SHORT STUDIES IN ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY SHORT STUDIES IN AND BIOGRAPHY REV. H. N. OXEN HAM, M.A. LATE SCHOLAR OF BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFOKD CHAPMAN AND HALL, LIMITED 1884 [All rights reserved.] CLAY AND TAYLOR, PRINTERS. TO tog $efr. lojm ahfcjj, g.g., DEAN OF MANCHESTER, IN GRATEFUL RECOGNITION OF A VALUED FRIENDSHIP LASTING FROM OLD OXFORD DAYS, IS WITH MUCH REGARD AND AFFECTION INSCRIBED. PREFACE. THE following Essays are reprinted, by the kind per- mission of the Editor, from the Saturday Review, with some corrections and additions, and the occasional omis- sion of matter of merely temporary interest. In one or two cases portions of different articles bearing on the same subject have been incorporated. It was of course inevitable in dealing, under the necessary limitations of space, with themes of wide and varied import, on many of which whole volumes might be written, that a method of treatment should be adopted suggestive rather than exhaustive, with a view to bringing out the salient points, and thus refreshing the memory or stimulating the minds of those who may lack leisure or opportunity for more serious study. And in a busy and restless, which is also a reading age, but is somewhat apt to regard "a great book, as a great evil," the author ventures to hope that to many readers such aids to their own reflection may prove not unacceptable. While however he has thought it most suitable to viii PREFACE. the character of the work to avoid, as far as possible, all display of learning, and not to load his pages with references, which to some might appear wearisome and to others superfluous, it must not therefore be supposed that the judgments expressed have been lightly formed, or are based on authorities which have not been carefully verified. It has been his aim throughout to offer an honest, if but a modest and fragmentary, contribution, as of a single stone, towards the building up of the great temple of historic truth. May I, 1884." CONTENTS. PAGE I. CHRISTIANITY BETWEEN TWO FOES I II. CHRISTIAN AND PAGAN ART 9 III. CONFLICT OF EARLY CHRISTIAN AND PAGAN THOUGHT IJ IV. RELIGIOUS ATTITUDE OF THE EMPEROR HADRIAN ... 2J V. HELLENISM AND ITS REVIVAL 35 VI. THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND THE CHURCH 42 VII. UNITY AND VARIETY IN CHURCH AND STATE ... 49 VIII. LATIN CHRISTIANITY 57 IX. RISE AND GROWTH OF ULTRAMONTANISM 64 X. LATIN HYMNOLOGY 74 XI. FOURTEENTH BENEDICTINE CENTENARY 86 XII. PROPHECIES OF THE CHRISTIAN ERA 94 XIII. LATER CHRISTIAN PROPHECIES 104 XIV. PROPHECY OF ST. MALACHY N ... 112 XV. SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY I2O XVI. PENAL LAWS AGAINST HERESY 130 XVII. TOLERATION AND INDIFFERENTISM I4O XVIII. "BLAC'-C AND BLOODY GARDINER" 151 XIX. ICONOCLASM 163 XX. CHRISTIAN TEACHING ON THE RIGHT OF REBELLION 171 XXI. DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS l8p XXII. FESTIVAL OF CHRISTMAS 191 XXIII. MIRACLE PLAYS 199 CONTENTS. PAGE XXIV. ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF UNIVERSITIES 2o3 XXV. JEWISH PATRIOTISM 219 XXVI. THE yiSDENHASS IN HISTORY 228 XXVII. REVIVAL OF GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE 239 XXVIII. INTOLERANCE OF SCOTCH CALVINISM 248 XXIX. FORCE OF INDIVIDUALISM IN RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS 259 XXX. PREACHING ANCIENT AND MODERN 269 XXXI. HUGO GROTIUS 281 XXXII. SWEDENBORG AND SWEDENBORGIANISM ... .'.. 289 XXXIII. STRAUSS 297 XXXIV. JOHN BERNARD DALGAIRNS 309 XXXV. BISHOP DUPANLOUP 3l8 XXXVI. CANON OAKELEY 325 XXXVII. DR. GUMMING 333 XXXVIII. DEAN STANLEY 344 XXXIX. WILLIAM GEORGE WARD 358 XL. DR. PUSEY AND THE OXFORD MOVEMENT 367 XLI. THE LATE PROVOST OF ORIEL 375 XLII. ARCHBISHOP TAIT 385 XLIII. DEAN CLOSE AND THE EVANGELICALS 394 SHORT STUDIES IN ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. I. CHRISTIANITY BETWEEN TWO FOES. IN an address which he delivered some years ago before a religious Congress at Munich, Dr. Dollinger starts from the assertion that by the cradle of Christian theology stood two mighty foes, heathen philosophy and the heretical gnosis, with both of which it had to contend, and from both also had much to learn. No student of ecclesiastical history will question the correctness of his statement. But a still broader truth is conveyed in a remark we came across the other day, which applies, not only to the early Church, but to the whole course of Christian history from the beginning until now. Christianity, it was observed, has in every age been confronted by two rival religions ; its morality has been threatened by the higher Paganism, or worship of beauty ; its doctrinal system by a scientific Theism, or worship of what claims to be pure and absolute truth. With both of these it has always been in conflict, B 2 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. and yet to both it has been constrained to own its obliga- tions ; and this mutual interchange of blows and courtesies was never more conspicuous than in our own day. A distinguishing feature of the last half-century has been the revival of artistic taste and culture in the service of religion throughout Europe, of which the so-called Ritualistic movement is one subordinate phase ; but alongside of this ecclesiastical restoration there has grown up a religion of art, independent of all theological restraints, and looking on them much as the Roman and Florentine literati of the Renaissance looked on the reforms of Savonarola. Mean- while the dominant scientific school is impatient of any Deity that cannot be resolved into an impersonal abstrac- tion, and declines to proffer more than " a silent worship at the altar of the Unknowable and Unknown." Yet, at the same time, the exponents of the extremest form of scientific Atheism loudly assert their claim to be the prophets of a new and exclusively true religion. And, however much we may smile at the half-grotesque details of the Comtist creed, with its elaborate mimicry of the hierarchy, the discipline, and the ritual of Catholicism, no one can fail to be struck with so unexpected a homage to the inextinguishable cravings of the religious sentiment, which it as fully recognises as it entirely fails to satisfy. Nor can the Church, which has in former periods accepted the services of an Augustine, an Aquinas, and a Pascal, affect to ignore in our own day the need for scientific champions of her cause. It may perhaps be said that these opposite forms of faith or scepticism, in whichever light we choose to regard them, are now more confident and impetuous in their assault than has usually been the CHRISTIANITY BETWEEN TWO FOES. 3 case before, and that they more distinctly assume the functions, not of mere negative criticism, but of rival creeds. Whether or not Mr. Mill could be fairly considered a Theist and his nearest approach to it appears to have been a kind of revived Manichean dualism he inculcated a kind of religious and ethical system of his own, often borrowing the language, if not the ideas, of the historical religions which he rejected. This may also be said of some living writers who would be classed more or less in the same category with him. And thus again the artistic religion of Paganism finds a passionate apologist in Mr. Swinburne. But if there is some difference in their methods of warfare, the same triangular duel, so to call it, between Christianity and its two powerful rivals has been in progress continually since the first preaching of the Gospel. The two mighty antagonists stood, to repeat Dr. Dollinger's language, by the cradle of the nascent faith ; but the infant Hercules proved strong enough to coerce, if not to strangle, them, or rather succeeded in bending them to the service of a power yet mightier than themselves. Some change there has been no doubt in their relative importance, as mankind has gradually advanced from what has been termed the mytho- logical to the physical stage. Pagan art was a far more formidable opponent to reckon with in the first century than Pagan philosophy ; the opposition of science, which, cannot always be thrust aside as false, gives much greater trouble to the apologists of Revelation in the nineteenth. Let us begin with art. From the earliest period of which any records remain, art has been a powerful factor in the religious development of mankind. It has been by turns the instrument and the B 2 4 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. tyrant of the national faith, or sometimes both together. Greek religion, which was the worship of natural beauty, expressed itself in those unrivalled artistic forms which have riveted the admiring gaze of successive generations for above two thousand years ; but the chisel which wrought so marvellously in its service was tracing the lines of its corruption. Its most exquisite art was the efflorescence of decay. The gods who were worshipped with sincere devotion were the deities of Homer, not the creations of Pheidias, and it was only by crushing the genius of its artists that Egypt so long preserved the sombre grandeur of its hereditary faith. Christianity could afford to be less jealous, although the early fathers betray an uneasy suspicion of whatever had been associated with Paganism. And accord- ingly the Catacombs, which were the first homes and work- shops, as well as the sepulchres, of the new religion, are pro- fusely ornamented with sculpture borrowing the imagery of existing forms of art. A refined and graceful Christian sym- bolism was by degrees superinduced on these ancient models ; but it showed nothing of that darker and sterner aspect of Gospel teaching which was afterwards so abundantly exhibited in churches and cemeteries ; there were no repre- sentations of hell or purgatory, or of the Last Judgment ; and, what seems stranger, there were at first no represent- ations of the Passion. The fiery persecution, through which so many of those who were thus piously commemorated had passed to their reward, was but distantly alluded to in an occasional picture of Daniel among the lions, or the three holy children walking unharmed amid the flames. All this was changed of course at a later date, and, in spite of the triumphs of mediaeval architecture, it is true to say that, as CHRISTIANITY BETWEEN TWO FOES. 5 the purely religious sentiment attained its ascendency in the "ages of faith," aesthetic art on the whole declined, to revive with the irreligious, or at least non-religious, outburst of the Renaissance. Yet Christianity never forgot, like narrower and more artificial creeds, that its world- wide mission imposed on it at once the capacity and the obliga- tion of embracing every genuine product of the human intellect and heart. The contrast is strikingly exemplified, if we turn for a moment to Mahometanism, which could only hold its own against the inroads of idolatry by sternly proscribing art. The Arabian prophet, it has been truly said, could not prevent his disciples from worshipping images, except by absolutely forbidding them to make any ; and thus " he preserved his religion from idolatry, but made it the deadly enemy of art," as it has remained ever since. The same criticism applies, in a more limited sense, to the illogical compromise by which the Iconoclastic controversy was eventually settled in the Eastern Church, permitting pictorial, but prohibiting sculptured, repre- sentations of sacred subjects. On the other hand, the Renaissance was not a religious movement. In its artistic development there is a close analogy to what has already been noticed in the case of ancient Greece. Instead of using his art to do honour to religion, the painter made religious conceptions subservient to the display of his artistic power. The devotional and the aesthetic temper are distinct, though not incompatible, and seldom pre- dominate in the same class of minds. It was perfectly natural that an ardent reformer like Savonarola should head a crusade against a classical revival which had brought, not only the arts, but the tastes, the sensuality, and the 6 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. scepticism of classical Greece in its train. It had already been strongly denounced, and indeed forcibly suppressed, by Paul II., though his successors in the Roman See for some time afterwards by no means followed his example in this respect. But neither Pope nor preacher could perma- nently arrest the degradation of religious art which rapidly followed, and the course of which may even be traced in a comparison of the earlier and later pictures of Rafifaelle. There cannot be said to be a school of religious painters in the present day, though some of the earlier works of the prae-Rafifaellites may have suggested an anticipation not destined to be realised. In another department we have indeed witnessed a remarkable resuscitation of distinctively religious art, for it is quite true that Gothic architecture and the love of it are intimately connected with the Christian, as contrasted with the Pagan or secular, habit of mind ; and Mr. Lecky is certainly right in saying that " we mainly owe the revival of Gothic architecture to the Catholic revival of the present century," though a party powerful of late in the Roman Catholic Church have betrayed their instinctive aversion to history by opposing it. In the early Christian centuries physical science was not sufficiently advanced to present any serious difficulties to the Christian apologist. St. Augustine could easily dispose of Manichean objections to the Mosaic cosmogony in a fashion which would never occur to a very inferior class of thinkers now ; and in the sixth century Cosmas Indico- pleustes the special butt of Mr. Matthew Arnold's raillery carried public opinion with him when he argued against the antipodes, in his Topographia Christiana, for this reason, among others, that St. Paul speaks of all men living " on CHRISTIANITY BETWEEN TWO FOES. 7 the face of the earth," which proves that it is flat and not round. It is right to add that when Virgilius, two centuries later, maintained the existence of the antipodes, Pope Zachary declined to condemn him, and he became a bishop, and eventually a canonized saint, but the religious world of the day, which found a mouthpiece in St. Boniface, was profoundly scandalized. We need not stay to dwell here on the critical instance of the Copernican controversy, but it is notorious that there has been a chronic feud between theologians and men of science, which one class of writers is fond of representing as the gradual triumph of science over a dwindling supernaturalism. This is the leading idea, for instance, frequently avowed and always implied, which runs through Mr. Lecky's History of Rationalism. On the other hand, as was pointed out before, if the Church has been jealous of scientific, as of artistic, encroachments on her own domain, she has numbered great philosophers as well as brilliant artists among her most devoted servants. In the fifteenth century, Christianity appeared to be engaged in an internecine struggle with the Pagan revolt against her ethical code ; in the eighteenth, a Deistic philosophy questioned the primary articles of her creed. In our own day the controversy has passed into a new phase, and arguments which were unanswerable in the mouth of Bishop Butler fail to convince disputants who repudiate, not his reasoning, but the premisses admitted in common at the time by himself and his opponents. It is not unreasonable, however, to believe that a religion which has survived so many open or insidious attacks will still be equal to the crisis. A way may be found in the future, as in the past, for acknowledging the legitimate claims of 8 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. science, without resolving into a beautiful but visionary Aberglaube the .faith which has ennobled the life and con- soled the last hours of sixty generations of Christians. Meanwhile it is significant that the great master of the positive philosophy in France should have passionately proclaimed the indestructible necessity of a religion, while the chief upholder of a similar system in England has left on record his conviction that the Christian religion has certainly been useful, if not indispensable, hitherto, and in part at least may not impossibly be true. * "II. CHRISTIAN AND PAGAN ART. IT has been said, with some truth, that art is the bloom of decay. There are two senses in which this may be understood, political and religious. The zenith of Athenian art coincided with the decay of political power; and in modern Europe the highest artistic rank has been attained by that country which was popularly said, till lately, to be a " geographical expression," and which has over and over again been the battle-field but never the leader of the nations. Of ancient Rome, on the contrary, the poet's words were emphatically verified ; her " arts " were those of conquest and of empire ; what she borrowed in her later days from the conquered Greece never became more than an exotic growth, and served but to grace the decadence of her imperial might. There is of course one obvious ex- planation of this phenomenon. A people whose energies are absorbed in political or military struggles lack both the time and the taste for artistic niceties ; while it is natural, on the other hand, that where there is less of the stir and grandeur of national life, intellectual and artistic cultivation should be more eagerly pursued, as the resource of facul- ties that might otherwise lie dormant. This is no doubt, for instance, one reason why German scholarship and io ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. literature are in many departments so far superior to our own. But there must be some other explanation of the fact, if such it be, of religious art and art has been in all ages closely dependent on religion illustrating the decay rather than the vigour of religious faith. To a certain extent this is especially true of ancient art. The oldest and most profoundly reverenced images of the gods were little more than hideous blocks. The beautiful creations of Pheidias or Praxiteles were admired, but not worshipped, by a people who, to say the least, sat very loosely to their mythological belief. Mr. Ruskin has a remark somewhere about Christian art, which points in the same direction. He says that, so far as he has observed, the pictures which excite popular devotion are invariably staring daubs, while the masterpieces of Raffaelle or Perugino are gazed at with critical appreciation by the cultivated few, and neither appreciated nor reverenced by the vulgar. So much as this may at least be admitted in either case, that art is necessarily self-conscious, whereas the natural atmosphere of devotion is unconscious awe. It was not till they had begun to theorize about their gods that the Greeks could make elaborate sculptures of them ; and, with a polythe- istic religion, to theorize means to rationalize. This need not, of course, be the case with Christianity. Frescoes of the " Good Shepherd," and other typical subjects of Chris- tian teaching, were traced on the walls of the Catacombs in the ages of martyrdom. Yet we can hardly conceive, under any circumstances, the " Transfiguration " or the " Sistine Madonna " being painted in those days of early faith. It is not simply that the genius for it was wanting, but that, if there, it would have been differently employed. CHRISTIAN AND PAGAN ART. That profound sense of the unseen which made the beings of another world almost a visible presence to the primitive Christian, and taught him to listen in each fresh political convulsion for the tokens of the approaching Judgment, could hardly consist with a minute attention to the details of artistic effect. There is a great step even from Fra Angelico to Raffaelle, and we feel at once that the artist has triumphed over the saint. But if in this respect there is some analogy, though it must not be pressed too far, between Christian and Pagan art, there are some very observable differences. The fact, which has so often been dwelt upon, that sculpture is the special glory of ancient, as painting is of modern, art, is at once suggestive of some deeper contrast than meets the eye at first sight. Many reasons may be given for the change. The higher and more scrupulous standard of purity introduced by the Gospel, and which shrank from the exhibition of the nude form, is of course one of them. Another may be found in the dread of a relapse into idol- atry, which long exercised so marked an influence over ecclesiastical discipline and worship, and of which we have a permanent record in the prohibition of sculptured images, as distinguished from " icons," or pictures, still maintained in the Greek Church. But explanations of this kind evi- dently do not go to the root of the matter. An observation of Winckelmann's, quoted by Mr. Lecky, suggests what is probably the real solution of the problem. " The supreme beauty of Greek art," he very justly insists, "is male rather than female." Strength, freedom, masculine grace are its prominent characteristics. And this was only to be ex- pected, for all genuine art is the expression of a moral 12 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. ideal, and the moral ideal of Paganism in its best days was essentially masculine. Courage, independence, constancy, patriotism, were the qualities it most highly honoured ; the softer virtues of charity, gentleness, meekness, benevolence, kindness, it either despised or ignored. Stoicism was the loftiest Pagan conception of excellence, and Cicero ex- pressly distinguishes it from all other philosophical sects " as males differ from females." Christianity reversed all this. Without discrediting, except in a relative sense, the masculine virtues, it gave a wholly unprecedented import- ance to the feminine type of goodness. Compare the Beatitudes with the moral standard of Stoicism, or of the best classical literature, whether poetry or prose, and they read almost like an explicit condemnation of it. Of all the qualities which Christ pronounced " blessed," there is not one which the Pagan ideal would recognise as virtuous ; there is more than one which it would reject as simply contemptible. And the ethical ideal in either case inspired the artistic. Sculpture was instinctively chosen by the Greeks as best suited to the expression of masculine grace. There was a further reason, partly growing out of the former, which it is impossible to dwell upon, though it cannot be passed over. The public games and the exer- cises of the palaestra, which accustomed the Greeks to the habitual contemplation of the nude human form, tended to foster the masculine ideal of beauty and the peculiar forms of vice with which it was connected in the ancient world. And the taste thus generated sought both ex- pression and aliment in contemporary art. The type, as well of courage as of passion, which the Greeks desired especially to idealize is sufficiently illustrated by the fact CHRISTIAN AND PAGAN ART. 13 that the first statues erected by Athenians to their country- men were those of Harmodius and Aristogeiton. It is not a little curious that the type should have been so well pre- served in the. days of Rome's lowest moral degradation in the perfect purity of the Antinous. The reasons which made sculpture the chosen vehicle of artistic utterance to the Pagan are precisely those which led Christian art to eschew it. It gave but inadequate scope for the expression of those virtues which Christian sentiment had learnt to canonize, and it suggested an ideal partly indifferent and partly abhorrent to the new religious sense. Painting, on the other hand, was admirably adapted for bringing out those feminine attributes of tenderness, purity, and patience which belonged to the Christian saint, and which mediaeval piety found most perfectly embodied in the Virgin Mother. Take as typical instances the Sistine Madonna and the Belvedere Apollo. The one as com- pletely satisfies the Pagan as the other satisfies the Chris- tian ideal. Both in their respective ways are of matchless beauty, but the one expresses devoutness, the other strength. To the mediaeval Catholic the Belvedere could be no more than a curiosity, and the Sistine Madonna would have been wholly unintelligible to Greek taste. It is a striking con- firmation of this view that, so far as the artist is dominated by the Christian or the classical sentiment, does he fail to give expression to the other. Michael Angelo's representa- tions of our Lord in the Sistine Chapel are as conspicuous a failure as Perugino's frescoes of the ancient heroes and sages. His figure of Cato, says an observer, "almost approaches the type of St. John." Nor can it be accidental that a poet of our own days, whose artistic sympathies are 14 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. intensely classical, also rebels fiercely against the ethical standard of Christianity. We may again borrow an illus- tration from ancient and modern poetry, where the same sort of difference reappears. With a few trifling exceptions, which only bring out the general fact more clearly, there is nothing tender or subjective in classical poetry. Thus, for instance, no single ancient poet ever dwells on his child- hood, while scarcely any modern poet of note has failed to do so. If we turn from sculpture and painting to architecture, we shall find something of the same contrast, though other considerations also come in, which it would take us too long to enter upon here. It may be true, as a great judge has said, that, properly speaking, " there are only two fine arts possible to the human race sculpture and painting," and that " architecture is only the association of these in noble masses." But for practical convenience, at all events, it requires to be separately treated. And Gothic, which was the creation of mediaeval Europe, may be fairly called the specifically Christian type of architecture, as bearing the intellectual impress of that period of modern history when men's minds were most exclusively and powerfully ruled by purely religious influences. Speaking broadly, then, we may say that size and symmetry are the dominant characteristics of the Grecian ; delicacy, tenderness, and reverential awe, of the Gothic style. The one is calculated to exhibit the greatness of man, and the other to suggest that there is a God above him ; the one to rouse admiration and a feeling of pride, the other to inspire humility. It is quite in accordance with this, if the story be true, that Louis XIV., who was so great an admirer and promoter of CHRISTIAN AND PAGAN ART. 15 the Renaissance style, should have expressed himself shocked at hearing that Christ spoke the language of the humble and poor. The heroes and philosophers of anti- quity would have entirely agreed with him. We need not carry out the comparison into its details here, but the low doors and lofty roofs, the elaborate carving, even where least likely to be seen, the disregard of mere symmetry, and the subdued light, which are characteristic of Gothic churches, will serve to illustrate our meaning. There is a further point to be borne in mind in reference both to Christian painting and architecture as distinguished from Pagan. The former was designed to teach, but not the latter. Greek art was indeed mostly religious, that is, con- secrated to the commemoration of gods or heroes ; but, like the priesthood and worship of Paganism, it had no didactic office. Even under Judaism the functions of the priest and the prophet were kept separate, and the latter had no existence elsewhere in the ancient world. Chris- tianity for the first time presented the priest and the preacher in the same person. And Christian art, from the rudest frescoes on the walls of the Catacombs to the most finished compositions of the great mediaeval painters, was designed not simply to " charm," like the sculpture of the Pheidian period, but also, or rather chiefly, " to strengthen and to teach." Painting is obviously more available for this purpose than sculpture. So far as ancient sculpture had any reflex action on popular morality, it would tend, as was observed just now, to foster the ethical conceptions which gave it birth. Painting and architecture in later times would do the same ; but this kind of influence is probably much less widely felt than we are apt to imagine, 16 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. and would be pretty well confined to the cultivated classes the immense majority of citizens perhaps in ancient Athens, but a small minority in any modern State. It was by the personages, scenes, and stories represented that the picture and the painted window were expected to convey direct instruction to the multitude. What has been the actual effect, both in nature and extent, of these appeals oculis siibjecta fidelibus, on the faith and devotion of Chris- tendom, would be an interesting subject of inquiry for the historian of religion or of art. But the question has been so darkened and perplexed by the rival zealots of image worship and iconoclasm, from the days of Charlemagne downwards, that it is far from easy to disentangle fact from fiction, and arrive at the requisite data for a trustworthy decision. III. CONFLICT OF EARLY CHRISTIAN AND PAGAN THOUGHT. AT the opening of a paper in the Contemporary Review (for May, 1879), on " Origen and the Beginnings of Chris- tian Philosophy," Dr. Westcott touches on the great struggle between the Pagan and Christian systems of philosophy during the first three centuries of our era, which is at once a deeply interesting and a much neglected subject of inquiry. We are apt to speak, or at least to think, in a loose sort of way of the conversion of the Empire, as though up to the year 313 A.D. Christians were undergoing a chronic and almost unintermittent persecu- tion, until suddenly the whole edifice of Greek and Roman Paganism collapsed, like the walls of Jericho before the trumpets of Joshua, and thenceforth the Church was co- extensive with the civilised world. It need hardly be said that a view more grotesquely unhistorical could hardly be conceived. Christianity, in spite of frequent outbreaks of persecution, very unequal in duration and intensity, was carrying on an active and continuous conflict, and on the whole making a steady advance, during the time of trial which preceded its public recognition. On the other hand, Paganism after the formal conversion of the Emperors still i8 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. retained its hold on a large proportion at first a decided majority of the population under their rule ; and even its outward forms and splendour its priesthoods, endow- ments, and ceremonials maintained a protracted, if some- what precarious existence, long after it might have been supposed that imperial edicts or popular sentiment would have suppressed all public manifestations of a defeated and decaying faith. The history of the first three centuries, as Dr. Westcott puts it, is the history of a threefold contest between the rival forces of the new and the old creed, closed by a threefold victory. " They met in the market and the house ; they met in the discussions of the schools ; they met in the institutions of political government." There were, in other words, conflicts in the region of life, of thought, and of the State ; and the victory in the world of thought, with which we are at present chiefly concerned, was the second, not the first. " The victory of the soldiers " the common mass who supplied the multitude of martyrs, confessors, and humble examples of Christian faith and practice came before "the victory of the captains of Christ's army," who vindicated the philosophical claims of the conquering creed. The period during which this second conflict was waged Dr. Westcott defines, " roughly speaking," to be " from the middle of the second to the middle of the third century " the special age of what are called "the Apologists," which precedes the age of "the Fathers." Of course the discussion really lasted much longer, but for its immediate purpose the limit of time is correct enough. And one of its leading characteristics was this, that, in the words of another recent writer, it " was a moment in the history of the human mind when East and CONFLICT OF CHRISTIAN AND PAGAN THOUGHT. 19 West were blending their traditions to form the husl^ of Christian creeds and the fantastic visions of Neoplatonism," while moreover its " whole creative and expansive force lay in the despised Christian sect." The peculiar centre and point of contact of these diverse influences, at once con- flicting and yet converging, was found at Alexandria, " the forge of fanciful imaginations, the majority of which were destined to pass like clouds and leave not a wrack behind, while a few fastened with the force of a dogma on the conscience of awakening Christendom." Mr. Lecky is not far wrong when he says that "the influence which this [Alexandrian or Neoplatonic] school exercised over Chris- tianity forms one of the most remarkable pages in [early] ecclesiastical history," though he certainly exaggerates it, in suggesting that Neoplatonic modes of thought are reflected in St. John's Gospel. No one familiar with Dr. Newman's Arians of the Fourth Century, one of the earliest and greatest of his works, can be ignorant of the important part played by the Alexandrian school in the development of Christian doctrine. After referring to the "cosmo- politan " tendencies of the age, Dr. Westcott adds : As a necessary consequence, the teaching of the Bible accessible in Greek began to attract serious attention among the heathen. The assailants of Christianity, even if they affected contempt, showed that they were deeply moved by its doctrines. The memorable saying of Numenius, " What is Plato but Moses speaking in the language of Athens ? " shows at once the feeling after spiritual sympathy which began to be entertained, and the want of spiritual insight in the representatives of Gentile thought. Though there is no evidence that Numenius studied or taught at Alexandria, his words express the form of feeling which prevailed there. Nowhere else were the characteristic tendencies of the age more marked than in that marvellous city. Alexandria C 2 20 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. had been from its foundation a meeting-place of the East and West of old and new the home of learning, of criticism, of syncretism. It presented a unique example in the Old World of that mixture of races which forms one of the most important features of modern society. Indians, Jews, Greeks, Romans, met there on common ground. Their characteristic ideas were discussed, exchanged, com- bined. The extremes of luxury and asceticism existed side by side. Over all the excitement and turmoil of the recent city rested the solemn shadow of Egypt. The thoughtful Alexandrian inherited in the history of countless ages, sympathy with a vast life. Arid he goes on to cite the testimony of a prominent personage of philosophical tastes, who has indeed some- times, though on grounds absurdly inadequate, been credited with being actually a Christian, the Emperor Hadrian. Hadrian had himself disputed with the pro- fessors at the Alexandrian Museum, and it is a curious fact that the practice of magic was already coming into vogue there ; Celsus, according to Origen, " compared the miracles of the Lord with the feats of those who have been taught by Egyptians." Dr. Westcott naturally interprets this as showing that " there was a longing among men for some sensible revelation of the unseen, and a conviction that such a revelation was possible." Incredulity had reached its extreme point in the Roman Empire during the period immediately preceding and following the commencement of the Christian era. From the middle of the first century a reaction began to set in, and there was a growing desire for some positive religious belief. The expiring Paganism made desperate and sometimes tempo- rarily successful efforts to satisfy this desire, and it is remarkable that in doing so it was constrained to borrow, consciously or unconsciously, from the powerful rival whose CONFLICT OF CHRISTIAN AND PAGAN THOUGHT. 21 advance it was striving to arrest. One startling example of this, which helps to support Dr. Westcott's argument, though he does not notice it, is closely connected with the name of Hadrian. A recent writer has traced out with much care and ingenuity the true significance of what he calls "the canonization of Antinous," which has proved a standing puzzle to historians. Milman speaks of the act as " tending to alienate a large portion of the thinking class, already wavering in their cold and doubtful polytheism, to any purer or more ennobling system of religion," and quotes a prediction from the Sibylline (probably Christian) poet about Hadrian : Oebv beiKiwa-fi, aTiavra cre/3dcr/Liara X&ret. This, however, was by no means the immediate effect of the procedure, which served rather to bolster up than to shake the tottering fabric. There was nothing of course out of the way in itself in the deification of an imperial favourite. These posthumous compliments were a common fashion of the Empire, and strangely enough lasted on into Christian times ; there were fifty-three of them altogether. But what is at first sight very perplexing especially considering the circumstances as commonly reported is the exceptional duration and tenacity on popular senti- ment of a cult which may in the first instance have sprung from a mere personal whim of the reigning Emperor. This might account for the fact of the city near which the death of Antinous occurred being rebuilt and named after him, and a new constellation which appeared about the same time being identified with his glorified spirit. It will not account for the rapid spread of his worship throughout 22 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. the provinces of the Mediterranean, and its survival for some three centuries. Medals were struck and countless works of art produced to perpetuate his memory ; public games were periodically celebrated at Antinoe, at Mantinea, Eleusis, Athens, and elsewhere, in his honour; he had temples, priesthoods, oracles, miracles ; great cities wore wreaths of red lotus on his feast day. His worship extended not only over Greece and Asia, but into Italy also, where his name is frequently found in Roman and Neapolitan inscriptions, and his statues in various cities of the Campagna. No other imperial apotheosis took such a hold on popular belief. What was the secret of its success ? It is needless here to follow Mr. Symonds into his elaborate discussion of the different versions of the legend about the death of the Bithynian slave boy, and the comparative evidence on which they rest. But he seems to have clearly established the actual motif, so to say, of his cult as it came to be generally accepted. It was adopted as supplying a nobler and more spiritual element to the effete forces of the ancient Paganism. " Here and there, in the indignant utterance of a Christian Father, stung to the quick by Pagan parallels between Antinous and Christ, we catch a perverted echo of the popular emotion upon which his cult reposed, which recognised his godhood or his vicarious sacrifice, and paid enduring tribute to the sublimity of his young life untimely quenched." In short, "the most rational conclusion seems to be that Antinous became in truth a popular saint, and satisfied some new need in Paganism, for which none of the elder and more respectable deities sufficed." The belief in the value of vicarious suffering, of which classical literature CONFLICT OF CHRISTIAN AND PAGAN THOUGHT. 23 presents so many illustrations, and to which Christian preaching had given a fresh and powerful impulse, attached itself to the new demigod, and this appears in process of time to have become more or less distinctly recognised by Christian Apologists. Prudentius, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Eusebius, Justin Martyr, Tatian, all inveigh against the base adulation of the worship of the imperial favourite which however will not explain its maintenance and increase long after Hadrian's death ; but Origen treats the matter more seriously in his controversy with Celsus. Celsus had deliberately put forward the self-devotion of Antinous in rivalry with the sacrifice of Christ. Origen replies, justly enough, that there is no real parallel between the lives thus strangely compared, and that the alleged divinity of the favourite is a fiction. But it is clear from the method of treatment on both sides how the name of Antinous had become endeared to his Pagan votaries, and formidable, or at least odious rather than simply contemptible, to Christian Apologists. His cult, however it originated, had been adapted, by a kind of plagiarism very characteristic of the age, for the satisfaction of crav- ings which the Christian doctrines of self-devotion and immortality had awakened throughout the Roman world. 1 Alexandria, at the opening of the third century, offered an epitome of the old world which Christianity aspired to quicken in all its parts. And there too the -first attempt was made, in the second century, to give a philosophic form to the Christian solution of the problems of the age. To the questions uppermost in men's minds at the time 1 This curious problem is discussed more fully in the Third Excursus of my Catholic Doctrine of the Atonement. 24 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. three types of answers were being returned, the Gnostic, the Neoplatonist, and the Christian. As against the Gnostic, the teachers of the new faith maintained that the universe was created, not by any inferior demiurgus, good or bad, but by the one Supreme Deity, and that evil is not inherent in matter, but due to the misuse of free will by the creature. As against the Neoplatonist, they insisted on the separate and true personality of the Deity, and the reality of the Incarnation and its results. As against both alike they maintained that the Creator is distinct but not alien from the world He made, which was originally good, and that man is the crown and end of creation. Moreover, while Gnostic and Neoplatonist were agreed in despairing of the world as it is, and saw no salvation for the multitude, the Christian was content to appeal not to the few but to the many, and claimed to be the bearer of a message addressed, in virtue of a common divine faculty, to all alike who bore the stamp of the Creator, and were the subjects of a common redemption. But while his answer to the difficulties propounded was a widely different one, the Christian teacher was prepared to meet the Pagan philosopher on his own ground. He "did not lay aside the philosopher's mantle in virtue of his office, but rather assumed it " ; so literally indeed was this the case that convert philosophers continued to wear the cloak or mantle which had been the outward badge of their former calling. " At Alexandria a Christian ' School ' the well-known Catechetical Schopl arose by the side of the Museum," and from the first they were connected with each other by more than mere local proximity, as was curiously typified in later days by the intimate relations of Hypatia with CONFLICT OF CHRISTIAN AND PAGAN THOUGHT. 25 Synesius, both before and after his conversion and elevation to the episcopate. Both Pantoenus and Clement, the first great names in the Catechetical School, were led to embrace the Gospel through the study of philosophy, and both of them carried on their philosophical studies as Christians. Origen, the most famous of them all, was born of Christian parents, ,and trained from the cradle in the exercise of piety and faith. He was but sixteen when his father was martyred, and before he was eighteen he became a teacher in the Catechetical School. Nor did he shrink from attending the lectures of Ammonius Saccas, the founder of Neoplatonism, whose lessons appeared to him to unveil fresh depths in the Bible ; and in after years, when charged with listening to the opinions of heretics and heathens, he defended himself by the example of Heraclas, his fellow disciple in the school of Ammonius, who, " while now a presbyter at Alexandria, still wears the philosopher's dress and diligently studies the works of the Greeks." He exhorted his theological scholars to study first the philo- sophers and poets of every nation. Yet he never faltered for a moment in his Christian steadfastness, and it was not his fault that the torture and imprisonment inflicted upon him in the Decian persecution were not consummated by a violent death. But this is not the place to enter into a discussion of the life, writings, and opinions of Origen. As a great master of the Alexandrian Catechetical School, he may be taken to illustrate the points as well of contact as of divergence between the Pagan and Christian modes of thought at the beginning of the third century. It is true, as was observed before, that " the victory of common life " preceded in the long struggle of the 26 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. early Church " the victory of thought," and of " civil organization." As St. Augustine said afterwards, domuit orbem non ferro, sed ligno, by patient suffering, not by outward force. The martyrs came before the Apologists, and the populace were already being won over before philosophers and statesmen would lend an ear to the teachers of the new religion. In Dr. Westcott's words, "the discipline of action precedes the effort of reason," just as, we may add, the process of reasoning precedes the elaboration of the formal rules of logic. But the second stage is not less indispensable than the first. The triumph of Christianity in the world could never have been assured if it had not proved itself able to satisfy the intellectual no less than the moral cravings of mankind. IV. RELIGIOUS ATTITUDE OF THE EMPEROR HADRIAN. AN article on " the Emperor Hadrian and Christianity," from the pen of M. Renan, which appeared some years ago in an American periodical, deals with a vexed question of ac- knowledged historical interest, though it can hardly be said to throw much new light on the subject. 1 That Hadrian has usually been reckoned by Christian writers among " the good Emperors " was of course notorious. But more- over, a notion has prevailed in some quarters that he was not only " an earnest man endowed with rare virtues, who devoted the best and finest part of his life to mankind," but was at least more than half a convert to Christianity him- self. The two main grounds for this belief, so far as appears, are, first that he caused certain temples to be erected in which no images were placed, and which in the absence of any description, dedication, or known object he was not unreasonably supposed to have intended for Christian churches ; and secondly, that a policy of tolera- tion was consistently pursued during his reign. Of these two facts there can be no doubt; the question is how they are -to be explained. And it will perhaps be found that the same explanation, based on a careful estimate of the 1 See North American Review for May, 1878. 28 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. Emperor's character and tone of mind, will sufficiently account for both alike without having recourse to what, without some better evidence to support it, would be, to say the least, a somewhat violent hypothesis. When in- deed we are told that " even Hadrian's relations with Antinous became a theme for Christian apology," it is difficult to restrain a smile. " Such a monstrous act," adds the writer, " seemed to be the culminating point of the reign of Satan. ' This last demon (does he mean Satan or Antinous ?) of whom every one had heard was employed to overthrow the other gods, which were more ancient and less easy to reach." Certainly, whatever version of the story of the death of Antinous be accepted whether it was an accident or an act of heroic self-sacrifice or a selfish immolation the subsequent deification and cult of the departed favourite is sufficiently startling, nor would it have appeared at all more tolerable to the early Christians from the fact of its having bequeathed to us one of the most perfect models of ancient sculpture. Emperors and their relations, wives, and favourites had often, it is true, been deified before. Caius assigned these posthumous honours to his sister, Claudius to his grandmother, Nero to his father and his wife Poppaea, Vitellius worshipped Narcissus and Pallas, favourite freedmen of his uncle. But Antinous obtained a far higher and more permanent place among the gods than any previous subject of imperial apotheosis. The city of Antinoe or Antinopolis was built over the spot where he died ; temples were erected and games celebrated in his honour at Mantinea and elsewhere; he had prophets, priests, and oracles all over the Empire ; coins bearing his likeness are still found in Greece, Syria, RELIGIOUS ATTITUDE OF THE EMPEROR HADRIAN. 29 Asia, and Egypt ; and astrologers were not long in dis- covering a new constellation which represented his glorified spirit. What is still stranger, this worship was so far from ending with Hadrian's reign that it lasted for centuries afterwards, especially in Egypt, where the new deity con- tinued to work miracles which both Christian and Pagan writers have noticed. An explanation of this remarkable phenomenon has been suggested elsewhere 1 ; but it is not one that would occur to contemporary Christians, who in fact regarded this abnormal development of polytheism as providentially designed for a reductio ad absurdum of the whole system, and this is distinctly implied in a passage of the Eighth Book of the Sibylline Oracles ; but they could hardly attribute any such intention to its author, and it must have been with important reservations that they spoke of him as an earnest and virtuous man. The fact remains that Hadrian discountenanced persecu- tion of the Christians. But persecution in those days, to use a phrase of Mr. Goldwin Smith's, was " tribal " or " political " rather than theological. Its motive was super- stitious among the vulgar, prudential among their rulers. There was little real belief in the gods of Olympus surviv- ing in either class, but the populace were shocked at the open defiance of the established worship, which was so inextricably mixed up with all the main incidents of civil and social life, and the magistrates suspected the loyalty of men who deliberately disobeyed the law. To both alike there was something " uncanny " about such stubborn and exceptional perversity. Hadrian, who was of a speculative and intellectual cast of mind, felt probably little sympathy 1 Cf. supr. p. 22. 30 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. with these sentiments or fears. He took indeed an exceed- ingly practical view of the interests of the Empire, as was shown in one of his first acts, when he withdrew the Roman garrisons from Mesopotamia, Armenia, and Assyria, and once more made the Euphrates the boundary of the Roman world. Nor can it be doubted that the Empire flourished under his sagacious rule. His vast and active genius, as Gibbon says, embraced at once the most enlarged views and the minutest details. But it is equally true, as the same writer proceeds to observe, that the ruling passions of his soul were curiosity and vanity. His curiosity may not improbably have led him to inquire about the Christian as well as about other forms of contemporary belief, but if his letter to Servianus is genuine, in which Christianity is studi- ously confounded whether from ignorance or, as Milman thinks, sarcasm with the worship of Serapis, the result of these inquiries cannot have produced any very deep effect on his mind. However, he issued a rescript to the procon- sul of Asia forbidding Christians to be punished in defer- ence to popular outcry, without a formal trial and convic- tion of some legal offence, and ordering the punishment of all false accusers. And as a matter of fact the Christians were left unmolested during his reign by the Government, though they suffered horrible tortures at the hands of the Jewish insurgents, which may have helped to open the eyes of their Roman masters to the distinction between rival religionists whom they had been accustomed loosely to identify as members of the same sect. At all events, when Hadrian rebuilt Jerusalem under the name of Colonia ^Elia Capitolina, Christians flocked into the new city, which the Jews are said to have been forbidden to enter, RELIGIOUS ATTITUDE OF THE EMPEROR HADRIAN. 31 and certainly did not approach ; perhaps the dedication of a temple to Jupiter Capitolinus on the site of their own ancient temple would alone have proved a sufficient de- terrent to them. But it was neither on Jerusalem nor on Rome but on Athens that the affections of the philosophic and cultivated Emperor were concentrated. He spent a winter there enjoying to the utmost the strenua inertia of learned dilettantism, disputing, conversing, legislating, building, and endeavouring to reproduce a kind of shadowy " Panhellenism " on the old historic site. He founded in- numerable philosophical chairs ; he fused the laws of Draco and Solon into a new Athenian constitution ; he completed the unfinished Temple of Jupiter Olympius and rebuilt the city, one quarter of which received the name of Hadriano- polis ; he chose to be initiated in the Eleusinian mysteries ; and he solemnly assumed the ancient titles of " archon " and " agonothetes." At Athens he was regarded as not only philosophical but very religious somewhat in the sense in which St. Paul applied the term to the Athenians of his own day and the spirit of discussion which his tastes led him to foster did undoubtedly give rise to a new development of Christian literature, though it cannot plausibly be maintained to have inspired him with any Christian belief. His mind was in fact essentially sceptical, in the strictest sense of the word ; he neither accepted nor denied any religion or philosophy, but bal- anced one impartially against another, or rather played with each in turn. The very levity of his dying apostrophe to his " anhnula, vagula, blandula " marks the character of the man as truly as the savage blasphemy of his last recorded words marks the very different spirit of the 32 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. Emperor Julian two centuries later. M. St. Croix says of him : " II parut constamment livre a cette incertitude d'opinions, fruit de la bizarrerie de son caractere, et d'un savoir superficiel ou mal dige're'." We have said that Hadrian's policy gave occasion to a novel species of Christian literature. Christianity had already borne fruit at Athens as at Rome ; but the secular contrast of the two great centres of ancient Pagan civilisa- tion was reproduced in their relations to the Church. None of the early Popes were men of any intellectual or literary distinction ; the very names of several of them are still open to dispute. But from a very early period some- thing of the old imperial instinct seems to have taken possession of them, and whereas Eastern theologians and prelates were exercised on the subtlest questions of the Divine nature and attributes, the first official utterance of a Roman Pontiff towards the close of the fourth century enjoins the observance of clerical celibacy. It was the speciality of Athens, as M. Renan words it, to produce " individual Christian thinkers," and among these thinkers were found the first " Apologists." The " philosophers " who from time to time embraced the Gospel did not feel it necessary to abandon their title or the peculiar dress which was its outward symbol ; being writers and orators by pro- fession they naturally became the doctors, disputants, and advocates of their adopted faith. Hitherto Christianity had never been put on its defence, argumentatively that is. Its strongest and only available arguments had been written in the blood of martyrs. Even had the advocates been prepared, there was no one ready to listen to them. No previous Emperor had challenged such explanations or RELIGIOUS ATTITUDE OF THE EMPEROR HADRIAN. 33 would have deigned to read them, and Christianas ad leones was a method of attack that did not admit of controversial rejoinder. But Hadrian's inquisitive temper and known love of free discussion invited overtures, which till then would have been scornfully ignored; his very vanity was flattered by an appeal to his superior discernment. To him accordingly was addressed the first Apology on record by one Quadratus, who is said to have been a disciple of the Apostles. It is lost, unfortunately, but we know that at the time it was highly esteemed ; the author is reported to have refuted the calumnies of " evil men " against the Christians, and to have dwelt on the miracles of our Lord, insisting that men whom He had healed or raised from the dead were still alive. The Emperor had probably heard of these miracles already from his secretary, Phlegon, who was familiar with the subject. Another convert philosopher, Aristides, also presented an Apology to Hadrian, of which we only know that it was not less admired than that of Quadratus. That these writings made some impression on his mind there is no reason to doubt. They must at least have confirmed his conviction of the perfect harmless- ness of the new religion, and there is some evidence of his having shown signs of genuine respect for it. He ordered, as we have seen, the erection of a number of temples or basilicas, which were never dedicated, and the precise destination of which is not distinctly known. When in the next century Alexander Severus expressed a desire to build a temple to Christ, the Christians asserted, not with- out plausibility, that Hadrian had entertained a similar design, and had only at last abandoned it on account of the response of the oracles that, if such a temple was built, all D 34 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. the others would be deserted, and the world would become Christian. They pointed in proof of this to the singular omission of placing any images in these temples, and the alleged ground of Hadrian's pausing in his design is quite in accord with all we know of his character. Several of these Hadriana were in fact turned into Christian churches after the conversion of the Empire. Still all this in no way proves that Hadrian ever meditated becoming a Christian, but only that he was disposed, like Severus, to provide a niche for the Founder of Christianity in his comprehensive pantheon. V. HELLENISM AND ITS REVIVAL. IN the short and very imperfectly reported address which he delivered at the close of M. Kenan's last Hibbert lecture, Dr. Martineau drew out what he conceived to be the moral of the whole course more pointedly than the lecturer had cared to do himself. He considered that, as in the early Christian ages, Paganism or what he preferred to call Hellenism and Atheism were apparently engaged in a death struggle for religious supremacy in the Roman Empire, which however resulted in the triumph of a third form of belief ignored or trampled on by both alike, so in our own day, when the future of religion seems to lie between the rival forces of Christianity and Agnosticism, a third solution of the problem might eventually be found; and his hearers were left to infer that this tertium quid would be a purified and enlightened Theism. Whatever may be thought of the analogy suggested between the traditional Paganism of the Empire and the traditional Christianity of to-day, or of the proposed Church of the Future, Dr. Martineau had good reason for tracing in the present unsettled and fluctuating condition of religious thought something analogous to the restless temper of the age when a corrupt and exploded Paganism was gradually D 2 36 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. succumbing to the nascent faith of the sect that was every- where spoken against. He might indeed have gone further, and have shown how one of the most curious among the moral and intellectual phenomena of our own day is a kind of spurious revival of " Hellenism," recalling in its darker rather than its brighter features the Renaissance of the fifteenth century. But that Renaissance did not end in the common absorption of the Hellenic and Christian elements into some newer, and presumably nobler, phase of creed or culture, but in the great schism of the sixteenth century, and the striking revival of spiritual life, under somewhat different forms, which followed it, in both divisions of Western Christendom. We need not essay prediction, but no fairly intelligent observer can have failed to notice that peculiar classical or Pagan revival of our own day which is a present and a patent fact, revealing itself at once in art, ; in literature, and in social life. A recent Catholic writer has not inaptly described it as " the reappearance of a passionate love for, and a desire to rest in and thoroughly sympathize with, mere nature, accom- panied by a more or less complete and sympathetic rejec- tion of the supernatural, its aspirations, its consolations, 'and its terrors." One of the leading prophets of the new evangel, of whose high classic and literary culture all must desire to speak with respect, Mr. J. A. Symonds, does not widely differ from this external estimate, when he -reminds us (to the discredit of the former) that " modern \i.e. Christian] morality has hitherto been theological, and has implied the will of a Divine Governor," whereas " Greek morality was radically scientific ; the belief on which it eventually rested was a belief in $wris, in the order HELLENISM AND ITS REVIVAL. 37 of the universe " ; and accordingly, while the motto of the one system is contained in St. Paul's words, " To me to live is Christ, and to die is gain," the other may be summed up in Gothe's well-known lines, " Im Ganzen, Guten, Schonen resolut zu leben." Gothe may indeed be fairly taken as the typical representative or precursor of this revived Hellenism. It is recorded of him that " repugnance to the supernatural was an inherent part of his mind"; and therefore on the approach of death "he only calculated the chances that might still remain to him of life and enjoyment, and the means he might employ for increasing them, among the foremost of which he placed care in keeping at a distance all gloomy thoughts," and when the end was close at hand his last words were, " Open the shutters, that more light may come into the room." Conspicuous in our own day among the literary exponents, in prose or verse, of this Pagan or naturalistic reaction, though differing widely from one another, are writers like Mr. Pater, Mr. Symonds, and Mr. Swinburne, the latter of whom strikes the keynote of the movement in such poems as the " Hymn to Proserpine " and " Our Lady of Pain," while we recognise in the obscene rhapsodies of Walt Whitman which are as dull as ditchwater and a good deal dirtier the shout of its drunken helot. It would be going much too far to say that "all able authors are avowed and aggressive atheists," but it is quite true that "a good many writers make it a condition of ability to exclude the Unknown Factor, . . . and in fact to speak from the Agnostic standpoint." This last extract is taken from a paper on " Debased Hellenism and the New Renaissance" in the Church 38 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. Quarterly Review (for April, 1880), containing much inter- esting matter, though one could wish the writer had drawn out more fully and distinctly than he has done the signs and characteristics of the movement he so earnestly con- demns. We quite agree with him that, if the worst vices of Greek civilisation and art were repeated, and if possible, exaggerated in old Rome, the tendency of some of our own schools, both of literature and art, seems to be to repeat them now, and that a protest is accordingly needed. That this new Renaissance should emulate, as indeed that of the fifteenth century did, the lower and debased rather than the higher moral tone of Greek art and culture, was perhaps inevitable, and is certainly the fact. Those who would revert from belief in a Divine Ruler of the world to belief in Nature to adopt Mr. Symonds's account of the distinction of the two systems are not in the same position with thinkers of an earlier age who, like some of the greatest among the old Greek poets and philosophers, were really " looking through nature up to nature's God." It is an echo of the baser, not the better, Hellenism that bids men exchange the " lilies and languors of virtue for the raptures and roses of vice," and calls on the dethroned goddess of lust to " come down and redeem us from virtue." There is moreover a fatal defect inherent in this to apply a phrase used in another connection by Cardinal Newman " bad imitation of polished ungodliness." Every attempt at the galvanized revival of a defunct form of civilisation is necessarily unreal, but the unreality is doubled in this case, for it is not merely an imitation but an imitation of an imitation. We have to measure the descent first from Pericles to Politian, and then from HELLENISM AND ITS REVIVAL. 39 Politian to the modern pretenders who ape his worst extravagances. It has been already shown that any attempt among ourselves to revive " the delighted animalism of Greek life " is a very different thing, both morally and intellect- ually, from what the pursuit of their cherished ideal was to those old Athenians, who had never known or rejected any better and purer faith. But that is not all. We have learnt from boyhood to gaze in something like a rapture of admiration on that wonderful product of human genius, the Athens of Pericles and Pheidias and Socrates, of those unrivalled orators and poets who being dead yet speak, and whose glowing words have rung music in the ears of some seventy generations of mankind. And our admir r ation is a perfectly natural one ; the spectacle is unique, for history has not such another marvel to record. As a recent poet puts it : " Every thought of all their thinking swayed the world for good or ill, Every pulse of all their life-blood beats across the ages still." But then we must remember that there was also a darker side to the picture, from which, as Professor Jowett no prejudiced or unfriendly critic observes, "we should have turned away with loathing and detestation." And that darker side not of course in its naked deformity, which would be felt to be intolerable is what some of our classical revivalists, like their predecessors four centuries ago, seem constrained or determined to unveil. Two prominent causes of the moral decline of Athens may be specified, the disorder of sexual relations and slavery. The critical significance of this last point is 40 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. rather apt to be overlooked. It really divides the Greek from every variety of modern life by an impassable gulf, and renders all social or political analogies to a great extent nugatory or misleading. When we recollect that all mechanical labour, whatever was esteemed fidvavcrov, or unfit for a gentleman, was devolved on a helot class immensely outnumbering the little community of free citizens, it becomes at once evident that the Athenian democracy in its most democratic days was, as compared with any form of political life we are familiar with, in one sense, a close and oppressive aristocracy. On the moral degradation of Greek, and still more of later Roman society, to which this absolute domination over a subject class offered such fatal facilities, we need not dwell here. Nor was that by any means the only cause of the evil. On one part of the subject it is difficult for an English writer to speak in detail. It has been treated with great tact and discrimination, both in its darker and its nobler aspects for he shows that it had a nobler side by Mr. Mahaffy in his Social Life in Greece. But we may observe here that it has a direct bearing on one prominent contrast of Christian and classical art. As Winckelmann remarked, " the supreme beauty of Greek art is rather male than female," and sculpture is as far superior to painting in the capacity of expressing masculine vigour and beauty as painting is superior to sculpture in the expression of feminine grace. This is undoubtedly one reason why sculpture has always been regarded as distinctively Pagan, and painting as distinctively Christian, the Pagan instinct delighting rather to glorify the masculine and the Christian instinct the feminine qualities, both moral and physical. HELLENISM AND ITS REVIVAL. 41 Here again our modern Renaissance naturally manifests its unmistakable preference for the Pagan or Hellenic as distinguished from the specifically Christian type of excel- lence. It is not of course the recognition of masculine virtues, which must have their place and value under every system, but the depreciation amounting both in ancient Greece and Rome almost to simple contempt of the feminine type, which is in fault. This one-sided conception of excellence culminated philosophically in the hard and pitiless Stoic ideal, while it lent itself no less readily to the popular canonization of Harmodius and Aristogeiton. And there are not wanting ominous signs of a tendency in the bastard Renaissance of our own day to reproduce the twin characteristics so inseparably united under that old civilisation which is its prototype reckless cruelty and unbridled license. Both forms of selfishness, for they have a common root, were abundantly exemplified in the literature and the life of the Italian Hellenists of the fifteenth century ; the latter is exhibited with an almost incredible shamelessness, far exceeding the worst passages of Ovid or Martial, in the Lusus Quinque Poetarum in Venerem, notably in the Hermaphroditus of Beccadelli, which nevertheless was much admired by contemporary scholars. Both have found at least literary expression in the " debased Hellenism " of our own. It might not even be a difficult, however ungracious, task to point to ugly revelations which suggest that in some quarters these neo-Pagan aspirations are beginning already to be trans- lated into act. But it must suffice to have struck a note of warning, not at all before it was required. VI. THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND THE CHURCH. AN interesting paper by Professor Zeller of Berlin, on the " Contest of Heathenism with Christianity as reflected in Greek and Roman Literature," l bears on a cognate question to that dealt with by M. Renan, both in his Hibbert Lectures and in a review article already noticed on the Emperor Hadrian. Considering that the period referred to includes the golden age of Roman, which is itself a borrowed reflection from the golden age of Greek litera- ture, it may seem strange at first sight that any such " con- test " should occur. For the literature of an age expresses and represents its highest civilisation, and in Greece and Rome posterity has agreed to recognise the representative civilisation of the ancient world. But Christianity and civilisation unquestionably have much in common in their idea, their methods, and their history. Christianity, it has been justly observed, waited till the world had attained its most perfect form before it appeared, and it soon coalesced and has ever since co-operated, and often seemed identical, with the civilisation which is its companion. Both alike are based on common ideas, have common 1 See Contemporary Review for May 1877. THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND THE CHURCH. 43 views and principles, and a common standard of appeal, for the classics and the studies rising out of the classics are to the one what Scripture and the Creeds are to the other. If Christianity has its patriarchs and apostles, Homer may be considered the patriarch, and the great Greek poets of a later age the apostles and evangelists, of the typical culture of the human race. We must say Greek, for the fact, already referred to, that the best Latin literature and philosophy were mainly a transcript from the Greek, seems to indicate that according to the familiar saying of Horace the Attic writers were destined to be, as they have in fact proved, the teachers and schoolmasters of all future generations. Civilisation, to use theological language, is in the natural what Chris- tianity is in the supernatural order, and there surely need not be, and ought not to be, any clash or " contest " between them. Nevertheless, while in the long run they have coalesced and co-operated, their aims are not identi- cal, and as every power has an inevitable tendency to encroach beyond its own legitimate boundaries, there have often been quarrels between the two. The almost chronic conflict of Church 'and State, though it involves other questions also of a purely dynastic kind, is in a wider sense part of the same great dichotomy. But the differ- ences, whatever they be, between Christianity and culture, and between the ecclesiastical and civil order, which are constantly reappearing in various forms, have never since culminated in so violent and radical a divergence as during the first three centuries of our era, when the brilliant but deeply corrupted civilisation of the mighty Empire, already sinking into premature decrepitude, was pitted against the 44 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. vigorous and growing life of the nascent Church. It is to that contest, so far as it is reflected in the literature of the period, that Professor Zeller would call our attention, and there is much that is fresh and suggestive in his handling of a familiar theme. He begins by pointing out what naturally follows from what has been already said that the new religion was not without many points of contact with the mental tendencies and needs of the age. It had really in some respects more in common with Hellenic culture than with Judaism ; and it certainly had much in common, in spite of important contrasts, with the Stoic philosophy, whence the story became current for which there is no real evidence, nor even the slightest probability that Seneca, if not secretly a Christian, was at least partly indebted to the teaching of St. Paul. It is thus the more remarkable that Christianity should have appeared to all classes of Roman society something simply and unmixedly abhorrent. "The Chris- tians in the first place were Atheists " ; and " Down with the Atheists " was the cry which rung round St. Polycarp's martyr stake at Smyrna. Being atheists, they were of course obnoxious to the charge of every form of atrocious crime, and hence the horrible and grotesque fables of their worshipping an ass's head, their Thyestean banquets, and their orgies of nameless obscenity. Even the great critical historian Tacitus thinks it perfectly natural that "a sect universally hated for their shameful deeds" should be credited, though untruly, with the burning of Rome. But to him, as to his more intellectual contemporaries gener- ally, their original sin was not atheism but superstition, though they were not the less for that "the enemies of the THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND THE CHURCH. 45 human race." Atheism and fanaticism were indeed only different forms, suited to the capacity of the vulgar or the learned, of conveying the same indictment; the real offence was that Christians were monotheists. We have heard of a modern writer, whose zeal considerably outran his knowledge and his logic, beginning his attack on the doctrine of eternal punishment with a disclaimer of any desire to adjudicate between the opposite alternatives of Universalism or annihilationism, though he might have known that the rival theories are, if possible, more abso- lutely incompatible with each other than with the doctrine they are intended to supplant. In the same way the Romans did not seriously care to discriminate between the merits of atheism and polytheism ; the latter was the established cult ; the former, if we may trust Juvenal, was in his day the general belief. But whether it was more reasonable to worship many gods or to reverence none, it was equally opposed to reason and to " civism " to adopt a later phrase to believe in One God. It was, as Professor Zeller rightly observes, its monotheism that placed Christianity in undisguised enmity to the national religion. But the root of this enmity lay deeper than any purely theological ideas in the national mind. We have seen that Tacitus considered the Christians a sect of loathsome and criminal fanatics, though he admits their innocence of the particular crime, of setting fire to the city, for which they were being executed. Pliny, who knew better, did not share this opinion. He had no special fault to find with the Christians, except the one unpardonable sin of resist- ing the State religion, to which they opposed their own 46 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. " strange and absurd superstition " ; but for this treason- able conduct he thought they deserved death, when it was judicially brought home to them. And Trajan, whose mandate governed for a hundred and fifty years the policy of Rome in the matter, approved his view of the case. All other religions were compatible with the established worship ; this one alone maintained a resolute isolation, and Christians, whatever their virtues or their vices, " could not be permitted to break the laws against making pro- selytes and against unauthorized societies." The way in which they held together among themselves, and their care to hold aloof, as far as possible, from the heathen world around, conveyed to an outsider, educated or uneducated, the impression of a secret society, a conspiracy against the established order of things. And that feeling was deepened among the higher classes by their well-known practice of recruiting their ranks from slaves, freedmen, and artisans, with whom they associated on terms of equality, but whom their masters looked down upon with a contempt which is but faintly reflected in the feelings of a Southern slaveowner in former days towards his niggers. Here we touch at last upon the root of that hopeless estrangement between the Empire and the Church which, if it occasionally smouldered, broke out again and again into fierce energy during three centuries of more or less persistent persecution. A true, though at first uncon- scious, instinct taught the ruling classes that there was a vital antagonism between the new faith and the existing national order, which must sooner or later issue in the destruction of one or the other. And therefore a well- known remark in Dr. Arnold's Lectures on Modern History THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND THE CHURCH. 47 must be regarded as only a half truth, though it may seem to a casual reader to be partly endorsed by Dr. Dollinger in his First Age of the Church. That the Christians " were punished, not as men who might change the laws of Rome hereafter, but as men who disobeyed them now," is true of the conscious and immediate motive of the early persecutors ; it is only very partially true of the later and more intelligent representatives of the same policy. Dr. Dollinger says, with his usual accuracy, that " the authorities and philosophers did not for some time understand clearly how completely the Christian Church was the rival of the Roman State, or they would not only have persecuted by fits and starts " ; but the very form of expression implies that they began to discern this after- wards. And so only can we account for the startling fact, at first so perplexing, that Marcus Aurelius, the best of the Emperors and one whose character and belief had much of moral and even religious affinity to Christianity, was the severest of persecutors, and denounced the con- stancy of the Christian martyrs as proceeding from " mere defiance." If we come to later Roman writers, we find the sceptical and worldly Lucian content to sneer at the foolish and fanciful fanaticism of the Christian sect. His Platonist friend Celsus takes a much more serious view of the matter, and charges them and their Founder with deliberate imposture ; but the head and front of their offending is still, as in the days of Tacitus though it is expressed in less vehement language their exclusiveness, their want of patriotism. Originally apostates from the national faith of Judaism, they were accused of remaining indifferent or 48 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. hostile to the welfare of the Roman State. After the middle of the third century the antagonism to the new faith took a somewhat different form with the rise of the Neoplatonic philosophy. Philostratus and Porphyry and Hierocles display more of the critical and carping tone of modern sceptical writers, and are obliged to admit a good deal of truth in the system they assail. The brief and highly artificial attempt of Julian to galvanize the moribund Paganism into a new life was in fact based on an elaborate plagiarism from the despised " Galilean " superstition, which he both hated and feared, and, even had his reign not been prematurely cut short, was doomed from the nature of the case to inevitable failure. When St. Cyril wrote his ten books against Julian the last hope of Paganism had sunk into the grave with him, and thenceforth even literary attacks on Christianity gradually diminished. It is quite true, as Professor Zeller points out, that the heathen polemics have been revived by many recent assailants of the Gospel, but that is too wide a subject to enter upon here. VII. UNITY AND VARIETY IN CHURCH AND STATE. THE problem and puzzle of all Governments, whether in Church or State, has been to combine authority with freedom, or in other words, variety of action with unity of principle and aim. For since individual judgments^ tastes, and tendencies must always differ widely, a dead level of uniformity is the sure sign of stagnation or of tyranny. There is no necessary opposition between order and liberty, though they are popularly supposed to repre- sent contrary if not incompatible ideas. There has been a good deal of talk of late years about Imperialism, but in its proper sense the word may be said to be obsolete. We have indeed in our own day seen the rise and fall of Empires so-called, both in the Old World and the New, and there are no less than three Emperors in Europe at this moment, but the distinction between a King and an Emperor is now little more than a verbal one. A King may be absolute like Louis XIV., and the powers of an Emperor may be strictly limited by constitutional checks, as is now the case in Austria. The last shadow of the old Imperialism disappeared, in the memory of some who are still living, with the formal extinction of the Holy 50 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. Roman Empire ; the reality had departed centuries before. For in truth Empire in the old sense the sense in which the Romans, from whom we have borrowed the term, understood it means a power that is or at least aspires to become universal ; and hence the difficulty common to all governments of reconciling liberty and authority is under such a rule enormously increased. It was this universal domination which "the King," as the Greeks called the Persian monarch, aimed at in his assault on their liberties, to the acquisition of which Alexander, for whom " one world was not sufficient," devoted the energies of his life, and which was in large measure carried on for centuries, though with very various degrees of stability and vigour, under the sway of imperial Rome. And the rule of the Caesars was reproduced in theory and in name in the Holy Roman Empire of mediaeval Europe, which suggested the ideal of Dante's De Monarchid, though it was never more than an ideal very imperfectly realised. The counter- acting principle of liberty was supplied then not only by the action of independent States, but still more by the spiritual power, which through the long strife of Guelf and Ghibelline represented, on the whole and in the long run, the cause of moral and intellectual freedom as opposed to brute force. The imperium and sacerdotium were re- garded in mediaeval theology as the opposite poles of a great cosmopolitan system for the government of mankind. All later attempts to revive the scheme of universal empire, which was supposed to be the best guarantee for universal peace and happiness, have been temporary and spasmodic, and have passed away with their authors. It was certainly the ideal of Charlemagne and of Napoleon, possibly of UNITY AND VARIETY IN CHURCH AND STATE. 51 Charles V., and of Maximilian. But the conditions of the modern world are fatal to its success. There is one institution, however, which has survived the wreck of dynasties and empires, and which from the nature of the case can hardly help laying claim to this cosmopoli- tan character; that is the Christian Church. One of Cardinal Newman's old Oxford Sermons is entitled " The Christian Church an Imperial Power," and he explains in the discourse that by a kingdom is meant " a body politic, bound together by common laws, ruled by one head, hold- ing intercourse part with part, acting together" ; and that this particular kingdom or empire was to be international and coextensive with the world, including all that is ordin- arily involved in the idea of a great empire extended dominion, warfare on its enemies, aggression, acts of judg- ment and the like. And such no doubt the Christian Church has shown itself in history. It follows then that the same problem which has perplexed civil governments, and has proved fatal to the continuance of a system of universal dominion, will recur here also. Nor can any student of ecclesiastical history fail to observe the con- stant struggle carried on, in various forms and with very various alternations of success, between the rival principles of authority and independence. The conflicts of national Churches with the sovereign jurisdiction of Council, Pope, or Patriarch claiming their allegiance, of religious orders with bishops or Popes, of heretics or reputed heretics with ecclesiastical tribunals, and of " the lay element " generally with the clerisy, are all examples of the same standing rivalry. It is obvious of course that, when the contest is pushed on either side beyond a certain point, it becomes E 2 52 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. fatal to the maintenance of unity. After several centuries of intermittent conflict and compromise the Eastern Patriarchates finally repudiated the advancing claims of the Papacy, and a similar contention issued at a later period in the disruption of Western Christendom into its Latin and Teutonic elements. With the theological or controversial aspect of these questions we are not here concerned. The rival but complementary principles which in this relation may for convenience sake be designated Catholic and Protestant, the centripetal and centrifugal forces, must ever coexist in the Church as in the State, and in either sphere the great problem of sound statesmanship is to harmonize the two without sacrificing the due interests of organization on the one hand or of liberty on the other. But it is a common temptation of rulers ecclesiastical and civil to imperil both alike by confounding uniformity with unity. This is one of the stock charges of Protestant con- troversialists' against the Church of Rome, but it has in fact a wider application. The French Minister of Public Instruction who boasted that at the same minute, which he could tell by looking at his watch, the children in every school in the country were learning the same lesson, and the French bishop who boasted that his clergy was an army to which he had simply to give the word of command, " March, and they march," betrayed a common addiction to the regimental method of administration. Uniformity was their notion of unity. It has been for many years past a cherished object of Ultramontane zeal to suppress every lingering trace of diversity, whether in great matters or small, within the Roman pale ; and accordingly during the last pontificate, UNITY AND VARIETY IN CHURCH AND STATE. 53 in deference to such wishes, all the various diocesan " uses " in France many of them in the opinion of competent judges very superior to the Roman use were suppressed one after another. The Paris Breviary, well known to liturgiologists without as well as within the Latin Church, was buried in the grave of Archbishop Darboy. Yet three centuries ago not even St. Charles Borromeo, the saintly and strictly Ultramontane Archbishop of Milan, would consent to sacrifice the Ambrosian rite, which may be witnessed there to this day ; and the Eastern Uniates may perhaps prove equally firm in refusing to surrender rites, which are more distinctive and probably older than the Ambrosian. But we merely refer to the matter here in illustration of a general principle. If national and local specialities are not to be tolerated, even in ritual minutiae where confessedly no difference of doctrine is at stake, we may recognise at once the narrow and impolitic temper which pursues uniformity at the risk of schism. The Church, which is described in prophecy as circutn- amicta varietatibus, was not weaker but stronger for all important purposes when it included in one visible body a variety of disciplinary and liturgical arrangements, as well as of nationalities, and the attempt to enforce a rigid uniformity of detail has ended in creating a diversity of communions and creeds. In the State, as we have seen, the scheme of an ecumenical empire has long since been abandoned as impracticable, however plausible in theory. In the Church, as the organ of a religion which claims to be universal, the principle must always be up- held, but it has now and again been so applied as to limit her range of comprehension by snapping the cord till it 54 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. broke. To use theological language, Catholicity has been sacrificed to Ultramontanism. How far precisely the con- trast between the Christendom of the early ages and the modern " spirit of disruption," which not only acquiesces but glories in "the Protestantism of the Protestant religion and the dissidence of Dissent," may be due to this cause is too wide an inquiry to be undertaken here. But we cannot be wrong in assuming that what has proved a fatal diffi- culty of imperialism in the State has also very seriously affected the policy and fortunes of the Church. In this respect, as in some others, a certain analogy may be traced between the Greece and Rome alike of ancient and of modern times. That imperial instinct, which the great Latin poet claimed as the proud prerogative of his people, reappears under new conditions in the steady advance and strong hand of the Roman pontificate ; there is the same political temper, the same tenacity of purpose, the same subordination of the abstract and ideal to the practical, the same stern intolerance of rivalry or opposition ; the Ponti- jex Maximus of the new order inherited the sceptre of the Caesars. Greece, on the other hand, in the classic age was the home of philosophy, not the seat of empire ; it was split up into a number of rival States, jealous of their separate independence and refusing all common organization, till they fell under a foreign yoke. And the Greek Church in like manner was the fruitful mother of speculative theology, not the "mother and mistress" of an ecclesiastical com- monwealth ; its several Patriarchates were independent of each other, and would acknowledge none but an honorary primacy either in the Old or the New Rome ; its schools were the hotbeds of heresy as well as the nurseries of UNITY AND VARIETY IN CHURCH AND STATE. 55 sacred learning ; it aspired to shape the thought, not to rule the destinies, of Christendom. There have been Greek theologians and preachers who might rival the subtlety of Plato and the eloquence of Demosthenes, but no line of imperial pontiffs has sat on the thrones of Alexandria or Constantinople. If the instinct of dominion has been the ruling principle of the Latin Church, the secret alike of its weakness and its strength, the energies of the East have been absorbed and often wasted in controversial discussion j it has produced no Hildebrand and provoked the opposi- tion of no Luther. And as ancient Greece, from lack of internal coherence and power of organization, fell a prey first to a Macedonian and then to a Roman master, so has the Eastern Church too often succumbed to the despotism of the Sultan or the Czar. But we need not pursue the parallel further. Enough has been said to show how, alike in secular and sacred history, East and West exhibit the con- trast of an individuality tending to anarchy and a central- ization hardening into despotism. An imperial regime that shall combine the excellences and avoid the faults of both extremes has been the dream of philosophical statesmen, since Plato imagined a republic where philosophers should reign, and Aristotle sketched the idea of the 7raju/3ao-iXeis who should be absolute in power as in justice. But the world has long since resigned all expectation of seeing the ideal carried out in practice ; " the balance of power " has replaced the Monarchia of Dante. It is not so easy for religious minds, familiarized with the old conception of a Civitas Dei, to abandon all hope of witnessing in the Chris- tendom of the future the harmonious co-ordination of principles which in their divorce have been subject to so 56 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. much perverse exaggeration. This perfect consummation however belongs as yet to the region of unfulfilled pro- phecy ; perhaps we must wait for St. Malachy's Pastor Angelicus who ought to come fifth in succession from the present Pontiff to make it a reality. VIII. LATIN CHRISTIANITY. DEAN MILMAN'S well-known history of the mediaeval Church is entitled the History of Latin Christianity. There is a fitness in the title, though in one sense it is open to exception. The author uses it to distinguish the Western from the Eastern Church, and he has no doubt purposely chosen a term which indicates that the distinction is some- thing more than a geographical one. It is true that for several centuries the Christian Church received its impress, as it had derived its origin, mainly from the East. The great majority of the early Fathers and theologians, and several even of the early Popes, as Dr. Milman has pointed out, were Greeks. All the seven Councils which met before the great schism were assembled in Eastern cities, and occasioned by Eastern heresies. Pelagianism was the first heresy that stirred the West, and characteristically enough it concerned, not the nature of God, but the free will of man. On the other hand, the mediaeval Councils of Western Christendom were concerned much more with discipline than with doctrine. The subtleties of Greek theology and of Greek heresy were alike alien to the sterner and more practical spirit which the Roman Catholic Church inherited from the Republic and the Empire. 53 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. The first Eastern Council was summoned to define the nature of the Trinity ; the first recorded decree of a Latin Pope, about half a century later, was to enjoin, what the East had never admitted, the celibacy of the priesthood. The words of the Roman poet describe no less the dis- tinctive genius of the Roman Church than of the Roman people : Tu regere imperio populos, Romans, memento ; Has tibi erunt artes. And accordingly, from the first, if Eastern influences were most powerful in shaping the creed, it was left to the West to organize the polity of Christendom. M. Guizot says somewhere that the Church is a great idea ; the dominant aim of the Papacy has been to make it a great fact. It is not, therefore, without a special meaning that the history of the mediaeval Church is called the history of Latin Christianity. As the old intellectual civilisation of the East succumbed before the inroads of the barbarians, there were no renovating influences at work to give it a fresh lease of life. Action had never been its strong point, and from the time of Photius, in whom the expiring flame shot up with a bright but evanescent radiance, its vigour of thought seems also to have died out. Thenceforth Eastern Christianity presents at best a spectacle of sterile conservatism ; we have to look to its rival for that capa- bility of progressive development and adaptation to succes- sive emergencies which is an inseparable attribute of all healthy life, whether mental or moral. If we compare either the monasticism or the theology of the two great divisions of Christendom from the eighth century onwards, the same conclusion is forced upon us. There may be LATIN CHRISTIANITY. 59 much that is open to criticism in both systems, but no one who will contrast the dull stagnation of an Egyptian Laura, or the passive immobility of the peopled solitude of Mount Athos, unbroken still by the revolutions of ages in the living world around, with the studious labours of Monte Cassino or St. Maur, or the active zeal of a Jesuit or Franciscan community, can fail to note the radical difference between them. There is an almost ludicrous perversity in the popular Protestant misconception of the cloister, as a mere refuge of broken hearts, fainting spirits, and crushed affections. It is certainly true that the most prominent characteristic of the Western monks was pozver, and that the cell was to them as really a battle-field as the world they had in one sense abandoned. And it is there- fore a mistake of Montalembert's to attribute the origin of the monastic life, as far as they are concerned, solely, or chiefly, to a desire for solitude. Bernard from his cell at Clairvaux was the adviser of popes, the healer of schisms, the mouthpiece of synods, the protagonist of Catholic ortho- doxy, and helped alike in matters ecclesiastical and civil to control the destinies of Europe. Such was mediaeval monasticism in its Latin form. Nor can the later Eastern Church offer any parallel to the huge edifice of scholastic theology, which tasked and tested the logical acuteness of contemporary thinkers in the West, however limited may have been the permanent result. St. John of Damascus in the eighth century was her last theologian. These considerations abundantly suffice to explain, if not to justify, Dr. Milman's use of the term Latin Chris- tianity. But, without explanation, there is serious danger of its misleading us. It must not be forgotten that, if 60 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. the Roman Pontiffs inherited much of the imperial and organizing spirit of the Caesars, to whose throne they succeeded, there would have been little opportunity of giving practical effect to their policy, had not a very differ- ent element come into play to supplement and regenerate the decaying energies of the Latin race. The barbarian hordes who swept down from the North, and, like the ancient Romans in their conflict with Greece, were van- quished by the civilisation of those they had conquered in war, added much more than a merely numerical force to the Church of their adoption. Little of the stern old Roman spirit survived among the Italians of the fourth and fifth centuries. They retained the passive virtues of submission and obedience, but the vigour, the energy, the self-reliance to which, quite as much as to the organizing genius of Rome, Christianity owed its noblest conquests in the middle ages, were the contribution of the Teutonic nations to the religion which had reclaimed them from barbarism. And, broadly speaking, the Teutonic and Latin elements parted company at the Reformation. While, therefore, we may in one sense speak all along of the Latin as synonymous with the Western Church, it is, at least as true to say, in another sense, that the Roman Catholic Church became the Latin Church after the Council of Trent. At that period, in the words of the great, historian of the Papacy, it " owned the circumscrip- tion of its dominion ; it gave up all claims upon the Greeks and the East, and Protestantism it repudiated with count- less anathemas." No doubt, as Ranke immediately adds, " in thus limiting the field of its operations, it concentrated its strength and braced up all its energies." But the LATIN CHRISTIANITY. 61 limitation, both morally and materially, was a very important one. In his work on The Church and the Churches, published in 1 86 1, Dr. Dollinger observes that, "as each new and vigorous population enters into the Church, she becomes not only numerically but dynamically enriched. Every people, in whatever way gifted, contributes its share in religious experience, ecclesiastical customs, interpretations of Christian doctrine, in its impress on life and science. It adds thus to the great Church capital which is the product of former times and older nationalities." Cardinal Newman says, in the Apologia, with still more direct reference to our immediate subject: "The multitude of nations who are in the fold of the Church will be found to have acted for its protection against any narrowness (if so be) in the . various authorities at Rome. ... It stands to reason that, as the Gallican Church has in it an element of France, so Rome must have in it an element of Italy. It seems to me that Catholicity is not only one of the notes of the Church, but, according to the divine purpose, one of its securities. . . I trust that all European races will ever have a place in the Church, and assuredly I think that the loss of the English, not to say the German element, in its composition, has been a serious misfortune." In other words, the combination of various races, with their diversities of national character, contributed not only numerically but morally or, as Dr. Dollinger words it, dynamically to the strength of the great whole whereof they became constituent portions. And in this sense " the Teutonic element " was lost to the Roman Catholic Church at the Reformation. It is 62 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. true that several million Germans and several million English-speaking Celts, as well as a small fraction of Anglo-Saxons, still remain in her communion. But the merest tyro in Church history is aware how infinitesimal since that date has been the influence of the Teutonic mind on her intellectual or moral life. In the middle ages, as we have seen, the Teutonic peoples supplied the very life-blood of the body they joined on their con- version. It was the German Emperors in the eleventh century whose aid was invoked, and who, by procuring the election of German Popes, largely contributed to raise the Papacy after that " iron age " when it was currently said that " Christ was sleeping in the ship " to the highest point of authority over the conscience and convictions of Europe it has ever attained. The reforming Councils of the fifteenth century were convoked and carried on, and the Council of Trent was summoned, under German influences. But the latter came too late to arrest the Protestant revolt, and the Church tightened her grasp on the Latin race, in despair of recovering the Teutonic. The German element would count for little in a General Council now ; German Catholic divines, however eminent, have long been viewed with something more than suspicion by the authorities at Rome. For the last three centuries of the Latin Church, her administration, her theology, her devotional literature, and the ruling spirit of her whole religious life, have almost exclusively represented what Cardinal Newman calls the Italian element. And this dominant Italianism it has been the persistent aim of the Ultramontane school to import into England ; even the Italian language has been extolled as peculiarly sacred, or Catholic, or "dear to Catholic hearts." LATIN CHRISTIANITY. 63 One cause which has largely contributed to the preva- lence of this exclusive spirit in the Church, is the fact that for three centuries and a half none but Italians have sat in the chair of St. Peter Adrian VI. was the last foreign Pope and that hence also the great majority of the Cardinals, who are the special Senate or Privy Council of the reigning Pontiff, as well as the electors of his successor, have also usually been Italians. And there was at least a plausible ground for this while the Pontiff was an Italian Sovereign. But it is noteworthy here that there are already signs of change. Of the twenty Cardinals named by Leo XIII. nine are non-Italian, one of them being Cardinal Newman, while of the fifty-eight members at this moment composing the Sacred College no less than twenty- six between half and a third are also citizens of other States than Italy. Of these last three are English, one Irish, and one American, giving a much larger proportion of English-speaking Cardinals than at any previous period either before or since the Reformation : there has seldom indeed been more than one at a time. Much will probably depend in the future of Catholicism on the influence of the Teutonic element among the advisers and electors of the chief Pastor of the Church. IX. RISE AND GROWTH OF ULTRAMONTANISM. FEW things are so remarkable, when we penetrate at all beneath the mere surface aspect of events, as the silent revolutions of history, and the unnoticed and seemingly insignificant or accidental agencies on which they so often depend. No doubt there are occasional cataclysms in the moral as in the material universe ; but for the most part what Newton said of the order of nature is true equally of the progressive sequence of national, as of individual, life Continue, non vero per saltum. The most momentous changes in the character of a society or an institution are accomplished quietly ; the old order passes and the new succeeds, but it " cometh not with observation," and is only recognised long afterwards in its results. We can point to the Edict of Milan as marking the precise date of the pub- lic recognition of Christianity, yet it did but proclaim and sanction the ultimate issue of a process which had been secretly working for centuries. Had that recognition of the triumph of the new faith over the old civilisation come from Marcus Aurelius, instead of from Constantine and it looks like a mere accident that it did not who can calcu- late the difference it might have made in the subsequent history of Christendom ? We can point our finger again, if RISE AND GROWTH OF ULTRAMONTANISM. 65 not to the exact year, to the very decade, somewhere between 835 and 845, when the Isidorian forgeries were compiled in the province of Tours, and palmed off on the patient credulity of an uncritical age ; but it was not for centuries that their full significance was revealed in the altered relations of the Papal See to the hierarchy, and the final estrangement of East and West. It is not, however, to the spurious Decretals still less, as is popularly'but most mistakenly imagined, to Hildebrand that Ultra- montanism owes its rise. Gregory VII., whatever his faults, was far too great a man, both morally and intellectually, to stoop to the vulgar ambition of ruling as a despot over willing slaves ; and the system so often associated, both by his admirers and his enemies, with his name, can lay no claim to so venerable an antiquity or so distinguished a parentage. He sought to work out in practice, imperfectly enough, no doubt, but honestly and in accordance with the needs and circumstances of his day, that ideal of the " City of God " which had floated as a glorious vision before -the greatest mind of the ancient Church. It was no part of his aim to convert the Church into a vast bureaucratic despotism, with a well-drilled episcopal police obedient to every intimation of the unseen hand that pulls the wires at the Vatican. He left it for lesser men and a later age to essay the Tarquinian policy of cutting down all the taller poppy-heads, and importing into the ecclesiastical govern- ment that vicious centralisation which has been the bane of so many secular States. Gregory desired to strengthen the hands of metropolitans and primates, whose influence it afterwards became the policy of his successors to depress, partly by curtailing their privileges, and partly by 66 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. multiplying their number; so that at the present day there is one archbishop on an average for every four or five bishops of the Latin rite throughout the world, nor is there since the suppression of the old Gallican hierarchy a single province containing as many suffragans as were originally assigned by Gregory the Great to the primates of Canterbury and York. But we are anticipating. The etymology of the term " Ultramontane ", as indi- cating a party or principle dominant " beyond the Alps," meaning an Italian one, sufficiently reveals its Northern origin, in the theological application which for the last four centuries has attached to it. At an earlier period it had been used in Italy, but in a purely geographical sense, to describe nations lying to the north of the Alps. 1 In the century immediately preceding the Reformation, when the demand, more loudly uttered from day to day, for " a reform of the Church in her head and in her mem- bers " had become the watchword of all serious men, there was passing over her whole spirit and constitution one of those silent changes, the origin and growth of which it is not difficult to trace, but which has not yet attained its final issue. The " seventy years' captivity " of Avignon in the thirteenth century, and the schism of the anti-Popes which followed directly on its close, had forced on practical men the important inquiry, where the supreme authority of the Church must be held to reside ? Was it in a Pope or a Council ? The question received an authoritative answer when, in 1409, the Council of Pisa, acting in the spirit of 1 Thus, e. g., Urban VI., in 1378, "openly avowed his design to make so large a nomination (of Cardinals) that the Italians should recover their ascendency over the Ultramontanes." (Milman, Lat. Christ^ viii. 42.) RISE AND GROWTH OF ULTRAMONTANISM. 67 Gerson's famous work De Auferibilitate Papa, deposed both the rival Pontiffs, and appointed Alexander V. in their place ; and again, eight years later, when the Council of Constance, having deposed two Popes and extorted the resignation of a third, proceeded to elect Martin V. to the chair of St. Peter. Had the principle then affirmed been consistently upheld and, above all, had not the Council of Constance, against the urgent reclamations of its most earnest members, elected first to appoint a new Pope, who at once dissolved it, and leave the reformation of the Church to be taken up afterwards the future of Christian history might have been very different from what it actually was. In checking all reforms that did not emanate from themselves exclusively, and in drawing continually tighter the reins of the central autocracy, Martin V. and his suc- cessors were at once sowing the seeds of Ultramontanism and of the Reformation. From that time forward the de- pression of national Churches, the exaltation of purely Papal authority, and the fatal plan of seeking to get rid of scandals not by correction of abuses but by silencing complaints, became the normal policy of the Roman Court. It has been said, with substantial if not with technical accuracy and we are of course exclusively concerned with the matter here in its historical, not its theological, aspect that whereas hitherto the Popes had claimed extraordinary, they hence- forth claimed ordinary, jurisdiction over national Churches. This may be illustrated from the history of the English Church during the century which intervened between the Council of Constance and the complete severance with Rome under Henry VIII. Indeed the struggle between the rival systems, though seldom breaking out F 2 68 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. into open antagonism, forms the chief element in the ecclesiastical history of the period. The appointment of Cardinal Beaufort to the purple, without consent of the Crown, and the attempt to make him legate a latere> was the first encroachment, and was resisted, with only partial success, by Archbishop Chicheley. When, soon afterwards, Kemp, Archbishop of York, was made a cardinal, the Pope ruled that he should take precedence, as such, of the Primate of all England, on the curious ground that the Cardinals were "those venerable priests mentioned by Moses in Deuteronomy, and that they were afterwards instituted by St. Peter " ; which reminds one of M. About's equally remarkable statement, at the opening of his pamphlet on the Roman Question, that " the Catholic Church is gov- erned by a Pope and seventy Cardinals, in memory of Christ and the twelve Apostles." Thenceforth till the Reformation, some bishop who was usually, but not always, the Primate was made legate a latere in England, and three of the Archbishops of Canterbury Kemp, who was translated from York, Bouchier, and Morton were also Cardinals. It was as Cardinal Legates, not as national Primates, that they were to exercise supreme ecclesiastical authority in the country ; and this of course immensely increased the actual power of the Pope, who began to inter- fere much more than before in episcopal appointments and other matters. The last effective resistance made to the new system occurred in Henry VI. 's reign, in the case of Pecock, Bishop of Chichester, whom Foxe, with character- istic blundering (probably in this case ignorant rather than dishonest), has metamorphosed into a Protestant martyr. He had, in fact, excited general opposition by his extreme RISE AND GROWTH OF ULTRAMONTANISM. 69 Ultramontane views, as we should call them now ; maintain- ing among other things, what was then a startling novelty, though it has since been revived by some of the Jesuit divines, that the Papacy is the sole Divine institution in the Church, and the Episcopate a creation, not of Christ, but of the Pope. Pecock was charged with seeking to change the religion of England, and was censured for heresy and imprisoned ; but his leading principles after- wards prevailed. It was by Papal authority only that Archbishop Morton and Archbishop Warham assumed the visitatorial functions which served to expose but not to remedy the crying abuses of the existing monastic institu- tions. In Henry VII.'s reign indulgences were publicly hawked about for sale in England, under sanction of a papal bull, by one John de Gigliis, for all sorts of crimes, including simony, theft, murder, and uncleanness. Mean- while in Italy Pius II., who had abandoned the opinions as well as the name of ./Eneas Silvius on ascending the papal throne, condemned in a bull with the ominous title of Execrabilis the appeal from a Pope to a General Council, thus annulling on his own authority the principle affirmed at three General Councils held during his own lifetime. 1 1 The claim of Pisa to be reckoned among the General Councils has been subsequently called in question by Ultramontane writers, and is still made matter of dispute, but no doubt was entertained about it at the time by the Council itself, by Pope Alexander V., whom it elected in place of the two rival claimants it deposed, or in Europe generally. The decrees entitle it " Sancta et Universalis Synodus, Universalem Ecclesiam repraesentans," and the Bull of Alexander sanctions them as " Universalis Ecclesiae auctoritate et corcordia facta." Milman justly describes it as " the most august assembly as to the number and rank of the Prelates, and the Ambassadors of Christian Kings, which for centuries had assumed the functions of a representa- tive Senate of Christendom" (Lat. Christ, viii. 114). Bishop Maret (Du Candle Central, i. 380) says, " Ldgitime dans sa convocation, le 70 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. In Spain the practical fruits of the new system were ex- hibited in the establishment of the Inquisition ; the earliest auto-da-fe was held at Seville in 1481, and no less than two thousand heretics were burnt in that year. The first epoch of Ultramontanism, which commenced with the Council of Constance, closed with the Council of Trent. For a while the two principles hung in the balance, and had the counsels of men like Pole and Contarini prevailed, who strove to avoid by timely con- cessions the consummation of the religious schism, there can be little doubt that a bond fide reformation of at least the graver practical corruptions would have followed, and the Teutonic element would have conquered for itself its natural place and recognition in the development of the Catholic Church. But it was not to be. The movement which rent half Europe from the obedience of Rome riveted the chain of Latinism all the more tightly on the half which retained its allegiance. If the Isidoriari Decretals of the ninth century had done much to pre- cipitate the severance of East and West, and in doing so paved the way for the growing pretensions which culmin- ated in the Ultramontane movement of the fifteenth, that movement, in contributing to the success of the Reform- ation, was also preparing its own temporary ascendency Concile de Pise fut ge"ne"ral dans sa composition, car il repre"senta verit- ablement 1'Eglise Universelle. On ne peutdonter de cette universalite"" &c. Hefele indeed declines to acknowledge it, but on grounds the reverse of convincing, and which would prove equally fatal to the claims of other mediaeval Councils (such as Constance, e.g.} whose title has not been seriously impugned in the West. Even the Ultramontane Bellarmine, while he abstains from positively committing himself, was too much of an historian not to call it a General Council, and he gives very sufficient grounds for so regarding it. RISE AND GROWTH OF ULTRAMONTANISM. 71 within the more limited area still left to it. When the Catholic became virtually the Latin Church, the victory of Ultramontanism was an inevitable sequel, even if it had not been avowedly one of the first aims of the master mind of Ignatius, in organizing those indefatigable " praetorians of the Papacy," of whom it has been said not by their enemies, but their admirers -that " for the last three centuries the history of the Jesuit Order is the history of the Catholic Church gone into Commission.'' As the old methods of persecution became obsolete, the new methods of spiritual terrorism and pious frauds came in to take their place. It was dangerous to question any doctrine asserted in the name of the Church, though it might be merely the private opinion of an individual or a school ; and equally dangerous to admit any estimate of facts discfeditable to the Church, or to those who claimed to represent her. Historians, like Rohrbacher, or Audin, or Dom Gueranger, too plainly show that the favourite temptation of theological partisans of all schools, to lie " for the greater glory of God ", has not yet lost its charm. In one Roman Catholic country the struggle between the rival systems was continued for two centuries after the Reformation, and the great name of Bossuet is not more illustrious for his eloquence than for his bold vindica- tion of the national as opposed to the Ultramontane theory of Catholicism. 1 But, in this as in other respects, the Revo- lution sealed the work of the Reformation, and with the fall of the old Gallican Church the last corporate protest 1 Ultramontanism, in its contest with this later phase of Gallicanism, has been defined by an impartial critic, as " a jealousy of liberties, stimulated by an equal jealousy of authority." 72 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. against the modern pretensions of the Papacy was ex- tinguished. A national Church's necessity is Rome's opportunity ; and though the devout and high-minded Pius VII. deeply resented the pressure put upon him by Napoleon, and only yielded unwillingly at last, and to avoid greater evils, it is not the less certain that to sweep away at one stroke of the pen the hierarchy of a thousand years, and substitute another in its place, was an exercise of Papal power which as yet its extremest advocates had scarcely dared to claim. In an age like ours there could not well have occurred a contingency more favourable to the progress of those principles which the Church of Bossuet so resolutely resisted, but which the Church of the French Empire was content to make her own. The Ultramontane movement gained a fresh impetus, not only from the incidents of the French Revolution, but from the line adopted by the reactionary school of Catholic apologists to which it gave birth, of whom De Maistre and Lamennais, in his orthodox phase, were the chief representatives. The latter, according to Bishop Maret, was, " even more than De Maistre, the true founder of modern Ultramontanism," and he illustrated in his later career what has too often proved the effect of such opinions on a sensitive nature and keen intellect. Of De Maistre Maret justly observes that "his mind was essentially and eminently political" and that his leading aim was to restore the principle of authority or sovereignty in the Divine order. Hence " the political dictatorship of the Popes, the theocracy of the middle ages, appeared to him the ideal of Christian society," and he advocated an extreme view of Papal infallibility which had not RISE AND GROWTH OF ULTRAMONTANISM. 73 then in any sense been authoritatively proclaimed on grounds neither theological nor historical, but because " infallibility is identical with sovereignty." If the Pope was not infallible, room was -left for an appeal against his judgment, whether to a Council or to conscience mattered little, for any appeal against the supreme authority savoured of revolution. It was therefore neces- sary in the nature of things that it should be infallible, if his argument is to be consistently applied, alike in Church and State. Indeed, he says expressly that " infallibility in the spiritual order and sovereignty in the temporal are terms perfectly synonymous." But to carry out these principles in detail was the work of a very different class of minds from De Maistre's, who would have turned in scorn or disgust from the petty jealousy of all local or personal independence which busies itself, e. g., with the suppression of national liturgies, or the gagging of writers, however eminent, and however sincerely and intensely Catholic, who cannot frame their lips to re-echo its peculiar shibboleths. In an age when education is general, and the Inquisition is out of date, this sort of Ultramontanism can make little way with thoughtful minds. Already, indeed, a reaction has visibly set in against it, not from a sceptical or a Protestant point of view, but among the devoutest believers and deepest thinkers in the Church. X. LATIN HYMNOLOGY. IT has been justly observed by a recent writer in the Quarterly Review^ that not the least important side of the history of the Christian Church is written in her hymns, that is of course the history of her internal development and religious life. " It is with a hymn that it opens, the sublime Canticle of the Incarnation, Magnificat anima mca Dominum ; and in the Apocalyptic vision which presents the last glimpse of the City of God the glorious company gathered in adoration around the Immaculate Lamb have 'a new song' in their mouths." And hence, we may add, the Bencdictus and Magnificat, the two great prophetic hymns of the Incarnation, have held from an early period a prominent place in the Lauds and Vespers respectively of the Latin Breviary, from which they were transferred to the English Prayer-book. Nor is it only the history of the Church, but the history of every great religious move- ment in the Church, that has been marked by a fresh outburst of hymnology. Two of the ancient Creeds, the Nicene and the Quicunqne vult, are hymns as well as creeds, and may be said to celebrate an epoch in the onward march of the Church as well as in the elaboration of her doctrinal system. Thus Cardinal Newman speaks of the Quicunque as " the war-song of faith," celebrating 1 Quarterly Review, July, 1882. LATIN HYMNOLOGY. 75 a triumph over its Arian assailants ; " it is a psalm or hymn of praise, of confession, and of profound, self- prostrating homage, parallel to the canticles of the elect in the Apocalypse ; it appeals to the imagination quite as much as to the intellect." And Dr. Arnold used to call the Nicene Creed a "triumphant hymn of thanks- giving," and made a point of having it always chanted in the services of Rugby School Chapel. To come to later times, the German Reformation owed quite as much to the hymns of Luther, with their captivating double rhymes, as to his translation of the Bible. The Wesleyan revival again was largely indebted for its early successes to the hymns of its founder, and it would be difficult to exaggerate the influence of the Christian Year in popularising the spirit and teachings of the more im- portant movement which succeeded it. It is not indeed too much to say that every religion, Christian or not, relies more or less on its hymnology, as may be exemplified in the Vedic songs of our Aryan ancestors, just as ballad poetry, like the songs of Tyrtus, is a power in the early history of almost every nation, whence the familiar saying, " Give me the making of a nation's ballads, and I will leave you the making of its laws." Our present concern, however, is with what the Quarterly Reviewer calls the mediaeval, but what it is more correct to call the Latin hymnology of the Church for its origin dates from the fourth century or as Dean Church puts it, " that wonder- ful body of hymns to which age after age has contributed its offering, from the Ambrosian hymn to the Veni Sancte Spiritus of a King of France, the Pange lingua of Thomas Aquinas, the Dies Tree and the Stabat Mater of the two ;6 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. Franciscan brethren, Thomas of Celano and Jacopone." His predecessor, Dean Milman, observes that it " has a singularly solemn and majestic tone." The late Mr. C. Hemans, by the by, considered the Stabat Mater to be more probably the composition of Pope Innocent III., a century earlier, than of Jacopone. It is only natural then that the great ecclesiastical revival of our own day should have drawn the attention of learned writers, both German and English, to this splendid treasure-house of old Catholic devotion, the principal English contributors to the subject being Cardinal Newman and the late Mr. Isaac Williams, who both edited and translated the greater part of the hymns as well of the Roman as of the Parisian Breviary, Archbishop Trench, Mr. Digby Wrangham, who has translated the poems of Adam of St. Victor, and the late Dr. Neale, who both edited and translated many of the Latin Hymns and Sequences, and discussed the general question in a paper on " the Ecclesiastical Latin Poetry of the Middle Ages" in the Encyclopedia Metropolitana. How far indeed, and in what relative degree, these translations or any of them are satisfactory, or how far again translated hymns are as a rule suitable for use in public worship, are questions which we cannot do more than glance at here. All translation, and notably translation of poetry, is con- fessedly a difficult problem, and there can be no doubt that the Latin hymns present peculiar difficulties to the trans- lator, from the obvious fact that they are cast in the mould not only of another language but of another age. It is not easy to avoid the opposite dangers either of literal exactness, which produces a stiff and pedantic version wholly unsuited to popular singing, or of substituting LATIN HYMNOLOGY. 77 paraphrase for translation. And, as to the latter, it may be questioned whether original hymns embodying the same ideas would not really possess for English congregations more of the spontaneity and verve of the originals ; to transfuse the spirit and idiom of a Latin hymn, whether of the fourth century or the twelfth, into a modern English hymn is certainly not impossible, for it has sometimes at least been achieved, notably by Cardinal Newman and Dr. Neale but is a task where failure is much more common than success. And here it may be well to put on record the righteous protest of John Wesley against the reckless and inexcusable in many cases illegal manipulations to which the makers of hymn-books, almost without excep- tion, are wont to subject the compositions, original or trans- lated, whether of living or departed authors, whom it pleases them to fancy they can adapt or improve : Many gentlemen have done my brother and me, though without naming us, the honour to reprint many of our hymns. Now they are perfectly welcome to do so, pro- vided they print them just as they are. But I desire they would not attempt to mend them, for they really are not able. None of them is able to mend either the sense or the verse. Both Dr. Neale and the late Dr. Faber, the great hymn- ologist of the day among English Catholics, and many of whose pieces have found their way into various Protestant compilations, found reason to make similar complaints, as well as other and less illustrious composers who have suffered from the same fraudulent dealing. But to return to the Latin Hymns. It would be a complete misapprehension to look on the hymnology of Western Christendom as a corrupt and 78 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. deteriorated excrescence on the silver, or post-silver, age of Latin Classicalism. It really represents a new language created by the Church. Dr. Dollinger has called atten- tion, in his First Age of the Church, to the change which passed over the Greek language when " the richness, depth, and speciality of Christian ideas constrained them [Christian writers] to form a new terminology, not so much by coining new words as by giving a new sense to old ones." The Latin tongue, which became the vehicle of theology and worship for the most powerful and ener- getic portion of the new community, underwent a yet more thorough transformation, and nowhere perhaps does this revolution show itself more conspicuously than in the contrast between classical and Christian poetry. The poetry of ancient Rome in its best estate had been a more or less skilful imitation and adaptation of Greek models ; poetry was not in any form germane to the Roman genius, and could only flourish as a delicate exotic ; its graces were artificial, and appealed exclusively to the learned and the refined. There is no clear proof, begging Lord Macaulay's pardon, that even in their national infancy the stern nurslings of the she-wolf had any ballad poetry of their own deserving the name. And a type of literature so unreal in its origin and its form was the least fitted for the exigencies of a popular religion. The leading characteristic of Latin ecclesiastical poetry, from which all its other peculiarities were ultimately derived, is the intense and essential popularity of its construction. The strength of the Gospel in those days of its early struggles and advance lay not so much in the power of intellect, or the force of logical demonstration, or the prestige of authority, LATIN HYMNOLOGY. 79 as in its appeal to man as man, to the testimonium animcs naturaliter Christiance ; in the answer it offered to the immemorial yearnings of our common humanity. It was therefore not in obedience to any external arbitrary law, but in mere fidelity to her mission and from the nature of the case, that the Christian Church gradually, and to some extent unconsciously, evolved a literature of her own, which in its passionate directness and vigour set little store by graces of diction, and was too stern in its objective sublimity to hanker after the studied prettinesses of foreign imitation. The process was necessarily a gradual one, for the Church could only utilise the materials placed ready to her hand, and infuse, as time went on, her own spirit into their somewhat effete formalities. The Quarterly Reviewer therefore is right in observing that mediaeval Latin is no uncouth patois, but a real language, with definite rules and principles of its own and " can no more be judged by Augustan standards than Westminster Abbey by the rules of Vitruvius." The first great change, not so much adopted perhaps as unconsciously evolved, was the substitution of accent for quantity, as better meeting the needs of public singing or recitation in the Church service, where, as Archbishop Trench remarks, " the classical or prosodical valuation of words would have been clearly inappreciable by the greater number of those who it was desired should take part in the worship. . . . Quantity, with its value so often fictitious and involving so many inconsistencies, could no longer be maintained as the basis of harmony. The Church natur- ally fell back on accent, which is essentially popular, appealing to the common sense of every ear, and in its 8o ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. broader features, in its simple rise and fall, appreciable by all." The next and still more important transition, to which this change led the way, was consummated by the full development of rhyme, which, however, began in mere assonance of vowels, and hardly reached its perfection before the age of Hildebert and St. Bernard. Dr. Neale distinguishes two great periods of Latin hymnology, the first chiefly marked by a decay of the old life, and ending with Gregory the Great, the second illustrating the growth of a new and better life, and beginning with Venantius Fortunatus, who, however, only survived Gregory by five years, dying in 609. To the former period belongs St. Ambrose, the reputed author of the Te Deum, and " father of Latin hymnology," to whom, by the way, not more than nine of the twenty-one hymns traditionally ascribed to him can with any confidence be assigned ; those which rhyme regularly, or display a want of metrical exactness, though rhyming is not infrequent in his undoubted poems, must be certainly rejected. The noblest of his compositions, Vent Redemptor Gentium, is too well known to need quota- tion here. To the same early period belongs Prudentius, who in his fifty-seventh year first devoted himself to the production of the ecclesiastical poetry which has conferred on him an enduring fame. And last, but not least, comes Gregory the Gceat, at its close, in whose undoubtedly authentic hymn, Primo dierum omnium, the growing tendency towards rhyme manifests itself. Venantius Fortunatus, who had been, as Archbishop Trench puts it, "a master of vers de societi^ but became afterwards Bishop of Poitiers, opens a new epoch in hymnology. His two grandest poems, Vexilla Regis prodeunt and LATIN HYMNOLOGY. 81 Pangc lingua not to be confounded with the Sacramental Pange lingua of Aquinas are both embodied in the Passion-tide offices of the Breviary, and have become familiar to English readers and worshippers in Dr. Neale's excellent translation. The second, beginning Pange lingua gloriosi lauream certaminis, from which the following characteristic stanzas are ex- tracted, is a fine specimen of the rolling trochaic tetrameter which had been once or twice incidentally used before, but which he was the first systematically to arrange or adopt : Crux fidelis, inter omnes arbor una nobilis, Nulla talem silva profert fronde, flore, germine ; Dulce lignum, dulci clavo dulce pondus sustinens. Flecte ramos arbor alta, tensa laxa viscera, Et rigor lentescat ille quern dedit nativitas, Ut superni membra Regis miti tendas stipite. Sola digna tu fuisti ferre pretium saeculi, Atque portum praeparare area mundo naufrago, Quern sacer cruor perunxit fusus Agni corpore. Between the rise of the new school in the seventh century and its culmination in the verse of Adam of St. Victor in the twelfth, we have, besides several striking hymns of unknown authorship, such masterpieces as the Vent Creator by Charlemagne, the Vent. Sancte Spiritus by King Robert of France, the Chorus Nova Hierusalem of St. Fulbert, and a hymn on the Joys of Paradise, attributed to St. Augustine, but which is really the work of St. Peter Damiani, and later on the Jesu, dulcis memoria of St. Bernard, and the exquisite hymn by his contemporary and countryman, ^Bernard of Morlaix, which has attained a wide popularity in Dr. Neale's ringing translation, G 82 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. "Jerusalem the Golden." The introduction of " Sequences," sung between the Epistle and Gospel in the Missal, of which in their earlier form of " proses " the Victima Pascliali for Easter is a notable example, is ascribed to St. Notker Balbulus ; it was left for Adam of St. Victor " the foremost among the sacred Latin poets of the middle ages," as Trench calls him to develop the rhythmical Sequence. It must suffice to mention in passing the four great hymns composed by St. Thomas Aquinas for the newly-instituted festival of Corpus Christi, the greatest of which, Lauda Sion Salvatorem, has been familiarised to modern ears by the noble music to which Mendelssohn has wedded it. About fifty years after Adam of St. Victor comes Thomas of Celano, the author of what has been regarded from his own age down to that of Gothe and Sir W. Scott who died with its murmured words on his lips as the masterpiece of ecclesiastical poetry, while it is also the solitary extant example of the triple rhyme in which it is composed ; the solemn and pathetic ^Dies Ira, too well known to require citation here. Two specimen stanzas, however, shall be cited from a hymn of Adam of St. Victor on the four Evangelists, a finer one even than his Sequence on St. Agnes, quoted in the Quarterly : Jucundare, plebs fidelis, Cujus Pater est in ccelis, Recolens Ezechielis Prophetae praeconia ; Est Joannes testis ipsi, Dicens in Apocalypsi, Vere vidi, vere scripsi Vera testimonia. Circum throna majestatis, Cum spiritibus beatis, LATIN HYMNOLOGY. 83 Quatuor diversitatis Astant animalia ; Formam primum aquilinam, Et secundum leoninam, Sed humanam et bovinam Duo gerunt alia. From the close of the thirteenth century the old founts of Christian inspiration, in poetry as in theology, and even in architecture, were beginning to run dry. " Sinai and Calvary were deserted for Parnassus and Olympus," and under the blighting influence of the Renaissance "imitation took the place of invention, pedantry of inspiration." Nor was the evil a purely negative one. It seemed good to Renaissance Popes and poetasters, like the Medicean Clement VII. and Zacharius Farrerius, to whom he com- mitted the ignoble task, to replace the splendid heritage of old Breviary hymns by a new series of pseudo-classical compositions made to order, in the style of the following Horatlan doxology : Unus est divum sacer Imperator, Triplicis formae, facie sub una, Qui polum, terras, tumidosque fluctus Temperat alti. The volume containing this collection of mongrel mon- strosities was actually published with Papal approbation and authorized for use in the Divine office, but by some happy and rather unaccountable accident the clergy declined to avail themselves of the proffered boon. The ecclesiastical authorities, however, were not so easily to be balked of their pet scheme, and if they could not get rid of the existing hymnology altogether, they determined to reform it on classical models, and the charge was finally G 2 84 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. entrusted by Urban VIII. to three" Jesuit fathers, among the most approved pedants of their day, of reducing the old hymns " ad bonum sermonem et metricas leges," and adding some new ones to the Breviary. A French eccle- siastic of the present day, the Abb^ Pimont whose work on the Hymns of the Roman Breviary, it is fair to say, was published with the express imprimatur of the late Pope has justly complained how in this revision " under the pretext of elegance or clearness the correctors have too often, alas! on the whole, merely sacrificed, for the sake of classical expressions, the primitive words which were nearly always rich in symbolism and a profound mysticism." In his Introduction the Abb6 insists at length on the very important point already referred to, that " Christianity created a new Latin language for the expression of ideas to which classical forms were inadequate." He might, further, with advantage have made some reference to the collection of hymns, decidedly superior on the whole to those of the Roman Breviary, which till within the last few years were sung in all or nearly all French churches. The ruthless scythe of that ultramontane centralising movement which culminated under the last pontificate has swept away the Paris Breviary, in common with many other local or national " uses," but it may be permitted to the Christian scholar and ritualist, as well as to those who scruple at the many fabulous legends, still left after several prunings, in the Roman lectionary touched with a gentle, hand in Lord Bute's translation to deplore its fall. Not least among its merits were the preservation in their pristine form of ancient hymns which Urban's correctors had done their LATIN HYMNOLOGY. 85 best, to use a phrase of Ruskin's, " to polish into inanity, and the wonderful beauty of some of the modern ones of comparatively recent date, which were not unworthy to stand beside them. There are few, e.g., among the shorter Latin hymns of any age to equal, still fewer to excel, the musical rhythm and sublime simplicity of the lines beginning O luce qui mortalibus Lates inaccessa, Deus, which some may recollect hearing sung at Sunday Vespers in France, and will regret to know they can have no opportunity of hearing again. But this is not the place to enter on a discussion of comparative hymnology. XI. FOURTEENTH BENEDICTINE CENTENARY. IN the year 1880 there was observed throughout the whole Benedictine Order, and especially at the famous Abbey of Monte Cassino, which was the "cradle and is still the centre of its organic life, the fourteen-hundredth anniversary of the birth of its illustrious founder, St. Bene- dict, in 480. The celebration was a natural one. Benedict may justly be styled the father of Western monasticism, which received its first impetus and its mould from his informing hand, since all later religious orders, or at least all established before the Reformation, are directly or indirectly modifications of his rule. To celebrate his centenary is in fact to keep the birthday of monachism in the Latin Church. And the institution is one to which, . apart from all theological or ethical differences of view, Protestants need not be, and of late years have not been, slow to acknowledge their indebtedness. It is not only, as Mr. Lecky has rightly pointed out, that to the monks, and especially to the Benedictines, we owe it that the dignity of labour came to be appreciated, as under Pagan forms of civilisation it never had been appreciated, in modern Europe. Nor was the rapid spread of monasticism due simply to the popular belief a belief not difficult to FOURTEENTH BENEDICTINE CENTENARY. 87 account for in a rude and barbarous age, when " conver- sion " seemed almost to imply seclusion from the world that the cloister was the sole or the shortest road to heaven. It had other and more sublunary attractions for many classes of minds. It combined the elements of aristocratic and democratic power in the princely position and prestige of the abbot, who ranked with the highest of the land, from whom indeed he was often sprung, and the vast common- wealth of monks, where peasants and emancipated serfs found a secure -refuge, and took their place side by side with the tonsured knight or noble, in the choir and chapter house or at the plough. There too was seen the corporate influence of vast wealth generally, it is fair to remember, expended with discretion and benevolence combined with the merit of individual poverty. And thus to the ambitious, the philanthropic, and in Benedictine houses especially to the studious, the cloister offered attractions hardly less inviting than to the devout. Monasteries were the nurseries not only of labour but of learning ; they were the great eleemosynary institutions of the age ; and mitred abbots made their voices heard in courts and parliaments. Of this vast and comprehensive system St. Benedict of Nursia was the founder, and from him it derived, as has been intimated already, not merely its origin, but the shape and form which, throughout all variations of detail, it has substantially preserved from his day to our own. If it be true that "the Benedictine statutes still remain a living code, written in the heart of multitudes in every province of the Christian world," that is partly due to the remarkable union in the person of their author of those opposite characteristics, active and passive, which usually 88 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. divide mankind ; he had the instincts at once of a worker and a thinker, a ruler and a recluse. And his whole nature was dominated by that fervent yet profound enthu- siasm without which no man in any age least of all in such an age as his can hope to exert a lasting influence over his fellows. Benedict was born at Nursia, in the duchy of Spoleto, in 480, of respectable parents, and, if we may credit Mabillon, gave early presage of his future sanctity by singing eucha- ristic hymns in his mother's womb. He was sent to Rome for his education, but the sensitive boy fled from the vices of the capital and took refuge in a cave near Subiaco, which is still pointed out to travellers, not far from the site of Nero's villa of Sublaqueum, and here he was wont, like St. Jerome, to subdue his animal passions by rolling his naked body among the thorns and sharp points of the rocks. At length his hiding-place was discovered, and the fame of his sanctity led a neighbouring conven-t of monks to choose him for their head, in spite of his earnest remon- strances. They soon tired, however, of the severity of his rule and attempted to poison him, but the cup miraculously broke in his hands, as the Breviary assures us, and after calmly reproving their wickedness the youthful abbot returned to his old solitude. But solitude was no longer possible for him. Little communities of monks or hermits grew up around his retreat and under his government, including some noble youths from Rome who were drawn thither by his growing reputation, one of whom, Maurus afterwards known as St. Maur, founder of the Order in France began very soon to share his gift of miracles. There was another attempt to poison him, the culprit this FOURTEENTH BENEDICTINE CENTENARY. 89 time being a priest named Florentlnus, who was envious of his fame, and then at last, about his fiftieth year, Benedict left Subiaco, never to return. He travelled to a hill over- looking the fountain head of the Liris, Monte Cassino, where an ancient temple of Apollo is said to have been still standing, to which the ignorant peasants brought their offerings. Benedict converted them, destroyed the idol- atrous temple, cut down the grove, and raised a monastery on its site ; and hera, to use Milman's words, " arose that great model republic, which gave its laws to almost the whole of Western Monasticism." But even in this final retreat he was not left undisturbed. The storm of war swept over Italy, and Totila, the Gothic monarch, came to visit him, when the saint rebuked him for his cruelties, and predicted his conquest of Rome and his death after ten years. We are told that the last days of Benedict were darkened by a vision of the destruction of his abbey by the Lombards, which happened forty years afterwards, but consoled by another vision, which also came true, of the extension of his rule throughout every part of Europe. He died March 21, 543, and was buried in the oratory of St. John the Baptist, which stood on the site of the demolished sanctuary of Apollo. The Benedictine itule is of course bound together, as its animating principle, by the threefold cord of monastic perfection poverty, chastity, and obedience ; and the three occupations into which the Benedictine day is apportioned are divine worship, study, and manual labour, the last two of which found no counterpart among the coenobites of the East. Monte Cassino was not a reproduction of the Egyptian Laura, or the model of Mount Athos. But the 90 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. comprehensive vigour and wisdom of his polity, which has made it the model for all subsequent institutions of the kind in Western Europe ; the skilful adjustment of abbatial dominion with universal suffrage of the monks, at once concentrating 'power and diffusing it ; and that prescient insight into the human heart, which has moulded some forty generations of men and women (for there are Bene- dictine nuns also) into voluntary and submissive instru- ments of his will all this does certainly show a legislative capacity in the founder which, as Sir James Stephen observes, may well appear to those who reject the theory of supernatural guidance " a phenomenon affording ample exercise for a liberal curiosity." And we may further agree with him that, great as are the services rendered by the Benedictine Order for many centuries, by their agri- cultural labours, their marvellous architectural achievements, and their priceless libraries, their greatness is most signally attested by the names of so many worthies illustrious alike for active piety, for administrative wisdom, for profound learning, for devout contemplation, and, we may add, for missionary enterprise. The names of Lanfranc and Anselm would alone suffice to show the influence produced by mediaeval Benedictines on English history and theological thought. The dying vision of St. Benedict was indeed fulfilled with a rapidity which he could scarcely have fore- seen. In Italy houses of his Order began at once to rise, increasing as time went on in spaciousness and splendour, from Calabria to the Alps, and to this day, or at least till the recent changes, scarcely a town of any size was without its Benedictine convent. His monks, as an abbot of Monte Cassino expressed it, "swarmed like bees," and began FOURTEENTH BENEDICTINE CENTENARY. 91 everywhere to plant new monasteries. Yet it is hardly in Italy that they have won their highest reputation. Before the death of Benedict, his faithful disciple Maurus had crossed the Alps, and the first French Benedictine abbey rose at Glanfeuille on the Loire near Angers. It was the first of many rich and noble foundations, famous for their learning, and still " the name of St. Maur is dear to letters." During the seventeenth century no fewer than a hundred and five writers of that Congregation shared their literary renown, and to them we owe the best editions known of the works of many of the Fathers, both Latin and Greek, as well as of some later celebrities, not to speak here of the gigantic task accomplished by Mabillon alone in his Spicilegium, his Acta Sanctorum, his Annals of the Bene- dictine Order, and other works. To English readers it may be more directly interesting to remember that with St. Augustine the rule of St. Bene- dict passed into this country, and, we might almost say, took possession of it. To quote Milman once more, " In every rich valley, by the side of every clear and deep stream, rose a Benedictine abbey, and usually the most convenient, fertile, and peaceful spot in any part of England will be found to have been the site of one of them." It may be generally assumed, till evidence appears to the contrary, that an English monastery belonged to this Order, for the Cistercian was only a stricter reform of the Benedictine rule. Far the greater number of our old abbeys, several of our cathedrals, and many parish churches were in Benedictine hands. The names of Canterbury, St. Albans, Westminster, Glastonbury, and Tewkesbury in the south, of Wearmouth, Yarrow, and Lindisfarne in the 92 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. north, will recall many others to those familiar with our ecclesiastical history or our ruined shrines. So strongly indeed were the English Benedictines rooted in the soil, that after the suppression of their houses at the Reform- ation they resolved at least to retain in the Order all their old titular dignities, in the hope of better days. And we believe that at this moment Dean Bradley has a rival in existence somewhere though it is not on record that he has ever claimed his seat in the Upper House in the shape of a mitred Abbot of Westminster. In mediaeval England, as on the Continent before the rise of the Jesuits, the education of youth was conducted chiefly in the schools attached to Benedictine monasteries. To this day indeed these schools are frequented by Roman Catholics of the upper classes, many of whom prefer their milder and more liberal discipline to that of the Jesuit teachers. But in the present stage of civilisation, religious orders, whatever their permanent merits from an ascetic or theological point of view, are hardly likely to reconquer the wider influence or reputation that once belonged to them. They still of course have their uses, but their glories must be sought rather in the past than the present. And a community which has flourished already for nearly fourteen centuries, and shows no signs of decay, may afford to repose on its laurels and dwell with a pardonable pride on the memory of a founder whose name is honoured and his will obeyed, amid all the social and moral revolutions of later ages, by a multitude of men and women throughout modern Europe and beyond it. To a thoughtful observer this abiding influence in a world so full of change will perhaps appear a greater miracle than any of those which his biographers FOURTEENTH BENEDICTINE CENTENARY. 93 have recorded. It would have amazed John Knox and his associates to know that, three centuries after "the rookeries had been pulled down, and the rooks had fled," a large Benedictine monastery and school would be erected in the heart of Presbyterian Scotland, on the banks of the Caledonian Canal ; while another, not without architectural pretensions, has arisen almost under the shadow of Here- ford Cathedral, and as the centre of a rival See, to say nothing of the more ambiguous establishment set up by " Father Ignatius " at Llanthony. It may at least be granted, by friends and foes alike, that St. Benedict has more than earned the honours of his fourteenth centenary. XII. PROPHECIES OF THE CHRISTIAN ERA. THERE has never probably been a period or a nation in the world's history that has not borne witness to that craving for a knowledge of the hidden future, which seems to be an ineradicable instinct of the human mind, whilst it is doomed by the limitation of human faculties to inevit- able disappointment. From the savage who reads in a thunderstorm or an eclipse the anger of his offended Deity, or the somewhat more systematic reasoner who argues, cometafulsit, bellum erit, to the most elaborate organization of " wizards that peep and mutter," all are dominated by a common feeling of hopeless curiosity and a common desire to gratify it. Even Saul, who had been so zealous in destroying witches, bows down in the cave at Endor. In our own day the spirit-rapping superstition counts its vota- ries by thousands among the educated classes, and has even formed in America the basis of a religious sect ; while, on the other hand, science, if the Positivist theory is to be accepted, proposes to establish by natural methods that prescience in which so many rival claimants to pre- ternatural power have competed and failed. There is, however, this distinction, broadly speaking, between the prophecies of the ancient and modern, or rather, let us say, PROPHECIES OF THE CHRISTIAN ERA. 95 the Pagan and Christian world for with Jewish prophecy we are not concerned here that the former was purely national, referring mainly to wars or approaching political revolutions, while the latter has also wider bearings, and often points to a more distant future. The nations of mediaeval Europe, without losing their separate individu- ality, felt themselves to be parts of a great religious com- monwealth, in which, moreover, the three leading nations Germany, France, and Italy were supposed to have dis- tinct and special offices to fulfil. To Italy was committed the chief priesthood, to Germany the Empire, to France the leadership of intellectual culture. We may again make a fourfold division of the subject-matter of Christian pro- phecies, which are either purely religious, or dynastic, or national, or cosmopolitan. Under the last head would come those bearing on the fortunes of the Universal Church predictions, e. g., of a great reformation, or of the reunion of separated bodies which, however, have often a secular as well as an ecclesiastical aspect, in so far as they affect the history of the principal civilised nations. And if we turn from their subject-matter to their origin, these prophecies seem sometimes to be a kind of sponta- neous product of the soil or of the temper of the age, sometimes to be deliberately framed with a view to pro- moting their own fulfilment, and sometimes to be due to the predictive glance of genius, inferring the future from the past. Prophecies with a purpose, which may be called " prospective history, as history is retrospective prophecy," are such as John of Bridlington's poem in the reign of Edward III., where a bitter satire on contemporary vices is disguised under the form of a prediction. So again a 96 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. good specimen of dynastic prophecy may be found in the old English proverb of Elizabethan days, When hempe is spun, England's done ; where the five letters of the word " hempe " stand for the five Tudor monarchs (Henry VI II., Edward VI. , Mary and Philip, Elizabeth), and the chances of invasion or revolu- tion at Elizabeth's death are indicated. Such, too, is the old catalogue of mottoes for successive Popes, ascribed to St. Malachy, who died in 1148, but first heard of in 1595, which begins with Celestine II. in 1143, and extends to nine Popes still to come. Sometimes it has had a curious felicity, as in giving Pius VI. the motto " peregrinus apos- tolicus," and Pius IX. " crux de cruce " ; while a more far-fetched interpretation may adapt "aquila rapax" to Pius VII., who was torn from his throne by the French eagles. To Leo XIII. is assigned the appropriate title of ''lumen in ccelo." These remarks are partly suggested by a short treatise on Prophecies of the Christian Era, published in 1871, by Dr. Dollinger one of those little satellites, so to speak, like the Papstfdbeln, thrown off from his larger works in the process of composition, and bearing similar evidence to the wonderful range and minute accuracy of his inform- ation. In it is given a sketch of the course of popular prediction in successive Christian ages, which is of course in some respects a measure of the course of popular feel- ing and belief. It must be remembered that the early Christians inherited from the Jews the Sibylline books, composed partly before, partly after, the time of Christ, to PROPHECIES OF THE CHRISTIAN ERA. 97 which both alike attached a high authority, and whence the Christians inferred the triumph of the Church over the Pagan Empire. For many ages indeed the chief subject of Christian prediction was the reign of Antichrist and the end of the world, which last, in the tenth century especially, was believed to be very near at hand, but as was gathered from the Apocalypse could not ensue till Antichrist, who was expected to be a Jew, had appeared, and tyran- nized for three years and a half over the afflicted Church. It was not of course till later, when Christendom was shaping itself into separate States, that there was room for national prophecies to spring up, which, so far as they are not distinctively religious, seem usually to be the expres- sion of the common hopes or fears of the people. Often they cannot be referred to any known author ; and then some mythical personage, such as Merlin, "the British Orpheus," is usually credited with them, and comes to be accepted as an historical reality. English chroniclers testify to the high repute in which Merlin was held by their frequent use of such phrases as " tune impletum est illud Merlini," or " ut impleretur Merlini prophetia." Gal- fridus, who has incorporated Merlin's prophecy into his work, is open to the reproach of having altered the legend about him by making a d). One crucial and familiar example may suffice to remind us how far this principle was appreciated in the ancient world. No visitor to Rome can forget what is perhaps its grandest and most striking monument the Colosseum. And few can visit the Colosseum without thinking of the gladiators. But it is an effort to our imagination to realise at once the hideous atrocity and the unnatural popularity of those ghastly spectacles. Not content with witnessing them in life, wealthy Romans would leave large sums by will for SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 127 gladiatorial contests to honour their memory after death. Schmidt records two cases of rich citizens who bequeathed, one all the young men in his establishment, the other all his beautiful slave girls, for these combats. From Rome the custom spread over Italy, and gladiatorial contests were introduced between the courses of a banquet, like the performance of a band, for the amusement of the guests. And this, be it remembered, not among a barbarous, but a highly civilised people, who could appreciate the poetry of Virgil and Horace, who had brought the fine arts and the tactics of military organization to a rare degree of perfection, and from whom we have inherited the science of law. Yet delicate and high-born ladies vied with each other in their frantic enjoyment of these hideous exhi- bitions of " the gladiator pale for their pleasure ", writhing in his last agonies of groans and blood. Not only would a worthless wretch like the Emperor Commodus himself descend into the arena, but " the good Titus " reserved his Jewish captives for the same horrible pastime. There is a startling passage in the Confessions of St. Augustine which shows the hold it had on the Roman imagination. He tells us how his friend Alypius, who had a horror of the circus, and had resolved never to approach it, was one day almost forced by his companions to accompany them to a gladiatorial show, and at first kept his eyes obstinately shut, but at last the shouts from 80,000 spectators so excited him that he could no longer contain himself, and, as he gazed, he became intoxicated with the sanguinary delight, in spite of himself. He shouted, he raved, he retired at last burning with a mad desire to come again. And how was this abomination finally put down ? 128 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. Christian Emperors had vainly forbidden it, and nearly a century after the conversion of Constantine the Colosseum still reeked with gladiators' blood. But on the first of January, 404, a young monk named Telemachus, at the critical moment, flung himself into the arena to separate the combatants. He was instantly hacked to pieces amid the howls of the furious spectators balked of their enter- tainment, but he had done his work ; his blood was the last that stained the sands of the amphitheatre. These examples are enough to establish the moral influ- ence of Christianity. Nor is it any reply to point to the shortcomings or sins of individual Christians. Their condemnation is just, but its very severity renders homage to the sanctity of the doctrine they are felt to have so grievously dishonoured in their lives. And the same may be said of the persecutions which stain the annals of the Christian Church. They are in direct violation of the spirit of Christianity, and recall the old Pagan confusion between the things of Caesar and the things of God, which the Founder of Christianity so emphatically con- demned. The Massacre of St. Bartholomew, the dragon- nades of Louis XIV., and the Republican noyades, all alike illustrate the saying of Christ that " those who take the sword shall perish by the sword." And the more completely the true spirit of Christianity penetrates the institutions and customs of Christian nations, the more entirely such contradictions will disappear. The worst foes of the Church have been those of her own household, who sought to serve her cause by the weapons their Master forbade them to borrow from her assailants. In many points, and especially in his exposition of the new teaching SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 129 of Christianity as to the dignity and responsibility of man which would of course bear a much fuller and more detailed treatment M. Naville has closely, though appar- ently without knowing it, followed the line taken by Dr. Dollinger in his work on the Apostolic Age. His article incidentally throws a good deal of light on a question often raised in the present day, as to the bearing of Christian belief on morality, but that is too wide a question to enter upon here. It must suffice for the present to remark that non sua poma is the proper description of many excellences which are sometimes attributed to a non-Christian or even to an anti-Christian source. The effects of Christianity are not to be looked for always or exclusively in its nominal professors, while their antecedents cannot fail more or less closely to adhere, whether they will or no, to those who have renounced it. XVI. PENAL LAWS AGAINST HERESY. ONE of the many collateral questions growing out of the controversy stirred by Mr. Gladstone some years ago about the Vatican Decrees concerns the history of perse- cution, or of penal legislation against heresy, during the Christian era. Dr. Newman has shown conclusively and indeed, as an argumentum ad hominem, it is one of the most telling points in his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk that, if " the traditions of the old Empire " in religious matters are preserved in the Encyclical and Syllabus of Pius IX. they have also been preserved in the general system of European civilisation, and in particular among ourselves. The Puritans and Scotch Presbyterians, as Mr. Buckle testifies, held these principles quite as firmly as the school of Laud, and they have survived in Blackstone, and in the theory if not the practice of English jurisprudence down to our own day. Christianity is still officially declared to be the law of the land, and within living memory the phrase had a very practical meaning. Those who are shocked at the enunciation of the principle in Papal manifestoes are shocked at witnessing " the words, ways, and works of their grandfathers." Dr. Newman gives various illustrations of the actual recognition of this system in England down to quite recent times, and a writer so little in harmony with PENAL LAWS AGAINST HERESY. 131 him as Sir Fitzjames Stephen admits that he is quite right in his facts. In some shape or other, though in very vari- ous methods and degrees, the punishment of heresy has existed in Europe for fifteen hundred years ever since, that is, the Empire became Christian. At the same time it is also true that, in some sense, the Church has always disclaimed the responsibility of persecution. Ecclesia ab- horret a sanguine is a maxim of the canon law, and in the Roman Pontifical, a work of the very highest authority, the Bishop, in delivering over a condemned heretic to the secular judge, is directed efficaciter et ex corde et omni in- stantia to intercede that he may not be punished with death or mutilation, in the following prescribed form : Domine Judex, rogamus vos cum omni affectu, quo pos- sumus, ut amore Dei, pietatis et misericordiae intuitu, et nostrorum interventu precaminum, miserrimo huic nullum mortis vel mutilationis periculum inferatis. It is often said but, as will presently appear, with very im- perfect accuracy that this only makes matters worse by adding hypocrisy to cruelty, and that the severities which the Church thus affects to deprecate were in reality her own work, and at a word from her, which was never spoken, would have disappeared. And no doubt the principle of persecution is clearly enough laid down in the Bull Unam Sanctam, which some modern Ultramontanes regard as infallible, though the late Bishop Doyle denied in his letter to Lord Liverpool that it had any force at all, inasmuch as, " so far from being received by the Church, it was violently opposed." For it is there expressly laid down that there are two swords in the power of the Church, the spiritual and material, the one to be used by the K 2 132 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. Church, the other for the Church, sed adnutum et patientiam sacerdotis. And the sword must imply the power of life and death. Indeed Boniface VIII., the author of the Bull, ruled that Bishops might surrender criminals to the secular arm, knowing that the intercession for mercy would not be attended to ; and this ruling was quite in harmony with the general opinion of the fourteenth century. Nor would it be fair to judge the sentiment of that age by the habits and circumstances of our own. Heresy was then to the full as much an outrage on the acknowledged standard of right and wrong as Atheism or blasphemy among our- selves, both of which are still punishable by English law, or Mormonism in the United States. The Lollards in England and the Albigenses on the Continent were looked on with the sort of feeling now entertained in respectable and religious society towards Mr. Bradlaugh and his allies; with this difference, that in those " ages of faith " a denial of the received belief was far more keenly resented as a crime of the deepest dye than in days when the strictest religionists feel obliged to make some allowance for the chances of involuntary error or ignorance. Innocent VIII. in 1484 went so far as to excommunicate all magistrates who delayed more than six days to carry out the capital sentence of the Inquisitors, who nevertheless were still obliged to use the form of intercession prescribed in the Pontifical. But it would be a great mistake to suppose that the forcible suppression of heresy had been from the first a recognised principle in the Catholic Church, or that the practice was suffered to take root without protest from the most orthodox and influential quarters. The language of the Roman Pontifical represents a genuine tradition, PENAL LAWS AGAINST HERESY. 133 though it had for centuries fallen into desuetude. A glance at the original introduction of capital punishment for heresy will serve to illustrate this. Sir Fitzjames Stephen asserts that penal laws against heretics followed close on the conversion of the Empire, and to a certain extent this is true. But so far as the secular power went beyond giving civil effect to the spiritual sentences of Councils, in the deposition of Bishops and the like, its action was for some time of a very uncer- tain and spasmodic kind, and was exerted, to say the least, quite as much in the interests of heresy as of Catholicism. The almost lifelong persecution of Athanasius at the hands of Arianizing Emperors is a case in point. The first ex- ample of the execution of heretics is in every way so note- worthy that it may be worth while to dwell for a moment upon the circumstances. Two chief pleas are commonly put forward by those who shrink alike from defending per- secution in the abstract and from condemning the conduct of ecclesiastical authority in former ages ; it is urged that either the civil power was alone responsible for the pro- cedure, or that as is sometimes alleged in excuse of Elizabeth's wholesale torturing and hanging of Roman Catholics heresy was merely the cloak or the accompani- ment of treason or some other heinous crime. The doc- trines of Wicliffe and Huss, for instance, were notoriously dangerous to the State, and Dr. Maitland has shown that a similar excuse may be pleaded for the Albigensian crusade. Now both these explanations may be alleged, the former with unquestionable justice, in the case of the Priscillianists, who were the first to suffer death for hetero- doxy. The facts are briefly these : In 380 the Synod of 134 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. Saragossa condemned and excommunicated Priscillian and his adherents, who taught a kind of Gnosticism, and the Bishops Idacius and Ithacius procured an Imperial rescript for 'their banishment from Spain, which however they contrived, by bribing the Court officials, to get rescinded. Upon this Ithacius betook himself to the Emperor Maxi- mus, who had just usurped the supreme power, and established himself at Treves, and Priscillian was sum- moned to answer before a new Synod at Bordeaux. He came, but forestalled his sentence by an appeal to the Emperor, and this appeal to the secular power contrary to all ecclesiastical precedent in questions of faith or internal discipline was allowed by Ithacius, who himself became his accuser before the Imperial tribunal. But here St. Martin of Tours, one of the saintliest and most influ- ential men of his age, appeared upon the scene, protesting first indeed against the gross and unprecedented breach of ecclesiastical discipline, but also vehemently deprecating the infliction of civil punishment on the heretics. He at length obtained a promise from Maximus to spare their lives ; but as soon as he had left Treves the persecuting Bishops renewed their importunities, and the Emperor had Priscillian and several of his adherents beheaded. But it is to be observed that he took pains to explain, in writing to Pope Siricius on the subject, that these " Manichaeans " were not put to death simply for heresy, but for the practice and encouragement of the most hideous impuri- ties, of which they had been convicted perhaps under torture on their own confession. The explanation was not deemed satisfactory, for a solemn protest against the whole proceedings was entered by Siricius, St. Ambrose, PENAL LAWS AGAINST HERESY. 135 and two Italian Councils. Ithacius, a man of luxurious habits and insolent temper, was deposed and excom- municated, and when St. Ambrose afterwards came to Treves, he refused to hold communion with Maximus. Martin himself, on his return to Treves in order to inter- cede with the Emperor for some political offenders, would not hold communion with the persecuting Bishops, and only yielded this point at last, as the condition of inducing him to recall the military officers whom he had sent into Spain with a commission to put all heretics to death a sufficiently alarming measure, as a pale face and peculiar dress were the tests of heresy adopted by the soldiers. To Martin also Maximus had represented the executions as inflicted for crimes within the cognisance of the civil courts. Fifty years later Leo the Great refers in an apologetic tone to this earliest sanguinary persecution, still however on the assumption that the doctrines of the Priscillianists were as utterly subversive of morality as had been alleged ; and it is worth noting that they were com- monly reported to be a Manichaean sect. For the Mani- chaeans " had a singular power of exciting animosity," as Sir Fitzjames Stephen justly observes, though he omits to give the reason, which is however pretty clearly indicated in one of his extracts from the Code of Justinian, where they are described as men " qui ad imam scelerum nequi- tiam pervenerint." We may infer from St. Augustine's Confessions that the charges against them were not altogether without foundation. It was towards the end of the fourteenth century, in the period intervening between the persecuting enactments of Boniface VIII. and Innocent VIII. referred to just now 136 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. that a regular system of penal legislation against heresy began in England, with the Act of 5 Richard II. for the arrest of heretical preachers, which was followed up in 1400 by the famous statute of 2 Henry IV. de h&retico somburendo, confirmed by 2 Henry V. in 1414, which authorized justices of the peace to inquire into heresies and commit heretics. These Acts "remained in full force up to the time of the Reformation. Sir Fitzjames Stephen, after stating that they were repealed by Edward VI., and, after a short revival during the reign of Mary, 1 were again finally repealed by Elizabeth, adds that the burning of two Arians under James I. was therefore illegal ; and he has since explained that the same remark applies to the burnings for heresy which unquestionably took place in the reigns of Edward VI. and Elizabeth also one being the famous case of Joan Bocher, in which Cranmer played so discreditable a part although these executions are not generally supposed to have been illegal. Serjeant Stephen indeed expressly affirms that the writ de hceretico combu- rendo was still in force in James I.'s reign, and Mr. Lecky fixes its repeal in 1677. To which it must be added that witches were burnt much later than that ; in England the last execution took place in 1712, in Scotland ten or fifteen years afterwards. And witchcraft was closely akin to heresy, for whether or not the elaborate daemonology of 1 The Marian persecution, cruel and impolitic as it was, demon- strably emanated from the Government, not the Church ; it was neither inspired nor encouraged, but so far as their power went moderated by the ecclesiastical authorities. Something will be said on this point in the essay on Gardiner. No doubt Mary's personal, and very intelligible, dislike of Cranmer and his associates had a good deal to do with it. PENAL LAWS AGAINST HERESY. 137 the middle ages, with its evil hierarchy of incubi and succubi, was accepted entire witches were always punished for the crime of a compact with the devil. But the Act of Charles II. abolishing capital punishment for heresy leaves untouched the power of the Ecclesiastical Courts to inflict, not only spiritual censures, but other punishments, " not extending to death," for " atheism, blasphemy, heresy, or schism, and other damnable doctrines and opinions." And this power they still retain, though it has of course long since become a dead letter except as applied to clerical delinquents. But to the end of Charles I.'s reign it was a very serious reality, being in fact a kind of modified Inquisition. There are also certain provisions of the common and statute law against heresy, blasphemy, and Atheism still in force, to which Dr. Newman refers, in the passage on the Encyclical in his Letter, as having been acted upon within his own memory and giving a tone to society and to the publications representing public opinion. There is a curious coincidence in the view taken by two writers of such widely opposite opinions as Dr. Newman and Sir Fitzjames Stephen, not only of the facts but of the moral deducible from them. The latter sets out by disclaiming any abstract theory about persecution, and considers it perfectly natural that sincere believers in Christianity should desire to make the confession of anti- Christian opinions penal, and only proper that sincere dis- believers should either remain silent or be ready to take the consequences of avowing their dissent. But he holds it to be impossible, in view of "several broad, patent, notorious facts" of the present day, to carry out with any consistency or success the system of repression still existing in the 138 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. theory of the law, and thinks therefore that it had better be frankly and formally abandoned. And he concludes by sketching out a short Act for the purpose. Dr. Newman avows himself in the abstract "an admirer of the principles now superseded" meaning apparently such limited enforce- ment of respect for orthodoxy as was till lately a recog- nised principle of the English law courts and of public opinion. But he admits it to be impossible to maintain such a system in the present intellectual condition of the world. No Government could be formed on the principle of religious unanimity, and "as a necessary consequence the whole theory of Toryism, hitherto acted upon, came to pieces and went the way of all flesh." And he only hopes that in centuries to come some way may be found of uniting the freedom of the new system of society with the authority of the old without any base compromise. There can hardly be two opinions among thinking men as to the practical conclusion arrived at on independent grounds by these two diverse authorities. No reasonable man, for instance, could desire the "unequal justice" of prosecutions for coarse and vulgar blasphemy, as such, while the subtler, but for that reason far more effective, ridicule of refined and educated sceptics must inevitably go unpunished ; but of course a further question is involved, when the religious sentiment of the great body of citizens is outraged, and blasphemy becomes a public nuisance, as was alleged, e.g., in the recent prosecution of the Freethinker. The altered condition of things may be frankly accepted even by those who regret the change, and it need not in any case involve, an unqualified condemnation of those who upheld a policy which may naturally have been thought tolerable or PENAL LAWS AGAINST HERESY. 139 expedient under very different circumstances. There will probably be many, even among the sincerest believers in a dogmatic creed, ready heartily to welcome the change, in view of the atrocities, the hypocrisies, and the manifold moral and intellectual evils generated by the old system, which never lost the original sin of its parentage from a profligate prelate and an . usurping Emperor. 1 Professor Murray of Maynooth, in his written evidence delivered to the Parliamentary Commissioners in 1854, after examining 'at some length the opinions of distinguished authorities, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, on religious persecu- tion, sums up with the avowal of his own judgment that " the punishment of heresy, as heresy, does not fall within the province of the civil magistrate." His concluding words may be profitably commended to the notice of theologians both of his own and other communions : I wish that all parties, Catholics and Protestants, would agree together that heretics should be coerced only by the force of argument, burned only in the fire of charity, cut off only with the sword of prayer and all good works ; that not only temporal punishments and civil disabilities, except for civil crimes, should be abandoned, but all angry revil- ings and recriminations unchristian passions under the mask of Christian zeal. . . . For my own part " I have faith in my faith," and I believe that if we tried only the weapons which the Divine Founder of Christianity has put into our hands, we would come nearer to a united decision on that great controversy which can never be decided by the arms of worldly warfare. 1 It may be as well to explain that this paper was in type before the appearance of Sir Fitzjames Stephen's article on Blasphemy and Blasphemous Libel," in the Fortnightly Review for March 1884, which, however, only confirms his previous argument. XVII. TOLERATION AND INDIFFERENTISM. IT is frequently affirmed or assumed that toleration and indifferentism are synonymous, or at least correlative, terms; or, in other words, that those whose faith is unhesitating are sure to persecute if they have the means, while toleration, if it arises from anything but weakness, is an infallible sign of real, though possibly unconscious, doubt. Mr. Lecky, for instance, is constantly harping on this theme in his History of Rationalism, and it crops up again and again, though in a somewhat different connexion, in the works of Mr. Froude. Some modern writers, who are thorough-going advocates of toleration in general, have even gone so far as to say that no " exclusive " religion, such as the Roman Catholic, ought to be tolerated, because it is bound, in common consistency, to suppress all dissent whenever it has the power. Those who speak in this way do not usually care to argue about a point which strikes them as self-evident ; or, if any argument is required, they think it enough to appeal to what they would call the broad facts of history, and observe that the ages of faith were the ages of persecution, and that toleration was the result of the Reformation. And it may be allowed that, on a mere prima facie view, the testimony of history does TOLERATION AND INDIFFERENTISM. 141 seem so far to be in their favour. Yet we shall venture to maintain, at the risk of what may look like a paradox, that the half-truth they have seized upon is not even half the truth, and that it would be less inaccurate to say, though it would be an exaggeration, that doubt is the foster- mother of persecution, and faith of tolerance. It is not true in fact that the most rigorous persecutions have been based on religious principles, any more than that they have served the cause of religion ; neither is it by any means true that those religions which are commonly regarded as the most dogmatic and exclusive have always been the most persecuting in principle or in practice. Here, however, it is necessary to draw a distinction, or rather to guard against a very common confusion of language. Of course, if to tolerate all religions means to regard them as all about equally true, to say that toleration is synonymous with indifferentism, is much the same thing as saying that a spade is a spade. But then that is not the proper meaning of the word. And yet this confusion runs through a great deal, of the popular nonsense that is talked on the subject. Thus, for instance, we saw it stated the other day that it is absurd and intolerant to deny the orthodoxy of Churches which have no episcopate ; which can only mean that it is absurd and intolerant to maintain the High Church doctrines of apostolic succession and sacramental grace, for it follows of necessity from those doctrines that Churches which have no succession are, so far at least, heterodox ; but it does not at all follow that they ought not to be tolerated, any more than that Jews are not to be tolerated, though the broadest of Broad Churchmen might hesitate to admit a Rabbi to his pulpit. Yet there 142 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. was a great deal of angry complaint not long ago about the frustration of an attempt made by some few Anglican clergymen to establish an interchange of pulpits with Dissenting preachers, and we were loudly assured that the great principle of toleration was at stake. But the real question at issue was something totally different namely, whether there are any differences worth considering between the Church of England and the Nonconformist bodies which have separated from her communion. To tolerate a religion does not mean to treat it[ as true, or even as free from the most serious errors, but simply as having a fair claim to exist and enjoy civil rights. With the improper and purely arbitrary sense often attached to the word we are not now concerned, and it may be dismissed for the present, with the obvious remark that it is simply inconceivable that all religions, or all varieties compre- hended under the common designation of Christianity, should be equally true, though it is of course conceivable that they all might be equally false. Taking toleration then in its proper sense, is there any ground either of abstract reasoning or historical evidence for alleging that it is incompatible with genuine religious belief? None whatever. There are a hundred reasons why men may persecute besides the conviction that all heretics will be damned for that, to put it plainly, is the principle assumed in the argument we are dealing with just as there are a hundred reasons, besides mere want of power, why they may tolerate religions which they firmly believe to be false. Toleration may spring from a sense of superiority so strong that it despises all dissidents, and thus Mahometans are sometimes said to be tolerant from TOLERATION AND INDIFFERENTISM. 143 their scorn of " infidel dogs." But this is hardly a case in point, for Mahometans have little opportunity of persecut- ing in the present day, and intolerance is certainly a principle of their creed, which was originally propagated, as Christianity never was, by the sword, and that by the express directions of its founder. Still it remains true that a profound conviction of their own faith would naturally incline believers to trust to its inherent strength, and that the bitterest religious persecutors have for the most part been men whose sincerity was questionable. There fe something in persecution analogous to the hard and con- fident professions by which waverers sometimes endeavour to disguise from themselves and others an uneasy suspicion that they may be wrong. To confine ourselves here to the case of Christians, it is surely no proof of latent scepticism to believe that all forcible methods of propa- gating truth are directly condemned by the letter or spirit of the Gospel. This was unquestionably the belief of the great body of the early Fathers, who yet never hesitated to sacrifice their own lives for their faith, as was conspicuously illustrated in the dispute between St. Martin and certain Spanish bishops about the Priscillianists at the end of the fourth century. St. Augustine may indeed be cited on the other side ; but as he was one of the most voluminous of writers, and almost always wrote pro re natd to meet some immediate call, he is by no means always consistent with himself, and the general tenor of his writings points the other way. It was not till the middle ages that perse- cution became a recognised system, and that, as we shall see presently, on grounds more secular than religious. Some, again, advocate toleration neither from religious 144 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. principle nor religious indifference, but on what may be called in this country the traditional Whig theory, that an opposite system serves to concentrate and sharpen the religious element in society, which it is the wisdom of statesmen to keep as much as possible in abeyance. This is one reason why so many Englishmen heartily disliked Prince Bismark's ecclesiastical policy in the Kulturkampf, though there were of course many also who sincerely condemned it as unjust. It is obvious again, that no persecution is likely to alter the inner belief of its victims, except by intensifying it, though it may sometimes be possible, by a sufficiently thorough process, to stamp out a weak or nascent sect altogether. And an earnest believer would feel the religious force of this objection the most keenly, while it would not affect the argument from political expediency. He would also be likely to remember that even a persecution which is successful for the moment is pretty sure in the long run to injure any cause with whose religious interests it is supposed to be identified. Thus, to take an obvious example, English Roman Catholics are suffering to this day for the disastrous policy of the last few years of Catholic ascendency in England under Mary and Philip. But, in fact, all the chief persecutions recorded in history have sprung much more from social and political than from religious motives. This will at once be admitted as to the persecution of Christians during the first three centuries of our era, which was carried on under some of the best as well as some of the worst of the Roman Emperors, and had from their point of view a good deal to say for itself. It was only to show his contempt for the religion he had abandoned that Julian TOLERATION AND INDIFFERENTISM. 145 the Apostate did not choose to dignify it by a revival of their ineffectual severities, and, had he lived longer, it is more than probable that he would have changed his mind. What is not so generally understood is, that the same principle lay at the root of the mediaeval treatment of heresy. No doubt a theological theory was framed to justify it, which eventually found its way into the canon law, but the theory grew out of the practical necessity, real or supposed, not vice versa. Thus, to take a critical example, the extermination of the Albigenses was con- sidered, and there were plausible grounds for considering it, essential for the preservation of Christian society, and that not simply on account of their immoralities, but of the social and political principles of the sect, which was moulded on a radically different ethical standard. It was regarded by contemporary public opinion much as we should regard a community of Thugs, or, to take a modern parallel, as the Salt Lake settlement is coming to be regarded in the United States. And the same idea was acted upon in cases to which its application is less obvious. It was thought dangerous to admit any new religion into a State organized on the basis of religious uniformity. Now there are obvious advantages in religious uniformity from a purely political point of view witness " the religious difficulty," in educational and other matters, which is so perplexing to modern statesmen and it may even be argued that it is necessary at a certain stage of political development. In the youth of States, when they are maturing their system of law and imbibing that religious spirit which lies at the basis of all law, and again in their weakness, so long as they cannot stand without the L 146 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. support of an ecclesiastical organization and the sanction of definite religious ideas, this uniformity may be said to be necessary to them. Some States again are more fragile than others, and more sensitive to religious dissent. This at all events is the historical explanation of mediaeval intolerance, but it came inevitably in course of time to be justified by simpler and less tenable arguments, and then to be continued when it had already become an anachronism. It is always a temptation to men to gener- alise from their immediate experience, and to imagine that what is right or expedient or excusable in a given case holds good as a universal law. Thus the Southern States of the American Union held a theory of slavery, and the Northern States held a theory of abolition, equally abso- lute and equally unreasonable. Mediaeval, and indeed Catholic persecution generally, was in reality, like that carried on by the Roman Empire against the Christians, more political than theological, and defensive rather than aggressive, the great exception to this rule being found in the cruel and senseless religious policy of Louis XIV. But the practice, which had been formulated into a system by theologians and canonists, survived when its original grounds had passed away, and we look with natural horror at the most glaring instance of it in the Spanish Inquisi- tion, which may properly be regarded in the light of a gigantic anachronism ; partly explicable, however, by the peculiar circumstances of early Spanish history, which had identified Catholic with national sentiment, much as in the sixteenth century Protestantism became identified with national sentiment in England. It was to the last a political rather than an ecclesiastical institution, and dealt TOLERATION AND INDIFFERENTISM. 147 with sundry offences of a wholly secular kind, such as selling horses across the Pyrenees. After making all deduc- tions for current exaggerations and Llorente's figures are successfully demolished by Hefele in his Life of Ximenes it was bad enough in all conscience, but it is worth observ- ing that it does not seem to have done such fatal injury to literature as is often represented, and as we might a priori have expected. From 1500 to 1670 Spanish literature was at its zenith, and Spanish theologians took the lead at the Council of Trent. Cervantes died in the same year as Shakspeare, Lopez and Calderon much later. . Mariana, who has been called " the only Jesuit that ever saw and spoke the truth in Church and State," and who was per- haps the ablest writer that powerful Order ever produced, lived and wrote and published in Spain under the Inquisi- tion. Historical science, as distinct from the history of their own country, and physical science, have never flour- ished among the Spaniards, but that seems to be due rather to their national character than to the Inquisition, for national history and theology are more provocative of censorship, and Spain has done no more for science since the tribunal was abolished than before. But this by the way. It is not of course meant as an apology for the Spanish Inquisition, but merely as noting some points, apt to be overlooked, which may contribute to a more accurate appreciation of its historical position. Shocking as were the cruelties perpetrated, it still represented, like the Albi- gensian crusade and other mediaeval severities, though under altered circumstances and with far less excuse, the political and defensive rather than the aggressive and theological principle of intolerance. L 2 148 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. We have seen that the principal persecutions, Christian as well as Pagan, were justified, or capable of being plausibly justified, on other than doctrinal grounds, accord- ing to the circumstances of the case. But the practice gradually generated a theory, which came in time to be authoritatively sanctioned. Not to go further back, Leo X. condemned Luther's statement that to burn heretics is contra caritatem Spiritiis ; Benedict XIV., the most tolerant of Popes, is hardly less explicit in a Brief of 1748, and Pius VI. in a Brief of 1791. At the same time it is true, and could easily be shown by copious references to their writings, that the speculative and purely theological prin- ciple of intolerance is far more universally and emphatically taught by the early Protestant divines than had ever been the case previously. All the leading Reformers of the sixteenth century, without a single exception, are most emphatic on this point, and they insist on it strictly as a religious duty, and for aggressive quite as much as for defensive purposes. Nor did they shrink, when they had the power, from translating their theory into practice. This arose partly no doubt from the Calvinist doctrine, 'which has always shown an affinity with persecution, partly from a literal application of Old Testament precedents, partly and in great measure from the belief by no means extinct yet that the Pope is Anti-Christ, and his adherents not heretics simply, but idolaters. Of the fact at all events there can be no shadow of doubt. Cranmer was zealous in burning Anabaptists ; and Calvin won the warm approval of all the Protestant leaders in Germany when he sent Servetus to the stake. The gentle Osiander wished both Papists and Anabaptists to be suppressed. Luther, in spite TOLERATION AND INDIFFERENTISM. 149 of the thesis condemned by Leo X., proclaimed the duty of the State to put down "abominations," and he expressly reckoned among them a denial of his dogma of justification by faith ; no Government could tolerate heresy without being responsible for the souls it destroyed, and the Mass must be suppressed as the worst kind of idolatry. Even Melancthon insisted that new opinions should be punished with death, and highly applauded the burning of Servetus as "a pious and memorable example for posterity." Bucer and Zwinglius maintained the same view, and Bullinger boasted that "by the grace of God we have always punished heresy with fire." Beza wrote an elaborate treatise in defence of the same thesis. John Knox, as is well known, called toleration "opening the floodgates of heresy," and objected to the Queen being allowed to have " the idol of the Mass " in her private chapel. Nor can it be fairly said that the Reformers merely inherited these views from their Popish ancestors. For we have seen already that the latter had usually based their persecutions on grounds of ecclesiastical or civil policy, while the Protestant author- ities, almost without exception, laid down the "principle" that religious error, as such, deserved the severest punish- ment. In the next century the same abstract principle of intolerance is laid down by two writers so widely differing from the early Reformers and from each other as Arch- bishop Laud and Milton. But it must suffice to have called attention to this important fact ; there is no need to pursue the subject further here. One other point requires to be noticed in conclusion. Whatever may be pleaded in defence or in excuse of intolerance, under given circumstances, on grounds independent of religious doctrine, i 5 o ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. can hardly apply to the infliction of civil disabilities on the adherents of any particular religion, which do not preserve uniformity but supremacy, and are shown by experience to be a great political evil. It is easier, for instance, to justify the expulsion of the Moors from Spain, or the attempted suppression of Christianity in the Roman Empire, than the humiliating and unprofitable restrictions imposed on Roman Catholics in England before 1829, and on Protestants in Austria before 1859. To sum up what has been said ; so far from intolerance being a religious duty, as all the Reformers and several Popes have taught, the principle of toleration comes to us commended by all the best as well as the earliest traditions of the Christian Church. It is a principle, however, which has frequently been held liable to exception from ethical, social, and political considerations, on which it is enough to observe here that the necessity for making an exception requires at all events to be in each case distinctly proved. XVIII. "BLACK AND BLOODY GARDINER." IF there is any truth in the proverb, " Throw plenty of mud, and some will stick," it no doubt applies especially to cases where the odium theologicum comes in to clench the charge. There are no lies that die so hard as lies that have a controversial importance. The whole history of " the B. Reformation," from whatever side it is told, is a conspicuous illustration of this ; but it is only with the English Reformation, and with one distinguished personage whose name is mixed up in the contest, that we are imme- diately concerned here. Everybody of course is familiar with the name of " Bonner, whom all generations shall call bloody," or, as Foxe, with characteristic coarseness, meant for humour, delights to call him, " that bloody bitesheep." But it was something new to find the " fixed epithet " which Fuller and Foxe have succeeded in attach- ing to Bonner, like Homer's " rosy-fingered morn," quietly extended, with hardly a word of explanation or evidence in a speech of Sir William Harcourt's ten years ago on the Public Worship Bill to "the black and bloody Gardiner." There may be some prim*, facie ground though it is really nothing more for speaking of " the bloody Bonner" ; but there is not even any plausible pretext for 152 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. affixing such an epithet to Gardiner. That he has been denounced by historians like Hume, and in our days by Mr. Froude, as a persecutor is true enough ; with what amount of reason will appear presently. But to justify such a description as " black and bloody," something more is required than to show that a high official took the part required by his office in the legal punishment of heretics, in an age when the very notion of toleration was scouted on all sides alike, certainly not least by the Protestant leaders. That there are persecutors of the sixteenth century fairly open to the charge of cruelty is true ; no impartial student of history can doubt that neither Gardiner nor even Bonner is among them. And it is only fair to remember that Gardiner, unlike some of his contemporaries, did not seek to impose upon others a faith to which he was himself indifferent, or for which he had not, during the six years of Protestant ascendency under Edward, been content to suffer with patience and dignity. His position was rather a peculiar one, and Mr. Froude, who has a keen eye for theological distinctions, is not altogether wrong in calling him the "inventor of Angli- canism." He was firmly attached to those Catholic doctrines which continued to form part of the established religion to the close of Henry's reign, both before and after the breach with Rome, and he suffered imprisonment throughout the reign of his successor rather than abandon them. But while he consistently adhered from first to last to the whole cycle of beliefs which it is the modern fashion to stigmatize under the name of " sacerdotalism " and that may perhaps help to explain Sir W. Harcourt's and Mr. Froude's peculiar bitterness against him he "BLACK AND BLOODY GARDINER." 153 cannot without a great abuse of terms be called a Romanizer or Romanist, hardly even, strictly speaking, a Roman Catholic. The Papal Supremacy he seems to have regarded as a matter of indifference in itself, though, after six years' experience of Edward's Protestant head- ship, he may naturally have thought the Royal Supremacy a worse than questionable substitute. 1 But this was seldom or never the critical question in the Marian perse- cutions. Of the three hundred or so of victims the precise number appears to be 277 put to death for heresy during her reign, scarcely any suffered for rejecting the Pope's supremacy. Their trial almost always turned on the denial of doctrines about which unlike Cranmer, who burnt Zwinglians, while he shared their opinions neither Bonner nor Gardiner had ever wavered, most often on the Real Presence. There is no evidence whatever that either of these prelates was harsh or bloodthirsty in enforcing the law on that matter, and there is much evidence to the contrary ; and this is especially true of Gardiner. Let us first take the testimony of an impartial historian of the last generation, whose sympathies are strongly Protestant, and who had not the means which now exist of correcting popular misconceptions of history. To the common assumption, repeated by Sir W. Harcourt on which a word shall be said presently that Gardiner had a 1 He had written in the reign of Henry VIII. in defence of the Royal Supremacy, in his book De Vera Obedientia, to which Bonner con- tributed a preface. But in a sermon at St. Paul's Cross, preached the Sunday after the public reconciliation of the realm by Cardinal Pole, he made a general retractation of the errors he had fallen into under Henry VIII. He preached before Edward VI. against the Papa Supremacy, but in defence of the Real Presence and Sacrifice of the Mass, for which he was sent to prison. 154 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. hand in the " Six Bloody Articles," or was their main author, Sir James Mackintosh does not even allude. He does indeed assert that Gardiner was " at least in the beginning" a chief author of the Marian persecution, but only on the wholly inadequate ground that his great abilities, commanding character, and high station do not allow us to doubt it; but he adds that the Chancellor probably did not intend the persecution to extend beyond the Protestant ringleaders, and that, when disappointed by their resistance, he " withdrew from a share in vain blood- shed." That Gardiner did his best to confine the execu- tions for heresy within these limits is perfectly true, and we may gather even from Foxe's one-sided narrative a similar inference as to Bonner. If there was to be per- secution at all and that neither of them could have prevented, had he desired it this was obviously the wisest as well as the most merciful policy. Sir James Mackintosh goes on to say what has since been proved in detail by Dr. Maitland that many of the prelates are recorded by Protestant writers to have exercised an effectual and perhaps hazardous humanity, and that their violent language was often a cloak for more effectually screening the accused. He observes that of fourteen dioceses they altogether prevented bloodshed in nine, and reduced it within limits in the remaining five ; "justice to Gardiner requires it to be mentioned that his diocese was of the bloodless class." And although he quotes with approval Fuller's libellous description of Bonner Dr. Maitland had not then exposed its absurdity he feels bound to point out that Fuller's charge against the Bishop of London of burning about one-half the martyrs .in the kingdom really "BLACK AND BLOODY GARDINER." 155 proves nothing, inasmuch as they were sent to the capital from all parts of England for the purpose. We may add that many of Foxe's most ill-natured stories, when they come to be sifted, prove just as little, even assuming their accuracy to be beyond dispute, and that is not often the case. Thus, for instance, the well-known story illustrated by a large woodcut in the old editions of Foxe's Martyr- ology of Bonner's holding the hand of Thomas Tomkins, the weaver, over a lighted taper " to try his constancy," after exhausting all his powers of persuasion to induce him to recant, simply proves, if true, his persistent desire to save the prisoner from a punishment which it was not within his discretion to remit. As Maitland justly remarks, " Whether it was wisely done, people may dispute ; but that it was kindly meant no person of common sense can doubt." And it is worth noting that in all similar tales about Bonner's cruelty, he is never alleged to have done these things in order to extort confession of guilt or names of accomplices by torture, but always with a view of in- ducing convicted heretics to adopt the only available means of saving themselves from further punishment. And he often, on Foxe's own showing, kept them in confinement for weeks or months, notwithstanding their refusal to listen to his persuasions, in the hope of their eventual submission. This hardly corresponds with the language of Foxe's elegant couplet : This cannibal, in three years' space, three hundred martyrs slew, They were his food ; he loved so blood ; he spared none he knew. But it would be mere waste of time to follow Foxe through the details of his nauseous indictment ; Maitland's Essays 156 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. may be consulted for a minute exposure of his wholesale mendacity. If we turn back from Mackintosh to Hume, we shall find him taking the ordinary Protestant view of Gardiner's character, and implicitly crediting him with the Act of the Six Articles, but without alleging any evidence whatever for this charge, or for saddling him with the graver responsibility of the Marian persecution, while he men- tions one fact which looks entirely the other way. After Mary's accession, Peter Martyr, anticipating trouble, was anxious to leave the country, but some zealous Catholics moved for his commitment to prison. Gardiner not only opposed this, urging that he had come over by invitation of the Government, but supplied him with the means for his journey home. Mr. Froude, as might be expected, is both more explicit and much more bitter than Hume. His way of dealing with the case is highly characteristic. He tells us in his third volume that the cruel nature of the Act of Six Articles was attributed " by sound authority " to the influence of Gardiner, but the only authority he gives, besides Foxe's which he admits not to be worth much is a phrase in a letter of Melanchthon's to Henry VIII., "Oh cursed bishops! oh wicked Winchester!" which is certainly worth no more. 1 When, however, he comes in the sixth volume to sum up Gardiner's character on his death, the indictment opens with " He passed the Six Articles Bill," as though it were one of the most 1 Dixon, who gives the letter in full {Hist. Church of England, vol. ii. pp. 159, 160), observes, with obvious justice, that the writer is evidently hitting at the King in hitting the bishops, the supposed advisers of the King. What he dared not say of the King he said of them. "BLACK AND BLOODY GARDINER." 157 notorious facts of history, instead of resting at best on mere gratuitous conjecture. His other allegations of cruelty against Gardiner are based on much the same kind of evidence. As to his high abilities and services to the State, Mr. Froude of course finds himself obliged to speak with decent respect of a man who was conspicuously among the foremost statesmen and ecclesiastics of his age. But when he calls him " vindictive, ruthless, and treacher- ous," and "the incarnate expression of the fury of the ecclesiastical faction," he simply describes his character and career by contraries ; and when he winds up with the dogmatic assertion veiled under the thin disguise of a Latin extract that after his death Gardiner "went down to hell," his authority may fairly be questioned for interpolating this new article into the Protestant creed. Lingard may perhaps be put aside as a prejudiced witness, yet his History is generally colourless enough, and he had no particular reason for admiring a prelate who, if in one sense a staunch Catholic, was very vacillating in his allegiance to Rome. He mentions Gardiner's being on one of the two Committees named for drawing up the Act of Six Articles as was also Cranmer but mentions further that, as there is extant a Bill nearly similar in Henry's own handwriting, there is good reason for believing the King himself to be its real author. Blunt states absolutely that it was so. Cranmer as well as Gardiner voted for the Bill. Lingard emphatically denies that there is any authentic document to support the charge made against Gardiner by Reformed writers of being responsible for the Marian persecution, while the whole tenor of his conduct contradicts it. It was Gardiner, 158 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. as he points out, who saved Elizabeth and Courtenay not without considerable risk to his own reputation with the Queen, from the penalties of treason to which their share in Wyatt's rebellion had exposed them ; and he further records how, when the epithet ." bloody " was first applied to him by Francis Hastings, Parsons indig- nantly replied that "any good-natured Protestant that lived in Queen Mary's time, and hath both wit to judge and indifference to speak the truth without passion, will confess that no one great man in that government was further off from blood and bloodiness, or from cruelty and revenge, than Bishop Gardiner, who was known to be a most tender-hearted and mild man in that behalf." To come down to contemporary writers, the estimate of Gardiner's character and conduct given in Dixon's History of the Church of England far the fullest and most impartial work on the English Reformation published in our own day accords entirely with that of Lingard and Maitland. The work has not as yet advanced beyond the second year of Edward VI., but the author acquits Gardiner of any but a purely official and formal share in the passing or enforcement of the Act of Six Articles, and points out, in opposition to Foxe, how his influence as well as Bonner's was habitually employed to mitigate rather than to fan the flame of persecution. The testimony of Mr. Blunt, another learned Anglican writer, in his Reformation of the Church of England, is still more explicit. After citing the savage indictment of Foxe and Fuller, he observes : " The charge against Bishop Gardiner may be soon dismissed. So long as his influence lasted " i. e. till the Queen's marriage " no person was executed on tJie ground of heresy? "BLACK AND BLOODY GARDINER." 159 During the year he lived after that time he sat on one trial of heretics only, upon a Commission over which he had to preside as Lord Chancellor, and here it fell to his duty to pronounce formal sentence of excommunication; but " no persons in his diocese were burnt for heresy until a year and a half after his death." And in the case of this solitary trial, he used his utmost endeavours to provide a way of escape for Hooper, Rogers, and the rest of the accused, as he also did his best to procure the pardon of Cranmer, whom he had every personal reason for disliking and distrusting, and who had shown him no mercy or justice in Edward's reign. Such was the man described by the infamous Poynet a favourite of Cranmer's intruded into his see under Edward, and who lived there in adultery with a butcher's wife of Nottingham in language worth putting on record, as an illustration of the traditional Protestant fable about Gardiner, the more so as it is endorsed, with some slight reserve, by the veracious Foxe, though contradicted by the testimony alike of Holbein's portrait, of the monumental effigy at Winchester, and of Gardiner's own writings, which " give abundant evidence that he was a man of solid learning." Poynet says : " This doctor hath a swart colour. He hath a hanging look, frowning brown eyes an inch within his head, a nose hooked like a buzzard's, nostrils like a horse, ever snuffing in the wind, a sparrow mouth, and great paws like the devil, talons on his feet like a gripe, two inches longer than the natural toes, and so tied to with sinews that he cannot abide to be touched, nor scarce suffer them to touch the stones." l As to this last detail of the " monstrous making 1 Poynet elsewhere calls him " the great devil and cut-throat of England, the Papists' God." 160 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. and misshaped fashion of his feet and toes," Foxe says it "hath been constantly reported" to him, but retains just enough self-respect to decline positively to commit him- self. After dismissing Gardiner, Mr. Blunt proceeds to Bonner, who, according to Cowper's familiar couplet, based on Foxe, " blithe as shepherd at a wake, Enjoyed the show, and danced about the stake," though in fact he was never present at the stake at all. It is shown at length that he also did no more than discharge his office as ecclesiastical judge, which he " had no more power or authority to refuse to exercise, as the law then stood, than a judge of assize has to refuse to try the prisoners brought before him at a gaol delivery " ; and it is further shown that in the discharge of his office he exhibited the utmost gentleness and forbearance, so much so indeed, that he was publicly reprimanded for his leniency by the Crown. Of him, as of Gardiner, the great Foxian tradition, on which writers like Strype and Burnet have implicitly relied, is not only a baseless myth, but a myth founded on a categorical contradiction of the facts. As regards the Six Articles Act, however, there is a word more to be said. Lingard naturally enough calls it " a severe and barbarous statute," and so it was, judged by any modern standard of toleration. But the Act was framed in a severe and barbarous age, and the offences against which it was in fact mainly directed were of a nature that would not now be tolerated in any civilised society. Subsequent events show that it was intended to frighten people rather than to hurt them, and was never 1 Blunt's Reformation, vol. ii. pp. 229 syg., 282 sqq., pp. 124 sq. "BLACK AND BLOODY GARDINER." 161 meant to be executed according to the letter. It caused several of the more violent partisans of the Reformation to quit the country, and made those who stayed at home more quiet and peaceable. At the outside, according to Foxe's list, which is not likely to be defective, only twenty- eight persons suffered death under the Act during the eight years it continued- in force. But the sort of " ribalds " against whom it was chiefly put in use were for the time effectually suppressed. It may sound strange to our ears to hear of persons being arraigned and punished for " reading the Bible in Paul's ", or " depraving the Sacra' ment " ; but when we find that the first charge meant collecting a multitude of people and making a tumult in the Cathedral, while the second includes such practises as maintaining boys to sing songs against the Sacrament of the Altar in public, and interrupting the solemnities of Divine service with studied mockery of what was still, be it remembered, the religious belief of the immense majority of the nation, we can hardly wonder that the Government should have thought it time to interfere. Nor is there any proof that the Bishops carried out the Act in a violent manner, but the reverse. Of all the prosecutions that took place under it, Dixon observes : " These were lay prosecu- tions, not clerical ; they were neither instigated by the clergy nor in the main conducted by them." On one occasion, for instance, when two hundred persons had been presented to Gardiner for tumultuous proceedings of this kind, he was " content that one should be bound for another," and on this easy bail they were all discharged. There is, however, as was said before, no reason to believe that Gardiner had any hand in originating the Act, and of the first four M 162 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. persons condemned to death under its provisions one was begged off by him. And his dealings with those brought before his Court as Lord Chancellor for sedition or heresy in Mary's reign were quite of a piece with this conduct, although, like Lawrence Saunders, who "gave a privy nip to Winchester," as Foxe expresses it, they often publicly and grossly insulted him to_his face. It would be easy of course, if space permitted, to go more fully into detail, but enough has now been said to show what sort of reliance can be placed on writers like Fuller and Foxe, or even on Strype and Burnet, who, like some later writers, are their servile copyists in describing the bishops of the Marian period generally as a whole forest of wild beasts raging among -a flock of defenceless sheep, and Bonner in parti- cular as an ogre whose fury no sex, quality, or age could escape. If their language about "wily Winchester," who is now held up to odium as " black and bloody Gardiner," is a trifle less grotesquely virulent, it is still not one whit more consonant with the truth of history. XIX. ICONOCLASM. THE first impression made on most readers of the tele- gram announcing the destruction of the Vendome column, in May 1871, was one of regret that the Versailles Govern- ment had not shown sufficient promptitude in mastering Paris to anticipate this act of wanton Vandalism. Many and bitter were the reproaches levelled at the Philistine brutality of Red Republicanism, and for the next four years, till in 1875 it was restored, English visitors took up their parable about the curse of mob rule, as they turned from the vacant site of what had been for sixty years one of the most conspicuous ornaments of the French capital. Nor can it be said that such reproaches were unreason- able. The love of destruction for its own sake, and especially destruction of anything that may be con- sidered a badge of superior authority, is a passion strongly developed in the manly bosoms of those who delight to call themselves " the People ; " and we may well believe that the men of Paris gazed on the downfall of the column in the Place Vendome with much the same feeling of coarse satisfaction which inspired " the men of London ", as they witnessed or helped to effect some few years before the smashing of the Hyde Park railings. Only M 2 164 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. their satisfaction would be so far more intense, as the column was not only a symbol of sovereignty, but a very beautiful and costly work of art. Most of us are not dis- posed to think very highly of the culture of the Commune, notwithstanding Mr. Bridges' favourable estimate of it as compared with the results of an Oxford education ; and the indignant censors of the iconoclastic tendencies of Republicanism might point their moral by reminding us that the Parisian democrats of to-day are but treading in the footsteps of their ancestors in the first Revolution, who destroyed the statue of Louis XIV. on the very spot afterwards selected by Napoleon I. for the monument to commemorate his victories. Nor is the analogy merely one of outward form. Neither Louis XIV. nor Napoleon was a model of exalted virtue, and history has a heavy indictment to bring against the principles and policy of their administration. But that they were two of the greatest rulers who ever swayed the destinies of France, and that they raised her to a height of material splendour unequalled at any other periods of her history, is beyond question. Their rule may not unfairly be characterized as an immoral despotism ; but Frenchmen might be expected to treat with some decent respect the memory of despots whose faults represented and flattered the national character, and who contributed so much to the realisation of its ideal of national greatness. The sans culottes of the '89 Revolu- tion, like the Commune of 1871, were otherwise minded. No sense of historic continuity or aesthetic grace could avail to stay their hand in defacing the beautiful records of a magnificent but monarchical past. They quite deserve all the hard words that are said of them. But it would be ICONCCLASM. 165 a mistake to regard iconoclasm as a mere incident of repub- lican excess. It is one of those natural instincts, partly good, partly evil, which have played an important jpart in the history of the world. We are reminded of the passion of destruction for its own sake among the uneducated masses. Perhaps Mr. Darwin would tell us that it is a relic of that earlier stage of development when we were gradually fighting our way to full humanity by the process of natural selection, and with the aid of those destructive organs which have gradu- ally disappeared since the struggle for existence ceased. At all events it is a fact. The pleasure felt by a baby in smashing a toy is very much akin to the pleasure felt by a boor in smashing a work of art. Probably in both cases it consists partly in a sort of rude sense of power, or " conscious- ness of the ego" which finds its intellectual expression in the manfiihlt sichot the German student who is breaking loose from the trammels of hereditary belief. It is the same sort of feeling that leads a savage to value himself on the number of men he has killed in battle. To make is of course a much higher test of power than to unmake, but it is also much more difficult, and children and savages naturally catch at that exercise of independent action which comes readiest to their hand. And men who have little or no education remain in many respects grown-up children all their lives. This goes far to account for the often quite purposeless mischief of a mob who are set free for the time from all restraints of custom or police. There is a story in the life of John Wesley of a lawless rabble who surrounded the house where he was staying, some- where in the North of England, and spent half the night 166 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. in carrying him about from one place to another, with occasional threats of ducking or more serious outrage, and then took him home again. Yet they had no particular spite against him, and cheered lustily when he addressed them. It was simply a stupid and brutal frolic, which the local magistrates were too orthodox or too inert to interfere with. The midnight revellers who destroyed the Hermes busts at Athens were probably of a very different class, but probably also they were drunk ; and the characteristic "insolence" of Alcibiades made him act more like an overgrown schoolboy than a man of genius and high culture. But his iconoclasm was not the mere instinct of mischief, still less the boorish pleasure in defacing what one cannot appreciate. The Hermes busts, like most popular idols, are said to have been exceedingly ugly, but they were the object of profound if not very intelligent veneration, and to deface them was to inflict one of the keenest possible insults on the national religion. It gratified the sense of power, not so much by an act of wanton destruction as because it was an outrage on public decency, which, if suffered to go unpunished, would show that the perpetrators could hold themselves superior to the laws by which the rest of their countrymen were bound. And thus it was a more refined, but not one whit a nobler, form of iconoclasm than the vulgar pleasure of a Parisian mob in pulling down Imperial statues, or of a Protestant mob at the Reformation in tossing elaborate missals and vestments into a bonfire, and dancing to the music of an ecclesiastical chant round the burning pile. It must not, however, be supposed that the iconoclastic instinct is never anything more than the aimless passion ICONOCLASM. 167 for destroying, with a consciousness more or less realised of the exercise of power in the act. In coarser natures such a sentiment is almost sure to be present, even when it does not predominate. The reformer who breaks with axes and hammers the carved work which his ancestors had reverently laboured at, is apt to be quite as much influenced by love of mischief as by hatred of idolatry ; but the latter motive has dominated some of the strongest, if not the largest, minds among those which have shaped the course of history. Iconoclasm, when it rises above mere wanton destructiveness, expresses abhorrence either for the thing destroyed or for the ideas it is supposed or intended to convey. The distinction is necessary, to be borne in mind. The column in the Place Vendome was designed to commemorate Napoleon's German victories ; but the more rational agents in the piece of Vandalism perpetrated there in May 1871 meant to signalize their hatred, not of French victory, but of Imperialism. So again, the Puritan zealots, who smashed crucifixes and images of the saints, did not, we must presume, wish to assail the sacred personages represented at all events as regards the crucifix but what they considered an objectionable method of honouring them. But iconoclasm implies feelings and tends to produce results very much beyond what the iconoclasts themselves are thinking of. This may be illustrated by two comments which have been made, from very opposite points of view, on the great iconoclastic controversy of the eighth and ninth centuries, which ended in the use of images, as distinct from pictures we need not trouble ourselves here with the point of this somewhat fanciful contrast being proscribed i68 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. in the Eastern Church, and authoritatively sanctioned in the West. The bitterness of feeling which it evoked may be judged from the opprobrious sobriquet of Copronymus, bestowed on the Greek Emperor who had made himself most notorious as a leader of the iconoclast party. Yet why should the question between images and " icons," as the Greeks called their pictures, so violently embitter those who had no disagreement in their belief about what either symbol equally represented ? It was hinted at the time, and has often been said since by Latin writers, that the doctrine of the Incarnation was at stake, and that the dislike to images of Christ was prompted by a repulsion of the subtle Greek intellect from the anthropomorphic side of Christianity. There is certainly some force in the criticism, but the Easterns as certainly had no conscious intention of disparaging the Incarnation, and the first decree against images was immediately prompted by the reproaches of the Mahometans against the idolatry of the Christian Church. On the other hand, modern writers, like Dean Stanley, have spoken, not without reason, of the Greek Church rejecting in her prohibition of images the influences of Christian art and civilisation, and have con- trasted her conduct with that of Rome in accepting the Renaissance. And it is quite true that the close of the iconoclastic controversy marks the period of the decadence of all religious and intellectual energy in the East. We need not adopt Mr. Froude's extreme, not to say extrava- gant, view that the Eastern Christians stood on an immea- surably lower level than their Mahometan assailants, but there can be no doubt that Eastern Christianity, for the last thousand years, has presented very much the appear- ICONOCLASM. 169 ance of a sterile petrifaction of its former self. Yet it would be absurd to suppose that the iconoclastic Emperors and Synods of the eighth century had any conscious intention of repudiating art, and the civilising influences which it indicates or effects. But the iconoclastic instinct, though it has its nobler side, and has not unfrequently been the vehicle of righteous indignation against falsehood and oppression, is in itself essentially narrow and debasing. It belongs to the lower, not the higher part of our nature, and inclines us directly not so much to reject the evil as to refuse to recognise what is good. The religious narrowness of iconoclasm was illustrated at the Reformation in the reckless demolition of all outward adjuncts of devotion, because some of them had been perverted to idle or superstitious uses. Its political narrowness is not the exclusive badge of any one party, though, for reasons already referred to, it has a natural affinity with the violence of democratic agitators. Napo- leon I., whose statue was demolished in Paris, displayed an almost puerile littleness in his anxiety to efface every visible memorial of the ancient monarchy of France. The statue of Louis XIV. had indeed fallen already, but his stringent orders to obliterate the fleurs de lis t wherever found, were hardly less absurd than the attempt to expunge from French literature all mention of the former state of things, as though he really thought it would be possible to make Frenchmen forget that they had any history before the 18 Brumaire. This is no doubt an extreme, but it is also a highly characteristic, instance of the genuine spirit of iconoclasm. As there can be no image worship without images, so there can be no iconoclasm without i;o ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. images to break. It is essentially a protest against what has hitherto been held in honour, and its radical vice is the resolve to break with the past, because in the past there have been errors and abuses, as though forsooth the present or the future were at all more likely to be free from them. Far truer and nobler is Mr. Ruskin's eloquent tribute to the memory of those great mediaeval church builders, whose faith he does not share : " Of them, and their life and toil upon the earth, one reward, one evidence, is left to us in those grey heaps of deep-wrought stone. They have taken with them to the grave their powers, their honours, and their errors ; but they have left us their adoration." No doubt there are some idols which deserve to be utterly abolished, but it is not often that the outward symbol even of a rejected creed or a justly dispossessed sovereignty has no historic or artistic interest which gives it a claim to live. The most ardent Christian would hardly think it a discredit to the Popes that they have done their best to preserve the relics of Pagan and Imperial Rome, although the Paganism had become in its dotage a coarse and heartless superstition, and the Empire a gigantic system of tyranny and corruption. To make a clean sweep of the past is an unhopeful augury for the future. The life of nations as of individuals is made up of their accumulated experiences, and France can as little divest herself of the traditions of the monarchy or of the Empire as England can ignore the elements of national life which the Stuart reigns or the Commonwealth have bequeathed to her. We should have more faith in the stability of some future Government in France, if she had shown less eagerness in effacing all traces of those which are passed away. XX. CHRISTIAN TEACHING ON THE RIGHT OF REBELLION. IN a Papal Encyclical, issued about five years ago, occurred a passage which was criticized at the time in some quarters as teaching that "a government, however bad, is not to be resisted, except it require from its subjects that which is rebellion against God, but that in that case God is to be obeyed rather than man." It was observed that this theory, unless very freely interpreted, " would hardly cover the ground of most Catholic rebellions." But the words in the original Latin are patient, not to say suggestive, of a different construction. The passage runs as follows : " Si tamen quandoque contingat temere et ultra modum publicam a principibus potestatem exerceri, Catholicae Ecclesiae doctrina in eos insurgere/n?/rz0 Marte non sinit, ne ordinis tranquillitas magis magisque turbetur, neve societas majus cxinde detrimentum capiat." The phrase " proprio Marte," especially when coupled with the reason added for this prohibition, seems to point to violent and seditious actions on the part of individuals, who have not the general body of the nation at their back. And as the Pope does not profess to be laying down any new doctrine of his own, but only recording " the teaching of the Catholic Church," it may be worth while to inquire what 172 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. that teaching is, as a matter of history, which is in itself a question of considerable interest. There is not indeed any formal dogma or definition either of the ancient or mediaeval Church on the subject, and the " Catholic doctrine," if there be any, must therefore be gathered from the general Christian tradition and the teaching of accredited divines. And if we go back to the Fathers, it cannot be denied that the most stringent interpretation of the Pope's language would be supported and even demanded by the almost unanimous tenor of their teach- ing on the absolute duty of submission. The very few apparent exceptions occasionally quoted only serve to prove the rule, as, e.g., when St. Gregory Nazianzen and St. Cyril inveigh against the memory of Julian the Apostate, after his death, and St. Hilary denounces the Arian Emperor Constantius as a precursor of Antichrist and the like, when he may be supposed to have already been virtually deposed for his heresy. As a rule, the early Fathers seem to have taken St. Paul's admonition to obey the powers that be in its most rigorous sense, and would admit no right of rebellion against a Nero or a Caligula, though Nero was by many of them regarded as the personal Antichrist. De Maistre stands almost alone among modern Catholic writers in maintaining this view. He declares it to be a maxim of the Catholic religion " that against our legitimate Sovereign, though he be a Nero, we have no other right than respectfully to tell him the truth, and let him cut off our heads for doing so." l That the maintenance of this principle, which was not only taught but consistently acted upon by the early 1 Correspondance Dtplom., II. 132. CHRISTIAN TEACHING ON RIGHT OF REBELLION. 173 Christians throughout the ages of persecution and where- by, as a modern writer expresses it, they constituted themselves the champions of legality in an age of turbu- lence and disorder, when the rival forces of civilisation and barbarism were engaged in an internecine strife was salutary in its results, may be readily admitted. It would have introduced fresh and disastrous complications if the Christians, when they became strong enough, had assumed the position of insurgents against the persecuting Empire. They acted on a true and generous instinct, but their theory was certainly an excessive one, and this became manifest when it was reproduced under altered circum- stances in the English Church of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, where the doctrine which has been ascribed, on very insufficient grounds, to Leo XIII. was persistently inculcated in all its fulness. We need not endorse the characteristic maledictions of Macaulay against the Church he so little loved, which "continued to be for one hundred and fifty years the servile handmaid of monarchy, the steady enemy of public liberty," and " once, and but once for a moment, and but for a moment when her own dignity and property was touched, forgot to practise the submission she had taught." But he has not misrepresented what may be called the consensus of the great Anglican divines on the duty of passive obedience. Their teaching is summed up with unmistakable emphasis and precision in the author- ised Homilies on Obedience and on Wilful Rebellion^ form- ing part of the First Book, published by Cranmer under Edward VI., in 1547, but the Homily against Rebellion was enlarged in 1573 under Elizabeth. We are there 174 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. taught that " eternal damnation is prepared for all impeni- tent rebels in hell, with Satan, the first founder of rebellion," while "heaven is the place of good obedient subjects, and hell the prison and dungeon of rebels against God and their prince." Nor does the badness of the government make any difference in the paramount obligation of obedience, for " a rebel is worse than the worst prince, and rebellion worse than the worst government of the worst prince hath hitherto been." Bad government is indeed to be accepted as a righteous punishment, not made an occasion of fresh sin. " God placeth as welt evil princes as good," and it follows that " for subjects to deserve through their sins to have an evil prince, and then to rebel against him, were double and treble evil by provoking God more to plague them." And the example of the Jews submitting to Nebuchadnezzar, and St. Paul to Nero, are cited in evidence of this view. Jeremy Taylor, in the chief Angli- can work on Moral Theology, the Ductor Dubitantium, lays down the same doctrine, declaring it to be so plainly set forth in Scripture as hardly to need the comment supplied in the teaching and practice of the Church, which is however equally unmistakable. Hooker, whose moral and philosophical teachings are much more shaped on scholastic than patristic models, though he does not always acknowledge his obligations, takes a different line, but he stands almost alone. And even he, though he lays down principles very like those of Suarez of whom something will be said presently hesitates to draw the natural con- clusion. He considers the royal power to be derived from the people, and subject to the law ; and yet when he comes to inquire whether " the body politic " may with- CHRISTIAN TEACHING ON RIGHT OF REBELLION. 175 draw the authority it has delegated, when it is misused, he only ventures to reply that " it must be presumed that supreme governors will not in such cases oppose themselves and be stiff in detaining that the use whereof is with public detriment ; but surely without their consent I see not how the body should be able by any fresh means to help itself, saving when dominion doth escheat." l There is no need to follow the course of this absolutist teaching in secular and even sceptical English writers of later date, like Barclay, Filmer, Hobbes, Bolingbroke, Hume, and others, as we are at present concerned with the theological aspect of the question, as it has in successive ages presented itself to the mind of the Church. We have seen that the great Anglican divines reproduced on this matter the stringent teaching of the Fathers, without making any allowance for the altered social and political conditions of their own day. But they certainly did not inherit that teaching by un- broken succession from the earliest ages to their own, as Taylor's language would imply, when he says that the doctrine of the Church is " without any variety, dissent, or interruption, universally agreed upon, universally practised and taught, that, let the powers set over us be what they will, we must suffer it and never right ourselves." Two distinct and in some sense opposite tendencies of mediaeval thought conspired to induce a gradual modifica- tion of the patristic doctrine of passive obedience. On the one hand, the growth of the Papal power, with its steadily ascending claim of supreme jurisdiction over all temporal governments, introduced a new element into the discus- sion. In deposing tyrannical and heretical sovereigns, 1 Eccl, Pol., VIII. ii. 10. 176 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. who, unlike the Pagan Emperors of a former day, had become by baptism her own children and subjects, the Church professed to act, and often did act, as the organ and executor of the moral sense of the Christian com- munity, and thus the idea was at once suggested, under whatever limitations and control, of the nation having rights as against its rulers. On the other hand, the rise of the scholastic philosophy marked a great upheaval of thought, struggling to emancipate itself from the fetters of a mere dead traditionalism. It has been called, and in one sense not unjustly, a rationalistic movement, for it aimed at bringing all questions within the sphere of its cognisance under the domain of reason, though it accepted as ultimate premisses and starting points of inquiry revealed as well as scientific truths assumed to be certainly and finally fixed. Archbishop Trench speaks of the Schoolmen as seeking " to inaugurate a supernatural rationalism in the Church." Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of them, was probably influenced by both religious and rational con- siderations when he argued that the duty of obedience to secular princes is only obligatory in quantum ordo justifies reqtiirit, and is therefore forfeited by an unjust or usurping ruler. It was the general teaching of the Schoolmen that the power of Kings is derived mediately, not immediately, from God, and directly from the people. And this doctrine was reasserted and developed by Bellarmine, Suarez, and other great Jesuit theologians of the Reform- ation period, mainly of course, but by no means exclu- sively, in the interests of Papal supremacy over civil governments, and in opposition to Protestant princes. The Gallican divines naturally took a different line, harmoniz- CHRISTIAN TEACHING ON RIGHT OF REBELLION. 177 ing much more closely with that of the Caroline school in England, and Bossuet quietly observes that the Schoolmen, who for some centuries after St. Thomas were nearly unanimous in maintaining the view he opposes, are mani- festly mistaken. The works both of Bellarmine and Suarez were publicly burnt by order of the Parliament of Paris. The work of Suarez which was, by the way, written in reply to one bearing the name of James I. of England distinctly subordinates the rights of the sove- reign to those of the nation, even independently of the interposition of the Pope, or the lapse of the sovereign into heresy, which ipso facto annulled his right to the throne, though in that case it was better to await a definitive sentence of deprivation from the Pope ; nor does he shrink from maintaining, as indeed Aquinas had done before him, that in extreme cases the sovereign may be put to death. But the most remarkable work on the subject is that by the Spanish Jesuit Mariana who was at once one of the ablest and the most honest and independent writers of his order De Rege et Regis Institutione, which elabor- ately vindicates the doctrine of tyrannicide, and pronounces a warm,eulogium on those who have had the courage to practise it, from Harmodius and Aristogeiton and Brutus to the young Dominican Clement, "the eternal glory of France," who killed Henry III. And it is carefully explained that a tyrant does not mean only a ruler who had originally no right to his throne, but a sovereign who by governing on selfish principles, instead of for the interests of his people, has forfeited his right to govern them. Of course this extreme remedy of assassination was only to be resorted to in extreme cases, and when all N 178 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. constitutional methods of putting down the tyrant had failed or had been rendered unavailable, but Mariana evidently supposes such cases not to be so very uncommon. The same doctrine of tyrannicide was defended by other Jesuit writers, though it had been expressly condemned by a decree of the Council of Constance, occasioned by Jean Petit's advocacy of it at Paris. This decree Mariana rejects altogether, as not being confirmed by the Pope, while Suarez, who admits its authority, explains it as only applying to a legitimate sovereign. Many Protestant writers of the Reformation period advocated the same principle, which was acted upon in the assassination of the Duke of Guise and of Cardinal Beaton. But its systematic elaboration and defence was the special work of the Jesuits. It would of course be most untrue to say that the Church of Rome is in any way committed to the doctrine of tyrannicide, though canonized Saints and Popes, like St. Pius V. and St. Charles Borromeo, as well as Protestants like Buchanan and unbelievers like Sarpi, have deliberately maintained it. But it would be equally untrue to say that the duty of passive obedience, as taught by the Caroline divines, is a " Catholic doctrine " in any intelligible sense of the word. It was an ethical principle generally asserted and acted upon by the early Christians, but never thrown into a formal or dogmatic shape ; and when questions of this kind came to be handled as matters of philosophical discussion, which was not the case in the early ages, it was at once challenged and very generally repudiated. De Maistre has already been referred to. He insists that the absolute despotism, and in fact virtual infallibility, of the civil ruler is the proper corollary of the CHRISTIAN TEACHING ON RIGHT OF REBELLION. 179 absolute infallibility of the Pope, and that both are alike essential for the preservation respectively of Church and State. 1 In practice, both Catholics and Protestants in periods of fierce religious conflict have been too apt to bend their theories into conformity with the immediate exigencies and interests of their respective causes ; but a close similarity may be traced between the abstract theories of Ultramontane and Puritan divines as to the proper method of dealing with " heretical " or " idolatrous " sovereigns. John Knox's First Blast of: the Trumpet against the monstrous Regimen of Women, issued at Geneva in Queen Mary's reign, is an example in point. But, putting aside the extreme theory of tyrannicide, which is condemned, to say the least, by the verdict of enlightened experience, the doctrine of Mariana, that nations have an ultimate right of resisting an unjust ruler, whether his original title be legitimate or not, has never been either formally or practically rejected by the Church, and most persons in our own day would probably agree with him in thinking that it is supported by " the voice of nature and the common sense of mankind." 1 " II ne peut y avoir de socie'te' humaine sans gouvernement, ni de gouvernement sans souverainetd, ni de so^^verainete sans infaillibilite' ; et ce dernier privilege est si absolument ndcessaire qu'on est force" de supposer I'infaillibilite' ineme dans les souverainete's temporelles (on elle n'est pas) sans peine de voir 1'association se dissoudre. L Eg Use ne demande rien de plus que les autres souverainete's?' 1 Du Pope, p. 147. Lamennais at the time expressed his full agreement with this view. N 2 XXI DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS. THE Prussian royal rescript which took Europe by surprise two years ago, whatever may be thought of it from a constitutional or practical point of view, did not profess to claim for the Prussian dynasty an indefeasible hereditary right to the throne. Nor do the claims it put forward go far, if at all, beyond those habitually asserted and to a large extent successfully enforced by George III. in this country less than a century ago. The doctrine of the Divine right of kings, satirized by Pope, and in our own day by Macaulay, as " the right Divine of kings to govern wrong," meant a good deal more. It is rightly called a "doctrine," for the theory of royal prerogative once maintained in this country by a powerful school both of jurists and divines was for about a century regarded and taught almost as a thirteenth article of the Apostles' Creed. It will perhaps surprise some readers, who may have been accustomed to laugh at the belief as an ex- ploded mediaeval superstition, to be told that it only originated at the close of the sixteenth or opening of the seventeenth century, and was in fact coeval in its origin and its decay with the succession of the Stuart line in England, including the reign of Queen Anne, if we choose DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS. 181 to treat the Sacheverell affair as a kind of posthumous survival or recrudescence of the principle virtually expelled with James II. No doubt, both in England and in Christendom generally, there had been in earlier days a reverent appreciation of the Divinity which doth hedge about a king. But the highest expression and representa- tion of monarchical supremacy in Europe throughout the middle ages was " the Holy Roman Empire," so called, aS Mr. Bryce points out, as being nothing less than the visible Church or Christian society organized on its secular side under a form Divinely appointed. Yet the Empire was avowedly not hereditary but elective, nor was the elected Emperor authorised by custom or public opinion to assume his supreme title till he had received coronation at Rome from the hands of the Pope. Divine right indeed, if the powers that be are ordained of God, every legitimate Government, whether monarchical or not, must in one sense possess, or it would have no right to exist at all ; and so far the phrase, at least in the mouth of a theist, is a mere innocuous truism. But what is meant by the doctrine known to history under that name is an indefeasible hereditary right to the succession by Divine ordinance. And that in this sense the doctrine was as little known in England as elsewhere before the reign of James I. is matter of history. England, like the Holy Roman Em- pire, though the fact may not be so readily acknowledged, was at first an elective monarchy. Our Saxon and Norman sovereigns did not succeed by simple right of inheritance, though a high regard was paid partly perhaps on the fortes creantur fortibus et bonis principle to the claim of lineal descent, and thus Henry IV. sought to justify his 182 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. usurpation by showing that he had a better hereditary right than Richard II., which was not the case. Still the modern rule, which we have inherited from the days of James I., that "the King never dies," was as yet unknown. There was sometimes a long interregnum, nor was it always closed by the election of the next of kin ; and the elected Sovereign, like the Roman Emperor, did not venture to assume his title till it had been sealed by the sacred unction of Coronation. That is perhaps one reason of the anxiety Queen Mary is said to have betrayed about the due consecration of the oil to be used at her corona- tion. Saxon kings were formally elected by the Witan, and the very form of Coronation, both in Saxon and Norman times, included an appeal to popular acceptance. Some of our kings, like Henry VIII. afterwards, assumed the right of bequeathing the crown by will, and the Con- queror based his claims on the will of Edward the Confessor. Several of them, including five out of the eight Henrys, reigned in defiance of the strict rule of descent. Stephen was' chosen in order to exclude a female sovereign, and John because his nephew Arthur was still a boy. Henry VIII. himself, who had the blood both of York and Lancaster in his veins, could put in an undisputed claim, but its security was again imperilled by his matrimonial eccentricities, and so little respect did he show for the hereditary principle that he had an Act of Parliament passed to enable him to bequeath the throne by will, and he actually made a will, afterwards confirmed afresh by an Act of Elizabeth's reign, excluding from the succession the very family who immediately succeeded her. Edward VI. was induced by Cranmer, without any Parliamentary DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS. 183 authority, to make a will excluding his sister Mary. Both Mary and Elizabeth reigned only by Parliamentary right, for it was impossible that both of them could be legitimate, and the highest authority in the realm had pronounced both to be illegitimate. Elizabeth went further than Henry, and got an Act of Parliament passed making it high treason to dispute her right to leave the crown by will. Yet within a few hours of her death, James I., who was doubly excluded by law from the succession, but was the heir by lineal descent, was proclaimed King amid the universal acclamations of the people. The nation had settled the matter for itself as though by instinct, and when the line of Henry VIII. had failed, fell back on the lineal representative of Henry VII. With James I. the principle of Divine right mounted the throne of England, and with James II. it was banished. It is a further question, of course, how this was brought about, and what endeavours were made after the fact to bring theory and practice into accord. But meanwhile it is important to emphasize the fact that James I., first of our English Sovereigns, did reign by virtue of Divine right, if he reigned by any right at all. He not only had no Parliamentary claim, but he was expressly excluded by the will of one Sovereign made under Parliamentary sanction, and endorsed by a second Act of Parliament passed in another reign. It is true, indeed, that on his accession Parliament hastened to acknowledge him, but in the very act of doing so it virtually admitted his right to be not Parliamentary, but Divine. The first Act passed in his reign declared " that immediately on the decease of Elizabeth, late Queen of England, the imperial Crown of 1 84 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. the realm of England, and of all the kingdoms, dominions, and rights belonging to the same, did, by inherent birthright and lawful and undoubted succession, descend and come to your Most Excellent Majesty, as being lineally, justly, and lawfully next and sole heir of the blood royal of this realm." This was almost to assert totidem verbis the principle of hereditary Divine right, hitherto unknown to English law or history, and, so far as the immediate suc- cession of the next heir to the throne on the death of his predecessor, without waiting for any formal ratification of Parliament or for coronation, is concerned, it has held good ever since. But how came it to be so universally and peacefully recognised ? No doubt the way had been prepared for it by the troubles about the succession since the death of Henry VIII. and the pressure of dangers from opposite quarters to which the country was believed to be exposed. Elizabeth, on whatever basis her rights reposed, clung tenaciously, and with the general assent of the nation, to her supremacy. And that supremacy was assailed, from points of view more or less cognate, by two very opposite parties called respectively Papists and Puritans, who were accordingly denounced as the two great enemies of the State. Both alike denied her religious authority, and not only held her to be liable to ecclesi- astical censure and excommunication in the abstract, but held also that, unless she would consent to reform the national Church on their own principles, she actually deserved or had incurred it. Moreover, the scholastic divines generally, and the Jesuits especially, had always maintained a theory of popular as opposed to Divine .night,- and. argued that a power -which the people had DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS. 185 originally given they might again in certain contingencies resume ; and the question was further complicated by the dispute about the deposing power of the Pope. Moreover the famous Jesuit, Father Parsons, had published, towards the close of Elizabeth's reign, a treatise elaborately dis- cussing the rival pretensions of five different families and twelve possible claimants, who after her death might plausibly dispute the succession. This may help to explain why, immediately upon her decease, the Earl of Northumberland wrote to inform James that the eyes of the whole nation were fixed on him, while nobody gave a thought to any of his competitors. Thus then the way had been paved for James's peaceful succession to the throne ; but some theoretical justification was also required, and this it became the business of theologians and jurists to supply. We have seen that the schoolmen, and the Jesuits after them, maintained a popular theory of the right of government. Suarez. indeed, one of the most distinguished theologians the Order has produced, wrote a work against the Divine right of Kings, in reply to James I., but dealing chiefly with the right of the Pope over heretical sovereigns. It would be a mistake, however, as Mr. Lecky justly observes, to suppose that the Jesuit divines advocated popular principles of government only on theological grounds, or as applied to Protestant countries. Mariana, e.g. perhaps the greatest and certainly the most impartial writer they can boast has discussed the whole question of tyrannicide from an entirely independent point of view, nor does he admit the distinction usually drawn between a tyrant in regimine (i. e. a lawful- King who, governs tyrannically) and a tyrant in. 186 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. titulo, i. e. a usurper ; or at least he insists that a tyrant who governs in his own selfish interests, and not in the interests of his people, however legitimate his hereditary pretensions, is no better than a usurper, and may be deposed, or if necessary killed. It is curious to notice how Hooker, who had studied the schoolmen carefully, modified their theories on this matter, though he does not go the whole length of the Divine right doctrine after- wards developed by Filmer and the Caroline divines. And it must be remembered that the Eighth Book of the Ecclesiastical Polity, in which he discusses it, was written towards the close of his own life and of Elizabeth's reign, though not published till fifty years afterwards. He begins by laying down the obviously reasonable principle that "on whom [supreme power] is bestowed even at men's discretion, they likewise do hold it by Divine right," and therefore "unto kings by human right honour by Divine right is due"; but this power is not unlimited, for "the king is major singulis, universis minor" Hooker allows then with the old Latin divines that royal power comes originally from the people, but he deserts them and favours the new theory just then coming into vogue in maintaining that, once given, it becomes hereditary, and cannot be recalled. He expressly rejects, as " strange, untrue, and unnatural conceits," the opinion that no man's birth can make him a king, or that succession, in a family once established on the throne, depends on the acceptance or election of the incoming heir ; whereas, on the contrary, " in kingdoms hereditary birth giveth right unto sovereign dominion, and the death of the predecessor putteth the successor by blood in seisin." The question then arises DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS. 187 whether the body politic may, for sufficient cause, with- draw from the dynasty or the individual sovereign the power once bestowed. Hooker thinks " it must be presumed " that, when " grave inconvenience doth grow thereby," they will be willing to resign it a presumption hardly borne out by history but denies that it can be taken from them " without their consent." This reads very like the doctrine of " non-resistance " afterwards so hotly contested, but we may perhaps infer from the context that Hooker would have allowed some modifica- tions of it in practice, and we must at all events bear in mind that the last three books of the Ecclesiastical Polity were not published in the author's lifetime, and may not have received his final touches, though there is no just ground for the doubts sometimes cast on their authenticity. This then was the state of the controversy at the accession of James I., when divines and lawyers lost no time in taking up the question. Convocation prepared a draft of canons condemning all resistance to sovereign authority in terms sufficiently sweeping, but, as they did not very clearly distinguish between kings de jure and de facto > James only snubbed them for their pains. Then the Professor of Civil Law at Cambridge, Dr. Cowell, published a dictionary which defined the royal prerogative to be above all positive enactments, and " though it be a merciful policy, and also a politic mercy " for the king to make laws only by consent of Parlia- ment, he neither is bound to ask their consent, nor bound by the laws when they are made. The House of Commons not unnaturally protested against this work, and James i88 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. discreetly suppressed it, acknowledging what however, as we have seen, was certainly not the fact that he was indebted to the law for his crown. But then again the Papal controversy came in, and one Talbot, " a Popish recusant," who had refused to repudiate the deposing power, was prosecuted by -Bacon, as Attorney-General, before the Star Chamber, and this helped on the growing tendency to assert, at least in words, an indefeasible and absolute right of the hereditary sovereign. It was strength- ened no doubt by that passionate personal devotion which the Stuarts, however we may choose to explain the fact, had an almost unique gift of evoking, and consecrated in many minds by the aureole of martyrdom which wreathed the brows of " the Blessed King Charles the First," and was for two centuries enshrined in the Anglican Prayer Book. With the Stuarts the power of touching for " the King's Evil " went out. But the great exponent of the theory of Divine right, who has therefore been the favourite butt for the bitterest ridicule of later Liberal assailants from the time of Bishop Burnet, though Locke did not disdain to answer him, was Sir Robert Filmer, a zealous royalist whose house in Kent was ten times plundered during the civil wars in the reign of Charles I. His Patriarcha, said to have been written in 1642, was not published till nearly forty years afterwards when he had long been dead, but other publica- tions of his had appeared during his lifetime, which are pro- nounced by a very competent critic to be remarkable not merely for sagacity but for shrewd common sense. The argument of the Patriarcha is briefly this. He began by denying the scholastic theory, affirmed alike by " Calvinists and Jesuits," and, we may add, by Hooker, that sovereign DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS. 189 power was originally bestowed at the will of the multitude, from which radical sophism they inferred consistently enough that the multitude might for any lawful cause of which they were themselves to be the judges with- draw or change the powers they had conferred. Filmer insisted, on the contrary, that all men were not equal by nature, but from the first Adam, and then the Patriarchs, had by Divine institution power over their children, and after the flood and subsequent dispersion of the descend- ants of Noah "we find the establishment of regal power throughout the kingdoms of the world." From this he inferred that, however this or that particular dynasty might have originated by election, usurpation, or otherwise the " natural right of a supreme father over every multitude " remained an established principle, and therefore the actual king must always enjoy a Divine right over his subjects. God may suffer him to be removed by the instrumentality of men, but their action in displacing him is not the less sinful and damnable. In the case of there being no legitimate heir to the throne, the sovereign power "es- cheated," not to the multitude, but " to the prime and independent heads of families," as a kind of natural aristocracy, and on them devolved the duty of conferring the crown afresh on whom they pleased. "And he that is so elected claims not his power as a donative from the people, but as being substituted properly by God, from whom he receives his royal charter of a universal father, though testified by the ministry of the heads of the people." The theory thus stated is not otherwise than plausible in itself ; the real difficulty lay in its application, as expounded by Caroline and Jacobite divines, into whose igo ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. treatment of the question it would take too long to enter here. But it may fairly be asked whether Filmer's prin- ciple is any less defensible than the modern popular dogma, as repeated and interpreted usque ad nauseam from a thousand platforms, that all power comes from the people. For politicians like Gambetta or Victor Hugo the Divine right of the Republic is as absolute a truth as ever was the Divine right of Kings for Strafford or Laud. Bishop Sanderson, one of the very few casuists the Church of England has produced, maintains a view not greatly differing from Filmer's in his De Obligatione Legum, where he lays down, first, " praesidendi in republica potestatem . . ab ipso Deo esse, solo et immediate", nullatenus autem a populo " ; secondly, " dominationem politicam ab initio non nisi patriae potestatis propaginem fuisse," which implies the rule of a single monarch ; and hence, finally, " in conferenda regia potestate nullos fuisse, nee quidem esse potuisse, populi partes, certo certius est." Royalty there- fore is the Divinely ordained form of government, and the sovereign or dynasty actually in power, " quocunque modo ad earn perveniatur," holds its power from God. Burke at a later day declined to discuss the abstract question of " the sovereignty of the people ", but to the practical question, whether anything can justify their resuming the sovereignty, whose seat has once been fixed, he replied as peremptorily as Hooker : " I am satisfied that no occasion would justify such a resumption, which would not equally authorise a dispensation with any other moral duty, per- haps with all of them together." But Burke wrote with all the horrors of the first French Revolution fresh before his eyes. XXII. FESTIVAL OF CHRISTMAS. CHRISTMAS has, at least in this country, a double sig- nificance ; it is both a secular and a religious festival. It is indeed rather curious that, even in its ecclesiastical character, it should hold a more prominent place in England than anywhere else. Not only in Presbyterian Scotland, which is intelligible enough, but in Catholic France, it is virtually superseded or overshadowed by the great secular anniversary of the New Year in the following week. That does not mean of course that it is not solemnly observed in church in all Roman Catholic countries, where it still retains the singular and appropriate distinction abolished strangely enough of late years among English Catholics of the Midnight Mass, on which a word shall be said presently. But still, although it holds confessedly the third place in the Christian calendar, yielding only to Easter and Pentecost, it is certainly not made so much of among any other people as with ourselves. The Yule-log, the boars'-head, the plum-pudding, the mince-pies, the waits, and the mummers, as well as the " roast beef of old England," are specialities of our Christmas, partly of Scan- dinavian origin. An ingenious reason has been suggested for the precedence which its domestic observance has 192 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. established over Easter in the fact that roast beef is more easily and widely procurable than the lamb of the Paschal feast. Another incident of its domestic observance which appears to be peculiarly Teutonic as Santa " Klaus " and the Christmas-trees of Germany may remind us was pro- bably borrowed from the old Pagan festivals which Christ- mas superseded in the early Church. The Saturnalia amorig the Romans, representing the golden age and abolishing for a while the distinction of ranks, had been associated with the custom of making presents (streruz), and as early as the second century Tertullian reproached Christians for following this ancient practice. And the Saturnalia closed with the festival of infants the Sigillaria when children were presented with little images (pscillis fictilibus), as Macrobius tells us, coinciding more or less closely with the Feast of the Holy Innocents. Then again the Roman festival of the shortest day of the winter solstice (dies invicti Solis], designed to celebrate the birthday of the new sun, was of course directly suggestive of the Christian celebration of the birthday of the True Sun of Righteousness. And hence Faustus, the Manichean, charged the Catholics of his own day with observing the Pagan solstitia. But it does not at all follow, as Neander points out, that the date of the Christmas festival was actually suggested by these older observances. On the contrary, there can be little doubt that it arose out of a very ancient tradition, for which Benedict XIV. cites vari- ous early authorities, that the Nativity really took place at this season of the year. In aftertimes the words of a hymn of Prudentius came to be literally accepted, and it was thought that at the first and each recurring Christmas, FESTIVAL OF CHRISTMAS. 193 " the cry of the Holy Child imparted to the earth a verdant spring." The words of Isaiah (i. 3) were interpreted to signify, not only the presence of the ox and ass in the stable of Bethlehem, but that the cattle knelt down year by year at the Christmas midnight. A Cornish peasant told Mr. Brand, in 1790, that he had himself on Christmas Eve seen the two oldest oxen in their stalls fall on their knees at midnight, and "make a moan like Christian creatures." In the words of the old hymn, " Cognovit bos et asinus Quod Puer erat Dominus." Several other touching traditions of this kind it sounds hard to call them superstitions formerly existed, and some still survive, both in our own country and other parts of Europe, such as are noticed by the poet in a familiar passage of Hamlet: " Some say, that ever 'gainst that season comes Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated, The bird of dawning singeth all night long : And then, they say, no spirit dares stir abroad ; The nights are wholesome ; then no planets strike, No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm, So hallow' d and so gracious is the time.'' But best of all is the time-honoured traditional usage enshrined of old in one of the capitularies of Charlemagne, and to this day nowhere more religiously observed than in England of making Christmas the special season for those varied ministries of human kindliness and beneficence, which are our response to the Divine message of " peace on earth" proclaimed in the angels' midnight song at Bethlehem. It is clear from Church history that St. Paul's warning O 194 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. against the Jewish observance of " days and months, and times and years " was never understood, as some Protest- ants have imagined, to preclude or discourage the setting apart of special seasons for religious worship and com- memoration. There is evidence indeed in the New Testa- ment of Sunday being kept as the weekly feast of the Resurrection, and the appropriation of Wednesday and Friday named stationes by a military metaphor to com- memorate the Betrayal and Death of Christ followed very soon after. The yearly anniversary of the Resurrection had already become an established and highly prized institution in the second century, as we know from the long and angry disputes as to the proper method of fixing the day. Christmas was added rather later, but certainly not later than the fourth century, and was closely con- nected with the proximate feast of the Epiphany, insti- tuted mainly to commemorate the Baptism of Christ. But whereas the Epiphany originated in the East, Christmas first came to be observed in the Western Church, and in some places, as at Antioch, its introduction into the East met with considerable opposition. The Donatists, on the other hand, " refused to communicate with the Eastern Church, where that star appeared," as St. Augustine tells us, because of its keeping the Epiphany, which they con- demned as an innovation. The Gnostics seem, from what Clement of Alexandria says, to have been particularly zealous in observing the Epiphany, to which they gave an interpretation of their own, but it is absurd to suppose that the observance was their own invention. The Catholic Church would certainly not have chosen to borrow it of them. It is not impossible however, as Neander suggests, FESTIVAL OF CHRISTMAS. 195 that the Epiphany, representing the unction of the Messiah by the Holy Spirit for His earthly work, may have origin- ated with the Jewish Christians, while Christmas, which presents Him "as the God-man, the Word made flesh, whose humanity was from the first filled with the Divine Essence," undoubtedly had a Western origin. Be that as it may, these two great festivals of the Birth and Baptism of Christ, though existing in germ from very early times, first came into general use in the fourth cen- tury, when indeed the public worship and ritual of the Church were for the first time able to develop themselves freely, as the pressure of persecution was withdrawn. St. Chrysostom speaks, in a sermon preached at Antioch, of the Epiphany as one of the ancient and principal feasts of the Asiatic Church, and the only one having reference to the appearance of the Lord among men. By 361 it had penetrated into some regions of the West at all events, for Marcellinus records how the Emperor Julian kept it that year at Vienna. But in passing westwards it acquired a new meaning, and, without dropping the reference to the Baptism of Christ, the Latin service for the festival dwells mainly on his manifestation to the Gentiles, symbolized by the visit of the Magi to Bethlehem. And thus in its Western form it was closely associated in idea, as well as in the time of its celebration, with the greater festival of the Nativity. It was also taken to commemorate the " beginning of miracles " in the Public Ministry by the conversion of water into wine at Cana of Galilee, whereby Christ " manifested forth his glory " to the Gentiles. This triple significance of the day is expressly noted in the ritual, "Tribus miraculis ornatum diem sanctum colimus; O 2 196 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. hodie stella Magos duxit ad prsesepium ; hodie vinum ex aqua factum est ad nuptias ; hodie in Jordane a Joanne Christus baptizari voluit ut salvaret nos." Nor is it unlikely that the importance attached in the Latin Church to the festival of Christmas may have been connected with the prominent place assigned in Latin theology to the doctrine of original sin, from which all men born into the world required to be cleansed ; this also accounts for the practice of infant baptism first coming into general use in the West, whence it spread to the Eastern Church. Certain it is that in the time of Pope Liberius the Christmas festival had become an established usage throughout Western Christendom. Some thirty years later St. Chrysostom preaching again at Antioch, on Christmas day, speaks of the feast having been recently introduced there, but dwells on its rapid and general reception, calling it " the mother (/xrjrpoTToAis) of all the festivals, since from it Epiphany, Easter, Ascension, and Pentecost derived their origin and meaning." In some Eastern Churches, as at Jerusalem and Alexandria, the commemoration of the Nativity was for a time united in a common festival with the celebration of the Epiphany or " Theophany " of Christ, which could of course be explained as another name for the Incarnation. And the simultaneous observance of the two festivals was further justified, according to Cosmas Indicopleustes, by a strange inference from Luke iii. 23 that the Baptism of Christ took place on the day of his Birth. One of the most ancient and characteristic distinctions of the festival in the West was the treble celebration of mass, the first taking place at midnight in memory of the time of the Nativity, which is found in the Sacramentary of Gelasius FESTIVAL OF CHRISTMAS. 197 in the fifth century. The Pope used to celebrate the first mass in the Liberian basilica, the second, at daybreak, in the church of St. Anastasia, the third in the Vatican ; and hence the custom grew up of every priest saying three masses on Christmas day. Gregory the Great speaks of these three masses, of which various explanations are given by liturgical writers ; but that of Aquinas is most com- monly adopted, that by the first at midnight is signified the Everlasting Generation of Christ from the Father, con- cealed from human gaze ; by the second at daybreak, His temporal birth of the Virgin Mary ; and by the third His spiritual nativity by grace in the hearts of the faithful. There was formerly a midnight mass at Easter also, traces of which still survive in the forms of the Latin ritual, and perhaps at some other festivals, but the Christmas celebra- tion, which has of late years been popularised in many Anglican churches, and originated the now universal cus- tom of ringing the church bells on Christmas night, has alone held its place. The custom of carol-singing on Christmas night is another very old-established and popu- lar speciality of the festival, and the wording of many of our English carols reaches far back into the middle ages. It is curious, as Milman observes, how many of the quaint traditions sometimes very touching, sometimes more strange than reverential enshrined in the Apocryphal Gospels have thus been preserved and handed down to our own day. But this transmission is also due in part to the mediseval miracle plays, some idea of which may be gained from the Play of the Nativity in Longfellow's Golden Legend ; and with the Christmas miracle plays were asso- ciated the more questionable and boisterous burlesques of 198 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. the Boy Bishop, the Abbot of Misrule, and the like, which must have ministered to merriment rather than to edifica- tion, and must too often have degenerated into such coarse profanities as Scott has depicted at St. Mary's Kenna- quhair in the Abbot. It was remarked some years ago on a Christmas sermon of Dean Stanley's at Westminster Abbey, about the coronation of William the Conqueror, which took place there on that festival, that " he seemed unaware of the day having been rendered memorable by any previous event." He might, however, have recalled one still earlier historical event of an equally secular, but wider and more pregnant significance, which had marked the recurrence of the same festival more than two centuries before the Norman Conquest On the Christmas day of 800, during High Mass at St. Peter's, Leo III. placed the Crown on the head of Charlemagne, and thus consecrated the revival or inception, as we may choose to view it, of the Holy Roman Empire. There is a sense therefore in which Christmas, while it has become from immemorial usage our great domestic festival, may be also regarded as the birthday of the Christian State, as well as of the Church. XXIII. MIRACLE PLAYS. IT has come to pass from various causes, during the last twenty or thirty years, that the Passionsspiel at Ober- Ammergau, formerly known only as a local religious so- lemnity, has risen into a centre of interest and attraction, not only for England, but for the whole Christian world. 1 And this naturally suggests some inquiry into the origin and history of those Mysteries or Miracle Plays once so common throughout Europe, but of which this decennial celebration in an obscure Tyrolese valley is now the almost solitary memento ; for we cannot reckon in the same 1 The performance of 1850 was described by the Baroness Taut- phaeus in a novel entitled Quits, which first drew attention to the subject in England. In 1860 there were several English visitors, and among them Dean Stanley and Dean Milrnan. The former recorded his experiences in an article in Macmillatfs Magazine, the latter in a note to the third edition of Latin Christianity (voL ix. p. 180), where he relates, with an enthusiasm unusual in his pages, how he had " never witnessed a performance more striking for its scenic effect," or " passed a day in more absorbed and unwearied attention." After this there was naturally a rush of visitors from England, as well as elsewhere, to the next decennial celebration in 1870, which moreover was interrupted by the outbreak of the Franco- Prussian war at the end of July, and had therefore to be continued in the August and September of 1871. My own Recollections of Ober-Ammergau in 1871 (Rivingtons), describes a visit paid in the August of that year. 200 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. category the grotesque, not to say profane, representations of sacred subjects occasionally interpolated into the dramatic programme at some Spanish theatres. The Ammergau Passion Play is not indeed itself a mediaeval institution, but it can only be rightly understood in connexion with those popular " Mysteries " and " Moralities " of the middle ages, and they again must be traced back to a more remote antiquity and to earlier forms of faith. The drama, as has been justly said, is based on a principle inherent in human nature that instinct of imitation which is not peculiar to any age or people. And hence there is evidence of its early existence among the most diverse and even the rudest nations. Not only was it in high repute at the same time in Greece and in Hindostan, but even the Chinese have from time immemorial possessed a regular theatre, and the ancient Peruvians had both tragedies and comedies. And they must in each case have invented the drama for them- selves. But there is a further point in common among all the earliest dramatic performances of which we have any record, though it is most conspicuously brought out in the case of the Greek drama, which is the best known to us. They seem, like ancient art generally, to have always had a religious origin and significance. Mythology supplied the materials alike for the Comic and the Tragic Muse, and the frequently recurring festivals of local or national deities afforded the occasion for public representations. Music and poetry, wherever they exist, are sure to be enlisted in the service of religion, and with an agricultural population like that of early Greece, Dionysos, the god of the vineyard, held necessarily a prominent place in the national worship. The hymns sung round the festal altar, MIRACLE PLAYS. 201 whether solemn or jocose, gradually developed into all the artistic splendours of the drama; the stately dithyrambic ode, with the Satyric chorus, became the basis of Greek tragedy, and the Phallic song was expanded into the comedy of Aristophanes. We know of but two historical tragedies by Greek poets, which therefore have not a mythological origin ; the Capture of Miletus by Phrynichus, and the Persians of yEschylus. And the exception proves the rule. Phrynichus was fined by the Athenians for harrowing their feelings by the representation of contem- porary misfortunes. It must be remembered too that the Eleusinian and other Mysteries of ancient Greece, to which the initiated alone were admitted, consisted, as far as any- thing can be ascertained about them, mainly of symbolical and dramatic representations. And here we touch on the connecting link between the classical and Christian drama. The early Fathers of the Church, whether with or with- out sufficient information it may be difficult to determine, invariably denounce the Greek Mysteries in the strongest terms as hotbeds of the grossest obscenity. Even St. Clement of Alexandria, with all his admiration of Greek philosophy, is no exception. And for many centuries no Christian could be present at the theatre without forfeiting his religious position and privileges, and no actor could be baptized without first renouncing his profession. But if the authorities of the Church were unsparing in their denunciation alike of the Mysteries and of the Stage, they were too wise to ignore the human instincts to which the drama appeals. They put forward Mysteries of their own as a counter-attraction to these old heathen rites, and thus the Christian drama grew up by degrees on the ruins of the 202 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. Greek theatre. During the ages of persecution there was comparatively little scope for such a process of develop- ment ; yet even then a considerable dramatic element may be traced in the earliest Christian liturgies, and the modes of celebrating the greater Church festivals. And no sooner did the Church emerge from the Catacombs than we find not only a rapid elaboration of ceremonial splendour in worship, but also direct attempts to compete with the Greek tragedians on their own ground. An early instance of this is given in the " Dying Christ " of St. Chrysostom, which was acted in church at Constantinople, partly in tableaux vivants and partly by dialogue. St. Gregory Nazianzen was another sacred dramatist. A solemn dance is still performed at Easter before the high altar of the cathedral at Seville, which is said to recall the movements of a Greek chorus. It was thus in the East that these religious plays originated, and they were only imported at a later date, probably by the Crusaders, into Western Europe. There are, however, records of convent plays in Germany as early as the time of Charlemagne, though the earliest specimen of such compositions still extant is a manuscript of twelve dramas written in Terentian Latin by Hrotsvitha, abbess of Gandersheim in the tenth century, and performed in her convent, as we are told, " to the delight and edification of the nuns." Such representations soon became popular all over Europe, and nowhere more so than in England. It may be interesting to notice more particularly the " Mysteries " performed in our own country and in Germany. Strictly speaking, it should be said, that " Miracle " or " Mystery Play " designates a repre- sentation based on the Lives of the Saints, as distinguished MIRACLE PLAYS. 203 from the " Passion Play," which represented the sufferings of Christ; but the distinction of terms is not always adhered to. Matthew Paris tells us that the story of St. Catharine was dramatized by one Geoffrey, master of a school at Dunstable, afterwards Abbot of St. Albans, and acted by his boys early in the twelfth century. But the earliest play which has come down to us is the Harrowing of Hell, com- posed in Latin two centuries later, in which the principal dramatis persona are our Lord, Satan, Adam, and Eve. The so-called " Chester Mysteries," of about a century later again, are the best known of the English Miracle Plays. They include both a tragic and comic element, and in fact these performances seem always to have had a tendency, especially in England, to degenerate into such coarse buffoonery as Longfellow has sought to reproduce in the " Gaudiolum of Monks" in the Golden Legend. This was no doubt one element of their popularity, but it also led to their often being placed under the ban of ecclesiastical authority. Bishop Grandison, of Exeter, expressly forbade them as early as 1360. But they were too popular both with the Court and the masses to be easily put down. Edward III. was passionately addicted fo such spectacles, and appears to have himself taken part in them, if we may judge from an inventory of articles used in a play acted at Guildford at Christmas 1347, which includes mention of " a harness of white buckram, inlaid with silver namely, a tunic and shield, with the King's motto, ' Hay, hay, the Wythe Swan, by God's soul I am thy man,' for the use of the King himself'' To the Miracle Plays succeeded " Moralities," in which abstract qualities Justice, Mercy, 204 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. and the like were personified, and these in turn led to the representation of real persons on the stage. In the fierce contests of the Reformation, the drama, like the pulpit, was eagerly appropriated by both sides for purposes of mutual attack. The marriage of Luther with a nun was satirized in a Latin Morality at Gray's Inn in 1529. So profane and indecent were some of the controversial plays of the Reforming party that they were forbidden by the Privy Council, not only under Henry VIII. and Mary, but even under the fiercely Protestant sway of the " B. Edward VI.," on pain of imprisonment. But they held their ground never- theless down to the time of Charles I. There are old men still living who can remember seeing something like a Miracle Play in their childhood in remote country districts of England, as for instance in Cornwall ; and a performance of the kind was reported not many years ago in a Dissenting Chapel in Wales. We have seen that these Miracle Plays were at first always in Latin. They came, however, before long to be translated into the vernacular both in England and Germany. One of the earliest of the German Mysteries is the Lament of the Virgin, which was acted in church on Good Friday, and to "this succeeded afterwards the " Passion Plays," representing the death and resurrection of Christ. In the fourteenth century the performances were transferred from the church to the street and market- place, and the number of actors largely increased. There is a curious history attached to one of the most famous of these early German plays, the Tragedy of the Ten Virgins, which was performed at Eisenach in 1332, to celebrate the restoration of peace. The Landgrave Fred- eric, named the Joyful, was present, and was terribly MIRACLE PLAYS. 205 alarmed and angered by the close of the drama, where the Foolish Virgins are represented as appealing in vain to the intercession of the Blessed Virgin, and finally thrust down into hell, notwithstanding her entreaties to her Son to pardon them. " What means this, if God will not pity us even when Mary and the Saints intercede ? " he exclaimed. His fright and indignation threw him into a fit of apoplexy, from which he never recovered till his death two years afterwards. So painfully realistic did these Passion Plays become in Germany, that in one acted at Metz in 1437 the priest who took the principal part nearly died of exhaustion on the cross, and another priest, who represented Judas, narrowly escaped hanging himself. The Crucifixion scene is still found very trying to the principal performer at Ammergau, who has to remain some twenty minutes on the cross, and a younger actor had to be substituted in consequence in 18/0 for the person who had taken that part in the three previous celebrations of the decennial solemnity. It is remarkable that this one remaining memorial of the old Miracle Plays is of comparatively recent origin. In 1633 a deadly plague raged in the Ammerthal, and within three weeks eighty-four of the small community were corpses. The inhabitants then made a solemn vow that, if God would hear their prayer and remove the pestilence, they would every tenth year, in thankfulness for His mercies, represent the Passion of the Redeemer. It is said that not a single death occurred after this vow was made, and it has been religiously observed ever since. The King of Bavaria has to give his sanction every time for the performance, and in 1810 an attempt was made to put it 206 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. down by a general prohibition of all Miracle Plays. The inhabitants sent a deputation to Munich to plead their cause before King Louis, but in vain ; he was, however, induced to relent by the intervention of his chaplain, and no difficulty has since occurred to disturb the periodical recurrence of the solemnity. It usually lasts from Whit- suntide till the end of September, being repeated on most of the intervening Sundays. On one previous occasion it was interrupted, as in 1870, by the performers being summoned to join the army, and the omitted representa- tions were then also supplied in the following summer. It is a remarkable circumstance that of some sixty actors who were called away, to take part in the Franco-Prussian war, only seven were killed, and none of those taking any important part were" included among the slain. This is not the place to discuss at length the obvious objections raised against dramatizing the Passion altogether, as derogatory to the sacredness of the subject. Nor does the precedent, often noticed, of the dramatic character of the Holy Week offices of the Latin ritual offer a more than partial reply. That such representations become at once profane and injurious to those concerned if witnessed or enacted in any other than a religious spirit is self-evident. And it may not unnaturally be feared that, in an age like ours, the growing popularity of the Ammergau Passionsspiel will eventually prove fatal to its permanence ; but few who have ever witnessed it could fail to regard such a contingency, if it occurs, as matter of very serious regret. To the simple and devout denizens of that secluded mountain village the decennial solemnity as yet manifestly continues to be, what it has ever been, not an occasion of histrionic display MIRACLE PLAYS. 207 or pecuniary profit, but in the words of the pious editor of one of the local text-books " a religious duty, from which they neither can be nor wish to be dispensed by any earthly authority." Their most general ordinary occupa- tion as wood-carvers, chiefly of devotional objects, helps of course to develop both their artistic and religious instincts, and thus the study of the great religious painters, which is enjoined on those selected for the principal parts in the Play, especially for the highest, comes natural to them as a labour of love. And we may well hope that the writer already quoted is also at least substantially correct in the expression of his charitable belief, that "all who have hitherto been spectators of the Passionsspiel have returned home nobler and better men." It may safely be asserted that the fault, where it is not so, is their own, and that none can fail to be both edified and benefited who are content to witness the drama in the spirit of those who enact it. XXIV. ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF UNIVERSITIES. THE festival observed at Munich, in August 1872, with every circumstance of royal and popular solemnity, to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of the foundation of the University, was naturally regarded in Germany as an event of national interest. The University, originally founded at Ingoldstadt by Duke Albert in 1472, trans- ferred in the beginning of the present century to Landshut, and then, twenty-six years later, to Munich, by King Louis, is one of the oldest and still one of the most important of the German Universities the most important probably of those in Southern and Catholic Germany. And although the festival was of a strictly academical and not ecclesiastical character, it no doubt derived some addi- tional significance from the fact of Bavaria being just then the centre of the Old Catholic movement, and from the venerable Dr. Dollinger having been called by an almost unanimous vote of his colleagues to fill the office of Rector Magnificus on the occasion. His speech, which was received with continuous and enthusiastic applause from all his hearers, young and old alike, has a permanent interest. It was of course to be expected that he would say something of the antecedents and distinctions of the ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF UNIVERSITIES. 209 University which he was there to represent, and of which he has for so many years been a conspicuous ornament. But he did more than this. He took the opportunity to give what in less experienced hands might have been, a mere superficial sketch, while in reality it contains a vivid and critical appreciation of the origin and growth of University education in Europe. That is a subject on which few men are so well qualified to speak, and he handled it with that depth and accuracy of learning, that intellectual grasp and breadth of moral sympathy, and that ardent but ^intelligent patriotism, which will at once be recognised as characteristic of the speaker by all who are familiar with him personally or through his writings. It is worth while to put on record here the salient points of a discourse which occupied nearly two hours in delivery, and which well deserves to be read in full by those who are in a position to study it for themselves. 1 Dr. Dollinger begins by referring to the first consolida- tion [of national unity a thousand years ago under Louis the German, and its revival in 1871 in the new German Empire. Since then the University of Munich has been the first to celebrate its anniversary, which thus attains a sort of national importance, and the more so as the differ- ent German Universities are closely united, and there is a frequent interchange of professors and students among them. The corporate idea which was so powerful in the middle ages, but was wholly wanting under the old governments, 1 This discourse of Dr. Dollinger's has been collated, for the present purpose, with an earlier one of his on the same subject, delivered before the University of Munich in 1867, when also he held the office of Rector. P 2io ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. whether democratic or Imperial, of Greece and Rome, could alone make possible the foundation of Universities as independent communities, with their own rights and privileges, bound together by a community of interests between teachers and taught. Among such institutions the University of Paris, dating from early in the thirteenth century, for a long time stood supreme, and Paris became, far more than Rome, the intellectual metropolis of Western Europe. It was a common saying that, as Italy had the sacerdotium, and Germany the imperium, France had the studium. Far different in character were the Italian Universities, which began to be founded in the twelfth century, but never approached the theological and literary eminence of Paris and Oxford, and made no claim to the universality of teaching now associated with the name ; they were schools of one or two sciences only, the first established, at Salerno, being a school of medicine only ; their aim was practical, and the studies principally culti- vated were jurisprudence and canon law. Their origin and system were of a casual and purely democratic kind, without any recognised authority and position in Church or State. Two or three professors of canon and civil law and medicine combined to form a University, and students gradually gathered round them, but its prosperity was at best fluctuating and uncertain. Leo X. founded the Sapi- enza with eighty-eight professors, but a few years later Clement VII. diverted the endowments to other objects, and its days of prosperity were gone for ever. The teachers at these Universities had no corporate status or dignity, and were looked on simply as paid agents for the supply of a marketable commodity ; there was no genius loci, as ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF UNIVERSITIES. 211 at Oxford, no sense of pride in belonging to a great institu- tion either among the teachers or the taught. Bologna, however, has an historical importance as the birthplace and chief home of the allied sciences of Roman civil law and canon law, which exercised so large an influence on the development of the Papal autocracy; in 1262 there were 20,000 students of law there. Alexander III., Innocent III., and Innocent IV., the great founders of the system, had taught or studied there ; there, too, the Ger- man Emperors learnt lessons of absolutism derived from the maxims of the old Roman Empire which they were supposed to inherit, and openly proclaimed their superiority to law. Paris, however, exerted a more direct influence than the Italian Universities on the national life of Ger- many, through the crowds of students who flocked thither, having as yet no Universities of their own, and who brought back with them the French spirit and language on their return ; many men spent fifteen or sixteen years there in the study of theology. Even so late as the end of the sixteenth century the Venetian Ambassador says it .had 30,000 students. Yet even Paris till latterly had no Faculty of Law. But everywhere the curriculum was a very narrow one, and the entire absence of any historical and critical sense left unbounded room for the dominance of fiction and forgeries. Two men, in Germany and England, made the first attempt to break the ice ; Albert the Great, who has been not inaptly called the Humboldt of his age, and Roger Bacon, both of whom laboured to introduce the study of natural science, while Roger Bacon also paved the way for the cultivation of Greek literature. And now the time was come for Germany to take her P 2 212 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. part in the academical life of Europe. The ancient Universities of Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, and Bologna own no founder and no cognisable date of institution "they were a natural growth." 1 But it was the princes, secular and spiritual, who in the middle of the fourteenth century began to establish Universities in Germany, and the municipal authorities afterwards followed their example. The first was founded at Prague in 1348 by Charles IV., and is said to have numbered 40,000 students by the end of the century ; but the quarrels between the Czech and Ger- man students, which have lasted down to our own day, soon made an end of its prosperity. In the same century were founded the Universities of Vienna, Heidelberg, Cologne, and Erfurt, all of which were originally to a great degree ecclesiastical institutions, and supported by the revenues of Church benefices. They often had no fewer than six professors of canon law. But the great schism of the anti- Popes evoked a spirit of reform throughout the Church, and the German Universities, following in the wake of Paris, threw themselves into the movement of which Gerson and D'Ailly were the acknowledged leaders, and all united in proclaiming the superiority of Councils to Popes. But all hope of an effective reform was shattered by the transi- tion of Frederick III. to the Papal party, and he forced the University of Vienna, by the threat of withdrawing its 1 The foundation of University College by a bequest of William of Durham, who died in 1249, marks the real beginning of the Univer- sity of Oxford as such, about half a century after the first formal recog- nition of the University of Paris in the diploma of Philip Augustus, though there had been schools at Oxford for many centuries before. And there is good reason for believing that the original statutes were borrowed almost wholesale from Paris. ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF UNIVERSITIES. 213 endowments, to renounce the Council of Basle. Meanwhile a distinct but cognate movement had been originated at Oxford by Wycliff, and was taken up at Prague by Huss with greater immediate success, while a third University, that of Wittenberg, eventually gave it the form in which it has exercised so momentous an influence on the subse- quent history of the Church. The Universities, too, in Germany rather than in Italy, became the nurseries of that revival of classical literature which, however little such an alliance was intended or acknowledged on either side, materially aided the progress of the Reformation. Three more German Universities, at Greifswald, Freiburg, and Basle, were founded shortly before Ingoldstadt (in 1472), and Tubingen a little later. Paris was the common mother of them all, and Ingoldstadt borrowed its statutes from Vienna, which had received them from Paris. It was a dark period in the political life of Germany ; but for a time, from 1494 to 1518, Ingoldstadt gained celebrity for its classical teaching under Conrad Celtes, Locher, and Reuchlin, and the historian Aventin was its most distin- guished ornament. The number of students, however, was not large. It may be said that the history of these mediaeval universities illustrates the distinctive national character of England, France, and Germany. England, which abjured centralisation, and has ever pursued a two- fold aim, of practical utility and political freedom, has naturally had two Universities, correcting and supplement- ing each other, which retain to this day their independent constitution, and represent respectively " the two leading tendencies of the English mind, the ecclesiastical and the mathematical." On the other hand, the centralising 2i 4 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. tendencies of the nation, which make Paris the only place where an educated Frenchman cares to live, found expres- sion in its one University seated in the metropolis. In Germany the decentralising tendencies (partial larismus] , which gradually dissolved the unity both of the Empire and the Church, led to the separate foundation of a number of small Universities in various cities. Then came the Reformation, of which Wittenberg was the centre, and the new Universities of Marburg, Konigs- thum, Jena, Altdorf, and Helmstadt were founded for its promotion, while Leipsic, Rostock, Greifswald, and Heidel- berg joined the movement. Prague and Vienna, which adhered to the old faith, were almost deserted, and Ingold- stadt became, and continued for two centuries, one of the chief strongholds of Catholicism; there, as at all the German Universities, Catholic or Protestant, theology overshadowed every other Faculty. With the Reformation had in fact sprung up a new order of things, and the German Universities became " the arsenals where the weapons of war were forged, and often the battle-fields where the victory or defeat of the rival doctrines was decided." The German princes accord- ingly, who always assumed the right to fix the faith of their subjects, used them as the Jesuits of the period used the confessional, and Lutheran preachers the pulpit as instrumenta dominationis, keeping in their own hands the appointment to professorial chairs, especially those of theology. All that can be said of the seventeenth century is that the German Universities survived " that darkest period of German history," and the Thirty Years' War ; but the Catholic Universities scarcely deserved the name, while the Protestant were completely subordinated to ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF UNIVERSITIES. 215 theological interests and antipathies, and their history is the history of the conflict between Lutheran orthodoxy, on the one hand, and Calvinism, Syncretism, and Pietism on the other. Up to the beginning of the eighteenth century all lectures were delivered in Latin, which was fatal to any real originality and comprehensiveness of teaching. In the last century Kant made Konigsberg famous, and Jena in the hands of Fichte and Schelling became the theatre of a great philosophical movement. In 1810 the King of Prussia founded at Berlin the first German University since the Reformation which had no confessional character or object, and among its earliest professors were included men like Humboldt, Wolff, Fichte, Schleiermaeker, and Savigny ; it now numbers over 2000 students. With the eighteenth century the German Universities had received a new lease of life, which culminated in the foundations of Berlin and Bonn. It is curious that, at a period of such intense theological energy throughout Europe, Paris, which had long been "the Queen in that region to whose decisions every one submitted," entered on her period of decline. But the causes of decay were external, and are not difficult to explain. The place itself, which was now the constant scene of civil strife and bloodshed, was most unfavour- able for learning. But, more than that, the immediate neighbourhood of a Court which claimed supreme control over the minds and consciences, as well as the lives, of its subjects, made all freedom of writing and teaching impossible. Thus in 1624 a Royal decree forbade on pain of death any divergence from Aristotelian doctrines on physical and metaphysical subjects, and Louis XIV. would have instantly lodged in the Bastille any professor 216 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. who contradicted his opinions. It is not wonderful then that during the seventeenth century Paris lost nine out of her forty colleges, or that, while two-thirds of the most distinguished German writers belong to the Universities, scarcely a single name eminent in French literature since 1660 is connected with the Parisian or any other French University. Enforced subscription to arbitrary professions of faith completed the work of degradation, and when at last the University fell with the destruction of her property, the event was hardly noticed, nor has any French Government since the Revolution thought of restoring it etiam periere mines, Louvain, which had long been a flourishing University almost fit to compete with Paris, was strangled under a similar system of coercion, and her one great scholar in the last century, Van Espen, had to fly for his life when an old man of eighty-two. Leyden, on the other hand, founded by the Prince of Orange, and with far smaller resources, has produced a long line of illustrious scholars, and known no period of decay ; while the Spanish and Portuguese Universities, which once stood so high, have suffered a total and tragical eclipse. The Scotch Universities are very inferior to the English, and the North American, which are simply institutions for conferring degrees in law and theology, do not deserve the name. Nor can any very high praise be accorded to those of Denmark, Holland, Belgium, or Sweden. In Russia they are as yet a mere exotic, imported from Germany. There is no need here to follow Dr. Dollinger through the long catalogue of illustrious philosophers, linguists, historians, and divines who have adorned his own alma mater, and who naturally found honourableand appreciative ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF UNIVERSITIES. 217 mention on such an occasion. It includes Schelling, Baader, Savigny, Feuerbach, Stahl, Windischmann, Sailer, Mohler, and many other memorable, though less widely celebrated, names. When he comes in conclusion to dwell on the present and future of his country, he points, as might be expected, with pardonable pride to the bright prospect opened before her through the restoration of political unity, and to the mission assigned by general consent to the Germans of enriching other nations out of the fulness of their scientific and literary wealth ; though it must be remembered that in former ages they have learnt much successively from Italy, from France, and from England. He trusts that the single-minded and unwearied pursuit of truth for its own sake will always continue to be a distinc- tion of Germany, and that she will avoid that vicious centralisation which, in intellectual culture as in other matters, has proved the ruin of France. On one important point too much forgotten in some recent schemes of academical reform at Oxford and Cambridge he earnestly commends the example of the English Universities to the imitation of his own, where he thinks that the College system, unknown except partially at Tubingen, would supply a manifest and serious defect. And no less earnest is his caution against the danger of sensualism and materialism incident to a widespread cultivation of the natural sciences, especially among the half-educated, which would inevitably prove the harbinger of national decay. Against that danger the Universities, if only they are true to their high position and duties, will provide a sure defence. " Let us then," are the concluding words of this most instructive and eloquent discourse, " continue to 218 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. labour indefatigably, in a pure scientific spirit, and with loyal self-devotion, to build up the one temple of truth. That will be an imperishable monument, surviving all changes of fortune, of the honour and greatness of Germany." XXV. JEWISH PATRIOTISM. A QUESTION was debated some years ago in the Nine- teenth Century, which has an historical and practical interest beyond the particular occasion which suggested it. It opens out indeed an inquiry of such wide significance and bearings alike in a religious, a national, and an historical sense, that a very cursory treatment of its leading speciali- ties can alone be attempted within our present limits. The point in dispute may be thus stated. It is maintained on one side that the Jews are simply a religious sect, standing in the same relation as any other religious sect say Unitarians or Methodists to their countrymen, having the same stake in the national welfare, and the same claim on the privileges and rights of citizens. The opponents of this view, as represented by Mr. Goldwin Smith, disclaim all desire to curtail the civil privileges of Jews. They " do not wish to repeal Jewish any more than Catholic Emancipation" ; but just as they look suspiciously on that religious party who profess to be " Englishmen, if you please, but first Catholics," so they think there is some- thing in the specific character of Judaism that requires its political action to be watched with a jealousy which there is no need to exercise over the political action of the 220 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. members of any other religious community, because Judaism is not, like Methodism or Unitarianism, merely a religious belief, but a distinction of race also. It does not quite meet this difficulty to ask, Avith Dr. Adler, than whom no more competent authority can be found on his own side of the question, whether " the sacred books of the Jewish religion fail to inculcate the virtue of patriotism " ? There can be no doubt whatever that patriotism is far more strongly inculcated and illustrated in the Old Testa- ment than in the New. But then it is the patriotism of the Jewish nation, as such, which was then indissolubly bound up with their religious belief. As Mr. Lecky puts it, "In Judaea the spirit of patriotism and of sect were united ; each intensified the other, and the exclusive intolerance which is the result of each existed with double virulence." The grandest religious traditions of the Jews were associated with their national triumphs, and the Mosaic Law accepts and consecrates exclusive national distinctions which are certainly abhorrent to modern ideas of the universal brotherhood of man, as, e.g., in the different rules of dealing with strangers and with countrymen. This fact is equally and inevitably admitted by those who maintain and those who deny the Divine authorship of the Mosaic dispensation ; though the former reasonably insist that it marks a temporary and necessary stage in the gradual education of mankind, and they may justly point in defence of this view to the clear superiority of the Hebrew over contemporary 'heathen systems in the matter of humane and equitable dealing. It is further argued by Mr. Goldwin Smith, as evidencing the exclusively national character of the Jewish religion, that Warburton is clearly JEWISH PATRIOTISM. 221 right in maintaining that there is no trace in the Old Testament of the doctrine of a future life. There is no doubt some ground for Warburton's contention, but his statements in the Divine Legation are as grossly exag- gerated as the ingenious paradox he built upon them is eccentric. However, it may be admitted whatever may be the value of the admission that temporal blessings are the main inducements to righteousness held out under the Old Law. The point is dwelt on, with his usual vigour and subtlety of thought, by a writer as unlike Warburton as the late Professor Mozley, in one of his posthumous essays. So far then, while patriotism is unquestionably a prominent characteristic of Judaism, it is a patriotism bind- ing the Hebrew people in close bonds of religious and civil relationship with each other, but would seem at first sight likely rather to hinder than to help their fusion into one homogeneous body with the various nations among whom their lot may be cast in their present state of dispersion. And when we speak to-day of the patriotism of the Jews, we mean of course to inquire, not whether they were patriotic when they dwelt as one nation under the shadow of the Temple, of which there can be no sort of doubt, but whether they are likely to be patriotic citizens now of England or France or any other European country where they have found a home. If we look back on the history of the Jews since the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, we shall find that they were regarded in a peculiar light, quite differently from any other class of religionists, first in the Roman Empire, and then in the community of Christian States which gradually took its place. Under the Empire they 222 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. were not subjected to such severe and persistent persecu- tion as the Christians ; and Mr. Lecky is probably right in thinking that this was mainly owing to the tribal and "inexpansive" nature of their religion, which gave them no desire to proselytise, and so far brought them into less direct and constant collision with Roman ideas and insti- tutions. On the other hand, it is clear from the classical literature of the period that they had incurred the deepest hatred and contempt of their Roman masters ; and this reacted on the popular estimate of the Christians, who were long regarded in the Empire as a Jewish sect, with the additional demerit of an obstinate passion for propagandism. To this it must be added that the early Christians, who generally viewed the Empire as a special embodiment of Antichrist, could not, in spite of their rigid view of the duty of absolute submission to authority, feel any very ardent sympathy for its welfare. When the civil and ecclesiastical organization of mediaeval Europe had succeeded to the rule of Pagan Rome, we still find the Jews holding an exceptional position everywhere, which, however, exposed them now not only to bitterer obloquy but to sharper persecution than other dissentient sects. It is fair to remember that several Popes and Saints as, e.g., St. Bernard creditably exerted themselves to screen the victims of so deep and universal an unpopularity, but, as a rule, Jews were looked upon with even a deeper detesta- tion than the most detested heretical sects. Intermarriage with them was denounced as a horrible pollution, and in France and Spain any one taking a Jewish mistress was liable to be burnt to death. St. Thomas Aquinas main- tained that their property might at any time be confiscated, JEWISH PATRIOTISM. 223 because it was gained by usury. Without of course for a moment excusing the horrible cruelties to which they were subjected, it is difficult to believe that there was nothing in the character of the race to explain this universal sentiment of distrust. And, apart from the charges of usury, slave-holding, crucifixion of Christian children, and the like, their isolation from all national aims and inter- ests, to which Dean Merivale refers in his Roman History, had certainly a good deal to do with it : The Jew, with a spirit no less restless, with propensities no less migratory, neither conquered nor colonised nor civilised. He intruded himself silently' and pertinaciously into every known corner of the globe ; and no one could say wherefore he came or what was the object of his sojourn. His presence in foreign lands was marked by no peculiar aim or mission. He cultivated neither literature nor art, nor even commerce on a great scale or as a national pursuit. He subsisted for the most part by the exercise of active industry in petty dealings, evaded as much as he could the public burdens of the nations among whom he dwelt, while their privileges he neither sought nor coveted, and distinguished himself alike in every quarter, under every form of government, and in the midst of every social system, by rigid adherence to the forms of an obscure and exclusive creed. That something of the same feeling still survives on the Christian side may be inferred from the fact that many Liberals, while strongly opposed to the general principle of religious disabilities, were found some years ago in alliance with those who denounced "the unchristianizing of our Legislature/' in their opposition to the emancipation of the Jews. On the other hand, if the intermarriage of Jews and Christians was considered a pollution in mediaeval Europe, the Jewish World has quite lately deprecated it 224 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. on the very intelligible ground that it must eventually lead to an absolute extinction of Judaism. It does then seem obvious that Judaism differs from Methodism or any other merely religious form of denomi- nationalism in the circumstance that it denotes a "tribal" as well as a theological distinction. The same might be said, mutatis mutandis, of Mormonism, which also does not constitute a purely theological platform, but aspires to the formation, as Judaism implies the preservation, of a special form of national life. But before this distinction is applied for any practical purpose to the actual condition and claims of the Jews in the States of modern Europe, one or two important considerations have to be borne in mind. In the first place, as indeed Mr. Goldwin Smith himself admits, "before Christianity all religions were tribal," and of these tribal religions Judaism was confessedly the highest. And it is thertfore natural to inquire whether it may not be tending, under the intellectual and social influences of the modern world, to become less exclusive and more universal. And this leads us to notice the significant fact that there are two parties, or rather two sects, among the Jews of our own day, the one adhering closely to their traditional creed, while the religion of the other is hardly distinguishable from theism, and the latter party are said to be rapidly gaining ground. Whether this process of disintegration should be regarded with satisfaction or the reverse from a strictly religious point of view, is another question. But it is at all events clear that there can be no more reason for questioning the patriotism of the theistic, or, as they are sometimes called, rational- istic section of Jews, as such, than for questioning the JEWISH PATRIOTISM. 225 patriotism of, e.g., Unitarians, as such. And at the same time it must be remembered that, if Judaism of the narrow and traditional type is held to be inimical to patriotism in a modern State, as hindering the genuine fusion of Jews with any nationality other than their own, there is also a point of view from which Christianity may be regarded as a counter influence to patriotism, and that precisely because it is not a tribal but a universal faith. The criticism has often been urged with exaggerated emphasis, and even pushed to paradoxical lengths by sceptical writers, but a moment's consideration will show that it has a certain weight. If there is any force in the argument noticed just now, that Judaism is proved to be an exclusively national faith from its appealing to temporal rewards and punishments only, the converse must hold true, that a religion based on supernatural sanctions, and which bids its votaries look for their recompense not in this world but in the next, has a tendency to denationalise them by withdrawing their minds from earthly and secular interests and concentrating them on the world unseen. And thus the early Christians were out of harmony with the social and political life of the Empire, not merely because the language of St. Paul and St. John had taught them to look on Rome as an Anti-christian power, but because there were laws and customs obligatory on all citizens to which they could not conform without violating their religious belief. It is another way of expressing this contrariety or divergence of character to say that the heroic and the saintly ideal, though not of course incom- patible, do not exactly coincide. Saints, and especially martyrs, are sometimes loosely designated Christian heroes, Q 226 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. and there may be some, like St. Louis of France, to whom the designation is peculiarly appropriate, but, broadly speaking, heroism and sanctity represent different though not inconsistent types of excellence. To put an extreme case, Harmodius and Aristogeiton were reverenced by the Athenians as national heroes, but it would be difficult from any point of view to regard them as saints. In other words, Christian piety is not identical with patriotism, and may even conceivably conflict with it, as was the case under the Roman Empire. Moreover Christianity has from the first taken shape in some kind of visible organization claiming the religious allegiance of its members. This need not and ordinarily does not interfere with their civil duties, but it does to recall a phrase very prominent in the controversy about " Vaticanism " some years ago introduce " a divided allegiance," in so far as the Christian recognises his membership of a second society, having independent laws and interests of its own, and whose boundaries are not at all necessarily conterminous with those of the nation. Hence the frequent rivalries of Church and State, which were unknown under the Jewish and Pagan systems of government, where Church and State were one. It may happen here and there that religious and patriotic zeal run, so to speak, in the same groove, and thus the course of history served at one time to identify Catholicism with the national character of Spain, and Protestantism with the national character of England. But that is an accident. As a rule, the Christian and the national sentiment are distinct, and may therefore become divergent or even antagonistic forces. And thus if the patriotism of Jews JEWISH PATRIOTISM. 227 may be plausibly disputed, the patriotism of Christians may be, and has been, for plausible but in one sense very opposite reasons, disputed also. The loyalty of English Catholics, for instance, was distrusted as a rule quite unjustly in the reign of Elizabeth, and the Huguenots were notoriously out of harmony with national sentiment in France. The result seems to be that in the abstract a Jew who is heart-whole in his loyalty to traditional Judaism cannot at the same time be heart-whole in his loyalty to a modern, and especially a Christian State, because his own nation, though at present dispersed and with no visible prospect of restoration, has a prior and paramount claim upon him. On the other hand, an Englishman or Frenchman, of whatever religious per- suasion, remains simply an Englishman or Frenchman, and can have no temptation to prefer the interests of any other nation to those of England or France. But eccle- siastical may take precedence of national interests in his mind, as was objected to the Ultramontane advisers of Louis Napoleon who were said to have forced him into the Franco-Prussian war. From which quarter any prac- tical danger to the State is most to be apprehended it seems hardly worth while to discuss, inasmuch as no one seriously proposes to deprive either Jews or Ultramontanes of equal civil rights. Q 2 XXVI. THE JUDENHASS IN HISTORY. IT is a curious and at first sight perplexing fact that there has always been something strained and abnormal in the relations of Christianity and Judaism. There is a kind of historical symbolism in the story of the drunken sailor who thrashed a Jew on Good Friday, because he had just heard of the Crucifixion. Christians have acted again and again for centuries as if they had only just heard of the offences of the Jews in days long past, and did not care to draw nice distinctions between the sins of the fathers and the children ; while the Jews, if any credit is to be attached to mediaeval chroniclers, have retaliated savagely enough when they happened to have an opportunity. It looks as if an armed neutrality were the nearest approach to peace that could be established between the rival creeds. For some apparently inscrutable reason no considerable body of Christians seems to have been able to regard the Jews with that feeling of mere indifference or compassion which is entertained by the most orthodox believers, except under circumstances of temporary and special provocation, towards other forms of religion, such as Mahometanism or Buddhism, diverging yet more widely from their own. When the Jews have not been hated with a passionate THE JUDENHASS IN HISTORY. 229 and fanatical hatred, as has been too commonly the case, they have at least in modern times been loved with an equally strange and uncritical though comparatively in- nocuous affection. And thus in our own day a vast periodical literature has grown up on what is called the Anglo-Israel movement, which counts its circulation by hundreds of thousands, and includes a bishop and a retired Indian judge among its contributors, while an organized society, with all the machinery of newspapers, public meetings, and the like, has been formed for the purpose of maintaining that the Lost Tribes have found their home in England, and that the Jew is our brother in blood, if unhappily an alien in creed, and should be restored by English arms or diplomacy to the sacred soil which is his own. 1 Such silly crazes, however ridiculous, may be left to find their own level. But they serve to illustrate from another side the curious phenomenon already mentioned of some occult tension in the relations of Jews and Christians, which is apt to take the shape of paradoxical 1 It may serve to modify our contemptuous ridicule of mediaeval follies and fanaticisms to remember that, towards the close of the nine- teenth century, a body of ostensibly educated Englishmen, considerable in point of numbers, has deliberately set itself to propagate what is in fact a new religion, having for one of its not least credible articles of faith ; that the Coronation Stone at Westminster Abbey is that on which Jacob's head rested at Bethel, which Jeremiah and Baruch, after the Captivity, conveyed to Ireland, being wrecked by the way on the Spanish coast, where it fell into the hands of the " King of Spain," whoever he may have been, and was rescued from him by its prophetic bearers, who eventually deposited it at the Irish village of Tara, so named from Thora (the Jewish Law), with various other equally remarkable Taradiddles. The strangest legends in the lives of the saints are a trifle after this marvellous specimen of Protestant mythology. 230 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. sympathy when it does not break out into a storm of fanatical antipathy. This chronic feud, which is shown by recent experience still to retain a perilous vitality, is of course no growth of yesterday. It is as old as the Christian era, and was already at work long before the conversion of the Empire. At first indeed the Roman Emperors looked on the Christians as a mere sect of Jews, and were disposed rather to despise than to persecute them as such. For the Jews on the whole, in spite of their numbers and influence at Rome, escaped persecution. Augustus issued a rescript in their favour, which was confirmed by two later edicts of the proconsuls, Agrippa and Julius Antonius. Suetonius indeed tells us how Domitian imposed on them a severe and special taxation, but this appears to have been more with the object of replenishing an exhausted exchequer than from any general motive of policy. The Emperor Julian naturally petted them, desiring for ends of his own to re- build the Temple. And yet Jews were perhaps the most hated, from various causes, of all Roman subjects ; they were held notorious, as we learn from Cicero, Juvenal, and other writers of the day, as the most sordid, most turbulent, and most unsocial of mankind. But the exclusively national and therefore unaggressive character of their religion pre- served them from the overt hostility provoked by Christian proselytism. They were hated and despised, but they were not feared. No doubt they had spread in Rome ; even the Empress Poppaea was said to be a convert, and it is surmised by Gibbon that through her influence the Jews escaped proscription under Nero ; Juvenal tells us of the passion for Jewish rites among Roman ladies, and Josephus THE JUDENHASS IN HISTORY. 231 has an extraordinary story of an exorcism performed in the reign of Vespasian by a Jew named Eleazar, which he himself witnessed, when the demon was visibly drawn out through the nostrils of the person possessed. But on the whole Judaism, unlike Christianity, was an essentially unexpansive creed ; the Jews simply held aloof from other religionists in silent disdain, and neither denounced nor attempted to convert them. And thus, in spite of their hatred of the Gentile world and their frequent and bloody rebellions against their Roman masters, they were for the most part let alone ; they were not worth attacking. But they detested the Christians, whom they regarded as renegades from the Law, with a peculiar detestation, and, as Justin Martyr informs us, did their utmost to foment the calumnies and passions of the Pagan populace against them. In Milman's words, " the Jew, who had lost the power of persecuting, lent himself as a willing instrument to the heathen persecutor against those whom he considered apostates." They took a more prominent part than the heathen in the martyrdom of St. Polycarp. The Chris- tians, on the other hand, exulted over the downfall of Jerusalem and the dispersion of its citizens, as a signal fulfilment of prophecy and triumph of the Gospel. And thus already, during the ages of persecution and while both alike were pressed down under the iron heel of Rome, the seeds of a bitter antipathy were sown between them. The Gnostics, the most widely-spread sect of early heretics, even went so far as to treat the Jewish religion as the work of the Demiurgos, an inferior deity, or of the Principle of Evil a view which is obliquely censured in the Seventh of the Thirty-Nine Articles. 232 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. This pre-existing antagonism was not likely to be diminished when at length after three centuries of trial and suffering the Christians, through the conversion of Con- stantine, got the upper hand. Moreover the rise of some Judaizing sects within the Christian body, and several cases of actual apostasy, had served just then to accentuate the prevalent feeling against the obnoxious race. The Jews were accused of stoning converts from their own faith to Christianity, and of other enormities. Constantine accord- ingly made a law sentencing those who so acted to be burnt, and also punishing with confiscation of their property any Christians who apostatized. But in the persecution of Jews, as of heretics, it was the heretics themselves who took the lead. The Arian Constantius dealt more severely with them than Constantine, and the Visigoths at a later day showed themselves more intolerant than either. Theodosius, on the other hand, when a Christian mob had wrecked a Jewish synagogue, com- manded it to be rebuilt at their expense. The earliest alleged case of their crucifying a Christian boy a crime so frequently charged on them in the middle ages is related by Socrates (Eccl. Hist., vii. 16) as having taken place at Inmestar, a place between Chalcis and Antioch in Syria. He records it as a fact, without the slightest inti- mation of any doubt, and says that the perpetrators were searched out and punished. As we come down to the middle ages there were various influences at work to sustain or intensify this anti-Jewish sentiment, some due to their own conduct, some to causes beyond their con- trol. Among the last may be reckoned the crusading movement, which, however, as will appear presently, in THE JVDENHASS IN HISTORY. 233 other ways indirectly benefited them. Already at the beginning of the eleventh century, when the prevalent idea that the Second Coming of our Lord was at hand had led to a great outburst of penitence and devotion, which found one expression in crowded pilgrimages to the Holy Land, Hakim, the Sultan of Egypt, organized a fierce persecu- tion of the Christians of Palestine, and had the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and other Christian buildings in Jerusalem razed to the ground. It was currently rumoured, whether with or without grounds, that the Jews of Orleans had instigated him, and a savage perse- cution of Jews in France was the result. When at the close of the century the preaching of Peter the Hermit had roused all Europe to undertake the first crusade, it seemed to the ardent enthusiasm of the newly-enlisted soldiers of the Cross needless, if not presumptuous, to distinguish between one class of misbelievers and another, and there ensued a terrible massacre of Jews in the flourishing cities of Germany and the Rhineland. At a later period St. Bernard used the whole of his enormous influence and it required even in him no slight display of energy and courage to press on them the obvious dis- tinction between the armed Saracen and the defenceless Jew. There had again been a frightful outbreak in the German cities, incited by a monk named Rudolph. Bernard confronted him in all the dignity of Christian heroism, and denounced the outrage in the severest terms ; "it was not for men to punish by murder those whom God had punished by their dispersion." Meanwhile the Emperor Henry IV. had done his best to protect the -Jews, not perhaps from motives of unmixed benevolence, 234 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. for while he ordered a strict restitution to be made to all who had been plundered of their wealth, he decreed that the property of those who had been put to death had escheated to the imperial treasury. In France more than a century afterwards Philip the Fair plundered impartially his Jewish and Christian subjects, but the enormous wealth of the former was a tempting bait, and twice during his reign they were expelled from the country and their whole property confiscated. In the next reign they had again become numerous and prosperous, and this time they tempted the cupidity not of the monarch but of the mob ; throughout the south of France, in town and country alike, they were mercilessly massacred and pillaged, and the royal officers refused to protect them. At the end of the fourteenth century they were expelled from France altogether under Charles VI. The vast wealth amassed by the Jews explains one main cause of their unpopularity, which was further aggravated by the way in which they had obtained it. Usury had all along been strongly condemned by the patristic and mediaeval Church, and as it was forbidden to Christians by laws both of Church and State, the usurers in the early middle ages were almost exclusively Jews, who adopted the profession partly as being one of the very few open to them, partly for the huge profits it secured them. Some notion may be formed of the rate of interest they were in the habit of charging from an edict of Philip Augustus of France limiting them to 48 per cent. The crusades, however, led to a revival of commercial enter- prise, and this brought orthodox Catholics into amicable relations with both Jews and Mahometans, and tended to THE JUDENHASS IN HISTORY. 235 soften the prejudice against them. It is only fair also to remember that many of the Popes, and some other leading ecclesiastics as the Jewish historian Bedarride has acknow- ledged made strenuous, though not always successful efforts to arrest the violence of their assailants ; even Alexander VL, of whom there is not too much good to be recorded, distinguished himself by his generosity to the Jews, and did all in his power to alleviate their sufferings. But the general sentiment ran entirely the other way, and it found utterance both in the canon and the civil law. They were compelled to live in separate quarters and wear a distinctive dress ; Christians might not eat, or bathe, or enter into partnership, still less intermarry with them ; by the laws both of France and Spain a Christian who took a Jewish mistress was to be burnt alive ; till the fourteenth century a Jewish criminal was hung head downwards between two dogs. At the beginning of the sixteenth century it was proposed by the theologians of Germany and France, backed by the University of Paris, to destroy the whole literature of the Jews, with the exception of the Old Testament, and it required all the influence of Reuchlin to avert this wholesale proscription. They were burnt of course in large numbers, like heretics, by the Spanish Inquisition before their final expulsion from Spain in 1495 by Ferdinand and Isabella ; but the exceptional atrocity of the Spanish persecutions is in either case to be explained mainly by the peculiar conditions of the national history and character, on which it would be out of place to enlarge here. In the Italian republics, where they had succeeded in making themselves indispensable to the Christian community, they were tolerated and protected in 236 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. their rights, and were allowed to practise as physicians, which was elsewhere forbidden. But they were tolerated because they were needed, not because they were loved or repected. Besides the reproach of usury, the stigma of slaveholding had from a very early period attached to them, and one of the first and most frequent, as well as most legitimate, measures directed against them by imperial legislators was the manumission of their Christian slaves. The number of the Christian slaves bought up by them was among the complaints of Agobard in the ninth century. Christians, on the other hand, had not much scruple about enslaving Jews. There was usually less of fanaticism and more of self- interest in the policy of Christian governments towards them than in the popular sentiment, and it must be remembered that, having no civil rights or status, they were normally beyond the protection of the law. King John threw all the Jews in England into prison, and exacted 66,000 marks for their ransom ; on another occasion he extorted 70,000 marks from a single Jew of Bristol, by ordering one of his teeth to be drawn every day till he complied. In 1241 Henry III. exacted 20,000 marks of them, and again, in 1255, 8000 under threat of hanging them if they refused compliance. In the same reign Dispenser, the justiciary, imprisoned 500 Jews in order to extort a large ransom from the wealthier of them, and then abandoned the rest to the fury of the populace, who massacred them all, men, women, and children. In 1255 eighteen Jew's were hanged, and their goods confiscated to the royal exchequer, on the charge, recorded by Matthew Paris and Chaucer, of crucifying a THE JUDENHASS IN HISTORY. 237 Christian boy, known afterwards as St. Hugh of Lincoln. 1 Du Cange mentions a French law .forbidding the con- version of Jews to Christianity, under pain of forfeiture of goods and chattels to the king, as the convert would no longer have the opportunity of amassing usurious wealth which Christian sovereigns could plunder; it must be hoped the law is apocryphal. Edward I. was sterner and less politic than his predecessors in his dealings with the Jews. In his first year they were forbidden to lend money on interest, which was to deprive them at once of their occu- pation and their principal means of livelihood. They took, therefore, to clipping and adulterating the coin, a fraud not so easily detected at a time when the silver penny was allowed to be divided into halves and quarters. No less than 280 of them were hanged for this offence in London only in one year, and in 1287 all the Jews in England were thrown into prison, and a fine of 12,000 marks extorted from them. In 1290 they were finally expelled from the country, under pain of death if they remained or returned, and Hume observes that "very few of that nation have lived in England since." We have seen already that within the next two centuries they were banished from France and Spain. It will be clear from this brief sketch that, for one cause 1 The best-known example of these mediaeval stories of crucifixion, for some of which there may possibly have existed a basis in fact, is that of St. Werner, whose ruined chapel at Bacharach on the Rhine whither his body is said to have miraculously floated "up stream from Oberwesel, where he was martyred will be familiar to English tourists. There are many more alleged cases of these boy-martyrs, as, e. ., St. William of Norwich in 1144; St. Robert of Bury St. Edmunds in 1181 ; St. Rudolf of Berne in 1287 ; a boy murdered at Trent in Holy Wee'c 1475 ; and St. Robert of Poland in 1598. - 238 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. or another, there has been a chronic antipathy between Jew and Christian, sometimes smouldering, sometimes bursting into flame, from the time when St. Paul turned his back on " the unbelieving Jews," who on their part stirred up the Gentiles against him. It has been already observed that even in this country, the natural home of religious toleration, Jewish Emancipation did not follow till above a quarter of a century after the emancipation of Dissenters and Roman Catholics, and not then till after a protracted struggle, in which professed Liberals were ranged on opposite sides. There were many like the late Dr. Arnold, including some of Jewish descent though nor longer of the Jewish faith, who were eager to merge or ignore, for political or even ecclesiastical purposes, all differences however wide among professing Christians, while they argued that aliens not in' creed but in race had no part or lot in the administration of a Christian com- monwealth. There is no need to reopen that discussion here. It must suffice to have traced the broad outlines of the history of that Judenhass, which in these closing years of the nineteenth century still shows itself strong enough to foment bitter antipathy and even provoke deadly feuds in more than one country of Europe. XXVII. REVIVAL OF GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE. ON the Sunday after Sir Gilbert Scott's death, Dean Stanley preached a sermon which was published under the title of "The Religious Aspect of Gothic Architecture." It contains, as might be expected, a good deal that is true, though not particularly new, but it is by no means free from the inveterate passion for paradox characteristic of its versatile author. The revival of Gothic architecture, which is closely and notoriously connected with the great religious revival of the present century, is the main subject of the discourse. That style has been generally considered to be, what Mr. Ruskin calls it, the one specifically " Christian " style of architecture. Dr. Stanley is therefore careful to begin by observing that it " was altogether unknown to Pagan or Christian antiquity." He adds that after flourishing for four centuries no explanation being suggested of how it arose it died as completely as if it had never existed, being "repudiated alike by Catholic and Protestant." Of course this is true in a sense, but it is just one of those statements which go far to explain, if not to justify, the seeming paradox that nothing is so delusive as facts. The Gothic style was undoubtedly unknown to the early Christians, for sufficiently obvious reasons ; and 240 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. it was rejected throughout Europe, at the period of the Renaissance, in Catholic and Protestant countries alike, for reasons not less easy of apprehension. But to infer from this with the preacher that Gothic architecture does not possess any peculiarly Christian and indeed peculiarly Catholic significance, but has nearer affinities with Pro- testantism, and was therefore first restored "among the Protestant churches of England, rather than in the Catholic churches of the Continent," is to betray as complete a misapprehension of all the deeper bearings of the question as could well be conceived. Let us look a little more closely into the matter. The early Christians did not build Gothic churches, first because they did not, and could not, build churches at all. Lord Shaftesbury had probably forgotten this when he once said, on a memorable occasion, that " he had rather worship with Lydia on the river's side than with hundreds of surpliced priests in the temple of St. Barna- bas " ; but a professed scholar and historian might have been expected to remember it. And when the age of persecution had passed away and Christians began to erect temples for their worship, they naturally adopted the style they found prevailing around them ; in certain cases indeed they adopted the actual buildings, and thus basilicas were turned from courts of justice into Christian churches. The next four centuries were occupied with theological controversy and the gradual construction of the edifice of Catholic dogma, and then followed the dark period of " Europe's middle night," only broken by the great religious reformation of the second half of the eleventh century. In the twelfth century Gothic archi- REVIVAL OF GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE. 241 tecture arose. Christianity, as Mr. Lecky puts it, has created three things which have been recognised as special types and expressions of its religious sentiment, " the church bell, the organ, and the Gothic cathedral." The first is attributed to Paulinus, bishop of Nola, early in the fifth century; the second took its origin in the East, and was imported into Western Christendom about the seventh century ; the third, like the revival of painting which soon followed, was due to the reawakening sense of beauty interpreted by the Christian instinct of the twelfth century. It became the channel of the religious enthusiasm and the purest expression of the religious feeling of the age, and gave abundant scope for the display of the " lamp of sacri- fice." There is, to cite Mr. Ruskin's words, " an essential baseness in the Renaissance, and an essential nobleness in the Gothic, consisting simply in the pride of the one and the humility of the other." Mr. Lecky, who approaches the subject from a somewhat different point of view, coincides entirely in Mr. Ruskin's estimate of the specifically Chris- tian character of Gothic architecture. He observes that no other building that the world has seen can rival a Gothic cathedral in producing a sensation of blended awe and tranquillity, harmonizing or assuaging passion, lulling to rest the rebellion of the intellect, and creating that un- worldly but most impressive atmosphere befitting a " Church which acts on the imagination by obscurity and terrorism, and by images of solemn and entrancing beauty." He adds very justly that, in proportion as these modes of feeling have prevailed or fallen into disrepute, Gothic architecture has been rapturously admired, or has sunk into disfavour and neglect. It was natural therefore that 242 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. a form of architecture which was distinctively Christian, and " in which the highest sense of beauty was subordinated to the religious sentiment," should have arisen at a time when the dense ignorance that had overspread Europe during the ninth and tenth centuries was yielding to a great revival of moral and intellectual energy under the control of the Church. It was equally natural that, when " the moral and intellectual chaos that preceded the Re- formation " was universal, when painting had been secular- ised, and had passed entirely into the worship of sensuous beauty, the Gothic style should be everywhere superseded by one which some persons may consider more beautiful, but which is universally admitted to be wholly devoid of a religious character. The dominant feeling throughout Europe produced by the Renaissance, which in some countries issued in Protestantism, in others in a kind of diluted and rationalistic Catholicism, was a passionate .recoil from mediaeval Christianity to classical antiquity, which might be summed up fairly enough in Mr. Swin- burne's " Hymn to Proserpine " : O lips that the live blood faints in, the leavings of racks and rods ! ghastly glories of Saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods ! Though all men abase them before you in spirit, and all knees bend, 1 kneel not, neither adore you, but standing, look to the end. It was not an age to appreciate the great works of those who have only "left us their adoration." A certain analogy may indeed be traced between the contrast of Gothic and classical styles of architecture and the contrast of Christian and classical modes of appreciating natural scenery, which is illustrated as Humboldt points out in his Kosmos by the entire absence of descriptive poetry REVIVAL OF GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE. 243 among the Greeks and Romans, whereas " Christianity expanded the views of men in their communion with nature." He cites in proof of this a striking letter (in the middle of the fourth century) of St. Basil's to his friend St. Gregory Nazianzen which is also quoted in a different connection in Newman's Historical Sketches describing his retreat on the banks of the Iris in Pontus, and observes upon it very justly : " In this simple description of scenery and forest life feelings are expressed, which are more intimately in unison with those of modern times than anything that has been transmitted to us from Greek or Roman antiquity." 1 And the last century, which decried Gothic as a barbarous monstrosity, could see nothing in a Swiss mountain but an object of shuddering disgust, and would have found Coleridge's magnificent " Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni" as unmeaning and unmusical as a Gregorian chant. It is quite true then that Gothic architecture was repudiated, as Dean Stanley says, " by Catholic and Protestant alike" in the sixteenth century; but they re- pudiated it in virtue of an influence, by which both alike were at that time dominated, entirely alien to the spirit of historical Christianity. And, as always happens in such cases, the false taste once formed survived and outran the direct operation of the causes which had first produced it. In the sixteenth century our greatest writers, like Spenser and Shakspeare, have no word of sympathy, appreciation, or regret for Gothic architecture. . A curious work was published not many years ago by a French priest, the Abbe Corblet, on the Architecture of the Middle Ages 1 Kosmos, vol v ii. p. 394. Bohn's edition. R 2 244 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. judged by the Writers of the Eighteenth Century, and among those who spoke of it, not only without apprecia- tion, but with mere unqualified contempt, appear the names strangely combined in any common sentiment of Fenelon, Bossuet, Moliere, Fleury, Rollin, Montesquieu La Bruyere, Helvetius, Rousseau, Mengs, and Voltaire. Some reached the height of grotesque absurdity in their depreciatory assumptions. Thus Dupuis thought the zodiacs on cathedrals were a remnant of the worship of Mithra ; Montluisant explained the sculptures on the fa$ade of Notre Dame by the science of the philosopher's stone ; a third critic traced the shape of the ogive to the eggs of Isis. If we turn to English writers of the same period, Smollet gravely declares, speaking of York Minster, "that the external appearance of an old cathedral will be displeasing to the eye of every man who has any idea of propriety and proportion " ; while he describes Durham cathedral as " a huge gloomy pile " somewhat as Archbishop Whately called Milan cathedral " a big idolatrous temple " and could associate no better idea with a church spire than that of a man impaled. Hutche- son, in an able work on the Philosophy of the Beautiful, thought it necessary to enter into an elaborate" argument in order to show that the ancient preference of Gothic to classical architecture need not disprove the universality of the sense of beauty, but was an accidental aberration due to historical associations. At such a time it was natural that Cologne, the latest and one of the most splendid of mediaeval cathedrals, which Wordsworth invoked "the help of angels to complete," should be left unfinished, while the energies of Europe were concentrated on St. REVIVAL OF GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE. 245 Peter's. The "aspiring heat" had failed. And, to cite Mr. Lecky's testimony once more, it is unquestionably " to the Catholic revival of the present century that we mainly owe its revival." To. say that this revival took place among the Protestant churches of England rather than the Roman Catholic churches of the Continent, is only partially true in fact, and wholly misleading is the inference intended to be conveyed. One of the earliest Gothic restorations was of St. Germain des Pres at Paris, about the time of the commencement of the Tractarian movement which so much contributed to the architectural revival in England. And "the splendid if eccentric genius," as Dr. Stanley himself calls him, who took the lead in that revival began as an Anglican High Churchman, and, while to the last he retained strong affinities with Anglicanism, became a Roman Catholic many years before his death. By " the Protestant churches of England " must be meant of course principally and directly those belonging to the Church of England, for the extension of " ecclesiological " taste to Nonconformist places of worship is only a very recent afterthought, when the turn in the tide had become too strong to be resisted. But it was precisely to the renewed impulse given, not to the Protestant but to the Catholic side of Anglicanism, as Mr. Lecky has quite correctly apprehended, that the archi- tectural revival must be ascribed, which has covered the land with some thousands of new Gothic churches, and restored the greater number of the English cathedrals to much of their pristine grandeur. It is not very clear what is meant by saying that the religious power of our cathedrals has gained " in proportion as our worship has become more 246 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. solemn, more simple, more reverential, more comprehensive" nor does the passage referred to in Milman's Latin Chris- tianity throw much light on the matter. Milman points out what is obvious at a glance that the Gothic cathe- dral was " the consummation and completion of (what he calls) mediaeval hierarchical Christianity," and was neces- sary to the full majesty and impressiveness of the mediaeval ritual, with its "remote central ceremonial," its solemn music, its "curling incense," and its long processions. That the religious power of our old cathedrals is not discredited by the Anglican ritual is true, so far as it is true, because of the likeness, not the unlikeness, of that ritual to the forms originally observed in them, from which it is mainly derived, as any one may easily satisfy himself by observing how it fares with those Scotch and foreign cathedrals say at Basle, or Geneva, or Glasgow where Protestant " simplicity " is completely emancipated from that " cloud of superstition which has settled down over a large part of the ecclesiastical world." It is indeed remarkable that a paper on Cologne cathe- dral, contributed some forty years ago to the Quarterly Review, as was reported at the time, by no less dis- tinguished and staunch an Anglican than the late Judge Coleridge, should open with this melancholy confession : " It is a painful reflection, and one that conjures up a multitude of others, that a great cathedral can never again be built in this country. It is perhaps as painful to reflect on the utter disproportion of scale to use in those which still remain to us, but to this habit has familiarised us. We are accustomed to hear the glorious echoes of their nave and aisles awakened at best to the footsteps of a REVIVAL OF GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE. 247 small congregation for the most part only to those of the solitary verger. We are accustomed to see their grand quadrangular cloisters treated merely as covered passages to prebendal back-doors ; their beautiful chapels, those greatest imaginable luxuries of former wealthy piety, used only, if used at all, as waste places for mouldering rubbish. . . . We have' forbidden the pilgrimage, levelled the altar, smashed the image, and extinguished the candle." No doubt there is a visible change since then. Much has been done in England in the way of restoring old cathedrals, and some attempt has been made at build- ing new ones ; " the echoes of nave and aisles " have once more been awakened to the tread of a procession, occasion- ally even the defiled and desecrated " chapels " have been again turned to account, " the altar " replaced, and " the extinguished candle " lit. But this has only become pos- sible by applying a principle exactly the reverse of that recommended by Dean Stanley, and seeking by such means as were available to emulate or revive the old solemnities of Catholic devotion. A Gothic Cathedral derives its supreme value and significance from the con- viction which prompted the original builders, and can alone insure the permanence of their work that it is not only or chiefly a "magnificent architectural monument," but the fitting instrument and expression of the highest ideal of Christian worship. It is precisely because " they dreamt not of a perishable home," who reared those glorious piles, and desired to bequeath to posterity "their adoration," not their handicraft, that both alike still survive. XXVIII. INTOLERANCE OF SCOTCH CALVINISM. IT appears to be pretty generally agreed that there is a great break-up going on of the old dogmatic temper once so characteristic of Scotch Calvinism, though there may be differences of opinion as to the precise extent or the probable consequences of the change. No traveller can fail to be struck with visible signs of a decrease of the rigid Sabba- tarianism once held sacred, and it is already becoming difficult to realise the period, not so very far distant, when a Free Kirk minister was warned by his host not to scandalize the congregation by appearing in the pulpit on Sunday morning with a shaven chin. Ministers, both Free and Established 'the latter especially are said to sit loosely to the Westminster Confession now, and Dr. Macleod Campbell, who was excommunicated for heresy about fifty years ago, received a doctor's degree from the University of Glasgow before his death. Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, whose theology was of a still broader and more eclectic, not to say nebulous, type, was a layman, but he seems to have been popularly accepted almost as a prophet by his fellow-countrymen. Dean Stanley was always readily welcomed in Presbyterian pulpits. And the synods of more than one of the three disunited but doc- INTOLERANCE OF SCOTCH CALVINISM. 249 trinally concordant Churches which accept the formularies of John Knox have been exercised by the open or implicit disavowal on the part of influential preachers and pro- fessors, like Dr. Robertson Smith, of the authority of the Longer and Shorter Catechism and the Confession of Faith. It has even been rumoured that, in the event of disestab- lishment, a large section of the ministers of the Kirk would pass over to the Episcopal Church and bring their flocks with them, not indeed from any abstract preference for episcopacy, but in pursuit of a wider freedom than the Presbyterian platform seems likely to afford them. Be that as it may and we need not here concern ourselves with future possibilities the change of feeling which has recently taken place, if it is not greatly exaggerated, is a sufficiently remarkable phenomenon, and can hardly imply less than a serious change, whether for better or for worse, of national character. Most of us are familiar with Mr. Buckle's elaborate comparison of Scotch and Spanish bigotry ; he even identifies the two countries as the most "priest- ridden " in Europe. The word no doubt requires explan- ation, when so applied, but the meaning is obvious enough. And it may be worth while to show by a brief review of the facts, that there was in the temper of Scotch religionism an element of dogmatism, or bigotry, or intolerance, or what- ever we may please to call it, distinguishing it alike from that of England and of most nations of the Continent. It has been observed by a modern writer that there was one country where the Puritan ministers succeeded in moulding alike the character and the habits of the nation, and that, while England was breaking loose from old super- stitions and advancing along the paths of knowledge, 250 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. " Scotland still cowered in helpless subjection before her clergy." And one way in which this clerical influence was kept up was by fostering the belief in a continual suc- cession of miracles, sometimes wrought for the protection or greater honour of the clergy themselves, but in most cases miracles of terror. Disease, tempest, famine, and other calamities were attributed to the direct intervention of evil spirits, who were supposed frequently to appear in bodily shape. Sir Walter Scott has pointed out in his Letters on Demonology that the Calvinists were of all sects the most suspicious of sorcery, and the most eager to punish it as a heinous crime. Hence in a country where almost every kind of amusement was suppressed or tabooed, and men's thoughts were concentrated with peculiar energy on theological ideas, the dread of witchcraft was all but uni- versal. It was not, as elsewhere, a superstition diluted by imposture ; Mr. Buckle has called attention to the remark- able circumstance that among all the terribty numerous witch trials in Scotland, not a single instance of imposture is recorded. These trials were almost entirely conducted by the clergy, but " the secular arm " was placed ungrudg- ingly at their service for execution of the sentence. On the hideous tortures employed to extract confessions, and the punishments eventually inflicted, it is unnecessary to dwell here. Suffice it to observe how one traveller casually mentions having seen nine women burning together at Leith in 1664, and how in 1674 nine others were con- demned to be burnt in a single day. James VI. our James I. was peculiarly sensitive in the matter of witch- craft, and had this bond of hearty union with the ministers of the Kirk, whom otherwise he so little liked. And it is INTOLERANCE OF SCOTCH CALVINISM. 251 noticeable, considering what is said of mediaeval ignorance and superstition, that the first law against witchcraft in Scotland was passed in 1563, and it was not till thirty years later that it began to be systematically carried out. The persecution was therefore in a very special sense the work of the Presbyterian ministry, or rather of their creed, which, partly from political causes, connected with the history of the Scotch Reformation, was shaped more directly on the lines of the Old than of the New Testament. These executions for witchcraft came to an end about 1730, but not apparently by the good will of the Presbytery, who passed a resolution fifty years afterwards deploring the prevalent scepticism on the subject. It must not, however, for a moment be imagined that the dogmatism and intolerance of the Scottish Kirk showed itself only or chiefly in the matter of witchcraft. There was no less zeal displayed in persecuting Papists and other misbelievers when opportunity for it occurred. One of the first results of the final triumph of the Reformation in Scotland was a law prohibiting any priest from celebrating, or worshipper from hearing mass, under pain of confiscation of his goods for the first offence, exile for the second, and death for the third. John Knox, " the ruffian of the Reformation," who, according to Mr. Froude's characteristic paradox, " was no narrow fanatic who, in a world in which God's grace was equally visible in a thousand creeds (he would have burnt any one for saying so), could see truth and goodness nowhere but in his own formula," is described with perfect accuracy by Dr. Johnson as " the most intolerant of an intolerant creed and an intolerant country." Mr. Froude forgets to remind his readers of Knox's angry denunciation of permitting 252 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. the " idolatry " of the mass, even in the single case of the Queen's private chapel at Holyrood, seeing that " one mass was more fearful to him than if 10,000 armed enemies were landed in any part of the realm." Nor does he tell them how Knox in his Appellation teaches that " none pro- voking the people to idolatry ought to be exempted from the punishment of death," while the charge of idolatry is carefully explained to include " the whole rabble of the Papistical clergy." At the time of the Commonwealth the Presbyterians did their utmost to thwart the more liberal policy of the Protector, who was willing to tolerate all forms of Christianity, with the significant exceptions of " Popery and Prelacy." They wished those only to be tolerated who accepted the " fundamentals " of Christianity, and the list of fundamentals was so drawn as to exclude not only Socinians, who were to be punished with death, but Papists, Arminians, Antinomians, Baptists, and Quakers, who were to be imprisoned for life. In 1645 the Scotch Parliament solemnly protested against " the toleration of any sects or schisms contrary to our Solemn League and Covenant." And the Puritans carried with them across the Atlantic to the new world the intolerance they had practised at home. Maryland in the hands of its Catholic founders had been much to their credit the solitary refuge of oppressed sectaries of every kind, but when the Puritans gained the upper hand there, they at once sub- verted the existing rule, and enacted the whole penal code against those who had so generously received them. So again the Pilgrim Fathers revived in Massachusetts the Puritan panic about witchcraft, which was dying out in England though still dominant in Scotland. Multitudes INTOLERANCE OF SCOTCH CALVINISM. 253 were scourged, tortured, and imprisoned on this charge, and many were put to death. The New England colony indeed, during the quarter of a century or so that it had its swing, represented with a perfection unattainable elsewhere the Puritan ideal of toleration, which is the more remarkable considering that the settlers had fled from the ecclesiastical tyranny of Archbishop Laud and the Star Charpber, expressly and avowedly in order " to enjoy the blessing of a pure Gospel." It was not perhaps unnatural that they should be some- what exercised by the vagaries of a certain Anne Hutchin- son, a " preacheress " two centuries and a half before her age in resolving to flout the authority of St. Paul, though the result certainly justified the wisdom of the apostolic veto. Not content with assailing the regular Puritan ministers as " Baal's priests, Popish factors, Scribes, Pharisees, and opposers of Christ," she went on to propound a miscellane- ous assortment of heresies, including inter alia a denial of the Personality of the Holy Ghost, of heaven and hell, and of what she termed " the deadly doctrine of the covenant of works." This was too much for the ruling authorities, who had already decided that " it is impious ignorance to say " what they denounced Laud for disputing " that men ought to have liberty of conscience," inasmuch as " religion admits of no eccentric notions," i. e. none differing from their own, and therefore " for the security of the flock we pen up the wolf." The lupine Mrs. Hutchinson, however, was not " penned," but excommunicated and banished, and she afterwards came to a miserable end at Long Island in a massacre of the colonists by the Indians, to the undis- guised satisfaction of her former judges at Massachusetts. 254 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. The Rev. Thomas Welde, who had taken a prominent part in her condemnation, lost no time in proclaiming from the pulpit that, as no such outrage had hitherto been com- mitted by the Indians, " therefore God's hand is the more apparently seen herein, to pick out this woeful woman, and make her and those belonging to her an unheard-of heavy example of their cruelty above all others." But this was not the worst. Sir Harry Vane, who sincerely disap- proved of persecution on all sides, had returned to Eng- land, where, however, he was himself shamefully persecuted by Cromwell, as a consistent opponent of every form of arbitrary government. Meanwhile in New England pro- scription, fine, banishment, and capital punishment became the order of the day for Anglicans, Quakers, Anabaptists, Adamites, and other such " unhappy sectaries and energu- mens." Not only did the " Blue Code " so named ap- parently as seeming to be written in blood strictly forbid " reading the Common Prayer, keeping Christmas Day or Saints' days, making mince-pies, or playing on any instru- ment except the drum, the trumpet, and the Jews' harp," which were supposed to have a kind of Biblical flavour about them ; it also forbade mothers to kiss their babies on the Sabbath day, and enjoined that no one " should run or walk in his garden, or elsewhere, except reverently to and from meeting." Readers of The Scarlet Letter will readily understand the moral results of this sort of legisla- tion. As to religious toleration, " If," says one of their leading writers of that day, " after men continue in obstin- ate rebellion against the light, the civil magistrate shall still walk towards them in soft and gentle commiseration, his softness and gentleness is excessive large to foxes and INTOLERANCE OF SCOTCH CALVINISM. 255 wolves, but his bowels are miserably straitened and hard- ened against the poor sheep and lambs of Christ. Nor is it frustrating the end of Christ's coming, but a direct advancing it, to destroy the bodies of those wolves who seek to destroy the souls of those for whom Christ died." Jt is a curious satire on human weakness and inconsistency, that the hideous system of persecution enjoined in New England by the very men who had fled, as they elegantly expressed it, from "those proud Anakimes, the tiranous bishops, and their proud and profane supporters and cruel defenders " under Charles I., was at last brought to an end after the Restoration by a peremptory order from Charles II. There are no crimes like those that are wrought in the name of liberty. In Scotland the interference of the Kirk Sessions with every department not only of public but private life was no less inquisitorial and vexatious. Resistance was punished by fines, whipping, branding with red-hot iron, and public penances of the most humiliating kind. And the sins which incurred those penalties, and many of which have till very recently lain under the ban of public opinion in Scotland, were of the most various and most fanciful kind. For an innkeeper to admit a Catholic to his house, or for a town to hold a market on Saturday or Monday, as being too near the Sabbath, were sins. It was a sin to visit a friend, to water your garden, to shave, to ride, to walk, or to whistle on the Sabbath. To bathe was a deadly sin on Sunday, and of very questionable lawfulness at any time ; a boy had once been miraculously struck dead while indulging in that carnal amusement, and the Glasgo-.v Kirk Sess'on in 1691 invoked the aid of the civil power to 256 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. prevent boys from swimming altogether. As Chambers puts it in his Annals of Scotland, " to the Puritan Kirk of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries every outward demonstration of natural good spirits was a sort of sin, to be as far as possible suppressed," and thus " the whole sunshine of life was, as it were, squeezed out of the com- munity." The standard of a religious nation was the prevalence of universal gloom. That this scheme of life is the consistent and logical outcome of the Calvinistic theology is true enough. And we cannot wonder that the Scotch, who are a logical people, should have thus exemplified in practice the faith which had been so deeply ingrained into their national character. Still less need we be surprised to learn that the outward change, which has of late years attracted the notice even of casual observers, does not stand alone. It is obvious that the Westminster Confession must have been subjected to a " verifying faculty " of divines, and the Longer and Shorter Catech : sm have lost their hold over the popular mind, before the tone of ordinary preaching and practice could undergo any material alteration. What may be the moral or religious results of this change in the long run is a question on which it would be premature as yet to hazard any confident opinion. A narrow or preju- diced creed may often be better than none, and the collapse of a firmly compacted dogmatic system, whether true or false, not unfrequently brings with it, at least for the time, a dissolution of all religious belief; if not also of all moral restraints. Thus, as Macaulay observes, Catholic countries have become infidel and again reverted to Catholicism, but have never since the sixteenth century become Protestant INTOLERANCE OF SCOTCH CALVINISM. 257 On the other hand, it must be remembered that the profes- sion, however sincere, of a rigidly ascetic code of religious obligation has by no means always proved a sure guaran- tee for even an average observance of morality. Nature will have her revenges, and when the most ordinary and harmless recreations are forbidden as sinful, is apt to seek compensation in indulgences which no moralist would be willing to condone. The charges brought against Nova- tians and Manicheans in the early ages of the Church have been brought with equal plausibility against Puritans in our own day. One vice at all events, which Christians of every school, as well as non-Christian moralists, are agreed in condemning, is reputed to be a special opprobrium of Scotland, and the strictest observance of all those minute and oppressive Sabbatarian regulations, to which reference was made just now, has been found compatible with conse- crating the day of rest to a quiet but unlimited assimilation of the liquid which inebriates but does not cheer. And under the old regime to be drunk in private, though of course not sanctioned as allowable, would have been accounted a far less heinous outrage on the dignity of the "honourable Sabbath" than to whistle in the public street. On its theological side Calvinism has in all continental countries shown a tendency to develop into Socinianism, which the early Calvinists, after the example of their founder, who burnt Servetus, never hesitated to treat as a capital crime, and it will be curious to watch whether a relaxation of the old orthodox strictness in Scotland tends in the same direction. Swedenborg, we may remember, insisted on connecting the Nicene doctrine with Calvinism, and there- fore repudiated both together. At present perhaps the 258 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. prevailing disposition among the Broad school of Scotch Presbyterian divines is to reject dogmatic restrictions of all kinds, whether orthodox or the reverse. But it is needless to speculate on future contingencies ; let us be content for the present to take note of existing facts. For the last three centuries the traditional Calvinism of Scotland has shown a stern and vigorous tenacity of life, which has no parallel in any of the Reformed Churches elsewhere. It has now, for the first time since the Reformation, entered on a state of transition of which as yet we see only the beginning, but which cannot fail, whatever may be its ultimate term, to have an important bearing not only on ecclesiastical matters, but on the habits and character of the people. XXIX. FORCE OF INDIVIDUALISM IN RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS. THERE are some passages in Mr. Gladstone's very interesting and suggestive paper on the Evangelical Move- ment in the British Quarterly Review for July 1879, which open out a wider question than that with which the writer is immediately concerned. And it will therefore be suit- able to introduce the present subject by a reference to one particular portion of his argument. After pointing out that the Evangelical movement, influential as it was, never attained, even at the close of the last and the beginning of the present century, anything like predominance in the Church of England that it remained to the last more or less under the ban of authority, and was viewed with dis- trust or aversion by the great majority of the clergy Mr. Gladstone proceeds to explain how, as it appears to him, it has left its mark generally and permanently on the English Church. The explanation may sound at first paradoxical or far-fetched, but there can be little doubt that it is substantially correct. He considers that the Evangelical movement was, not simply in order of time or by process of reaction, but in some degree by direct causation, the parent of the Tractarian movement which S 2 260 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY followed it. And he holds that it is through this latter movement, especially in the later offshoot from it called Ritualism, that the Evangelical revival has so largely affected the tone of Anglican preaching and religious life. There is a great deal to be said for this view of the matter, but we may confine ourselves for the present to one argument on which Mr. Gladstone lays, and justly lays, special stress. He recalls to our memory what is indeed well known, but is apt to be forgotten or ignored, how nearly all the great leaders of the specific Oxford movement notably the greatest of them all began their course as Evangelicals, and, what might seem still stranger, how all the most conspicuous men among the Tractarian converts to Rome also belonged originally to the same school. It was not divines trained in high Anglican principles, like Keble, Isaac Williams, and Hook, or to add another illustrious name Hugh James Rose, so much as "the Newmans, the Wilberforces, and the Mannings," whose antecedents were very different, who gave its shape and direction to the movement. And the latter class also supplied the most distinguished converts to the Church of Rome, such as the two Cardinals, who may be called respectively the moral and the official heads of that Church in England, the Wilberforces, Mr. Sibthorpe, and, as the writer might have added, the late Dr. Faber, whose early Evangelicalism was perhaps more pronounced than that of any of his fellows, and certainly exercised a more perceptible influence on his religious tone and teaching to the last, in spite of his fervid Ultramontanism. On the other hand, Mr. Gladstone is surely mistaken in speaking of Mr. Manning as a Tract- writer. For some INDIVIDUALISM IN RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS. 261 time after his abandonment of the Evangelical party he sided with the pronounced Anglicanism of Hook and his school. It is forgotten perhaps that, on the collapse of the British Critic, the High Church party was represented by two quarterly reviews the Christian Remembrancer, which took a broader line under the editorship of the late Professor Mozley and the late Mr. Scott of Hoxton, in which Dean Church wrote most of the papers afterwards published as Essays and Reviews ; and the English Review, the representative of the most rigid Anglicanism. Arch- deacon Manning was a contributor to the latter periodical. So far we are concerned with facts which can hardly be disputed ; and now for the explanation. Mr. Gladstone indicates his belief that the extreme individualism which was a weakness of the Evangelical movement, and which neither the Roman Church nor the Nonconformist bodies would have tolerated, acted throughout as a drawback on the work of these men as Anglicans, and finally drove them out of the Anglican pale altogether. The correctness of this assumption turns on what may be termed a chrono- logical question. Did the " Tractarian " seceders precede, coincide with, or follow a remarkable change in this respect in the temper of the Church of England ? Individualism of doctrine is no doubt at present virtually tolerated in the Church of England to an extent which neither the Church of Rome nor, probably, any of the Dissenting communities would endure. It is obvious that such toleration must have its limits from the nature of the case, for a clergy of whom it could justly be said quot homines tot sentcnticz would be fatal to the coherence, and therefore eventually to the existence, of any religious body. And it may be 252 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. true enough, as the writer hints, that these limits have been nearly reached in the Church of England, and that there is a risk of divergence increasing till it lets in the peril of disestablishment. Be that as it may, it remains none the less true that, in spite of this wide doctrinal variety, which is in its present extreme form a thing of very recent growth, and partly in consequence of it, the Church of England has not usually shown herself very tolerant of any other kind of individualism among her clergy, and that she has suffered from want of doing so. On the other hand, it is surely quite clear that there has been not less but more scope given for this diversity of vocation, certainly in the Roman Catholic Church, and in some at least of the Nonconformist bodies. There is evidently much force in Macaulay's famous contrast between the position of John Wesley and that of Ignatius Loyola ; the Church of Rome utilised Ignatius, while the Church of England drove Wesley into revolt. Whether a different policy on the part of her rulers would have availed to retain Mr. Newman permanently within the Anglican pale, is a question which it would be scarcely possible, perhaps even for himself, to answer confidently now, and is hardly fitting for others to discuss ; that the policy they actually did pursue materially helped to drive him out of it, he has expressly told us. And there can be no doubt at all that a different treatment would have turned Wesley into one of its most effective bulwarks, instead of the founder of a sect which has proved its most determined and powerful rival. It is remarkable that Mr. Newman himself should have taken as the theme of one of his earliest University sermons, preached the year before the INDIVIDUALISM IN RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS. 263 beginning of the Oxford movement (January 1832), " Personal Influence the Means of propagating the Truth." There are passages in it which he might not be disposed to endorse now as they stand though he has not qualified them by any annotations in the new edition for the visible Church is almost put aside as a teacher, and every- thing is ascribed to the moral influence of gifted persons, who are represented as the sole " legitimate interpreters " of Scripture. But there is no reason for assuming that the main drift of the discourse would be out of harmony with his present opinions, and it is illustrated by his whole career, since the day when he sat " sobbing bitterly " on his bed in an inn at Castro Giovanni, and replied to the startled inquiries of his servant, "I have a work to do in England." The same idea is worked out in the lines on " The Course of Truth " written at Malta in the previous December ; while another of his poems in the Lyra Apos- tolica ends with the significant query, whether in the "dim future" we shall " NEED (sic] a prophet for Truth's Creed." And he reaffirms it in more prosaic form in the Apologia, where he observes that " living movements do not come of Committees," but rather from " the force of per- sonal influence and congeniality of thought." Nor can it be said that there is anything peculiar to Cardinal Newman in this insistence on the importance of individual action and influence, in the promotion of religious truth, though it is of course a conviction likely to come home with special force to men of exceptional genius and intensity of character. But the fact itself is one which lies on the surface of all ecclesiastical history, not to say of the history of all religions. But, as the subject is a wide one, 264 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. we had better here confine ourselves to Christian history. In the Sermon already mentioned Mr. Newman gives a single example only of the principle, when he says that " before now even one man has impressed an image on the Church which, through God's mercy, shall not be effaced while time lasts " ; and this is explained in a note to refer to Athanasius, on whose works he was at the time engaged. The example is a critical one. Athanasius in the East and Augustine in the West have undoubtedly left their impress from that day to this on the doctrine of the Church, the one, as might be expected, in its theological, the other in its anthropological aspect. But this is not the ordinary way in which individualism has taken effect. When we speak of Athanasius contra imindum, we mean that Athanasius in his day supported, or seemed to support, alone the burden of orthodox belief, on a point vital to the whole structure of Christian doctrine, against an heterodox world. But such a doctrinal crisis as that of the Arian controversy is not common in Church history, nor has it generally been met by the energy of a single individual. The elaboration of dogma is mostly carried on by theological experts and through the corporate action of the Church. It is rather in the conversion of worldlings or unbelievers, the enforcement or application of great principles, and the development of the moral or spiritual life of the age, than in the abstract enunciation or vindication of dogmatic truths, that personal influence has played so prominent a part. It would be obvious to refer to the case of the Apostles, but it might be replied though the reply would be only partially relevant that the gift of inspiration and of miracles differentiates them INDIVIDUALISM IN RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS. 265 from ordinary teachers. Take, however, the gradual con- struction of the splendid edifice of the mediaeval Papacy ; for a splendid edifice it was, whether we admire it or not. Viewed on its theological side, it may be regarded by one party as a creation of Divine Providence, and by another as the masterpiece of Satan ; but viewed on its human side, it was chiefly the work of some half-dozen great pontiffs in successive periods, who had grasped at once the sig- nificance of their own position and its relations to the social and religious needs of the age. If we subtract from the catalogue of Popes such names as Leo I., Gregory I., Nicholas I., Hildebrand, and the third and fourth Inno- cents, it is difficult to see, humanly speaking, how the result could have been achieved. And what these master spirits did for building up the external polity, men like Benedict, Dominic, Francis of Assisi, and Ignatius Loyola did, in very different ways and at different periods, for moulding or reforming the internal life of the Church. It must be clear, for instance, even to those whose inform- ation is confined to Sir James Stephen's charming but discursive and sketchy biography, how thoroughly indi- vidualistic, if we may use the term, was the Franciscan revival of the thirteenth century. And the same may be said of the origin and idea of the widely diverse, and in its final result rigidly regimental, system introduced three centuries later by Ignatius Loyola. It was his individual influence more than anything else that stemmed the advancing tide of the Protestant Reformation. Nor was the success of the attack less due to the personal energy of Luther than the successful resistance to Ignatius. And in both cases alike the determining force lay far more in the 266 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. vigorous personality of the men than in theological argu- ment. Luther, as a theologian, is not to be named in the same day with Calvin, but his influence was infinitely greater ; his peculiar scheme of theology had a moral and personal rather than an intellectual basis, and it may well be questioned whether it would ever have taken the shape it ultimately assumed, had a Pope otherwise minded than Leo X. understood how to appropriate his reforming zeal, as Innocent III. had appropriated the devotion of Francis. But the Papacy of the Renaissance had lost its cunning, and Luther was rudely repelled, like Wesley afterwards, with not very dissimilar results. If we turn back to England, the same phenomenon again presents itself. The English Reformation is an exception which helps to prove the rule. It was, properly speaking, not a religious or theological, but a political movement ; there was not, as Dollinger has pointed out, a single man of first-rate eminence, either for character or capacity, among the English Reformers ; too many of them sank in both respects below the level of respectability. Unlike the Scotch and Continental movement, it emanated from the Government, not from the people, and the Puritan revolt which grew out of it was closely connected with the advance of the democratic spirit. But the Caroline reac- tion of the next century, which has left its permanent mark on the Established Church, owes its origin and success mainly to the individual energy of men like Laud, and the individual piety of men like Andrewes and Ken ; and when the awakening came from the long spiritual slumber of the eighteenth century, it was again through the personal influence of a few gifted and devoted men that the work INDIVIDUALISM IN RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS. 267 was wrought. Wesley himself never willingly departed from the lines of the received orthodoxy, and was so far from sympathising with the Calvinism of Whitefield that he said he could sooner be a Turk, or a deist, or even an atheist, than believe a doctrine which made God an almighty tyrant. And Whiten" eld's electric power over the masses gathered on the bleak hill-side to listen to him did not arise from the peculiar doctrine, or even exactly from the eloquence, of his sermons for they are commonplace enough to read but from the marvellous force of individual earnestness he put into them ; it was the contact of soul with soul that gave reality to his message, when the tears streamed down the grimy faces of the rough Cornish miners, who had known little before of the love of God or man. In the Church of England the Evangelical movement owed whatever success it had at the time to the personal zeal and weight of men like Simeon and Wilberforce and Fletcher of Madeley. And if Mr. Gladstone's estimate of the net result of the move- ment be correct, as there is good reason to think it is, that is a still more striking testimony to the true secret of its power. For, so far as it has acted on the country through the medium of Tractarianism, the process was effected by individual agency alone, not only without the aid of authority, but in the teeth of its most strenuous and persistent opposition. The Tractarian leaders, as has been pointed out, were most of them trained in the Evangelical School, and the new revival was carried on by the same means of direct individual action as the old one, but with far more commanding attributes of moral and intellectual power. It was a true instinct which told 268 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. Dr. Newman he had " a work to do in England " ; the movement which never bore his name, and from which he retired at an early stage of its progress, is hardly conceiv- able without him. " A prophet " is in one sense con- stantly needed " for truth's creed." The purest system of doctrine, the most perfect organization, will not hold its own witho.ut the individual energy which can alone breathe into the dry bones the breath of life. Systems grow cut of individual exertions, and require to be sustained or renewed by them. And hence Churches which repress that energy, and in proportion as they repress it, must be regarded as in a state of partial or incipient decadence. The Catholic Church was at its lowest ebb at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and the Church of England at the close of the eighteenth. Heresy signifies in etymo- logical strictness the obstinate preference of individual opinion, and the best security against its triumph is found in giving free scope in the service of orthodoxy to indi- vidual zeal. To use Scriptural language, unity of spirit can only be preserved by a generous recognition of the diversity of gifts. XXX. PREACHING ANCIENT AND MODERN. A WELL-KNOWN Oxford tutor of a former generation, when asked why he preferred long walks on Sunday to attendance at St. Mary's, replied that he preferred sermons from stones to sermons from sticks. It is presumably a similar preference or a similar dread which has inspired so many discussions on preaching of late years. There have been articles in reviews, and a book by Mr. Mahaffy, better known for his classical publications, and " Conferences on Pew and Pulpit " at the City Temple, and an address by Mr. Walter in the Chapter House of St. Paul's, both critical and suggestive. It may, however, be doubted whether he attached its due weight to a preliminary distinction, which he mentioned, but scarcely appeared to have thought out in all its bearings. He observed that oratory is far less cultivated now than in ancient Greece and Rome, where public speaking monopolized that control of public opinion which it has come to share with the press. But it neces- sarily follows from this that preaching, and still more the public reading of the Bible, to which a large portion of his discourse was devoted, cannot hold the same position in the Church of our own day as in days before printing was invented, or even before " the schoolmaster was abroad." 270 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. It is in fact very difficult for us to realise to its full extent the distinction between a hearing and a reading age. It has justly been observed that, if society had never known any but a reading age, the history of the world would have lost one cf its most brilliant scenes, and oratory its greatest recorded triumph. When Demos- thenes persuaded the Thebans, while the Macedonian army was already hovering on their frontiers, to join the alliance of Athens, his eloquence wrought a wonder second only to that ascribed by poetry to Amphion's lyre, when the walls of that same city of Thebes rose obedient to its call. But the most eloquent speech of Demosthenes delivered in the present House of Commons might hardly influence half-a- dozen votes. The ablest speeches in the present day are made rather to be read than to be listened to, and this holds good also of many contemporary sermons. It may indeed be truly said that the whole character of modern as distinguished from ancient literature is affected by this fundamental change. Socrates taught his philosophy not by writing but by word of mouth ; the " erotetic," or, as he himself called it, obstetric method was of its very essence. Herodotus recited his history at the Olympic games, where, we are told, it drew tears from the sterner eyes of Thucy- dides. The poems of Homer, if our modern critics will allow them to be so named, were chanted by the Rhapso- dists. The same distinction has left its mark on our theology. As a well-known writer puts it, " the hymns of Luther and the sermons at St. Paul's Cross may find their parallel in the first age of Christianity, not in the con- fession of Augsburg or the decrees of Trent." The greatest Fathers of the Church, like St. Chrysostom, St. Ambrose PREACHING ANCIENT AND MODERN. 271 St. Augustine, and St. Leo, were also among the greatest preachers of their day. For all practical purposes the centre of influence has been completely shifted by the printing press. Thus, to take a very different illustration, Demosthenes has left us (in the De Corona) a graphic picture of the arrival at Athens of the messenger announcing Philip's seizure of Elateia, and how all the citizens, from the prytanes downwards, thronged to the market-place to hear the news. But when tidings arrived in London of the battles of Waterloo, Inkermann, or Sedan, the centre of attraction was the post or telegraph office. And so even in ordinary times the Roman or Athenian idler, whose object in life was to hear or tell something new, loitered* not in the Club or Coffee-house, but in the barber's shop. It was there the fatal news of the destruction of the Athenian army in Sicily was first made known, and a barber was actually put to the torture for spreading the report. To come to later times, when Richard III. wished to secure his own succession to the English Crown by discrediting the legitimacy of his unhappy nephews in public opinion, his first care was, not to send an inspired article to a political organ, but to cause Shaw, a noted preacher of the day, to deliver a sermon to that effect at Paul's Cross. To return to our immediate subject, we may readily conceive with what keen and breathless interest the public reading of a manuscript Gospel or Epistle would be listened to by an infant Christian community of the apostolic age. And for some centuries afterwards the reading of Scripture continued to form an integral portion of the worship of the Church, as before of the Jewish 272 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. Synagogue ; and it was usually followed, as in the Syna- gogue, by what Justin Martyr calls "a word of exhorta- tion," which gradually developed, especially among the Greeks, into a regular sermon by the bishop or some priest appointed by him. The selection of Scripture lessons, as we should call them, was at first left to the discretion of each bishop, but in course of time a systematic arrangement was adopted with reference to the various seasons and solemnities of the Christian year. St. Chry- sostom, himself the most eloquent preacher of his age, frequently complains of the prevalent habit of attaching an exaggerated importance to the sermon, to the disparage- ment of public prayer, and the evil consequences, shown on the one hand in the growth of a too theatrical and declamatory style of preaching, and on the other in the custom of noisily applauding impressive passages of popular preachers. " This," he told his hearers on one occasion, " is no theatre, nor are you sitting here as spectators of a tragedy." It is, indeed, curious to observe how close is the similarity, in points of detail, between ancient and modern preaching, though the stricter decorum of our own day has banished, at least in the Church of England, all outward demonstrations of approval from the sacred walls. Then, as now, the sermon was sometimes delivered from the altar steps, sometimes from the (3f)fJ.a or pulpit; then, as now, shorthand writers eagerly employed themselves in taking down notes of the discourses of famous preachers, so that St. Gregory of Nazianzus especially addresses them in his farewell sermon at Constantinople, and at a later date Gaudentius of Brescia complained of their transcribing him inaccurately. Then too, as now, sermons were sometimes, PREACHING ANCIENT AND MODERN. 273 though rarely, read off entirely from notes or manuscript, as is so common in England, or committed to memory, like those of Bourdaloue, Massillon, and the great French preachers generally ; sometimes delivered partly extempore, according to a plan previously prepared ; and sometimes altogether extempore. Thus St. Augustine tells us that his choice of subjects was occasionally suggested by the passage of Scripture which the lector had been reading, and St. Chrysostom speaks of something he witnessed on the way to church, or which occurred during divine service, suggesting the theme of his discourse, as when the lighting of lamps during his sermon had drawn off the attention of his audience. Very likely we might be able to trace an analogy in another respect also, if our means of informa- tion about those remote ages were as full as those supplied by the more various and voluminous literature of the present day. But, as a matter of fact, only the discourses of really distinguished writers have come down to us, and there are no journals or biographies, or serials and news- papers, of the patristic era to enlighten us on the popular taste in the matter. But we know that even apostles antici pated the snare of " itching ears," and it is more than probable that popular preachers often won as cheap a reputation among the early Christians as among their descendants. By degrees, however, preaching died out altogether in the East, and in the middle ages it had from various causes sunk to a low ebb in the Latin. Church. It was still supposed to be the special function of the episco- pate, but the statesman or warrior prelates of mediaeval Europe lacked alike time, inclination, and aptitude for discharging it, and thus again the Anglican prelates at T 274 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BICGRAPHY. a later date were stigmatized by their Puritan assailants as " dumb dogs that cannot bark." And hence it naturally became, as Milman observes, " the strength of all the heresiarchs of all the sects," till St. Dominic in the thir- teenth century founded the Order of Friar Preachers, in order to meet them with their own weapons. The Reform- ation, it need hardly be added, gave a fresh impetus to preaching both among the assailants and the defenders of the old faith, though the pulpit was then already begin- ning to share its influence on public opinion with the press. And we must remember, after making all allowance for change of circumstances, that oratory will ever be a power among men, while human nature remains what it is, and especially that sacred oratory can never fail to hold an important place in the prophetic ministry of the Church. 1 1 is of course quite true, as has often been pointed out, that "preaching the Gospel " does not mean in the New Testa- ment only or even chiefly what we call sermons, still less of the kind so lovingly commended by the Methodist old woman in Loss and Gain, " Dear Mr. Spoutaway, he goes to my heart, he goes through me," and that the ritual and ordinances of the Church are, and were intended to be, in a very real sense a proclamation or setting forth of Christ. But it is also true that from the first, preaching, as we now understand the term, was a distinctive and almost unique peculiarity of Christian worship. It formed no part of the official duties of the Pagan, or even of the Mosaic priesthood, though it had latterly been introduced into the service of the Synagogue. Mr. Lecky speaks of " a system of popular preaching " being created and diffused by the Stoics of the later Empire ; and he instances the PREACHING ANCIENT AND MODERN. 275 Cynics, who may be compared to the Mendicant Orders of the Church, and the Rhetoricians, who were a kind of itinerant lecturers. But he admits that the analogy in the latter case is a faint one, neither the talents nor the character of these Rhetoricians, any more than of the Sophists of a previous age, being usually such as to com- mand respect. And as regards both classes, it may be doubted whether their "system of popular preaching," so far as it existed at all, was not consciously or unconsciously borrowed from the contemporary usage of the Christian Church, as was certainly the case with the Emperor Julian's not very successful attempt to import it into his unreal and semi-Christianized revival of the Pagan cult. There can be no question then that the object of raising the standard of preaching is one of high practical import- ance. As to public reading, there can perhaps little more be done than to take all available precautions against slovenliness or irreverence. The well-known example, to which Mr. Walter and others have referred from their own recollection, of the marvellous effect produced by Mr. Newman's reading of the lessons at St. Mary's, Oxford, at once sympathetic and suggestive yet perfectly simple, is one which ordinary men must be content to admire rather than to imitate. If careless reading is to be. con- demned, there is also an opposite and by no means purely hypothetical danger of affectation arising from overmuch care. The case is not singular of an Evangelical divine of the last generation, who had taken lessons in reading the service from Mrs. Siddons, and the result, though he was himself not otherwise than devout, was decidedly more striking than devotional. But with preaching it is different. T 2 276 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. Orators indeed, like poets, are born and not made, but still a good deal may be done by judicious training, and even born orators cannot with impunity neglect it. No doubt, as has been often said, " the secret of good preaching must be learnt on the knees," but that is no excuse for ignoring the more human elements of success. A great barrister is reported to have expressed his surprise that the clergy did not make better use of their quite unique opportunities : "A whole week," he exclaimed, " to get up the case, and no reply ! " But the requirements alike of conscience and of public opinion would leave a parish priest of the present day a very limited fraction of the " whole week " for com- posing his Sunday sermon, or possibly his two sermons, and the absence of "reply" is by no means an unmixed benefit to the preacher, or at least to his discourse. That he is never under'the fire of contradiction may tempt him to be shallow or supercilious, and is a good reason why some such purifying process of criticism should be supplied in the education of preachers. And it does seem strange that what is practised almost everywhere else should be omitted in the ordinary course of training for the Anglican ministry. The composition and delivery of sermons form part of the regular training of candidates for orders among the Presbyterians and Protestant Nonconformists, as also in Catholic seminaries. i And without some such prepara- 1 Some such plan is said to have been adopted by the late primate, when Bishop of London, and an amusing story is told about it. He had set a candidate for deacon's orders to preach in the private chapel at London House before himself and his Examining Chaplain, the late Dr. Stanley. The young preacher, whose conception of the duties of his office was a very definite and somewhat narrow one, began by dividing his hearers into "the converted and the unconverted." The PREACHING ANCIENT AND MODERN. 277 tory discipline we cannot fairly expect those who are not endowed with exceptional gifts, or even wish them, to preach without book. Reading sermons is a peculiarity, and a comparatively modern peculiarity, of the Church of England ; it is almost unknown, and would scarcely be tolerated, in other communions, Catholic or Protestant, as neither would it be tolerated in Parliament, or at a public meeting, or in a law court. It does not of course at all follow that sermons any more than speeches should not be carefully prepared. The great French preachers used to write and learn their sermons by heart, like the Greek orators of old, and one at least of the most eloquent extempore preachers in the Church of England at the present day is said to do the same. Others might find the preparation of notes sufficient, perhaps committing to memory certain critical passages, as is the habit of some of our greatest Parliamentary orators ; not but that there is a danger in trusting too much to purpurei panni. Every one has heard the story of an ambitious young preacher, who had been discoursing before Rowland Hill, and who afterwards pressed the great man to tell him which passage in his sermon had struck him most. " Sir," was the 'prompt reply, " what pleased me most was your passage from the pulpit to the vestry." Mr. Walter, by the way, brought a charge against " our pulpits themselves ", which he had heard an American preacher describe as "an invention of the Devil." And it is true enough that " to be cabined, cribbed, confined in a wooden or stone box a few feet above the ground, with a brass Bishop at once interposed: "Stop there, Sir; in which class do you place me f " 278 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. bookstand in front, and a pair of candlesticks on each side, is not the most favourable position for giving full expres- sion to the impulses of the soul." In the early Church, as we have seen, the sermon was sometimes preached from the ambo which, however, was probably more spacious than a modern pulpit and sometimes from the chancel steps, and there is no reason why the latter practice should not be followed now, as indeed it often is, where the size and arrangements of the building admit of it. Or the Italian plan might be adopted of making the pulpit a sort of open gallery running round a pillar, which would equally meet the requirement that the whole person of the preacher should be visible, and would also leave room for freedom of action and movement. But these are matters of detail which may safely be left to find their natural adjustment. A more important suggestion has been urged both by Mr. Mahaffy and Mr. Walter. They are agreed in desiring that the Church of England should follow Catholic pre- cedent in establishing an " Order of preachers " to supple- ment the work of the parochial clergy, many of whom, however admirably fitted for their ordinary duties, are quite unequal to the task of preparing a fresh sermon of any value every week, not to say two or three, which is often demanded of them. Mr. Mahaffy is careful to add and such a recommendation comes of course with peculiar significance from an Irish Protestant clergyman "an Order of celibate preachers in the Reformed Churches " ; he gives his reasons for emphasising this condition, which are very sensible ones. But if that suggestion be thought imprac- ticable and one can imagine the wry faces the new Irish " Synod " would make over it he pleads at least for " an PREACHING ANCIENT AND MODERN. 279 Order of itinerant preachers," who, though having wives, to their occasional and scattered audiences, removed from all knowledge of their personal foibles and domestic cttsagr/- ments, may be as though they had none. And here no doubt he has abundant Nonconformist precedent, Wesleyan and other, on his side. A distinguished Canon and Professor, whose leanings are decidedly Protestant, was once heard to say that the first time he mounted the pulpit, after his marriage, he could not help feeling that half his authority had gone from him. Apart from criticism of graver de- ficiencies, the faults of style most commonly charged on modern preachers may be summed up under the two heads of priggishness and over familiarity. The former temper was exemplified by the lady who was taken by a friend to hear a famous Jesuit preacher, and came away much shocked, complaining that "she could hardly help laughing in church." Her friend's reply shocked her still more : " Well^ my dear, why didn't you ? that is just what he meant you to do." The same confusion of thought between reverence and priggishness was differently illustrated by the preacher, at the time of the Irish famine, who spoke of the potato a word offensive to pious ears as " that esculent succulent, the loss of which has deprived so many hungry sinners of their daily sustenance," and by another who called it " that, root on which so many thousands depended for support, and which in the inscrutable wisdom of Divine Providence has for a time ceased to flourish." But an opposite fault, apart from doctrinal questions, may fairly be charged on the Calvinistic minister, mentioned in Macmillan, who never preached without referring to " the back settlements of eternity," wherein the predestination of the elect had 280 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. been irrevocably fixed before the foundation of the world. It must be remembered, however, that the critical faculty, when employed upon sermons, is peculiarly liable to be dis- torted or obscured by personal or party bias, as when the Evangelical spinster, who had listened in rapt attention to what she fondly imagined to be a most edifying discourse, exclaimed in anguish, as the preacher turned to the altar at its close, " Alas ! I thought he had the gift of the Spirit, but he has only the gift of the gab." Originality of thought and genuine power of speech are of course essential ingre- dients of all true eloquence. But we cannot expect every preacher to be eloquent ; and after all, the main distinction between a good preacher and a bad one, is the difference between the man who has to say something and the man who has something to say. XXXI. . HUGO GROTIUS. THE observance last year at Delft of the tercentenary of Hugo Grotius to give him the name by which he is known to the world or, as he was called by his own countrymen, Huig van Groot, serves at once to remind us of a great memory and of the truth that prophets are so little apt to be honoured in their own country, during life, that it is usually left for the children to build the sepulchres of those whom their fathers have destroyed, Grotius was not indeed slain, but he was sentenced to perpetual imprisonment by his native Government, and only escaped the full endurance of the penalty through the courage and ingenuity of his wife. And three centuries had been suffered to elapse before the commemorative ceremony at Delft, when the Prince of Orange attended to lay a wreath on his grave, and a subscription was organized for erecting a monument to him, marked the first tardy instalment of respect or reparation paid by Holland to her greatest jurist, if not her greatest citizen. However, if he has suffered the usual' fate of a great prophet at home, he has enjoyed from his own day to ours an European celebrity. In spite of the marvellous criticism hazarded by De Quincey, whose pen was too apt to run away with him, on the prin- cipal work of Grotius, as a medley of " empty truisms and 282 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. time-serving Dutch falsehoods " combined in equal quanti- ties, the general verdict of posterity was pretty fairly summed up in a remark of the Times, that the author of De Jure Belli et Pads had done more than any writer except Adam Smith to establish the working principles of modern society. His Mare Liberum may even be said to contain in germ at least the doctrine of Free Trade. Like many other great men, Grotius was a prodigy of precocious genius, though infant prodigies by no means always verify the promise of their youth. At eight years old he com- posed good Latin verses ; at twelve he entered on his University course at Leyden, where he came under the guidance of Scaliger ; at fifteen he published an edition of Martianus Capella ; at seventeen he edited the remains of Aratus, and took his degree of doctor of law, and began practice as an advocate. He had meanwhile published three Latin dramas on Scriptural themes, one of which, Adamus Exul, is said to have supplied hints to the author of Paradise Lost. At the age of twenty he was appointed historiographer to the United Provinces, and a year later he composed a treatise De Jure Prcedaia theory of the Stoics is a very common phenomenon among advanced thinkers in Germany ; it was disagreeably exemplified in the political pusillanimity and toadyism of Gothe. The Leben Jesu was followed in 1840 by a work on Christian Doctrine in relation to Modern Science, in which the pantheistic views which the author had learnt from Hegel are more fully developed. In 1847 appeared Julian the Apostate, and in 1858 a Life of Ulrich von Hutten, the well-known author of Epistolce Obscurorum Virornm, which was republished in a some- what altered form in 1871, both editions having avowedly something more than a purely literary or historical pur- pose, the first being directed against the Austrian Con- cordat, the second against the influence of " priestly obscu- rantists " in the restored German Empire. An English translation by Mrs. Sturge appeared shortly after the author's death, in 1874. These are minor works, but the second Leben Jesu \fiir das deutsche Volk bearbeitet, pub- lished in 1864, and the Der Alte und der Neue Glaube, in 300 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. 1872, complete the theological trilogy, so to call it, by which Strauss will be permanently remembered. It is so much the fashion to regard Germany as the fountain-head of modern Rationalism that many persons may be surprised to learn, what is undoubtedly the fact, and is expressly acknowledged by Strauss in his latest work that the sceptical movement really took its rise in England, and passed thence into France, and from England and France into Germany. " To England's share fell the first assault and the forging of the weapons, the work of the Freethinkers or Deists ; Frenchmen brought these weapons across the Channel, and wielded them briskly and adroitly in constant light skirmishing ; while in Germany one man chiefly undertook the regular invest- ment of the Zion of orthodoxy. Voltaire on one side, Reimarus on the other, typified the character of their respective nations." The English Deistic school, of which Lord Herbert of Cherbury and Hobbes may be called the founders, and which culminated in the teaching of Tindal and Chubb, whose keynote may be said to be " Chris- tianity as old as the Creation," was coloured in its later development by the reflex influence of the French sceptical writers, who had received their first inspirations from this country ; it became less serious and more aggressive, and the sneering tone of Voltaire and Diderot is reproduced in Gibbon and Tom Paine. Far different, as a rule, is the temper of German rationalism. But in the first half of the eighteenth century the philosophical speculations of Wolff combined with the introduction of English Deism, through translations of Tindal and other writers, and the influence of French infidel refugees at the STRAUSS. 301 court of Frederick II. himself disguising under the out- ward profession of Protestantism his cynical disbelief both in morality and its Divine Author to stir the slug- gish waters of traditional Lutheran orthodoxy. Between that time and 1835 we may trace first a destructive and then a reconstructive period in German Protestant theology. The destructive criticism was begun by Semler, a Professor at Halle, who meant, however, to be an apologist, but remodelled the Canon of Scripture on a priori grounds, and first introduced the distinction, of which Baur and others have so largely availed themselves since, between St. Peter and St. Paul as leaders of two opposite parties in the infant Church. Lessing, of whom Strauss is reported to have left an unfinished biography, though perhaps himself rather a doubter than a Deist, gave a powerful impulse to the same movement by the publication of the Wolff enbiittel Fragments of Reimarus. The rationalistic criticism of Semler was continued by Eichorn and Paulus, who eliminated the supernatural element from Scripture altogether, while maintaining its historical accuracy. The miraculous portions of the narrative were not so much denied as explained away. Thus, e.g., the healing of the sick was effected by natural means or by a kind of magnetic influence on their minds, the multiplication of the loaves by a secret supply, walking on the water meant walking on the bank beside it, and the Resurrection itself was only a way of recording the fact that the Saviour had never really died on the Cross. The critical and moral difficulties of this method of interpretation have been by no one more mercilessly exposed than by Strauss himself ; but it was popular for a time, and was applied to Christian 302 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. doctrine by writers like Bretscfmeider, Rohr, and Weg- scheider. The philosophical teaching of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel tended of course in the same direction, though they came into less immediate contact with the theological controversies of the day. It was only natural that a reactionary movement should be provoked, and it was equally natural in a country of mixed religions like Germany that it should assume a double form. On the one hand, there commenced with the present century a Catholic reaction, of which Count Stolberg, Frederick and Augustus Schlegel, Tieck, and Novalis are leading repre- sentatives, ^though only the first two actually joined the Roman Catholic Church. On the other hand, Schleier- macher, who was, as we have seen, one of Strauss's earliest teachers, attempted in his Glaubenslehre to find a basis for orthodox belief, or rather orthodox sentiment, by founding it on the collective Christian consciousness, emulating to a certain extent the " pietism " of Spener a century before ; but in fact, as Strauss has pointed out, he gave up the genuineness of the Gospels, the divinity of Christ, and the reality of prayer, which for him had a purely subjective value. His treatment of the New Testament miracles differs in form rather than in substance from that of Paulus. Religion became in his hands a matter of devout emotion, independent of history and dogma, and he created a spirit rather than founded a school. De Wette and Ewald, and still more of course Neander whose Life of Christ was expressly designed as an answer to Strauss returned more nearly to the Evangelical standard of ortho- doxy ; while the advanced Lutheran school, represented by Hengstenberg, Havernick, and Stahl which was partly a STRAUSS. 303 reaction from the enforced fusion of the Lutheran and Calvinist Churches by Frederick William III. of Prussia, in 1817 may even be said to have some analogy to the Tractarian movement in England. Thus we are brought to the appearance in 1835 of the first Lebcn Jesu, which was a protest, addressed, as the author was careful to explain, not to the general public but to scholars, at once against the rationalism of Paulus and the mysticism of Schleiermacher ; not, however, a protest in the interests of orthodoxy. In 1846, when the work had reached its fourth edition in Germany, an English translation appeared from the pen of the writer, then unknown, who afterwards became famous under the sobriquet of George Eliot. The Leben Jesu may be divided into three parts, the first giving an introductory sketch of previous systems of Biblical criticism and the formation of the mythical theory, the second examining the Gospel narrative in detail, the third and concluding portion discussing its doctrinal signifi- cance. Towards the end, in a section on the " Christology of the Orthodox system," which is shown to have its roots in the New Testament, the author describes in a strain of almost rapturous eloquence the idea of Christ, " so full of blessing and elevation, encouragement and comfort," which prevailed in the early Church. There were abundant materials, he adds, in the New Testament for construct- ing the rule of faith eventually formulated in the so-called Apostles' Creed ; and the condemnation, as they arose, of the successive heresies, from the Ebionite to the Monothe- lite, which contradicted that faith, was fully justified. 1 1 A fuller analysis of this section, comparing it with the preface of the second Leben Jesu, is given in Excursus VI. of my Catholic Doctrine of the Atonement. 304 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. Nearly thirty years elapsed before the author published in 1864 his second Leben Jesu, addressed this time not to a learned but to a popular audience, as he rather oddly phrases it, "as Paul turned to the Gentiles, when the Jews rejected his Gospel." But the two works differ in form, not in principle, and the preface to the latter contains a distinct affirmation of their essential identity. The " Christology of the Church " is still represented as the product of several " groups of myths," of which twelve are enumerated ; but the word must not be understood in the sense which Comparative Mythology, as treated by Professor Max Miiller and Sir G. W. Cox, has attached to it. The Gospel myths are not a poetical presentation of sunrise and sunset or other natural phenomena, but have grown up round a nucleus of historic fact. The personal existence of Christ, which was left uncertain in the earlier work, is now expressly affirmed and here we trace the influence of the Tubingen school, which practically means of Baur, on the mind of Strauss ; but he insists that there are few great men of whom so little is known, and that the religion which bears His name was created by St. Paul rather than by Himself. " Little of His real history can now be certainly ascertained ; what is certain is, that the supernatural acts and events on which the faith of the Church has chiefly fastened never occurred at all." It is true, however, that the Divine wisdom was remarkably (in ausgezeichneter Weise] manifested in Christ, but His ex- ample can only be regarded as a partial and onesided one, for, as it is elsewhere stated with much force against Keim perhaps also with a view to Schleiermacher so long as He is regarded as a mere man, He cannot be said to STRAUSS. 305 represent the perfect ideal of humanity. The same argu- ment has been urged in this country, by writers like Professor F. Newman on one side, and Dr. Liddon on the other, against the Unitarian compromise. These views about the life and character of our Lord are repeated and dwelt upon in Strauss's last work. The distinction between the old orthodox Christianity which is again declared to have been the belief, and the natural belief, of the early Church and the religion of the future is drawn out at length in the preface to the second Leben Jesu, and resolves itself into the substitution of a purely rationalistic and intellectual system for a faith resting on a professed revelation. And therefore the Church, whether Catholic or Protestant, must be superseded, for a supernatural religion with sacraments and means of grace necessarily implies a sacerdotal hierarchy, and the first step towards getting rid of the priesthood is to eliminate the super- natural element from religion. The author, while differing in important points, as well as in general tone, from the Vie de Jesus, which had an enormous circulation in Germany through translations, hails Renan as a fellow- labourer in the same cause. His book opens with a long dedication to the memory of his brother, who died within a few months of its publication, and who is congratulated on his manly endurance of a long and painful illness without the fictitious aids of a supernatural belief. If there is little difference of view between the earlier and later versions of the Leben Jesu, the closing work of the series, which followed after an interval of eight years, does but sum up and expand, in what is meant for a sort of literary testament, the conclusions previously worked out. x 3o5 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. It is mainly an answer to two questions, " Are we still Christians ? " and " Have we still a Religion ? " And it is characteristic of the straightforward honesty and clearness of thought, which those who differ from him most widely cannot fail to respect, that the author replies to his first question with an emphatic negative. There are those who talk of a Christianity purged of all Chris- tian dogma, a Christianity, in short, which is sufficiently enlightened to dispense with Christ. But Strauss says in effect, what an admirer of his system has lately repeated in this country, " To proclaim an undogmatic Christianity, is to proclaim that Christianity is dead." As he himself puts it, " Christianity is a definite form of religion ; it is possible to relinquish it and still to be religious, but not still to be Christians." And accordingly, speaking for himself and those who agree with him, " If we would speak as honest upright men, we must acknowledge that we are no longer Christians." He will have nothing to do with the ingenious devices of a subtle rationalism or "a vague and inconsequent pietism, by which so many of his prede- cessors and contemporaries have sought to deceive both their followers and themselves, but says plainly that Christian theology must be replaced by " the modern kosmic conception educed painfully from scientific and historical research." There is a quiet humour in the pass- age where he draws out in detail the supposed teaching of a Protestant pastor, who has found himself obliged to explode one by one each successive article of the Apostles' Creed, the first not excepted. For it is in fact a " mere Hebrew prejudice " to suppose that monotheism is neces- sarily superior to polytheism ; both were but temporary STRAUSS. 307 stages in the gradual advance to a higher truth. The ideas of a personal God and a future life are now shown to be untenable, but we need not therefore acquiesce in the pessimism of Schopenhauer, which is "blasphemous, arrogant, and profane," or admit that we have no religion. On the contrary, " we claim the same piety for our Kosmos which the devout of old claimed for his God." But of course the notion of religion acquires, on this hypothesis, a wholly new meaning. It will no longer produce or justify a worship, though it will not fail, the author thinks, to exert a moral influence an assumption which, except in the case of very peculiarly constituted natures, may well be questioned. It is to consist in dependence on the Kosmos, in other words, on the laws of the material universe ; and that, we are bidden to believe, is a far truer and nobler conception than the " low anthropopathism " of dependence on God. This is not the place to enter into a detailed examina- tion of the merits, religious or historical, of Strauss's theological system, if a system which ends in pure materialism is to be called by such a name. The praise of a fearless and consistent thinker, and a luminous expositor of the views he had deliberately adopted and held unflinch- ingly to the last, he may fairly claim. There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of his almost dying assertion, made, as he assures us, under a solemn sense of the duty of giving an account of his stewardship, that he fought through life for that which appeared to him as truth, and against what appeared to him as untruth, while he dis- claims all desire to shake the faith of those who have not already lost it. Strauss's originality of genius, one cannot X 2 308 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. but think, has sometimes been overrated. Apart from his negative criticism there is very little really new in the theories he advocates. He began and ended as a disciple of Hegel, though Hegelianism has no doubt been very variously interpreted ; and it is not necessary here to inquire whether his interpretation of his master is the most correct, as it is certainly a very common one. His intellect was clear and critical rather than creative, and in historical grasp he was certainly inferior to Baur, to whom indeed he owed a good deal. But he has left his mark, whether for good or evil, on German theology ; and for one important service at least all serious believers are indebted to him, however little they may sympathize with his barren and unhopeful creed. He has unmasked a host of shams, if he has put nothing better in their place, and has made the elaborate, however unconscious, subterfuges of such teachers as Semler, Schleiermacher, and Paulus for ever impossible in the future. In him, whatever be his faults, the advocates of revelation need fear no treacherous ally ; he meets them with the downright challenge of an able, an honest, and an open foe. He does not, like some writers whose names are familiar to us, insult the faith it was his misfortune to abandon by professing Christianity, while he repudiates the teaching and the mission of Christ. XXXIV. JOHN BERNARD DALGAIRNS. THE announcement in April 1876 of the death of "the Rev. John Bernard Dalgairns, priest of the London Oratory," could not fail, over and above its necessary interest for his own co-religionists, to recall to others also who remember the Oxford of some forty years ago* many cherished recollections and associations of the past. Mr. Dalgairns took his degree in 1839, when his name appears in the same class-list with Professor Jowett, Bishop Fraser of Manchester, Dr. Kay, and Dr. Anderdon, a nephew of Cardinal Manning's, who has since become a Jesuit ; and he was one of the first batch of Tractarian converts who followed their great leader in 1845 across the Rubicon. Oxford has passed since then through at least three stages of religious transition. When the advance of the Tracta- rian revival was arrested for the time by the loss of its chief author and apologist, there set in a period of theo- logical stagnation, which may be said to have lasted till about 1851. The backwater of this great movement, which Dr. Whately had characteristically christened " Newmania," was still felt, but its first force was spent, and in the turn of the tide " the Oxford of the Lyra Apostolica" as it has been observed with considerable truth, " was slowly giving 310 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. way to the Oxford whose spirit is best reflected by the poems of Clough and Matthew Arnold." Some excep- tion might perhaps be taken to the coupling of two such incongruous names, though both represent a spirit the reverse of Tractarian ; but the statement of fact is sub- stantially accurate. With the second half of the century there began at Oxford what may be considered a reaction against the movement of 1833, which culminated in 1860 with the publication of Essays and Reviews, emanating from seven writers gibbeted at the time by an Oxford tutor, who has since become a bishop, as the Septem contra Christum of whom five either had been or still were residents and office-bearers in the University. One conspicuous effect of the change, however little intended by those who were instrumental in introducing it, was a sensible diminution in the supply of Oxford graduates, and especially of classmen, for the ministry of the Anglican Church. The party for the time in the ascendant, though far from deficient in men of high ability, can hardly be said to have had a leader in the sense in which Mr. Newman had been the leader of that which it had superseded. Mr. Jowett was for the time its hero, on account of the long quarrel about the endowment of the Greek professor- ship ; but neither he nor Dr. Stanley, who then held the chair of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford, and whose social capabilities added much to his influence, was exactly fitted to wear the mantle while the author of Tract XC. had dropped. On the Broad Church reaction supervened a revival, not exactly of Tractarianism for the Tracts had become things of the past while the clumsy sobriquet of " Ritualism " is at all events singularly inappropriate in JOHN BERNARD DALGAIRNS. 311 describing its academical phase. A High Church revival, however, there was, by whatever name it may be best designated, the force of which is by no means spent. Mr. Pattison, some years ago, in an article in Mind, contrasted it, not without bitterness, with the original movement of 1833, as substituting for intellect and learning the domina- tion of an "ecclesiastical ring"; and so far, of course, he was right, that no second leader had inherited the trans- cendent gifts of Mr. Newman. At present the rival schools of Catholic tradition and of Rationalism are engaged hand to hand in sharp conflict at Oxford, as in the Church of England generally. But it must suffice to have thus briefly sketched the successive waves of religious thought which have passed over the life of Oxford, since Mr. Dalgairns was a member of Exeter College, and one of the most promising among the younger disciples of the Tractarian movement. When the crash came in 1841, and Mr. Newman bowed before the storm of academical and ecclesiastical censure, he did not, as is well known, resolve at once on his final step, but retired for awhile to Littlemore, with a band of chosen friends and followers, several of whom did, while some did not, eventually accompany him in his secession. Conspicuous among these "monks," as they were some- times rather absurdly called, were Mr. Dalgairns and Mr. Anthony Froude, both of whom took part in the Littlemore series of Lives of the English Saints, to which Dean Milman refers in his Latin Christianity as admirable for their "research and exquisite charm of style," though he com- plains of their unhistorical character. It is certainly not very easy at first sight to recognise the future author of 312 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. the English History in the biographer of St. Neot, though Dean Milman's charge will by many critics be held equally applicable to both works. By general consent, however, one of the most popular of these biographies was the first, to which Dean Milman more especially refers, the Life of St. Stephen Harding, written by Mr. Dalgairns, who had already challenged attention by his article on Ozanam's Dante in the British Critic. His style, as was natural under the circumstances, bore evident marks of Mr. New- man's influence, though he could not be said to equal that great master of pure English ; while, on the other hand, he had too much originality to be merely an even unconscious copyist. In 1845 Mr. Newman finally quitted Oxford and the Church of England, and of those who went with him the two best known, and best deserving to be known, at the time and since, were Fabef and Dalgairns. Faber passed away in 1863, after a long and painful illness; and the grave has since closed over his intimate friend and associate for many years, who succeeded him in the head- ship of the London Oratory. In some respects the two men were very unlike each other. Faber was by nature a poet and an orator, and his impassioned delivery of "Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean, roll," in the Harrow Speech-room, was remembered long afterwards by his schoolfellows ; there is nothing to show that Mr. Dalgairns ever wrote a line of poetry in his life. As a preacher he lacked the persuasive eloquence and musical intonation of voice which would have made Faber a favourite anywhere, and which helped to account for the large gathering of Protestants, as well as of his own congregation, round the pulpit of the London Oratory, JOHN BERNARD DALGAIRNS. 313 whenever he was announced to preach ; but in power of thought his sermons were hardly inferior to Faber's, while in philosophical and historical knowledge he surpassed him. There is little of interest to record in Mr. Dalgairns's life after his conversion. He spent some years abroad in studying theology, and was ordained in France. On his return to England he again joined his old master, who was then founding the Oratory at Birmingham ; and he was subsequently allied with Faber in the establishment of a branch of the same institution in London, of which he remained a member to the last, though for some years before his death failing health, induced by overwork of the brain, had unfitted him for active work. To the outer world he was chiefly known as an able and acute, though not prolific, author. Besides occasional contributions on philosophical questions to the Contemporary Review, the Academy, and other periodicals, he published two works displaying considerable historical as well as theological research, and an interesting Essay on "Tauler and the German Mystics," which originally appeared in the Dublin Revieiv. His earliest Roman Catholic work, on the Sacrea Heart, has all the charm of style which won Dean Milman's admiration in the Life of St. Stephen Harding ; but the Introduction, on the history of Jansenism, able and interest- ing as it certainly is, shows rather the skill of a brilliant advocate than the judgment of a critical historian, though it does not deserve the very severe censure pronounced on it, in the preface to his Jansenist Church of Holland, by the late Dr. Neale, whose strong bias in favour of the Jansenists puts him also out of court as an impartial 3H ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. witness. Both writers require the correction of some really independent authority, such as Mr. Jervis's admirable History of the CJiurch of France. The subject of Mr. Dalgairns's principal work, on the Holy Communion, offers less scope for religious partisanship, and it contains much of interest to students both of theology and ecclesiastical history, whether they happen to agree with all the writer's conclusions or not. His intellectual tastes seem through life to have lain chiefly in a metaphysical direction, and it is to be regretted that he had not fuller leisure and oppor- tunity for utilising his familiarity with the general course of modern thought in this subject-matter, and especially his knowledge of the great German metaphysicians. Such acquirements are not too common even in the present day, and are essential for the discussion of many questions which, from different points of view, have a pressing claim on the attention alike of the philosopher and the Christian apologist. Among English Roman Catholics, Mr. Dal- gairns, at the time, stood almost alone in these, his most characteristic aptitudes. To say this is no disparagement to Mr. Renouf, whose specialities are not exactly of the same kind ; and unfortunately the absorbing duties of a School Inspector leave him little leisure for prosecuting them. It is certainly a noteworthy circumstance that, with the exception of Cardinal Wiseman, all the Roman Catholic writers in this country who have attained any celebrity during the last half-century have been converts ; and which is still more curious this remark applies as much to theological as to general literature. The fact suggests one or two concluding reflections which can only be indicated here. JOHN BERNARD DALGAIRNS. 315 It has been observed that converts always bring to their adopted faith much more than they gain from it The statement can at best only be received with considerable qualifications. There are converts and converts, as also there are very great differences between one religious system and another. If " the zeal of a renegade " is pro- verbial, it is often so entirely disproportionate to either his knowledge or discretion as to be a very questionable acqui- sition to the cause he has undertaken to support. On the other hand, some systems are so thoroughly rotten that no infusion of fresh blood can be of much service to them, while rival communions are not likely to gain much from the accession of any neophytes trained under them. The Eastern Church, for instance, is probably in want of a good deal of internal reform, but it could not expect much help for that purpose from a contingent of Turkish proselytes. In the particular case before us, the Tractarian converts, among whom Mr. Dalgairns held a prominent place, did unquestionably bring to their adopted Church an accession of moral and intellectual power out of all proportion to the mere increase of numerical strength. Fresh from the best culture Oxford had to bestow, and having many of them taken the fullest advantage of it, their enthusiasm, however vehement and one-sided, was backed by a solid reinforce- ment of learning and ability which could not fail to tell. It is actually the case that about forty years ago the English Roman Catholics had no single publisher of any standing. As it happened, two publishers of established repute were among the earliest converts, and in every form of religious literature, from the slender novelette "with a purpose," which ladies delight to write as well as read, to the grave 316 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. theological treatise, convert authors supplied the wares for their customers. And very soon too, again with the solitary exception of Cardinal Wiseman, the leading Catholic preachers came to be exclusively converts, and Protestants who would never before have dreamed of entering a "Romish" place of worship unless it were to hear what Pugin used to call "the shilling opera" came in large numbers to listen to them. There is of course another side to the picture, which is naturally suggested by every fresh announcement of the removal of a leading author or preacher of the convert body from the scene. The immediate gain to the cause of Catholicism in England has been manifest enough ; but now for several years past there have been comparatively few accessions to its ranks of any great importance, if recruits are to be weighed as well as counted. It becomes therefore a question of some interest what will be the net result of the change which has passed over it, when the original generation of converts shall have died out. Within a week of the death of Dalgairns, news arrived from Rome of the departure of another of the early Tractarian contingent, Mr. Simpson, author of the Life of Campion, whose literary powers were of no mean order, while his sincere devotion to the faith he had embraced was not darkened by the slightest shade of theological bitterness, and his genial kindliness of disposition and social gifts endeared him to all who knew him. Of both men indeed it may be said that they had, as they deserved to have, many friends, and never made a personal enemy. But who will fill their place in the future ? Cardinal Newman indeed remains, and he is a host in himself. But to no JOHN BERNARD DALGAIRNS. 317 cause and no communion is such a gift vouchsafed twice in the same century. To many, who still listen with eager reverence for every utterance from his lips, his own old question may perhaps even now recur with a fresh significance : " Dim Future ! shall we need a prophet for Truth's Creed ? " XXXV. BISHOP DUPANLOUP. THE late M. Veuillot of the Univers composed a highly characteristic epitaph on Bishop Dupanloup, whom he described as a questionable theologian and an equally questionable politician, emphatically denied to be " a model Bishop," and finally dismissed, in terms far more applicable to himself, as un de ces passants remarquables qui riarrivent pas. The description was characteristic, because neither good taste nor discretion ever restrains Ultramontane organs of that type from throwing plenty of dirt, in the hope that some will stick, at the greatest men of their own Church, whether living or dead, who are suspected as such men are sure to be suspected of any taint of Liberalism. The gross insults heaped on the memory of Montalembert will not easily be forgotten. Archbishop Darboy's heroic, not to say martyr, death did not shield his great name from something more than studied obloquy and neglect. Lacordaire, like a yet greater man among ourselves, was distrusted and snubbed during life by the same " insolent and aggressive faction," who have shown little disposition since his death to remember his splendid services to Catholicism. Horrible beyond all expression a kind of ghastly parody of " the Curse " in Southey's Kehama, translated into a jargon of Christian, or rather unchristian, Billingsgate was the BISHOP DUPANLOUP. 319 elaborate imprecation hurled by M. Veuillot in his Par- fum de Rome at Passaglia, far the greatest Jesuit theo- logian of his day, and the compiler of the Bull Ineffabilis, and of a learned treatise in defence of it, when he dared to pronounce against the temporal power. Dupanloup could expect no better treatment at such hands. If he was not in all respects a man of the same calibre as those already named, he was eminent alike as a preacher, a speaker, a writer, a politician, and a prelate. To say that "he was a failure" is true of course in a sense, but only in a sense which applies with at least equal force to the leaders of the party that his critics delight to honour. He failed no doubt to realise his ideal of Church and State, and it was inevitable, in the existing condition of the world, that he should fail. It is still less conceivable that Ultramontanes of M. Veuillot's school should succeed in making their own programme a reality. But in the ordinary sense of the word, and as regards his own personal influence, Dupanloup was anything but a failure. He certainly did not become a Cardinal, though it is very likely, had he lived a year or two longer, that he might under the present pontificate have attained to that dignity; but he was not, as was once ob- served of a still more eminent personage, who is now in the Sacred College, " the stuff Cardinals are made of," under the sort of regime which then prevailed. Even then, how- ever, his opinion on French ecclesiastical matters counted for something at Rome, little as he was loved there, because he was well known to be the most active and influential member of the national episcopate. By the present Pope he appears to have been unreservedly trusted and consulted, and His Holiness was reported, no doubt correctly, to be 320 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. deeply afflicted at his death. No French Cardinal for many a long year has wielded half the influence of the late Bishop of Orleans over his countrymen. But the reasons why the Univers refused to recognise that fact are not far to seek. It was the lot of Dupanloup through life to be assailed by Ultramontanes as a Liberal, *and by Liberals as an Ultramontane, and both classes of assailants had some- thing to say for themselves. Not that the Bishop was ever, at least consciously, insincere, though he was far from being always consistent. He had strong Liberal sympathies and strong Catholic sympathies, but his Liberalism always succumbed to his Catholicism when the two came into conflict, and Catholicism, for a French Bishop in the reign of Pius IX., could hardly, in extreme cases, mean anything short of Ultramontanism. A century ago, when Gallicanism was still a power, he would have been a leading Gallican. There was much about him to recall not only the eloquence but the personality of Bossuet, though of course the two are not for a moment to be compared. He had inherited, to a great extent, the dignified presence as well as the doctrinal traditions of the old Gallican episcopate. He was in heart a monarchist no less than a prelatist, and a national Church, subordinate of course to Rome, as the centre of unity, but independent in its local self-government, was the object of his aspirations, if not of his practical aims. In his sternness, his pug- nacity, and something of personal hauteur which pre- vented his becoming popular among his clergy he re- produced characteristic traits of the famous Bishop of Meaux. He had in him, however, as is clear from M. Kenan's Souvenirs, a vein of chivalry and tenderness which BISHOP DUPANLOUP. 321 evoked the passionate devotion of youth. But above all things he was to the backbone a Frenchman, and a French ecclesiastic ; and that may account for many of his seem- ing inconsistencies. If M. Thiers, who was a layman and a statesman, could say, as he is reported to have said, in reference to the Roman question, " je ne suis pas Chretien, mais je suis papiste," it is not wonderful that Dupanloup, ' who was very emphatically a Christian and a Catholic, as well as a Frenchman, should have been "a Papist," as regards the temporal power and some other points too. The whole course of French history since the Revolution of '89 has tended to alienate the Church from the Govern- ment, and thereby inevitably to throw it into the arms of Rome. Yet in theological matters, so far as he dared to trust his own feelings and convictions, Dupanloup was not " a Papist " ; and hence the Ultramontane antipathy to him. The Univers complained that " his submission to the Vatican Council was tardy." That is true, but it is not the whole truth. Before going to Rome for the Council, the Bishop published a Pastoral professedly discussing the " opportuneness " of the proposed dogma, but most of the arguments urged against the expediency of defining it turned really on the evidence for it, as his opponents were not slow to discover and indignantly to proclaim. And during the sitting of the Council the most vigorous Opposition pamphlets emanated from his pen. That was a fatal offence, which no " tardy submission," no zeal for the Church, or even for the temporal power, could condone in Ultramontane eyes. And moreover it was not what is, or used in our schoolboy days to be called, "a first fault," which might exempt the culprit from a flogging. Y 322 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. Bishop Dupanloup had not been a good boy, in the Ultra- montane sense, before that. In one notable instance he had shown what is by no means an invariable charac- teristic even of gifted Frenchmen, especially of French ecclesiastics his possession of strong common sense. Some years ago it pleased the Abbe Gaume and certain other obscurantist wiseacres of his school in France to get up a crusade against the use of the Greek and Latin, or as they preferred to phrase it the " Pagan," classics in the education of youth. Dupanloup, backed by the immemorial tradition of the Church both in France and elsewhere, and relying on his own educational experience, threw the whole weight of his not inconsiderable influence into the opposite scale. The scheme of teaching the Greek and Latin languages from the writings of the Christian Fathers was certainly an original one, but it was warmly espoused at the time by the Ultramontane zealots, who even perpetrated the absurdity of drawing up a series of school books modelled on this programme, but it eventually collapsed. The scheme was of course ardently supported by M. Veuillot, whose contempt for classical learning was only equalled by his ignorance of it ; and the Bishop of Orleans, who had not unjustly taunted him with making calumny the chief weapon of religious journalism, was not readily forgiven for his powerful opposition to it. Moreover, he had forbidden his clergy to read the Univers. But if Dupanloup defended as any educated man, who is not a fanatic or a fool, would be sure to defend the study of " the Pagan classics," it was assuredly from no tenderness for atheism or unbelief. One of the first acts for which he is remembered as a priest had been to receive the dying abjur- BISHOP DUPANLOUP. 323 ation and confession of Talleyrand, and among his earliest achievements was a lecture against Voltaire, delivered before the students of the Sorbonne which cost him his profes- sorship, owing to the tumult it produced while his latest literary efforts were directed against the recent Voltaire cen- tenary. His detestation of Voltaire, as an infidel and licen- tious writer, was intensified by a kind of chivalrous devotion to the Maid of Orleans the heroine of his episcopal city whose canonization he exerted himself to procure, and he could not pardon the gross outrage perpetrated on her memory by the foul-mouthed author of La Pucelle. His in- fluence availed for many years to keep M. Littre out of the Forty of the French Academy, and when the Positivist whose deathbed conversion was not then foreseen had at last effected an entrance in spite of him, he shook off the dust from his feet, and himself retired from the mystic circle whose sanctity had been profaned, though his resignation of his chair was not accepted by his colleagues. But within the limits of orthodoxy his sympathies were gener- ous and comprehensive, and leaned always to the liberal side. He used every effort, through the medium of Mont- alembert, to whom he was warmly attached, to induce Dr. Dollinger to attend the Vatican Council to which, how- ever, he had not been invited in order to join in opposing " the base acts " he thought only too likely to be attempted there ; Dr. Newman he invited and urged to attend the Council, as his " theologian." It was natural enough then that, while the Univers refused him the praise of a model bishop, the De'bats, premising that he had always been its political opponent, should offer a high tribute to "the generosity, frankness, and true nobility of his nature," and Y 2 324 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. declare him to be " one of the glories, or rather the glory, of the French episcopate, whose place will not easily be supplied." This is perfectly true, and not the less true because his influence, like that of Bishop Wilberforce in England, was of a kind to be felt at the time rather than to be perpetuated. He was a copious as well as a brilliant writer, but more of a pamphleteer than an author ; in this respect a thorough Frenchman, though not, like Renan, whom he sharply attacked, a master of French style. He wrote endless pamphlets on theological, ecclesiastical, social, educational, and political questions of the day, calculated to make a telling impression for the moment, but had not leisure or patience for the composition of what the Germans call eivige Werke, and here he differed widely from Bossuet. He cannot in fact be said to have made any permanent contribution to theology or literature, and it must be regarded as more than questionable whether his works will live, though his name is not likely to be for- gotten. His career was a long and honourable one, and he carried with him to the grave the respect of his country- men of all shades of opinion, with one conspicuous and not very creditable exception. Yet he can hardly be called felix opportunitate mortis, for while he outlived by a few months the pontiff who, devout and single-minded as he was, could not appreciate and would never have rewarded his distinguished services to the Church, his death followed too closely on that of Pius IX. to give him the opportunity of profiting by the tardy but sincere appreciation of the Holy See in the person of his successor. He has left behind him no prelate of equal or nearly equal mark on the roll of the French episcopate. xxxvr. CANON OAKELEY. ON January 29, 1880, another of the oldest and most distinguished of the early Tractarian converts passed away. Frederick Oakeley, formerly known as Fellow and Tutor of Balliol, and afterwards as Minister of Margaret Chapel, but for the last thirty years Missionary Rector of St. John's Roman Catholic Church, Duncan Terrace, Islington, and Canon of Westminster, died in his seventy-eighth year, leaving behind him many kindly memories, both in the Church of his birth and of his adoption, and probably no ill will anywhere. Mr. Oakeley was a man of powers decidedly above the average, and, had he been of a less retiring disposition and his conscientious convictions less decided than they were, he might fairly have expected to rise to high distinction in the Church of England. The youngest son of Sir Charles Oakeley, formerly Governor of Madras, he was born in 1802, and began, like Mozart, at four years old to give evidence of his musical taste which lasted through life being able at that early age to repro- duce on the pianoforte simple airs which had taken his fancy ; and at the age of eight the organist of Lichfield Cathedral (his family were then living in the episcopal Palace there) used to let him play the chants on week days. When he was fifteen he was sent as a private pupil to Mr. 326 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. Charles Sumner, afterwards Bishop of Winchester, for whom, in spite of all differences of opinion, he retained a warm affection through life ; and a long letter of his appears at the close of the Bishop's Life by his son, where it is amusing to find him recounting how on one occasion, in his undergraduate days, the Bishop, with whom he was breakfasting, rebuked him gently, but very justly, for his sweeping abuse of Roman Catholics, of whom he was obliged to admit that he had no personal knowledge what- ever. He went up to Christ Church in 1821, and obtained a second class three years later; in 1825 he gained the Chancellor's prize for a Latin Essay " On the Power of the Tribunes among the Romans," and in 1827 the prize for an English Essay " On the Influence of the Crusades on the Art and Literature of Europe," and also the Ellerton Theological Prize. In 1827 he was also elected Fellow and three years afterwards appointed Tutor of Balliol, where he had among his colleagues Mr. Tait, afterwards primate, and the present Bishop of Salisbury. His friendly relations with Dr. Tait were never interrupted, and we find his name in the Memoir of Catherine and Crawfurd Tait among those who were foremost to testify their sympathy with the Archbishop in his heavy bereavement. He held the offices of Public Examiner and Select Preacher at Oxford, and was appointed in 1837 by Bishop Blomfield one of the Preachers at Whitehall. It was in the preface to a volume of Sermons preached there that he first indicated his sym- pathy with the Tractarian movement, having previously been, like nearly all the leading Tractarians, a decided Low Churchman. In 1839 he gave practical testimony to his new views, when he left Oxford to take the incumbency CANON OAKELEY. 327 of the Proprietary Chapel in Margaret Street, of which Henry Drummond was lessee, and which had been previ- ously held by the late Mr. Dodsworth who himself joined the Church of Rome some years after Mr. Oakeley and had before belonged to the Unitarians. It is here that his theological career may be said to have begun. Mr. Gladstone spoke of Mr. Oakeley some ten years ago, in an article in the Contemporary Review, as one "who united to a fine musical ear a much finer and much rarer gift in discerning and expressing the harmony between the inward purposes of Christian work and its outward investi- ture, and who had gathered round him [at Margaret Chapel] a congregation the most devout and hearty that I, for one, have ever seen in any community of the Christian world." In that congregation Mr. Gladstone himself and the late Mr. Hope Scott were constant worshippers, while many others who had little sympathy with Tractarian views, such as Bishop Thirlwall, were .attracted by Mr. Oakeley's thoughtful and weighty sermons, which dealt mainly with the ethical aspects of religious truth. But it was the specialty of Margaret Chapel in those days to be the pioneer of what is now called " Ritualism " in the Established Church, though scarcely any of the distinctive details associated with the term were to be found there or would then have been tolerated. Mr. Oakeley's fond- ness for ritual, which he carried with him into his new communion, probably received its first impulse from his boyish delight in the services of Lichfield Cathedral, where, as we have already seen, he used to play the organ on week days. But choral services and surpliced choristers were then considered a startling innovation anywhere out 328 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. of a cathedral, and the " eastward position " must have looked still more unusual ; of vestments, or even of lighted candles except, as he afterwards explained, " on foggy mornings " there was no thought ; while the plain wooden altar cross was considered quite alarming. It is curious to find a letter in Bishop (then Archdeacon) Wilberforce's Life expressing his disgust after going to Margaret Street at the oddness and Romanizing character of what would now be thought very moderate ceremonial, hardly above the average of many " Evangelical " churches, and his con- sequent determination never to go there again. But it is not too much to say that to Mr. Oakeley's ministry at Margaret Chapel, more than to any other single instru- mentality, is due that marked restoration of musical and ritual solemnity which has triumphed over the parson-and- clerk duet constituting the almost solitary ideal of Anglican worship in the days of our grandfathers, though it has now almost faded into a dim tradition of the past. It may be difficult for those of a later generation to understand how, in 1844 (which falls within the period of Mr. Oakeley's incumbency), the Times was fiercely asserting " the repug- nance of the laity to the introduction of these obnoxious novelties," which involved " a contest not about words but about principles," and their indignant demand ' ( to be allowed to worship as their fathers worshipped, and to observe the same ritual they had been accustomed to from infancy " ; and how mobs of thousands of persons would wait for hours in pouring rain to hoot and yell at the clergyman who introduced these " obnoxious novelties," the whole dispute being about the wearing of a surplice in the pulpit. It is still harder perhaps for us to realise how a year later CANON OAKELEY. 329 a huge vestry meeting was gathered in London to complain that " a parish containing upwards of 43,000 souls (of whom it may be doubted if 43 had been in the habit of attending the parish church) was disturbed to its centre at the will of one individual, who at his mere pleasure disturbed and deranged the beautiful and solemn ceremonial of Church service which had been handed down to us unchanged for more than two centuries," i.e. the parson-and-clerk duet. At last the matter found its way to the House of Lords, and the Bishop of Exeter (Phillpotts) who had been sharply admonished by the Times " as a conscientious man to retire from the bench, and let the people of England have the sacred service of the Church as their sires and grandsires had it " ventured to ask Earl Fortescue " what these obsolete forms and usages were " which he had de- nounced, and which, as was asserted, "forced the son to pass the grave of his father, the widower of his wife, the mother of her child, to seek in some remote and unaccus- tomed house of worship that spiritual sustenance which the novel practices at their own church had rendered unaccept- able ? " Lord Fortescue, being thus brought to book, had to reply that " the innovations complained of, and which had caused all the mischief, were three in number namely, preaching in the surplice, the sentences in the Offertory, and the collection after service." It is likely enough that these extracts may raise a smile of incredulity ; but it is necessary to bear the actual state of things in mind in estimating the nature and extent of the ritual reform, as most Anglicans of every school would now agree to call it, first inaugurated at the obscure little chapel which has since grown into one of the stateliest churches of London. 330 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. It was while Mr. Oakeley was still at Margaret Street that the disturbance arose at Oxford about his friend and brother fellow Mr. Ward, whose Ideal of a Christian Church led to his being deprived of his M.A. degree by a decree of Convocation of very questionable legality. Mr. Oakeley, who had nothing to do with the book, chivalrously placed himself by his friend's side, declaring that he also " claimed the right to hold, though not to teach, all Roman doctrine " ; and this avowal led to one of the earliest of those ecclesias- tical causes cttebres in the Arches Court which afterwards became so frequent, and have at last brought the whole machinery of the Anglican Church Courts under the hammer of a Royal Commission. But the defendant did not care to await its termination. Within a few months his great leader Mr. Newman had decided on leaving the Church of England, and Mr. Oakeley almost immediately followed him. After going through a theological course at St. Edmund's College, Ware, and serving for a short time at St. George's Cathedral, Southwark, he was in 1850 appointed to the charge of St. John's, Duncan Terrace, and was two years afterwards made a Canon of Westminster, and he retained both offices till his death. At Islington, as before at Margaret Street, Mr. Oakeley paid great attention to musical and ceremonial arrangements, and he may be said to have effected no inconsiderable reform in these respects in his new as well as in his old communion. Discarding the services of the " shrieking sisterhood " of female pro- fessionals, then almost universally in vogue in Roman Catholic places of worship in England though expressly forbidden by the Roman ritual he entrusted the singing to a well-trained choir of men and boys, and had soon CANON OAKELEY. 331 established for his church the reputation of one of the best musical services in London. But it would be a great mis- take to imagine that, either there or at Margaret Street, his attention was absorbed by externals, however important. Both in his Anglican and his later ministry he always showed himself an indefatigable parish priest, and his church was thronged by a multitude of devout worshippers. It may perhaps be regretted that the career of active use- fulness which he had deliberately marked out for himself since he gave up residence at Oxford left him so little time for literary work. Some volumes of sermons and devo- tional treatises, and several pamphlets and review articles, he has left behind him, which go far to show that under different circumstances he might have made a name in literature. One of the most popular of the Littlemore Series of Lives of the English Saints was from his pen, the Life of St. Augustine of Canterbury. His style was evidently, though perhaps unconsciously, modelled on Car- dinal Newman's, and has much of the grace, though it lacks the concentrated force, of that great master of Eng- lish. It should be added that his controversial writings, if such they can be called, are free, as he was himself, from any taint of bitterness. Nothing could be more out of harmony with his refined taste and with his whole tone of mind than, e.g., to designate the Church of which he was once a minister, as another clerical convert did not long ago, " a monarch's cast-off mistress, now in her dishonour- able age vainly striving to cover her nakedness with the gifts which purchased her seduction " rather an unintelli- gible sarcasm, as the Church was not enriched but greatly impoverished at the Reformation or to describe English 332 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. Protestantism generally as an " offensive centipede." He kept up through life, as was observed before, habits of friendly intercourse with his old associates, and six years before his death he might have been seen at the Union Jubilee dinner at Oxford, sitting by the side of Mr. Matthew Arnold, who was an undergraduate at Balliol when he was a Fellow there. One can hardly help wondering, as the Oxford converts of that generation are passing away one by one there are few of the more eminent left now besides the two Cardinals how far their departure may affect that better understanding between members of the rival com- munions on which Cardinal Newman discoursed some years ago. There can be no doubt that the influence of their ante- cedents and personal character has done much indirectly in many ways to bridge over what once seemed an impassable chasm, the more so as many of them, like Mr. Oakeley himself, had shared to the full in their earlier days that hatred of the Pope and all his works which Dr. Hook's biographer tells us he used once to consider the essential duty and characteristic of an Englishman. And Cardinal Manning has thus been enabled, in his present position, to do much to raise the dignity and social status of the Archi- episcopal See of Westminster, as well as its directly spiritual influence. It would be another point well worth inquiring into, but is far too wide a question to discuss here, what kind and amount of permanent impression the Tractarian converts have made on their adopted communion. There is certainly a conspicuous difference, which can hardly fail to strike outsiders, between the general tone not only of Roman Catholic society in England, but of Roman Catholic worship and preaching, as it is now and as it was thirty or forty years ago. XXXVII. DR. GUMMING. THE news of Dr. Cumming's death would have created a much greater sensation than it did, had it occurred a dozen years earlier, when the Prophet of Crown Court was still in all his glory, or when at all events the perennial stream of unfulfilled prophecy had not yet run dry. For two or three years before his death he had retired from public view, and for some time previously the public had been retiring from his pulpit. Those who were suddenly reminded of his old reputation by learning, in July 1881, that he had passed away, were probably surprised to find that he was only seventy-two years old. The fact is that Dr. Cumming began to preach, which meant with him to prophesy, at a very early age, and occupied his familiar tripod in Crown Court for nearly half a century. That he should have managed during most of that period to retain his hold over a numerically not inconsiderable section of the religious world including at one time Duchesses and other such notabilities may seem startling at first sight, but it may be said without disrespect to that eminent poet that Dr. Cumming was the Martin Tupper of theology. And if it be true that Martin Tupper has his tens of thousands of readers, especially of the fair sex, where 334 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. Tennyson has his thousands, we need not marvel that multitudes who turned away from Newma or Westcott or even from Dean Stanley, as from a sealed book, should have eagerly imbibed the fiery contents of the Seventh Via^ and listened with awful suspense to the trumpet tone which announced though it announced in vain the imminent approach of the Battle of Armageddon. There was indeed one little drawback, for the predictions confi- dently repeated year by year, and usually about twice a year, somehow never came true, and the fateful dates had to be again and ag*ain reconstructed. The Sounding of the Last Trumpet was found to give a very " uncertain sound," and the Last Warning Cry was uttered, not indeed exactly to heedless ears, but to ears too likely to be rendered heedless for the future by disappointment of the expected result. But these little incongruities never ruffled for a moment the self-complacency or the self-confidence of the prophet himself. He always had some excellent explana- tion ready, as to why the prediction had not been fulfilled at the precise time or in the precise way anticipated, or some ingenious way of showing that in fact it really had been fulfilled, though nobody but he who had dreamed the dream had the gift of discerning the interpretation thereof. We all know how the Times, though it often changes, is always consistent, and never lacks an opportune quotation to prove that it has been always right. Dr. Gumming, though he traced his inspirations to a higher source, was equally consistent, and always " knew he was right." And, what is more, he always got a great many people " mostly fools," perhaps, in the Carlylese sense to believe him. Nor is this altogether inexplicable. In the first place, it is DR. GUMMING. 335 only fair to admit that he had the courage of his halluci- nations. His literary conscience, as will appear presently, was almost as queer as his literary taste ; but there can be no doubt that he really believed in the main what he said. The Pope was to him as real an object of mingled terror and detestation as to Bunyan's " Pilgrim," only a much more formidable one, and his final doom was a constant theme of Divine prediction from Genesis to the Apocalypse. The Doctor gave indeed in his latter days a strong proof of the sincerity of his sentiments on this point, if it be true that he made a pilgrimage to Exeter with his family on the Fifth of November, and took lodgings in the Cathedral Yard, in order to witness the huge bonfire whereby it pleases "Young Exeter" year by year to testify its Protestant zeal or presumably its rowdyism in defiance of official warnings, cordons of police, and the angry reclamations of the inhabitants of that " ancient and loyal city," especially those living in the precincts, who are in dread as each November comes round of their Cathedral and themselves being involved in a common conflagration. Then again Dr. Cumming was not only manifestly sincere in his strange vagaries, but he had a pleasing presence, an unfailing supply of the kind of eloquence which the British Philistine can appreciate, and a geniality of temper not perhaps quite in harmony with his awful denunciations which made him personally popular. And if each new composition that appeared, under whatever variety of title Babylon, A rmageddon, The Last Woe, The Great Tribula- tion, &c. was little else than a new setting of the last, so that one might almost literally say Ex uno disce omnes, still fresh events were constantly happening which could be 336 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. somehow or other dovetailed into the general plan, and fresh articles and books were being published, which could be quoted at any indefinite length, whether for approval or censure, though neither events nor extracts were always very much to the purpose. To use a favourite but some- what unintelligible quotation of his own, he got rein, quomodo rein. Dr. Gumming will live, if he lives at all, by his works, and ill-natured critics may possibly suggest that he has built himself a monument cere perennius, in more senses than one. Nobody can wish to be unkind to his memory, but it is simply impossible to accept him for what to the last he claimed to be, a great teacher and prophet of the highest truth. Whether his theology was right or wrong in the abstract, need not be discussed here, but his ignor- ance was as unbounded as his confidence ; and the plain fact is that he had a habit all his life, which grew into a second nature, of talking nonsense without knowing it. A brief glance at two or three of his later works will sufficiently illustrate the point of this criticism. In 1867 the Ritualistic movement, as it has come to be called, was beginning to attract attention, and it occurred to Dr. Gumming that a new variation of the old Babylonish melody would be appropriate. He accordingly seized his opportunity, and at once preached and published twelve lectures under the fascinating title, Ritualism the Highway to Rome. The date given for the destruction of the world had already been fixed not indeed for the first time and was then definitively settled for 1868. What occurred in the short interval might therefore have been supposed to be not very important. But in the preface to this new DR. GUMMING. 337 work the author professed himself " deeply persuaded that never was our country in greater peril in its highest and holiest interests." A leading Roman Catholic newspaper which must have borrowed for once something of Dr. Cumming's prophetic tone had avowed its belief that the time was coming " when High Mass will once more be sung in Westminster Abbey," and the prediction bore to his mind an almost Apocalyptic significance. On the other hand, a serial called the Protestant Churchman had shown by " tabular statistics " the fearful growth of Romish priests, chapels, convents, and colleges, since the fatal year 1829; and this increase was mainly due, he thought, to Ritualism or its Tractarian parent. Moreover, Dr. Gum- ming had just discovered that "vast masses of the poor especially Irish poor are already Roman Catholics," and the context implied, what it might surprise themselves to learn, that "" Ritualist ceremonial " had made them such. Then, again, the Directorinm Anglicanum a Ritualist work was somehow responsible for the mischievous Act which allowed Romish priests to officiate in gaols, and even " to be paid out of the rates, according to their work," and to have an altar, sacrificial vestments, and " a Virgin Mary " supplied in aid of their ministrations. And there were actually men eating the bread of our Protestant Establishment, who dared to call themselves what their own Prayer Book calls them "priests," and took every means, by the use of candles and rich dresses, " which, whether at the ball, or the opera, or a Ritualistic church, are no doubt very attractive," to inculcate Romish dogmas. Here was a sufficiently alarming basis of fact to go upon, and an elaborate argument follows borrowed wholesale, 338 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. by the way, from Tillotson against the Real Presence, capped by a somewhat obscure inference from what is not contained in a long passage of Justin Martyr, " who probably saw the Apostle John " if he ever did, it must have been as a baby to the effect that in his day there was neither liturgy, priesthood, nor sacrifice in the Chris- tian Church. And there is another still more obscure argumentation against the Ritualistic and Popish figment of the apostolic succession. But the learned Doctor also adds more suo some touching little anecdotes. He tells us e. g. how he once met " in that exquisite Corinthian struc- ture, La Madeleine," a venerable French priest, who was already " a real Christian," and had thoughts of coming to London to attend the May Meetings. On another occa- sion, however, at Bruges his landlord assured him that "his life would not be safe," if he attempted to preach Christ in that priest-ridden city, but he would be listened to with enthusiasm, if he liked to preach the Virgin Mary, "even in very bad French." We are left to infer that under the circumstances he wisely preferred to remain silent. Three years later that is, two years after what should have been the final catastrophe came the Vatican Council, and here of course was another great opportunity for Dr. Cumming. He had offered, indeed, to attend that venerable assembly in person, if the Pope would allow him full free- dom of speech when he got there ; but a somewhat curt and almost sarcastic message conveyed to " Dr. Cumming of Scotland," through Archbishop Manning, intimated that his offer could not be entertained ; so he took his repulse like a man, and put into print those views on T/te Fall of DR. GUMMING. 339 Babylon Foreshadowed in Her Teaching, in History, and in PropJiecy, which he had once hoped to utter in the Council Chamber. One can hardly help regretting that Pius IX., who had a considerable sense of humour, did not give him the opportunity of discharging his " olive branch out of a catapult ".at the heads of the assembled fathers. In this work, which covers nearly 500 pages, the date of the Battle of Armageddon is once more rearranged, and placed this time "about 1870" ; but there is not very much else in it new. We are told that the Romish religion is " super- natural," which evidently means infra-natural, for the writer immediately adds that it is too impious to come from above, and too artful to be the work of man ; in short, it is " the masterpiece of the Devil." There have been, how- ever, some few good Christians in the Church of Rome of whom three are named but then they were good " in spite of their creed." At the same time, so far from being a corruption of Protestantism, we are assured that Popery is nearly as old as the creation of man. It is " coeval in principle with the Fall. Adam was a Papist before he became a Protestant." And unfortunately Adam's first- born followed his parent in his original error, and not in his subsequent conversion. " Cain was, in principle, the first Roman Catholic priest," for he offered " an unbloody sacrifice, exactly typical of the Mass." So, by the by, did Melchisedech. And the same evil " principle " appears to have survived in the chosen people up to the time of their final rejection, for we are asked, " What land, from the sacred heights of Calvary to the pinnacles of the Alps, has not been drenched with the blood of martyrs, who have been slain by her " (Rome) ? It was the year of the Z 2 340 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. Vatican Council, so we have of course a chapter to prove the fallibility of Ecumenical Councils, which is demon- strated by the fact that "in the fourth century nineteen Councils of the Church were orthodox and nineteen heretical" The italics are the author's, but he omits to add that only two of these thirty-eight Councils were reputed Ecume- nical, both of which he classifies as orthodox. There are some odd historical puzzles about "the canonization of Teresias," apparently meaning St. Teresa, the revolting immoralities of Pope Alexander VI. and of Borgia, who are treated as two different persons, and the proceedings of " Gregory " and " Nyssen," whose personality is bifur- cated in the same uncomfortable fashion. But on this and some other very strange historical complications we need not linger here. We have seen already that the date of the end of the world is fixed in this volume for " about 1870," but this is based on a calculation that the world was to last 6000 years, and had then reached the year 6002, which might seem to show not that " the sands of our present mundane economy are nearly run out," but that they had run out two years before. The prophet, however, cautiously adds, mindful perhaps of former disappoint- ments, " I give dates. I refuse to decide." In another book, issued some months later, he denied that there was " one solution published in previous works that demands reversal or recasting," and thinks the battle of Armaged- don may " with no great difficulty " be identified with Sebastopol. This second work of 1870, entitled the Seventh Vial in the rhythmical and euphonious diction of the Revised Version it becomes the " Seventh Bowl "appeared after DR. GUMMING. 341 the prorogation of the Vatican Council, when "this unclean spirit from the Pope had inspired 533 prelates to proclaim an aged priest infallible " ; and we hear a good deal about " the false prophet," and " the croaking frogs," and " the lie," and how " Rome, filthy, bigoted, and cruel, is the nursery of brigands, the nest of priests, and the throne of beggars " ; with much more to the same effect. This, by the way, was published'just after Victor Emmanuel had entered Rome. One peculiarity of Dr. Cumming's style, which is signally exemplified in this and his next volume of the following year, is what might in a less devout and unworldly kind of literature be designated bookmaking. The simple fact is that at least half the volume is made up of extracts from the newspapers and serials of the day, the Times, the Standard, the Westminster Review euphemis- tically described as " making no pretension to be a religious organ " and the Saturday Review being heavily taxed for the purpose. Then again, a propos of "the Great Earthquake," we have nearly seventy pages of extracts on the natural history of earthquakes, and several more about " tidal waves," to illustrate " the Sea and the Waves roaring" ; while the "signs in the sun and moon and stars " are illustrated by a further series of extracts about " spots in the sun." The work on the Cities of the Nations, which appeared in the following year, reads very like a sequel to the Seventh Vial, and is also largely made up of cuttings from the daily papers and other publications of the day, together with long extracts from " Alison, the historian," who was a great favourite of Dr. Cumming's. In this work the author was able to exult over "the light " that had broken on Rome, and the substitution of "an 342 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. enlightened civil law " for the " sanguinary canon law " ; but he had to mourn over the sceptical teaching of Dr. Colenso and his allies for Dr. Gumming kept an eye on the sceptics as well as on the Pope and he urged some very odd arguments, partly based on personal experiences of his own, in reply to them. But one cannot help sus- pecting that this modern and mundane element in his books the gossiping stories and still more the gossiping extracts they are so full of constituted one of their prin- cipal charms. There are religious people who object to reading newspapers or novels, and especially object to them on Sundays. To such persons it must have been quite a godsend to meet with an indubitably pious and " Sunday book," which was nevertheless choke full of cuttings from the periodical press. They not only found pleasure and piety combined ; their curiosity was gratified in a manner not simply innocent, but positively devotional. If on the other hand we inquire why the popularity Dr. Gumming had enjoyed so long began to wane at last, the explanation is- hardly far to seek. Even the religious world will grow weary in the end of the dull monotony of perpetual repetitions and predictions constantly falsified by the event ; but there was a further cause also. When Dr. Gumming began to preach, the latent Protestantism of the country had been recently lashed into fury by the Catholic Emancipation Act of 18:29 ; and the Tractarian movement, with its direct and incidental consequences, kept the " No Popery " passion at fever heat for many years afterwards. But times had changed before the close of his ministry ; new storms were breaking over the theological horizon, and the old watchwords offered no guidance or protection amid DR. GUMMING. 343 dangers a former age had not experienced or foreseen. In spite of the inspiration he almost claimed, the Protestant Prophet had no chart to steer by in these untried seas. A generation had grown up which knew not Joseph, and Dr. Gumming found his occupation gone from him. If we could hope his career might act as a warning to others against a course of unconscious, but not wholly innocuous, charlatanism, it would be true to say that he did not live in vain. But it is difficult to point the moral without seeming to suggest an imputation he was too transparently credulous to deserve. XXXVIII. DEAN STANLEY. THE death of the late Dean of Westminster after only a few days' illness, at no very advanced age and in the full vigour of his powers, removed with startling abruptness a conspicuous figure from the scene. There are very few persons not occupying a still higher position, in Church or State, who have attracted of late years so much of public attention, or whose death would have called forth so universal a chorus of lamentation, comment, and eulogy. And even for those who find it impossible to join unre- servedly in the effusive laudations so copiously showered on his memory, one thing at least is attested by the very prominence of the place he had made for himself in the world's estimation from the first. For it may fairly be said that, from the day when Stanley and Vaughan, then Dr. Arnold's two most promising and devoted pupils, were " bracketed even," as Bishop Wordsworth, who examined them, has since reminded us, in the Sixth Form examin- ation at Rugby, he always held his own. The fact is, that he possessed in a remarkable measure what is alleged to be, under the conditions of modern society, becoming less and less possible, the gift of individuality, or, as Mr. Matthew Arnold would say, "distinction." In his whole character, DEAN STANLEY. 345 attitude, and tone of mind, as in his person, there was an unmistakable idiosyncrasy. You could generally be pretty sure beforehand what line he would take on any given subject, and that it would be like himself and unlike every- body else. One of his panegyrists has observed that the Dean " never twaddled, or declaimed, or repeated himself' ' Certainly he did not twaddle, nor was declamation much in his line, for that implies real or simulated passion, and he was not a religious enthusiast, still less an actor, but as to his never repeating himself, it would be more accurate to say that he repeated himself in every volume or article he published, almost in every sermon he preached. To say this does not, of course, mean that he repeated himself in the way, for instance, that Dr. Gumming did, but that one leading idea, which was apt to become somewhat tedious from constant iteration, formed the keynote of his teaching as of his life. He was always harping on one string, and whether history, or theology, or ecclesiastical discipline was the professed subject of discussion, the supreme excellence of liberalism or "latitudinarianism" the term in his mouth was one not of reproach but of honour would invariably turn out to be the moral of the tale. This has indeed been made by his admirers their special theme of commendation, but neither in an intellectual nor a moral sense can the praise be accepted without reserve. In one respect, how- ever, it is pleasant to be able to put on record the unanimous agreement of all, however widely differing in principle, who came into contact with him. In his personal conduct and demeanour his liberality was alike graceful and genuine, and knew no distinctions of opinion, school, or creed ; after the fiercest wranglings in the Jerusalem 346 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. Chamber the Dean and Archdeacon Denison, who seized the first opportunity of paying a warm tribute to his memory in Convocation, might be seen seated side by side in friendly converse in the hospitable refuge of the Deanery drawing-room. He was, in short, a thoroughly amiable, kind-hearted, and generous man in all the relations of private life, and the various positions he successively occu- pied, especially during his later years at Westminster, gave him abundant opportunities of exhibiting those estimable qualities, of which he was never slow to avail himself. It has been said, probably with truth, that he never had a personal enemy ; and to this kindliness of heart was added the rare charm of conversational powers which made his presence an acquisition to every company he entered. There is the more reason for rendering this just tribute, because, as will presently appear, there are decisive objec- tions against unreservedly endorsing all the commendations bestowed on the impartial breadth of his liberality in a wider sphere. But that inquiry runs up into a general estimate of his position as a writer, a theologian, and a dignified and influential Churchman. Lord Beaconsfield exemplified his wonted felicity of phrase when he selected " picturesque sensibility " as the special characteristic of Dean Stanley's mind. He was not a deep or philosophical thinker, and therefore was never likely to wield such influence as e.g. Cardinal Newman has exercised on one side, or, to name divines more nearly allied to him, Professor Jowett or the late Mr. Maurice on the other. The marvellous effect attributed to Dr. Newman's sermons at Oxford, which has been described with thrilling force by the most unsympathetic hearers, DEAN STANLEY. 347 could never be produced by any discourse of Dean Stanley's, who was a graceful and picturesque rather than a touching or eloquent preacher, and whose voice was the reverse of musical. For theology properly so called, that is for the abstract discussion of doctrine, he had a positive inaptitude and distaste, though he was constantly writing about it. It was not so much that he disliked this or that particular tenet, as that he disliked and failed to grasp the idea of doctrine or dogma altogether, and his liberality on its intellectual side was largely based on his inability to appreciate distinctions which to him were empty forms. His paradoxical and morbid passion for tracing impossible analogies was matched by an equal incapacity for discern- ing distinctions plain as the sun at noonday to every eye but his. He had an instinctive aversion to definite state- ments on abstract subjects, not because they were false, but because they were definite, and one could as little conceive his being martyred for a specific heresy as for an article of the Creed. Had he lived in the fourth century, he would have fully shared Gibbon's unphilosophical contempt for a Christendom divided about " the difference of a single diphthong," and would have been as little willing to sub- scribe or to condemn the Arian confessions as the Nicene Creed. One could almost imagine his sharing the fate of the unhappy victim of Turkish red-tapism, who is said to have been executed at Constantinople, not for being a Mahometan or a Christian for he was free to profess either religion but because he could not decide, or at least could not intelligibly explain, to which of the rival creeds he adhered. In a lecture to working men some years ago Dean Stanley ridiculed the notion of psychology 348 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. or theology being at all concerned in the problems raised by the Darwinian theory of the origin of species. He referred, in an Oxford University Sermon, to Renan's Vie de Jesus, with its profane and loathsome ravings about " Galilean idyls," pastoral loves, et id genus omne, as "homage offered to Christ from an unexpected quarter." He told the students of St. Andrew's, on another occasion, that "the faith of each successive epoch of Christendom has varied enormously from the faith of its predecessors " which only shows his strange incapacity for distinguish- ing fixed doctrines from passing phases of opinion and that " the true faith " has been to no one more largely indebted than to "the excommunicated Spinoza," who is regarded by all competent interpreters as having been either an Atheist or at best a Pantheist, but to whom, the Dean thought, " was vouchsafed the clearest glimpse into the nature of the Deity." In a paper on the three Creeds, published only a year before his death, while dismissing, as no better than "algebraic symbols" and "arithmetical enigmas," the doctrines they are commonly supposed to contain, he seeks to elicit from them some broader and loftier, but scarcely intelligible, conception of " Christianity, as it has appeared to Voltaire, Rousseau, Gothe, Mill, Renan." He would not have said in so many words, with Strauss in the Leben Jesu, that "the moral contents of Christianity " are alone valuable, for, unlike Strauss, he recoiled from all definite statements ; but from first to last, whenever he spoke as in his latest and not least typical work on Christian Institutions, and in the highly characteristic posthumous paper " On the Revised Version of the New Testament ", published in the DEAN STANLEY. 349 Times of " the great doctrines which all Christians alike hold," he invariably and exclusively referred to the moral, as distinct from the doctrinal, teaching of the Gospel. It is difficult to understand how such vague and colourless exhortations can, as Archbishop Tait declared after his death in Convocation, have " confirmed in the faith vast numbers whose temptations lay entirely in the direction of scepticism " ; for, if anything beyond faith in moral good- ness is intended, the question must at once arise, in what faith were they to be confirmed ? But the Archbishop's loyalty to his friends was stronger than his critical acumen. To say with one of his eulogists that the Dean was less a theologian than an ecclesiastical historian- is greatly to understate the case. He was not and never could have become a theologian at all, and unfortunately his theo- logical or anti-theological peculiarities, combined with the inveterate passion for paradox which grew out of them, materially affected his character as an historian also. The same vagueness of mind which led him rather to adumbrate than to define his theological views reappeared in his treat- ment both of Jewish and Christian history. As a writer he was versatile rather than accurate, brilliant rather than profound, and was always happier in illustrating his subject than in explaining it. And hence in truth those works, like Sinai and Palestine, and the interesting Memorials of Canterbury and of Westminster, which gave the amplest scope for pictorial illustration and the least for theological or ecclesiastical disquisition, were at once the most pleasing and most instructive of his writings ; the Life of Dr. Arnold, which first brought him into public notice, stands in a category by itself, from the singular charm as well of the 350 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. subject as of the treatment. In his Lectures on tJie Eastern Church, his description of the Council of Nice throws far greater light on the details of the national costume and temperament of the assembled prelates than on the momentous, but to his mind comparatively trivial, question they met together to decide for all future ages of the Church ; while elsewhere he dismisses the whole series of General Councils as of no practical value, because they failed to accomplish, what of course they never attempted or from the nature of the case could possibly have achieved, and did not create the art, the science, the literature, the poetry, the philanthropy, or even the theology of Chris- tendom. It did not occur to him that the same line of argument would equally prove the Roman Senate or the English Parliament to be shams. All competent judges again will agree with Mr. Lecky that Christianity has created three things generally recognised as special types and expressions of its religious sentiment, "the church bell, the organ, and the Gothic Cathedral." But Dean Stanley's paradoxical temper led him to argue in Good Words, in defiance of all historical evidence, that there is nothing distinctively Christian, still less distinctively Catholic, in Gothic architecture, and that, in fact, it has closer affinities with Protestantism than with Catholicism. But there is no need to go further into detail on a familiar theme. Those who are acquainted with his writings will be aware that Dr. Stanley was hardly more reliable as an historian than as a divine ; and it was a peculiarity of his mind that, while he was constantly making mistakes, which were at once detected and exposed by his critics, he could never be persuaded to admit them himself. DEAN STANLEY. 351 It remains to say something of the Dean's career as a Churchman, " the successor," as he was fond of styling himself, " of the Abbots of Westminster." And considering the singularity of his own views and policy in Church matters, there was a curious, though probably accidental, fitness in his occupying the one post of eminence in the English Church independent of all episcopal control. The mitred Abbots of Westminster were exempt from all superior jurisdiction save that of the Roman Pontiff, and when the Abbey was suppressed by Henry VIII. the same immunity passed on to the Deans, subject only to the supreme authority of the new Head of the Church, which for centuries past has meant that for practical purposes they can do as they please. This exceptional immunity of the Abbey Church enabled Dean Stanley to try experi- ments there which could have been tried nowhere else. On one occasion he induced a layman to preach in the nave, and more than once he invited suspended clergymen or Nonconformist ministers to occupy the pulpit an offer they had what most people considered the good taste to decline. That however was only one illustration of the ecclesiastical liberalism which shaped the Dean's peculiar view of the relations of Church and State. He is credited with being fearless and impartial in the breadth of his toleration, and always ready to defend the unpopular side. In one sense this is true, but not in another. It need hardly be said that in the present day the liberal or lati- tudinarian is really the popular side, and few men enjoyed a wider popularity in the outer world than the Dean of Westminster. But it is true that he braved, one might almost say scorned, ecclesiastical public opinion, and among 352 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. his own order and in the Church of England generally he was an object of suspicion. But for a man holding a dignified and independent position, with a powerful public opinion and very high authorities both civil and eccle- siastical at his back, it did not perhaps require any very exceptional courage to face a clerical opposition which at worst could only denounce him, and which, with all his personal forbearance to individual opponents, he never hesitated to denounce and satirize, not without some asperity, in return. One can hardly help indeed being a little reminded by his lofty scorn of " sacerdotal " preten- sions of the old story of Diogenes " trampling on the pride of Plato," as Plato quietly remarked, " with a greater pride of his own." On the other hand his liberality, however wide, was most readily and freely extended to the left wing of his own party. We never heard for instance of his voice being raised against the worrying Ritualist prosecu- tions or the harsh penalties which in some cases followed them. Yet, even assuming all the Privy Council judgments to be sound in law, and the Ritualist contention in every respect mistaken which is a strong assumption the victims had surely as much claim for toleration as Mr. Gorham, or Dr. Colenso, or the writers of Essays and Reviews of whom it was said at the time that "they escaped by the skin of their teeth " or Mr. Voysey, who did not escape, or Mr. Stopford Brooke, who did not indeed incur legal censure, but felt bound in honour to retire from an untenable position ; and for all these Dr. Stanley manifested an active sympathy. It may be replied that every one, however comprehensive his toleration, is most keenly alive to the wrongs of his own party, and, of DEAN STANLEY. 353 course, that is perfectly true; only something must in fairness be discounted from the impartial largeness of a tolerance, which is chiefly exhibited towards partisans whose extreme opinions incline to the extremity most closely in harmony with one's own. And the public pro- tests twice raised against himself by Churchmen of mark- edly moderate and conservative temper one by Bishop Wordsworth, then Canon of Westminster, against his instal- lation in the Deanery, the next some few years later by the Dean of Norwich, against his appointment as Select Preacher at Oxford suffice to prove that Dr. Stanley needed for himself a full measure of the toleration he claimed for others. It was characteristic of his one-sided liberalism in historical questions that, while he fiercely denounced "the atrocious Act of 1662," which imposed subscription to the Prayer-Book, and led to the ejection of two thousand Nonconformist ministers from the livings into which they had been illegally thrust, he had no word of censure for the far more arbitrary and sweeping ejection of some 7000 episcopal clergy under the Commonwealth, whose places these intruders had usurped. In practical matters, his eagerness to secure for the Abbey the remains of the Socinian author of Pickwick, at the cost of forcing the hand of his family and contravening his own express directions, contrasted oddly with the omission to offer a resting-place in the same hallowed precincts to the author of the Christian Year. And now for a word in conclusion on the peculiar theory of the relations of Church and State, which held a prominent place in the Dean's entire teaching and policy. He never, of course, precisely defined it, any more than he A A 354. ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. defined his theological views, but it would probably have coincided pretty closely in practical result with the scheme propounded by his old master, Dr. Arnold, that all sects except Jews and Roman Catholics should be united, by Act of Parliament, in one national communion. Their differences of belief or worship would have appeared to him of infinitesimal importance, or, rather, one main advantage of a Church Establishment was to hold such differences in check. At a great meeting convened in St. James's Hall, under the presidency of Archbishop Longley, to protest against the disestablishment of the Irish Church, he commenced a speech, which the frantic howls of his fervently .Tory audience would not allow him to finish, by declaring that he was " a Whig of the Whigs and a Liberal of the Liberals," and intended to support the motion on Liberal principles. He would no doubt have explained at length, had he been suffered to proceed, what he took occasion to set forth in print more fully elsewhere, that the essence of an Established Church is " to be under the supremacy of the Crown, that is, of the law," and that Joseph II. of Austria " my brother the Sacristan," as Frederick II. aptly named the meddlesome lay-pope was his model of a liberal monarch. He was careful to add that the possession of endowments, and still more of any exclusive system of doctrine or polity, or any separate clerical order, is not of the essence of the Church ; that it should be made as comprehensive as the nation, all theological tests being abolished, "except, perhaps, the Apostles' .Creed " this doubtful exception disappears from some later writings on the subject and that "every man capable of rendering good service to the community DEAN STANLEY. 355 be recognised as a minister." The advantages of this arrangement are further explained to be that it secures to the Church the supremacy of just and good laws though one hardly sees why all Church laws should be necessarily bad, and all State laws necessarily good that it gives scope for the growth of various diversities of opinion ; and that it protects " humble and devout souls from being borne down by the current of local and transitory clamour," which was supposed to refer to Bishop Colenso, whose quarrel with the South African bishops was then at its height, and whose pertinacity in maintaining it was more conspicuous than his humility to ordinary observers. In a lecture he delivered some years afterwards in Scotland the Dean pronounced a still more emphatic eulogium on " the principle of a national Establishment," not indeed that the State gains anything from union with the Church, but, on the contrary, "the Church is elevated and enlarged by contact, however slight, with so magnificent and divine an ordinance as the national commonwealth." It was in strict accordance with these views that, when in Scotland, he habitually worshipped and preached in the Established Presbyterian Kirk, and held aloof entirely from the unes- tablished Episcopal Communion. The simple fact of establishment was to him a far more fundamental " note of the Church " than any specialty of doctrine, discipline, or ritual. This is not the place to discuss whether such an establishment as he adumbrated and desired could ever become a practical reality, or how far, if per impossibile it came to be realised, it would differ from what Mr. Goldwin Smith once called " an established chaos." To call such views Erastian would be an obvious misnomer. A A 2 356 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. Erastianism subordinates the Church to the State ; the Stan- leyan hypothesis reduces it to an impalpable abstraction, which "cannot even be conceived of except as a variable accident of the civil administration, having no independent officers, principles, doctrines, or ordinances of its own. The wildest heresies which disturbed the early or mediaeval Church were less utterly alien to the whole temper and teaching of historical Christianity than such an estimate of religious obligations. Had the early Christians shared it, the " ten persecutions " would have been diminished at least by nine, for the first would have secured and justified their submission to " so magnificent and divine an ordi- nance as " the Imperial polity of Rome incomparably the grandest polity the world has ever seen. But it must suffice to have indicated the true nature of the ideal of " toleration, chanty, and comprehensiveness " as an ardent panegyrist has worded it which Dean Stanley made it the aim of his life to promote, and which he appears to the last to have expected or hoped might some day be trans- lated into fact. Its very vagueness and impracticability give a sort of nebulous grandeur to the ideal, but it is not wonderful that the man who desperately clung to it, and never tired of preaching it, in season and out of season, as the last word of religious truth and wisdom, should have found himself out of harmony with almost every section of his clerical brethren. It was a curious coincidence that within the same week with Dr. Stanley there passed away another representative dignitary, differing widely in many ways from him an old-fashioned high-churchman, a Conservative, a man of shy and retiring nature, and a bookworm, but also a man of DEAN STANLEY. 357 deep learning, great kindliness of disposition, and munificent liberality, to whom more than to any other individual is owing the splendid restoration of Exeter Cathedral Chancellor Harington, who was loved by all who knew him, and reverenced, one might almost say, throughout the whole West of England. No two men could be more utterly unlike in their opinions, habits, and the entire course of their lives, than these cathedral dignitaries, who in the time of their death were not divided. Meanwhile, if for Westminster Abbey, viewed as a centre of spiritual influ- ence, Dean Stanley was not exactly the ideal head, it might have been difficult to find any one better qualified to do justice in its secular aspects to a position of unique historical, social, and national interest. XXXIX. WILLIAM GEORGE WARD. IN a sketch of Cardinal Newman originally published in the Century, Mr. Kegan Paul refers to the curious fact that Mr. Ward's name is not once mentioned in the Apologia, and infers from it, justly enough, " how little he (the Car- dinal) considered Mr. Ward an exponent of his own views." At the same time there are few of the old Tractarian party who took a more prominent part in the Oxford movement than the able writer and metaphysician who, after a brief and painful illness, passed from among us in July 1882, at the age of seventy. His popular sobriquet of "Ideal Ward," which could not fail to bring a smile to the faces of all who knew anything of his outer man, was derived from a work which at the time produced an immense sensation ; and Mr. Mozley has reminded us that he was, in more senses than one, " the largest contributor to the British Critic" the recognised organ of the school. Mr. Ward was indeed a man whose personality, both physical and mental, it was impossible to overlook or ignore. Of his achievements at Winchester there is little to record ; but even as an undergraduate he had distinguished himself as a frequent and telling speaker at the Oxford Union, and from the time he gained his double second in 1834, and WILLIAM GEORGE WARD. 359 was soon afterwards elected, together with Archbishop Tait, a Fellow of Balliol, his name rapidly grew famous in the University and in the Church. Though not a Rugbean, but a Wykehamist, he fell early under Dr. Arnold's influence, and represented at Oxford, as Mr. Mozley puts it, " the intellectual force, the irrefragable logic, the absolute self-confidence, and the headlong impetuosity of the Rugby school." There is a story of his once paying a visit to Rugby to consult Dr. Arnold on his intellectual difficulties, when he plied his teacher so unsparingly with questions and arguments that on his departure the indomit- able Doctor was fain to confess himself utterly exhausted, and to retire at once to bed. But his allegiance was soon to be transferred to a yet more illustrious master. There was a tradition current at Oxford that he was instantane- ously converted to Tractarianism by a single line in the preface to the third volume of Newman's Parochial Ser- mons published in 1836 to the effect that " Ultra-Pro- testantism could never have been silently corrupted into Popery." Converted at all events he was, very speedily and very completely, from Arnoldian to Anglo-Catholic ideas, and his great literary powers were at once devoted to the service of the rising school. As a writer he was both startling and irrepressible ; " Ward alone was enough to fill the world with alarms." The " doctrine of reserve," which was elaborately and somewhat ponderously preached by Mr. Isaac Williams in one of the later Tracts, and for which the writer was mercilessly castigated by indignant Protestant critics as " a Jesuit," was not at all in his line. He not only knew what he meant, but said it with what in modern phrase would be called " a brutal frankness." And 360 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. hence the enemies of the movement denounced him as at once impudent and treacherous, impudent for his avowed design of " un-Protestantizing the Church of England," treacherous for remaining to " eat the bread of the Cuhrch " while he carried on this work, though in fact he never held any ecclesiastical preferment. The writer of a long- forgotten pasquinade, once widely circulated under the title of the Oxford Argo, thus gibbeted him, in what unfortun- ately was by no means the most offensive of his stanzas, in point either of reverence or good taste : There's Balliol's honest knave, Non-natural but real, To waft them o' er the wave Winding a blast ideal. And if Mr. Ward's lucubrations acted on opponents like a red rag on a bull, they were in other ways hardly less irritating to his friends. For one thing, he was terribly voluminous. His Few More Words in defence of Tract XC. covered 90 pages. The length of his contributions to the British Critic so overpowered the much-enduring editor that " for many years his idea of Ward was of a huge young cuckoo, growing bigger and bigger, elbowing the legitimate progeny over the side of the little nest." Nor was this the only grievance. From the first Ward's chief interest was philosophical, and the editor, who did not profess to be a philosopher, records pathetically how, if " I did but touch a filament or two in one of his monstrous cobwebs, off ran he instantly to Newman to complain of my gratuitous impertinence," so that he not only thought of him as of a huge young cuckoo, but also as of " a plump little Cupid flying to his mother to show a wasp sting he WILLIAM GEORGE WARD. 361 had just received." And " as for cutting short (his articles), where was one to commence that operation when they were already without beginning or end ? " Graces of style indeed Ward had less than none, differing therein widely from his friend Oakeley, who to the last remained, as a writer, very much what Mr. Mozley describes him as being in his earlier Oxford days, " an elegant and rather dilettante scholar ; " his English is always pleasant to read, and often felicitous, but is more remarkable for elegance than force. At the same time Mr. Mozley admits, what is not difficult to understand, that many readers of the Critic " looked to Ward's article as the gem of the number." But moreover the practical difficulties he threw in the way of editorial revision were vexatious enough ; " his handwriting was minute and detestable ; it defied correction. The MS. consisted of bundles of irregular scraps of paper, which I had to despatch to the printer crying out for copy. " There was always indeed something of the humorous as well as the alarming associated with the name of Ward, by friend and foe alike. The crisis of his Anglican career was brought about, as is well known, by the publication of his Ideal of a Christian Church and the censure pronounced on the book and its author by the Oxford Convocation : and on that occasion he sat down in the middle of his great speech, to read not his notes, as was supposed at the time but a letter from the lady who afterwards became his wife. Of the book itself it is superfluous at this distance of time to say much. It was marked by the keen insight and logical acuteness which never deserted him, but he would probably have allowed himself in later days that, if he did not exaggerate the slavery of the Church " working 362 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. in chains," which he had tried and found wanting, he had at least somewhat idealized the actual working of the Church which as yet he had only had the opportunity of observing from without. The story of the conflict at Oxford in 1845 and its issue has been told too often, and from almost every point of view, to need being told again. But it may be worth while to observe that " the very interesting and amusing account " of it by the late Dean Stanley in the Edinburgh Review, referred to by the writer of Mr. Ward's obituary in the Times, was chiefly amusing for its marvellous travesty of the facts. His own accuracy may be gauged by the novel information that " the votes were taken, and the majority was found to be for the censure [of Tract XC.], when the Senior Proctor, the present Dean of St. Paul's, pronounced the famous words, ' Nobis procuratoribus non placet', and the swarm dispersed." The proctors, it ought to be unnecessary to observe, have no such autocratic power of reversing a vote of Convocation once given ; the power they have, and exercised on that memorable occasion, is to prohibit a motion they deem objectionable being put to the vote at all. Mr. Ward was deprived of his degree by a sentence, the justice of which few adherents of any religious party would now care to vindicate, and the legality of which would have been challenged, probably with success, had he cared to retain his position at Oxford. But within a few months he had vacated his fellowship by marriage, and had been received into the Roman Communion. His marriage of course precluded him from pursuing an ecclesiastical career, but the Pope recognised his intellectual distinction by conferring on him the degree of Doctor of WILLIAM GEORGE WARD. 363 Philosophy, and Cardinal Wiseman appointed him to the Chair of Dogmatic Theology not Moral Philosophy, as the Times stated at the Seminary of St. Edmund's, Herts, which he held for several years, till he came, by the death of his uncle, into a considerable property in the Isle of Wight. In most respects he would have agreed with Sir George C. Lewis, that " life would be tolerable, but for its amusements." Of operatic music, however, he was pas- sionately fond, but he used to stop his ears, when com- pelled to listen to Gregorian chanting, which, he said, " always reminded him of original sin." His literary activity was not checked either by his conversion or his succession to a fortune ; it constituted, in fact, his ruling passion and his main interest in life. In 1860 he published an able treatise on Nature and Grace, and for fifteen years he held the editorship of the Dublin Review, to which, as before to the British Critic, he was himself a copious con- tributor. He had been, so to speak, an Ultramontane while still an Anglican, and his Ultramontanism naturally became more pronounced in his adopted Church. We have seen already that Dr. Newman never acknowledged him as an exponent of his own views at Oxford, and in his Letter to Dr. Pusey on the Eirenicon, published in 1866, while commending his " energy, acuteness, and theological reading," he peremptorily asserts him to be " in no sense a spokesman for English Catholics," of whom very few " go his lengths in their view of the Pope's infallibility." His extreme theological line and his vehemence, not to say arrogance, in his way of enforcing it, frequently brought him into collision with writers of his own communion, whose dissent he could least patiently endure, notably with 364 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. Father Ryder of the Birmingham Oratory, and some of the contributors to the Rambler and the Home and Foreign Review, and he had an unpleasant habit of intimating that those who differed from him on some detail of theological opinion, or ecclesiastical or educational discipline, ought in strict consistency to be sceptics or atheists. Of his sincerity there can be no shadow of doubt, nor did he ever intend to be unfair. But in dealing with a theological opponent, who had the misfortune to be one of his co-religionists, fairness was to him a psychological impossibility. Nobody ever exem- plified more consistently Warburton's dictum that " ortho- doxy is my doxy ; " it was inconceivable to him that a Catholic should not be heterodox, whose " doxy " differed from his own. He may be said in a sense to represent the same type of fierce and aggressive Ultramontanism which on the continent found a mouthpiece in the late M. Veuillot. But the comparison would be doubly unjust. Ward was a deep and powerful philosophical thinker ; Veuillot was at best no more than a racy and shallow pamphleteer. And if John Knox is rightly named " the ruffian of the Reforma- tion," Veuillot was the ruffian of modern Ultramontanism, modified of course by this difference between the conditions of the sixteenth century and the nineteenth, that Knox had command of knives and bludgeons, whereas Veuillot had to content himself with stabbing reputations of some of the noblest of his Catholic contemporaries with a pen habitually dipped in the acidulated quintessence of vitriol. Of Ward, overbearing and arrogant as he was apt to be in theological controversy with his fellow Catholics, it would be untrue to say this. He was not personally venomous or vindictive. WILLIAM GEORGE WARD. 365 The Times was quite right in intimating that it was partly, if not chiefly, Ward's opposition which some years ago wrecked the scheme of founding an Oratory not " a Roman Catholic College " at Oxford, as a religious centre for Roman Catholic undergraduates, for which Dr. Newman had already received generous promises of sup- port and warm assurances of sympathy from a large body of his co-religionists. Great as was Ward's admiration both personal and intellectual for his old leader, there was from first to last a marked divergence of sentiment and opinion between them. But, in spite of his keen interest in religious .controversy, and pugnacious advocacy of his own side, his real greatness was always rather as a speculative thinker than a theologian. He was most at home in the Metaphysical Society, which he helped to found, and where he met and argued on equal terms with some of the first thinkers of the day, and it is not his theological but his philosophical articles in the British Critic and Dublin Review which are the likeliest to survive. He republished during life one or two volumes of the former, but all who are familiar with his series of papers on the Intuitional and Free-will controversies, directed against the theories of J. S. Mill and Herbert Spencer, whether accepting his conclusions or not, must desire to see them collected and reprinted in a permanent form ; his leading opponents, like the late Mr. Mill, never hesitated themselves to acknowledge him as a foeman worthy of their steel 1 It is fair to add that the many controversies in which he was 1 While these sheets are passing through the press, two vols. are advertised of Essays on the Philosophy of Theism by the late W. G. Ward. 366 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. engaged through life seldom or never involved any inter- ruption of personal friendships, though it has often been observed that his relations were far more cordial with Protestants, from whom he could afford to differ, than with " Liberal Catholics," whom he could not easily bring him- self to regard as any better than traitors in the camp. In one respect he was honourably distinguished from some of his clerical fellow-converts who, owing to their marriage or other circumstances, were constrained like himself to retire into lay communion, and have been reproached with sink- ing into a state of intellectual apathy. It was not in Ward's nature to suffer the edge of his intellect to rust, or even rest for a moment, nor would he willingly let any one who came into contact with him escape " the keen en- counter of their wits," which he was ever on the watch to challenge or eager to accept XL. DR. PUSEY AND THE OXFORD MOVEMENT. ON the I4th of July 1883 the Tractarian Movement became entitled to celebrate its jubilee. Mr. Keble's Assize Sermon at Oxford on Sunday, July 14, 1833, marks, as Cardinal Newman has told us, what must be considered the date of its commencement, though some years had yet to elapse before it could be said to be in full swing. Nor did anything so much contribute, as the same high authority has reminded us, to its consolidation and eventual success as the accession to its ranks of the learned and saintly divine who on Sept. 18, 1882, passed away, in a ripe and honoured old age, amid the regrets of thousands of friends and disciples, and with the universal respect of his country- men of all shades of opinion. There is room of course for comment from many points of view on a life, singularly uneventful indeed in its outward circumstances, but of such large and manifold influence on the destinies of the Church of England, and the course of religious thought in this country, that to it the hackneyed epithet of "epoch- making" might not unfitly be applied. And we may confidently anticipate that full justice will be done to a theme of such wide and varied interest in the biography now in course of preparation by the writer of all others 368 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. most competent to undertake the task, as well from his intimate personal knowledge of Dr. Pusey, as from his having so largely inherited both the convictions and the influence of the teacher he loved so well. Meanwhile a few general remarks are all that can be attempted here, on the significance of a career which will retain its permanent place in the annals both of Oxford and of the religious life of England. For more than half a century the late Professor of Hebrew at Oxford held the post to which he was appointed, at an unusually early age, in 1828, and the long and yet imperfect list of his works, copied from Crockford, which filled more than half a column of the obituary notice in the Guardian, would alone suffice to prove his unwearied and lifelong assiduity. Nor was there to the last any sign of failing power. Clearness of style was never Dr. Pusey's strong point, and for this his Hebrew, patristic, and German studies might sufficiently account ; but his latest work, published only two years before his death in reply to Dr. Farrar's Eternal Hope, is not only one of the most masterly and decisive, but perhaps the most tersely and clearly written, that ever emanated from him. Within a few days of his death he was engaged in preparing his Hebrew lectures for the next term, though for some years past he had been unequal to the task of himself delivering either lectures or sermons, which were read by others for him. But, while throughout his long life Dr. Pusey realised the ideal of a student, in a sense which we are wont to associate rather with German than with English professors or divines, he was never a mere book-worm. To call him a party leader would convey an incorrect impression, for no one DR. PUSEY AND THE OXFORD MOVEMENT. 369 could have less of the ambition of leadership or the spirit of a partisan ; yet it was at bottom as true an instinct as that which almost invariably dictates schoolboy nicknames that identified with his name the great religious revival commenced at Oxford fifty years ago. Mr. Newman (as he then was) was earlier in the field, and his is unquestion- ably a mind of more rare and commanding genius ; yet the attempt, made at one time by the late Dr. Arnold, to saddle the movement with the sarcastic sobriquet of " New- mania" from the first completely failed. Whether it would ever have been begun, or would have attained the influ- ential position in the University and the country which it soon acquired, without the impetus derived from his devoted energy and transcendent powers, may well be doubted ; but, once fairly started on its course, it has owed more in the long run, as Cardinal Newman has himself, with charac- teristic generosity, been forward to remind us, " to the great learning, immense diligence, scholastic mind, and simple devotion to the cause of religion " of his loved and dis- tinguished colleague, whom he " used to call 6 /xeyas." " There was henceforth," adds the author of the Apologia, " a man who could be the head and centre of the zealous people in every part of the country who were adopting the new opinions ; and not only so, but there was one who furnished the movement with a front to the world, and gained for it a recognition from other parties in the Uni- versity. . . . Dr. Pusey was, to use the common expression, a host in himself; he was able to give a name, a form, and a personality to what was without him a sort of mob. . . . Such was the benefit he conferred on the Movement exter- nally ; nor was the internal advantage at all inferior to it. B B 370 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. He was a man of large designs ; he had a hopeful, sanguine mind ; he had no fear of others ; he was haunted by no intellectual perplexities." When Dr. Pusey was appointed at the age of twenty-nine to the chair of Hebrew at Oxford, and first occupied the canonry house at Christ Church which was ever afterwards his home, he had already spent a considerable time in studying successively at three German universities Jena, Gottingen, and Bonn and had published a work on German theology, long since out of print, which incurred the charge of rationalism, chiefly, no doubt, because anything coming out of Germany was then supposed to deserve the name. It was at all events the first and last time such a charge could with any semblance of plausibility be brought against him. It is somewhat curious to recollect that the book provoked two replies from Hugh James Rose, of Cambridge, who filled a conspicuous place in the Church movement of a few years later. As a Hebrew lecturer, a preacher, and a theologian, Dr. Pusey throughout a long and laborious life resolutely and consistently maintained the cause of Christian orthodoxy against all assailants. But while circumstances rather than choice often forced on him the office of a controversialist, and his own deepest convictions made him always an unflinching upholder of the dogmatic principle, there was ever about him a largeness of mind and a depth of Christian sympathy which rendered all bitterness of feeling or expression impossible. He was often bitterly attacked, and from opposite quarters, but while he felt it his duty, not so much for his own sake as in the interests of his Church, to defend himself against charges of disloyalty which involved an arraignment of his DR. PUSEY AND THE OXFORD MOVEMENT. 371 theological position, he never bitterly retaliated. The so- called Evangelical party for many years assailed him with unsparing virulence, but when the appearance of Essays and Reviews seemed to him to indicate a serious menace to truths held in common by all sincere believers in the Gospel, he did not hesitate to appeal to the readers of the Record for sympathy arid support in resisting the common enemy. The secession in 1845 f ms great friend and ally, with many of his followers, brought him of necessity into what was evidently to him a most unwelcome conflict, against claims he felt unable to admit, in defence of a position about which he had never entertained a doubt. But of controversial animus against the great Communion which had attracted so many of those on whose continued support he had once confidently reckoned, or against the seceders themselves, whose fidelity to conscience he re- spected while he dissented from their conclusions, there is no trace in his writings, as there was none in his heart. And when the growing pressure of the Rationalistic attacks, which had prompted his appeal to the Evangelicals, seemed to call for united action on the part of all who cherished their traditional faith in Divine Revelation, not only in England but throughout Europe, he put forth, under the winning title of An Eirenicon, a work which, however barren of any immediate practical result, will certainly live, as an abiding monument both of deep theological learning and of calm far-sighted Christian wisdom and charity. He was never wild, paradoxical, or, in the bad sense of the word, enthu- siastic ; no one, begging Dr. Arnold's pardon, could be less like Don Quixote. And if he sometimes lent his great name to phases of opinion or practice which were considered B B 2 372 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. " extreme," this arose from a fault, if fault it be, which leant to virtue's side. So far from sharing that base disposition, on which " safe men " are apt to pride themselves, to throw over dangerous allies, his generosity of temper, as Cardinal Newman has somewhere observed, always inclined him rather to go beyond than to fall short of his own deliberate convictions, in defending those with whom he substantially agreed, though it were to his own hindrance. He dis- approved, for instance, at the time of the publication of Tract XC., though it contained nothing to which he did not in principle assent. But when the author was assailed with a storm of authoritative censure and popular abuse, he at once came forward with an elaborate and unqualified vindication of it. So, again, at a later period, when the Oxford movement itself had won a recognised position, and it had become the fashion to contrast " Ritualism " with Tractarianism, as a new and parasitical excrescence, it might have been supposed that Dr. Pusey, who knew little and cared less about ceremonial details so that it has been not inaptly said, that " to the end he remained in practice a Berkshire country clergyman" would at least stand aloof from this new development, if he did not openly condemn it. On the contrary, while mingling words of counsel and caution with his commendations, he did not hesitate to throw his shield over those whom he believed to be honestly carrying out in practice whether judiciously or not the principles which he had devoted his life to reaffirming and propagating ; the fact that in doing so they had incurred an obloquy to which " the old Tractarians," as they were sometimes termed in contradistinction from their later disciples, were no longer subjected, was to him DR. PUSEY AND THE OXFORD MOVEMENT. 373 an additional reason not for disclaiming but for acknow- ledging them. When Sisterhoods were a new thing in the English Church, and were almost as universally censured or disparaged as they are now universally accepted and encouraged, he was the first to come forward as the spokes- man and champion of this salutary revival. He was not indifferent to the force of public opinion though no one less sought or cared for mere personal popularity and never thought it beneath him to say or do what lay in his power to disarm unreasonable prejudice and distrust; but he would not consent to escape unmerited criticism by the sacrifice of his friends, even when he might think that in particular points they were indiscreet or mistaken. The main interest of Dr. Pusey's life, as has been already intimated, lies in its relations to religion and to the Church of which he was so conspicuous an ornament. And the wonderful change, which during the last fifty years has passed over the worship, the teaching, and the general tone of the Anglican Church, constitutes at once its explanation and its crowning triumph. Those who agree and those who disagree with him must alike confess that he has not lived in vain. On the ultimate results of the movement, which he did so much to promote, it would be premature as yet to pronounce any comprehensive and final verdict ; to do so would be in effect to predict the future of the National Church, and to some extent of Christianity throughout Europe ; for it was part in fact of the general Catholic reaction which followed on the French Revolu- tion. But it may safely be asserted that he has left his mark on the Communion he served so faithfully and loved so well, as few, if any, of her prelates or divines have done 374 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. since the Reformation. Such as he found it fifty years ago it can never again become ; it will be for those who come after him to decide whether or not it shall decline from the higher standard which his teaching and example so largely contributed to establish. Of his private life this is hardly the place to speak. It was uniform and monotonous in its outward course, but not wanting in severe trials and sorrows. More than forty years ago he lost a wife to whom he was deeply attached, and soon afterwards his eldest daughter ; between two and three years before his death his only son was suddenly taken from him, who, in spite of what to many would be crushing bodily infirmities, had been not only a comfort and support to his father in his advancing age, but a ready and invaluable assistant in his literary labours. His sufferings from the separation, and in some cases alienation, of friends, are too well known to need being dwelt upon. But through all trials he preserved the even tenor of his course ; his spirit was not soured, and his energy never flagged. His life teaches many lessons of self- denial, charity, generosity, industry, and perseverance ; but perhaps the most precious memorial he has bequeathed not to his own disciples only, but to all who, in whatever ministry of action or of thought, would " serve their gener- ation after the counsel of God" is the example of that unselfish singleness of purpose, which is the surest secret of success. XLI. THE LATE PROVOST OF ORIEL. IT cannot exactly be said that the death of the late venerable Provost of Oriel, at the advanced age of ninety- three, removed a prominent figure from Oxford life. In the first place, Dr. Hawkins had retired eight years before from residence at Oriel, and from all active discharge of his duties as head of the College, which devolved on the Vice-Provost, Mr. Monro, who has since succeeded him. His death threw open the office for the first time to lay competition, as the canonry which formed part of its endowment has now been annexed to the ill-endowed chair of Scripture Exegesis, which happened by a curious coincidence to be also vacant at the same moment through the resignation of Dr. Liddon. But neither can it be said that the late Provost, though so long a well-known and familiar figure at Oxford, ever exercised any commanding influence as a leader of thought in the University or the Church of England generally. His tone of mind was critical and cautious rather than original, and his charac- teristic attitude was not such as to conciliate disciples or kindle enthusiasm. He belonged to what may be called the broader section of the old High and Dry School, and disliked innovations either religious or academical beyond a 3?6 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY. very limited range, and hence he had little sympathy with either of the two great intellectual movements, the Trac- tarian and the Rationalistic, which passed successively over the Oxford world of his day. Cardinal Newman's account in the Apologia of his personal influence over himself remarkably illustrates this temper of mind : " He was the first who taught me to weigh my words, and to be cautious in my statements. He led me to that mode of limiting and clearing my sense in discussion and in contro- versy, and of distinguishing between cognate ideas, and of obviating mistakes by anticipation. . . . He is a man of most exact mind himself, and he used to snub me severely on reading, as he was kind enough to do, the first Sermons that I wrote and other compositions that I was engaged upon." He did, however, though probably beyond his own knowledge or intention, influence Mr. Newman's mind at the time in a Catholicizing direction, as well by the books he lent him as by giving him a copy of his famous University Sermon on " Unauthoritative Tradition." But the special interest of Dr. Hawkins's life lies not so much in any paramount influence which he exerted over others, as in the exceptional prominence of the men and the events he was brought into contact with during his long University career, and the marvellous changes he lived to witness during the half-century of his provostship, as well in Oriel and Oxford as in the entire social, political, and religious condition of the age. Born in the very year of the outbreak of the French Revolution, and elected to his fellowship two years before the battle of Waterloo, and to the headship of his College the year before the Catholic Emancipation Act was passed, he seems, while many who THE LATE PROVOST OF ORIEL. 377 knew him intimately, and many more to whom his erect form and sharp, clear-cut face with its wreath of snow- white hair remain among their most familiar recollections, are still actively engaged in the work of life, already to belong rather to history than to the living world. Nor can it be forgotten that in his person passes away, if not by any means the greatest, the last but one a far greater than himself of that historic group, including Keble, Whateley, and Arnold, who combined to make the name of Oriel illustrious. 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Each Volume has about 450 pages and 1 6 full-page Illustrations. SKETCHES BY "BOZ." PICKWICK. 2 vols. OLIVER TWIST. NICHOLAS NICKLEBY. 2 vols. MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT. 2 vols. DOMBEY AND SON. 2 vols. DAVID COPPERFIELD. 2 vols. CHRISTMAS BOOKS. OUR MUTUAL FRIEND. 2 vols. CHRISTMAS STORIES. BLEAK HOUSE. 2 vols. LITTLE DORRIT. 2 vols. OLD CURIOSITY SHOP AND REPRINTED PIECES. 2 vols. BARNABY RUDGE. 2 vols. UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVEL- LER. GREAT EXPECTATIONS. TALE OF TWO CITIES. CHILD'S HISTORY OF ENG- LAND. EDWIN DROOD AND MISCEL- LANIES. PICTURES FROM ITALY AND AMERICAN NOTES. The Cheapest and Handiest Edition of THE WORKS OF CHARLES DICKENS. The Pocket-Volume Edition of Charles Dickens's Works. In 30 Vols. small f cap. 8v0, 2 55. New and Cheap Issue of THE WORKS OF CHARLES DICKENS. In pocket volumes. PICKWICK PAPERS, with 8 Illustrations, cloth, as. NICHOLAS NICKLEBY, with 8 Illustrations, cloth, 25. OLIVER TWIST, with 8 Illustrations, cloth, is. SKETCHES BY " BOZ," with 8 Illustrations, cloth, is. 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