Academy; a correspondent of the French Institute. He was also a
member of 'The Club'--the small dining-club which was founded in 1764
by Sir Joshua Reynolds and Dr. Johnson, and which since then has
included in its fortnightly dinners the great majority of those
Englishmen who in many walks of life have been most distinguished by
their genius or their accomplishments. He was elected to it in 1836,
three years before Macaulay, and he became one of its most constant
attendants. In 1841 'The Club' made him its treasurer, and he held
that position for twenty-three years, and presided over the centenary
dinner in 1864. He was also an original member of the Philobiblion
Society, which has brought together many curious and hitherto unknown
documents, and he wrote for it a short paper on Michael Scott the
Wizard, who, as he showed, had been once offered the Archbishopric of
Cashel. He was never a keen politician, but he was intimate with a
long succession of leading statesmen, and he contributed to Sir
Cornewall Lewis's 'Administrations of Great Britain' a full and
valuable letter on the relations of Pitt and Addington, which was
largely based on his own recollections of the latter statesman.
London society in the middle of the nineteenth century was much
smaller and less mixed than at present, and there was then a
distinctively literary or at least intellectual society which can now
hardly be said to exist. The most eminent men of letters came more
frequently together. Criticism was in fewer and perhaps stronger
hands, and was to a larger extent representative of the opinions
expressed in such social gatherings. In this kind of society Milman
was long a foremost figure. He had all the gifts that fit men for
it--not only brilliancy, knowledge, and versatility, but also
unfailing tact, a rare charm of courtesy, a singularly wide tolerance.
He was quick and generous in recognising rising talent, and he had
that sympathetic touch which seldom failed to elicit what was best in
those with whom he came in contact. Few men possessed more eminently
the genius of friendship--the power of attaching others--the power of
attaching himself to others. In the long list of his intimate friends
Macaulay, Sir Charles Lyell, and Sir George Cornewall Lewis were
conspicuous. Like most men of this type, he found the multiplying
gaps around him the chief trial of old age. Not long before he died
there was an exhibition of contemporary portraits, but though Milman
went to it he could not go through it. 'When I found myself,' he said,
'surrounded by the likenesses--often the miserable likenesses--of so
many I had known and loved, it was more than I could bear.'
An admirable portrait by Watts which is now in the National Portrait
Gallery will recall to those who knew him his appearance in old
age--his strong masculine features beaming with intelligence, his
grand shaggy brows, his bright and penetrating eyes. An illness
affecting the spine had bowed him nearly double, and there are still
those who will remember how his bent figure seemed projected, almost
like a bird in its flight, across the dinner-table, while his eager
brilliant talk delighted and fascinated his hearers. In his last years
increasing deafness obliged him to narrow the circle of his social
life, but he retained to the end all the vividness of his mind and
sympathies, and when at length death came in his seventy-eighth year,
it found him in the midst of unfinished work. His life was not of a
kind to win wide popularity and to give him a conspicuous place among
the great masses of his nation, but few English clergymen of his
generation made so deep an impression on those who came in contact
with them or have left works of such enduring value behind them.
FOOTNOTES:
[48] _Henry Hart Milman, D.D., Dean of St. Paul's._ A Biographical
Sketch by his son, Arthur Milman, M.A., LL.D.
[49] Laurence's _Life of Sir A. Sullivan_, p. 310.
[50] Smiles' _Memoirs of John Murray_, ii. p. 300.
QUEEN VICTORIA AS A MORAL FORCE
At a time when the unprecedented increase of gigantic and rapidly
acquired fortunes has deeply infected both English and American
society with the characteristic vices of a Plutocracy, the profound
feeling of sorrow and admiration elicited by the death of Queen
Victoria is an encouraging sign. It shows that the vulgar ideals, the
false moral measurements, the feverish social ambitions, the love of
the ostentatious and the factitious, and the disdain for simple
habits, pleasures, and characters so apparent in certain conspicuous
sections of society, have not yet blunted the moral sense or perverted
the moral perceptions of the great masses on either side of the
Atlantic. To this type, indeed, we could scarcely find a more complete
antithesis than in the life and character of the great Queen who has
passed away. Nothing more deeply impressed all who came in contact
with her than the essential simplicity and genuineness of her nature.
She was a great ruler, but she was also to the last a true, kindly,
simple-minded woman, retaining with undiminished intensity all the
warmth of a most affectionate nature, all the soundness of a most
excellent judgment. Brought up from childhood in the artificial
atmosphere of a Court, called while still a girl to the isolation of a
throne; deprived, when her reign had yet forty years to run, of the
support and counsel of her husband, she might well have been pardoned
if she often found herself out of touch with large sections of her
people, and had viewed life through a false medium or in partial
aspects. Yet Lord Salisbury probably in no degree exaggerated when he
said that if he wished to ascertain the feelings and opinions of the
English people, and especially of the English middle classes, he knew
no truer or more enlightening judgment than that of the Queen. She
thought with them and she felt with them; she shared their ambitions;
she knew by a kind of intuitive instinct the course of their
judgments; she sympathised deeply with their trials and their sorrows.
She could hardly be called a brilliant woman. It is difficult indeed
to judge the full social capacities of anyone who lives under the
constant restraints of a royal position, but I do not think that in
any sphere of life the Queen would have been regarded as a woman of
striking wit, or originality, or even commanding power. The qualities
that made her so successful in her high calling were of another kind:
supreme good sense; a tact in dealing with men and circumstances so
unfailing that it almost amounted to genius; an indefatigable industry
which never flagged from early youth till extreme old age; a sense of
duty so steady and so strong that it governed all her actions and
pleasures, and saved her not only from the grosser and more common
temptations of an exalted position, but also in a most unusual degree
from the subtle and often half-concealed deflecting influences that
spring from ambition or resentment, from personal predilections and
personal dislikes. It was these qualities, combined with her
unrivalled experience of affairs, and strengthened by long and
constant intercourse with the foremost English statesmen of two
generations, that made her what she undoubtedly was--a perfect model
of a constitutional Sovereign.