GIFT OF «^-V*~a V^f*->— f fne personal will with the conclusions of the social mind. It is not easy to see that in the his- toric development a certain legitimacy has attached to every form of human society. Some people do ttfLinaw vi FOREWORD know, for example, that organized slavery gave the master his duty as well as his rights, and so far was a great advance in the world's social order, just as dueling was far better than sneaking assassination; though slavery and dueling were both to pass away. We know that the ancient Greek artists did not un- derstand the theory of perspective, and on that ac- count we find their paintings amusing. But many writers treat historical subjects without any sense of perspective and both themselves and their readers often take the performance very seriously. Religion has suffered more from this unscientific method of procedure than almost any other depart- ment of human experience. It has been partly be- cause of the great intensity of interest men have usually had in religion and the consequent intrusion of the emotional element. The recent science of com- parative religion has taught us to be more respectful to the common elements in various systems, and to recognize in them whatever has been valuable for groups of believers and worshipers. It is no longer thought necessary for truth to be original in order to be useful; in fact, the more widely a conviction or a custom is shared among diverse peoples the more certain are we of its value. We have gone somewhat further and in addition to a history of philosophy some very respectable efforts have been made to present to the world a history of theology. Authorities of the Roman Church have often gone so far as to provide for a history of the- ology in the doctrine of the permanence of the teach- ing power of the church. Writers in various schools FOREWORD vii of thought have been seeking to appraise and appor- tion the Hebrew, the Greek and the Roman elements in modern Christianity. Some of these efforts have been too purposeful and not sufficiently naive to be really scientific. But at any rate the religious expe- rience of the race is being taken more seriously than it was in the middle of the nineteenth century, and the great scientific movement of that period, which seemed to many of the fathers big with disaster to every form of Christianity, turns out to find it neces- sary at last to regard the religious life of the world as a permanent department of social science. One objection to scientific method in the domain of religion, or indeed in any domain where human beings have a vital interest, is that the scientists as a rule have been rather a repellent sort of folk. They have seemed to have no place for life. That is to say a living thing is only of scientific importance when it can be cut up and its organs put in pigeon holes. The instrument of science has been supposed to be the "cold light of reason,' ' though "cold light' ' could not really be an instrument for anything. As a matter of fact we now know that the pioneer of science has usually been the imagination, and the im- pulse of science has been some human passion. It is possible even that in time it may become interesting. At all events there can be no social science worth the name that does not take into account the fundamental social forces, and those tremendous vitalities in indi- viduals and in groups, for which we may indeed have names, but which have never yet been fully de- scribed, and which up to date leave plenty of room viii FOREWORD for the thing which is vaguely called "The Tran- scendental." The attack upon Christianity as a re- ligion and upon the church as a social organization has changed very much of late years, and the change is partly unconscious. Formerly the enemies used to say, the thing is not true, but at present the strength of the attack is, the thing is not useful. With whip and spur the frantic friends of the church are urging it to all sorts of new activities, and the enemies of the church are insisting that the church is no longer available for important social ob- ligations. The outside enemies may be ignored. In fact they have always been negligible, but the time has come when the church is most sorely wounded in the house of her friends, and her foes are those of her own household. This study is an effort to use the genetic method in considering the relation of the Christian church to the development of democracy. For the time we have nothing to do with creed or sect, with Roman or Protestant, save as their activities bear upon the for- tunes of democratic institutions. The result of the study convinces the writer that Christianity has ful- filled a unique social function of the utmost value as a by-product of its religious life, and the attempt is here made to sketch that important function. The ideas of democracy are quite evidently in the world. It is important to know at what time and in what person the latent life of the people found an articulate voice. It seems evident that that time was the first century of our era, and the voice was that of Jesus. It may be found that the type of democ- FOREWORD ix racy which He introduced into the world has not yet clothed itself with proper institutions, but it would seem that the teaching of Jesus upon this subject is still the noblest philosophy which the race has heard. The history of the church has been an effort, more or less successful, to embody both the religious and the social teachings of Jesus in human experience. There are at least some series of events which indi- cate the pathway of democracy. The influence of primitive Christianity culminating in Constantine profoundly affected his legislation. There can be no question that primitive Christianity humanized the world. It is not quite true to say that upon the ruins of the Roman empire the Roman Catholic Church arose ; for the popes have always had emperors as their mas- ters, their servants or their antagonists. The strug- gles of the church and the empire were significant through several centuries. The result of the strug- gles has been without question to the advantage of the common people. Christianity has always been larger than the church. The Roman church, with a great flexibility, has frequently found room for new forms of life. This is shown in the history of the monastic orders, and conspicuously in her hospitality to St. Francis d'Assisi, as well as in the motherhood of the Univer- sities. When she has failed to find room for such turbulent souls as Luther and Calvin, these have gone their way carrying the jewels of Egypt with them, and seeking a church life in the promised land of new Christian organizations. The reformers have not x FOREWORD always been fortunate in their doctrine or method, but it is impossible for them at least to do anything but promote democratic institutions. Modern Christianity has been the mother of the great social movements of our times. Stupid critics have railed against the church because it did not al- ways move at once as one mass in favor of every great and good cause. It were foolishness to expect it. We have prophets and reformers simply because masses of men do not move easily, and love their tra- ditions. The glory of the church is not that she was always encamped in full force on every battle line but rather that she gave birth to the new leaders, fur- nished them their ideas, developed for them their character, provided their inspiration, and was the recruiting ground for their battalions. In spite of all that Jesus taught, and all that the church has done, it is by no means certain that the democracy of the present understands its weaknesses or can foresee its defeats. Its weakness is the lack of intelligence and virtue. Its defeats are to be nu- merous, and its final victory will only come when the new order of men predicted in the person of Jesus take the actual leadership of human affairs, and so shape human conduct that what the best men now largely dream about will be actually recognized as a possible goal in the domain of practical statesman- ship. The occasion for this study was an invitation to deliver a course of lectures upon " Applied Chris- tianity, ' ' upon the Enoch Pond foundation at the Bangor Theological Seminary. It soon seemed to me FOREWORD xi that all real Christianity is in its very nature "ap- plied," and I determined to attempt to show that there is not a special kind of Christian activity to be encouraged but that if essential Christianity has the right of way it will create every kind of useful so- cial activity. Though this volume was suggested by the course of lectures it differs from them both in form and extent, as they were spoken addresses and five in number. CONTENTS I. Jesus and Democracy . II. Influence of Primitive Christianity III. Papacy and Liberty IV. Social Revival in Italy V. Social Upheavals in England . VI. Luther and Liberty VII. Social Influence of the Reformation VIII. Democracy and Education . IX. Social Spirit of Modern Christianity X. The Democracy of Tomorrow Index PAGE 1 31 62 101 .133 165 207 244 272 309 347 A CONFESSION OF FAITH "The faith of Christ makes fraternal, individuals and nations, elevates the multitude, with education, personal and collective ; sanctifies labor, stirs the con- science with the excellence of spirit above matter, reinforces with eternal sanctions the duties which each has toward his fellows, induces abnegation and sacrifices and creates an unconquerable energy for social amelioration .... In brief all present democracy showing the Cross says : ' In this sign you conquer.' " Mons. Giambattista Savarese, "La Chiesa e la Democrazia. ' ' "The strongest and most durable powers of the earth are not those that come from an electoral urn (a polling booth) but from an election imaginary and mystical.' ' Tarde, "Les Transformations du Pouvoir," p. 45. "Christianity by her bond of unity, her moral tie, by softening slavery into serfdom, laid the founda- tions of modern civilization." Lecky, "Rational- ism," Vol. ii, p. 32. "A humanity ten times stronger than ours would be infinitely more religious" — such men would "see the baseness of all that is not truth and goodness and beauty." E. Renan, "The Apostles," p. 136. "The pagan world laboured under a triple curse, the curse of corruption, the curse of cruelty, the curse of slavery. ' ' Farrar, ' ' The Witness of History to Christ," p. 173. xv Democracy and The Church CHAPTER I JESUS AND DEMOCRACY The early history of the race depends upon physical environment and primary economic conditions. Savage men divided into types de- pending upon opportunities which involved neither travel nor commerce. For the anxious questions, what shall we eat and what shall we drink, could not be put aside. The quality of the body was fixed by the nature of the food, as the activities and interests reflected resources and opportunities. These things have to do with the development of the savage man and the beginnings of the race. The dawn of civili- zation reveals quite other forces at work. For the horde becomes a tribe, and the tribe a na- tion by the power of those ideas which inspire, and those ever-widening desires which drive to corresponding action. It is in these ideas 2 1 DEMOCRACY-. AND THE CHURCH and desires that we discover the interpretation of life. Those men are significant who have in- carnated and disclosed the most valuable social ideas; and those movements must be studied which have quickened the passions, and have resulted in new or more complex activities. Eeligion is the most efficient of all the factors in human history, because it furnishes at once essential ideas, inspires great motives, controls economic conditions, and creates great men. The makers of history are not those who fight its battles, who found its empires, who write its constitutions, or who frame its laws. St. Louis influenced France more than Louis XIV. The power of Stephen Langton was not in the See of Canterbury, but in his essential religious nature. Hildebrand was greater as the brain and heart of the church than he was as Gregory VII. So Catherine of Siena, without a throne, was more important than any woman of Italy. Joan of Arc has remained a human document of invincible interest, not because she conquered the English in battle, nor yet because she was burned as a martyr, but because her great re- ligious personality made men believe that the finite world was the theater of divine affairs. Gautama, resigning his throne, was mightier than any monarch in all the Asian empires. 2 JESUS AND DEMOCRACY Confucius has compelled every dynasty of China since his time, and the influence of Socra- tes upon the life and religion of the world, and not upon its speculative thought, is his final in- terpretation. Elsewhere 1 I have shown re- ligion as a primary experience. While other religions have lifted men out of animalism, fur- nished them noble thoughts, and afterward great duties, have made the temple the dwell- ing-place of every form of beauty, and often have established national unity, it has remained for Christianity to become the greatest and most universal force the world has ever known. The object of this study is to exhibit the in- fluence of Christianity upon the making of de- mocracy. The teaching of Jesus discloses a unique foundation for the rights of men; and the impulse of Christianity, as yet unspent, is on its way toward the formation on earth of the Kingdom of God. Let others debate about forms of theology, or the terms of church or- ganization, let us seek to see the life and teach- ing of Jesus as the creative and uplifting force in the social life of the world for nearly two thousand years. All debates about the nature of the final so- cial order are resolved by a discovery of the 1 ' ' Religion in the Making. ' ' 3 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH true nature of democracy. The foes of democ- racy have always feared the people, and in this the foes of democracy have shown their wisdom. The people, ignorant, selfish, inefficient, if placed in power, drive on to the wreck of the world. It was not the actual man, but it was the possible man, who was always in the mind of Jesus. He proposed to reorganize society, by reorganizing man. The failure of the actual man is seen in the doom of every form of demo- cratic government in history. The citizenship, even when limited to the upper classes, has soon been involved in ruin. Yet, in spite of failures of the past, the heart of the world claims democracy as its own, and history hastens on toward the goal promised in the birth of the Jewish child, whose mother named him Jesus. The regeneration of society, called by the name of democracy, means not simply that all the people shall share in political power, but that all the people shall share in the good of the world, and in the fullness of life. It demands the possibility of an adequate career for every man, woman, and child. It demands that the thing we vaguely call society adjust itself to the demands and the duties involved in this conception. It is only in the light of recent doctrines of 4 JESUS AND DEMOCRACY human development there can be seen in a new perspective the real values of history. Time was when history consisted of the story of wars and heroes. Then it came to mean the struc- ture of governments and the career of nations. A later school busied itself with descriptions of the social and industrial life of various peoples. The time has come to discover that history has had one increasing purpose. Social groups have conquered the limitations of physical en- vironment. Eager hand and conquering brain have made an economic success faster than any promise contained in national resources. The whole range of history has two interpretations. In the first is the ever-widening conquest of the spiritual, or, if you prefer the term, of the intellectual man, over material facts and appar- ent limitations, summing these up not alone in the conquest of the earth he knew, but in the discovery of a richer world than his fathers ever dreamed. The second fact is the ever-widening circle of men who participate in all the richness of hu- man life. In social and economic affairs even more than in politics the tendency has been for despotism to yield to oligarchy, for that to be succeeded by aristocracy, and for the democ- 5 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH racy, in some form or other, finally to emerge. In this reading of history, events once ignored take on new meaning, and the leaven in a meas- ure of meal becomes the source of life and the means of organization. In the rise and fall of empires, the rebalancing of human affairs, but especially in the reshaping of human authority, society manifests itself as a living thing. In the changes of the recent centuries, Christianity has been an inexhaustible dynamic. Only in our generation are the making of history and the methods of its progress becoming evident. Jesus is the maker of the modern world. In saying that, it is necessary to assume all the burden of Christian history. The making of monstrous creeds, the organi- zation of tyrannical churches, the ambitions of priests and prelates, and the thousand-fold struggle throughout all the generations have solemnly predicted one thing and one thing only — the developed man in a free human so- ciety where he may find opportunity for the ex- ercise of all his gifts. The slowness of the movement toward this great end is an offence, but it has been due to the stupendous nature of the task, as well as to the loftiness of the purpose revealed in aims of the world's Master. It is comparatively easy 6 JESUS AND DEMOCRACY to find a saint, for solitary examples belonged to all religions and to all ages, but it is an in- finite task to organize sainthood and to make it the controlling fact of a cosmic civilization. Aristotle taught that noble living is the pur- pose of the state, but he meant a life com- plete in action and in comfort. Jesus sought to develop not a state but men, leaving their ca- reer to themselves. These noble men were sure to make freedom and fullness of life the final goal of the race. The wealth and ambition of priests and rulers, the conflict of church and empire, and even the great popular disturb- ances were all parts of the process. Carlyle says that the French revolution was " truth clad in hell-fire/ ' but Brunetiere declares that it was essentially religious. It is impossible to present the whole range, or to even fully set forth the principal movements of modern his- tory, but enough can be presented to show the nature of the process. It is naturally essential in the beginning of the study to insist upon a fact to which all men will assent, and that is the presence to-day in the world of ideals of democracy. These ideals of democracy, however, would remain unre- vealed as practical forces had they not already been partially embodied in existing institutions. 7 7- DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH The voices of democracy come from various camps, sometimes strident, to many minds re- pellent, but they are here. In some period and in some living voice the ideals of democracy first appeared among men. It is important to our purpose to show that the ideals of modern democracy owe their origin to Jesus of Naza- reth, and their permanence in the world to the Christian church. The conclusion will follow that when the church of Jesus accepts the same democracy as its founder it will reach its final place of power and render its perfect service to the social order. It is necessary to show that before Jesus the ideals of democracy did not exist and that since His life and teaching the world has not been able to be rid of them. Credit will be given to the Hebrew ancestry of Jesus in a later para- graph. We have to do now with the world out- side of Hebrew life. Hegel, 1 in his ' ' Philosophy of History, ' ' speaks of the beautiful, free Greek Spirit, and would have us understand that the beginning of the realization of the ideal was essentially Hellenic. In Athens, if anywhere, we may look for a so- cial program to fit the needs of the world. For- tunately we have there the man, Plato, and the 1 Hegel's " Philosophy of History/ ■ p. 167. 8 JESUS AND DEMOCRACY book, "The Kepublic." Emerson says that of Plato only it may be said, "burn the libraries for their value is in this book." "Out of Plato come all things which are still written and de- bated among men of thought.' ' "Plato is Philosophy and Philosophy at once the glory and the shame of mankind. ' ' 1 James Martineau thinks that Plato in his "Eepublic" was writing in such deep earnest that he may be regarded as a moralist and prophet. 2 In this view the "Eepublic" is no dream, but was meant by its author as a real standard of which all actual social constitutions are only shadows and distortions. It must be confessed that, in all the intellectual endeavor of the an- cient world, nothing stands out as a distinct scheme for the reconstruction of society at all comparable to the work of Plato. It is worth while to consider briefly the structure of his ideal of society. As the universe is composed of Intellect, Soul and Matter, so man is com- posed of Eeason, Impulse and Sensation. The Commonwealth, therefore, must be constituted in harmony with these primary facts. At the head of the city are the golden guardians, the 1 ' ' Kepresentative Men," pp. 41 and 42. 2 " Types of Ethical Theory/' p. 24. DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH incarnation of thought. The second caste is composed of the silver warriors, who represent courage, while the producers, made of brass, carry on the material industries. Patriotism is really represented in the guardians, and since these public philosophers are to rule the state, they must be set free from personal interest. Personal interest depends upon family ties and private property. Hence, in the true state, the ruling class must have a community of goods and must be composed of one common family, including all the men and women composing this caste. The complete ritual of life, from the relation of the sexes through the care and training of children, as well as the smallest details, is to be controlled by the state. The state will be successful in proportion as philosophers are kings and kings become philosophers. The industrial class have the same relations to the state that matter has to reality. Matter has no real existence, but is the negative stuff through which the ideal re- veals itself, and the industrial classes are only significant for their assistance in furnishing the necessaries of life to warriors and rulers. The warriors who represent human desire are to be amply rewarded by every gratification. He pleads for some mitigation for the horrors of 10 JESUS AND DEMOCRACY war when the struggle is between the Greeks. The barbarians have no claims. Those con- quered in battle are to be slaves as happened in all the history of the world before his time. The basic political doctrine was : The value of the individual is only realized in the complete- ness of the state, and the state rather than the individual is the object of contemplation. Doubtless were Plato interrogated upon the point, he would say that the good of the indi- vidual could only be found through the perfect state. The value of this dialogue is so great, according to Walter Pater, 1 that "The towers of Plato's Eepublic blend with those of the City of God of Augustine. ,, There is this eter- nal difference, that the "Bepublic" rises out of the earth, but the "City of God'' comes down out of heaven. The theory grew out of the evils of his own time. He saw already the corroding force de- stroying the foundations of the social life about him. The greatest of all evils was the domi- nance of personal ambition. The greatest of all dangers was the strong man. He proposed a mechanical method of organization by which selfishness should be eliminated at least from 111 Plato and Platoniam/ ' Pater, p. 218. 11 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH the character of the guardians. I venture to differ from Dr. Martineau as to the deep ear- nestness of the proposals in the book. It seems to me a speculative political romance, which was largely modified in the " Laws" written aft- erward. It was certainly a paper constitution which no people ever tried to put in operation. These proposals are now as revolting to the political sense of the world as they have always been revolting to the Christian conscience. The community of wives, the destruction of the family, the doubtful expedient of abolish- ing private property, to say nothing of state control of religion and literature, the official writing of myths and of history, as well as the use of lying by the guardians as a fine art, when political expediency required it, are suf- ficient illustrations to show the failure of the "Bepublic" as a working program. What- ever it was, it was written for the Greeks and not for the world. Plato had in his mind the Eepublic of Attica, never exceed- ing five hundred thousand population, and of these only thirty thousand were citizens. The culture, beauty and glory of Greece rested upon the foundation of slavery. The political control of Athens was either an oligarchy or a plutocracy, sometimes both. Plato wished to 12 JESUS AND DEMOCRACY substitute an aristocracy of intellect. To com- pare Plato with Jesus first of all comes the matter of vision. Plato thought of a perfect city. Jesus had in mind a Kingdom of God. The horizon of Plato was bounded by the moun- tains and the seas visible from the Acropolis. Jesus had a world vision and proposed the con- quest of the nations. His vision was so intense that He saw his Kingdom already at hand. Into this Kingdom He bade all men enter. He be- lieved it a practical program for the movement of human history in all the ages. No doubt the unapproachable philosophy of Plato has been material for thinking on the part of great men in all the great ages, but the program of Jesus has been the object of passionate struggle on the part of good men in all times. Plato pro- posed a rulership of wise men. Jesus pro- posed an aristocracy of goodness, open to every man, however humble, who was willing to obey the laws of the kingdom. For Plato's principle of the political supremacy of mind, Jesus pro- posed the enthronement of character. It may be doubted if Plato meant anything more than to rebuke local conditions in Athens. 1 Grote, 2 in his " History of Greece,' ' quotes the advice 1 Plato, Epistol viii, p. 356. 2 Grote, " History of Greece,' ' Vol. ii, p. 131. 13 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH given to the contending parties at Syracuse, whom he advised to establish a triple, coordi- nate kingship, including the presidency of re- ligious ceremonies and permanently belonging to the three families by hereditary transmis- sion. This was a counsel of practical politics in order to preserve the Greek influence in Sicily. Variations from theory are always allowed to practical men of affairs and sometimes, when philosophers or theologians give advice, it is too much to ask consistency. It is no reflection upon Plato, the supreme thinker, to show that he did not really mean his theory to be taken too seriously. Indeed, in his later study of "The Laws," he abandons many of the posi- tions of 1 * The Eepublic. ' ' No doubt as he grew older he had become what the world calls more practical. All this was wholly foreign to the method of the Man of Galilee. In His teaching, instead of veiled irony, there were the frank- ness of love and a faith in the practical effi- ciency of His teaching never equaled among men. He offered rest to the souls of all who labor, and are heavy laden. If the climax of philosophy cannot come into serious consideration, how is it with effective political organization? When Jesus came, the 14 JESUS AND DEMOCRACY early democracy of the Roman people, such as it was, had been buried beneath the foundations of the empire. The early Romans had possessed certain important virtues. Their self-reliance, their stoicism and their courage had succeeded among all the peoples of the earth. They had developed legislation much of which has come down to modern times, and they discovered an unrivaled genius for organization, covering the great matters of material concern, and could afford to encourage also a careless catholicity in social manners and customs. But the age of Augustine, though it found the empire vast, peaceful and wealthy, offered abundant evi- dence that the time had come when it was im- possible to repeat the nation's successes and equally impossible to preserve its inheritance. That the empire was already doomed was in the very nature of the case. The virtues which had created the successes were rooted in the simplicity of a lost life. Wealth and Power had poisoned them. It is significant that the ideals of the people were represented by stories of secular heroes. Saints had no vital connec- tion with the history of Rome for the simple reason that its religion was not ethical. The classical gods were safer when dethroned, and could be better trusted dead than alive. It was 15 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH not the failure of organization, as some have supposed, or because imperial rule was too great for any municipality. It failed through the decayed foundations of its social life. The Latin language, if not the most perfect, was certainly the most useful which had been pro- duced, and became the organ of intercourse be- tween the nations of Europe generations after the empire was destroyed. But strangers used the language for greater messages to men than were found in the vast contributions of the Eomans. The Stoic philosophy borrowed from the Greeks was more at home among this people than among the Athenians, and it is significant that the Stoics furnish examples of the very best character that Eome has to offer. But Stoicism was only a gospel of life for those who were strong. It offered no guidance for those who were weak. It was, therefore, a gospel for the few, and philosophy could not save Eome. Oriental religions were generously admitted to the hospitality of the Pantheon, and many strange altars were erected not alone in the cosmopolitan city, but in various parts of Italy. These fresh religious ceremonies furnished ex- citement to the populace, but added no light for 16 JESUS AND DEMOCRACY the great problems of life and religion. There swept over the empire universal skepticism. It is very suggestive and not without parallel in other historic places that, while these Ro- mans were building new temples and erecting fresh altars, the vital faith in both gods and men was actually lost. The nation was already doomed, and its downfall was foretold. When Roman Law, legions, cities, industries and wealth had failed, and there came the slow breaking up of the strongest-formed political organization the world had ever known, almost unseen a new society, founded upon the death of a Jew, sailed out upon the dark waters. It was a small and feeble craft, but it held in its cargo the promise of immortality, because it had those ideas which can illuminate, those mo- tives which can inspire, and those objects which can exalt the race. The roots of modern democracy are not found in either Greece or Rome. What Athens could not do with its Pericles and its Plato, Rome did not offer under its Caesar and its Marcus Aurelius. The beginnings of democracy are found in the Old Testament scriptures. Deu- teronomy was the great law book of ancient democracy, and the prophets furnished its best applications. Jesus was the direct successor 3 17 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH of the Hebrew prophets. They had sternly re- buked social sins, but as His personality was more lofty than that of any prophet, so His brief career was the most revolutionary in history. He did not rival the philosophers in intellect, nor the statesmen in organizing power. He furnished no philosophy of religion, nor did He even write the constitution of a church. To say nothing of the Greeks, Isaiah had surpassed Him in sustained imagination, in literary grandeur, and in overflowing optimism. Even his disciple, Paul, when he spoke on the Areo- pagus to the successors of Plato, of which we have only a brief account in The Acts, furnishes more satisfaction to the intellect than anything found in the gospels. But Jesus moved among men as no other teacher ever had done, and pro- claimed Himself as having found union with the divine. On the religious side He offered neither philosophy nor theory, but a disclosure of the secret of living with God. Before His time men had been taught to love the Lord their God, and, before Him, God had been called the Father of men. It was left to Jesus not only to reveal the doctrine in terms of human passion, but to exhibit a life perpetually en- sphered with the divine. Without this living 18 JESUS AND DEMOCRACY revelation of an ever-present, ever-loving Fa- ther, neither Cross nor Eesurrection could have become final facts in human history. For the creation of new institutions of any kind new sources of life are required. The democracy of Jesus began in His own unique exaltation. In His personality He transfigured the peasant, not once on a starlit mountain, but on every highway of life over which He walked. As His religion freshly interpreted, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God," so His ethics made a new formula of the words, ' ' Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." It was a con- tribution to the wealth of the world, when, in the story of the good Samaritan, he broke down the barriers of prejudice, and gave the word neighbor a universal interpretation. The early history of religions shows no perfect identifica- tion with morality. Indeed, from the historic point of view, the relation of morality and re- ligion is comparatively recent in human history. By many a hard-fought battle the Hebrew prophets had won for the world a faith in the Holiness of God and the corresponding duty of righteousness among men. But it worked out among the Hebrews as morality of precept and observance. It was reserved for Jesus to de- velop the morality of motive, the guidance of 19 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH principles and to place the ethical life of the race upon universal foundations. The duties of life He would have us understand are larger than any list of precepts. They are also more complete than any mechanical interpretation of any one of His own parables. The duties of life are measured not alone by the necessities of the needy, but by the length and breadth, the height and depth of possible human develop- ment. In every individual Jesus saw, not the man that was, but the man who might be, and, therefore, should be. His sharp conflict with the Pharisees was not accident. He denied the religious value of merely external forms of wor- ship. It is of no use to merely multiply pray- ers or to frequent the temple. It is only when the soul bows down and the man gives his in- ner allegiance that the forms of religion have any value. Neither on this mountain nor yet at Jerusalem are men to worship God. Have done with formulas ; the only worship is that of the spirit, and the test cf it is its sincerity. If men cannot save themselves by ritual of wor- ship, still less can they by any ritual of con- duct. The Ten Commandments and all their precepts fail at last. There is no such thing as murder or lust unless they exist in the heart. This interpretation of conduct shows the cop- 20 JESUS AND DEMOCRACY pers of the widow larger in God's eye than the gifts of the millionaire. It is a new scheme of values intended to humble both the rich and the strong. His great ethical interpretation of life finds one of its deepest secrets in His constant faith in the value of the human soul. In distinct con- trast to every form of theological or scientific fatalism, Jesus appealed to the essential strength of the individual. For Him all men were God-like. In human nature was nothing finally or permanently unclean. As He had first identified Himself with God, so now He comes into perfect union with man. In His speech with His followers He deals always in the imperative of power. You can do the right thing because you ought to do it. "To him that believeth all things are possible." He re- fuses to accept ethical limitations. It is not that He prefers the beggar to the rich man. It is that in the actual beggar He sees always a possible saint. Sainthood is the greatest thing that man can achieve. It is not that the rich man cannot be saved, for with God all things are possible, but it is that the rich man must strip himself of his pride, rid himself of faith in his material fortune, and, if he would be perfect, go and sell all and give to the poor. 21 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH This was not an attack upon wealth, but upon the pride of the wealthy. With the rich as with the poor, it is the soul that counts. If you have discovered that you are a son of God, nothing else matters. All men may discover the divine relationship, for to every man there comes the call to reckon himself one of the sons of God. Earthly distinctions vanish, the discriminations of fortune must be thrown over, for man has a soul, and every soul is free. This spiritual be- ing may unite with an eternal fatherhood, and then he will discover that union with his fellow- men is the goal of human society. We are catching the accents of the first great Charter of Democracy. As God looked upon the new-born creation, so Jesus looked into the hearts of men, and found them very good. He taught sacrifice in- deed ; but it was none of the Oriental self-denial with which men were familiar. He scandalized His age because His disciples did not fast. He, Himself, was at home in every form of society, and was rebuked because He frequented the banquets of the rich. The cross-bearing that He urged was the love that serves. He knew that search for the fullness of life was the final basis of usefulness. As He put more meaning into the word neighbor, so He gave more power 22 JESUS AND DEMOCRACY to the word love. "Thou shalt love thy neigh- bor as thyself.' ' This was not to wear the hair shirt nor to deny the beauty and joy of the world. The man who has no high standard for himself will demand nothing important for his fellow-men. It is not simply a call to martyr- dom. It is a call to develop the world. It is only the man who seeks justice for himself that can be trusted to enforce equity for other peo- ple. It is a command that can only be nobly interpreted by noble souls. It would do no good to saturate the soil of human life with the martyr blood of thieves and scoundrels. Life is to be interpreted by the sacrifices of Christ-like men. The teaching of Paul shows that his own life of joyous self-denial was based upon the con- ception of benefit to others and the joy of en- riching the world. He sheds new light on the dignity and glory of every individual by his emphasis upon the sanctity of the body as the temple of the Holy Ghost. For him the doc- trine of the Eesurrection is the illumination of matter, and the whole creation, hitherto groan- ing and travailing, is to have a final apocalypse, when everywhere will shine out the beauty of the eternal God. It is no wonder that one who could think in such great terms of human 23 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH nature should also give the most explicit dec- laration of democratic doctrine: " There is neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor free, male nor female, but one man in Christ Jesus. ' ' 1 It has been widely observed that Jesus did not deal directly with either the social, eco- nomic, or political faiths of His time. His work was positive, regenerative and constructive. He neither attacked the evil of slavery, the vari- ous forms of economic injustice, nor political tyranny. He busied Himself in founding a so- ciety of love based upon a life of service. He promoted the new order by securing a new man. In many forms He repeated the admonition, "What is that to thee? Follow thou me." 2 "With a wisdom which in another teacher would have amounted to cunning He avoided imme- diate issues in the interest of a world-wide movement and an age-long plan. Yet this greatest of all revolutionaries did not come teaching a democracy of the common- place. His essential view of the potential great- ness of every man was strong as the hammer of Thor in breaking up the old foundations. He could not place the sons of Zebedee on the right and on the left in His kingdom. The position was not a gift; it was a reward of fitness. •Gal. 3:28. "John 21:22. 24 JESUS AND DEMOCRACY Against the caste system in every form, an- cient and modern, he offered a new social order in which lofty places were possible to all. The ancient distinctions of life must go. Plato's guardians, warriors, and workers would not do. Distinctions of wealth, of intellect, or of the most intimate social relations must all shrivel in the hot flame of love. But He produced a distinction which makes the blood and iron of puritanism permanent in the veins of the race. He is calling men out of every rank, rich and poor, learned and ignorant, slave and free, and this is the note of recognition: "Whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother. ' ' 1 It is not an easy task to rebuild a world. He was come not to send peace, but a sword, to set a man at vari- ance against his father, and a daughter against her mother. 2 As a principle of selection this unity of men in the will of God compels recognition as the noblest ever proposed. It destroys the way- wardness of vagrant emotions. Like a blast from the wings of God, it scatters the dry leaves of current opinion. It tramples upon every form of ordinary human ambition. It discloses a highway of greatness over which the 1 Mark 3 : 35. a Matt. 20 : 1-16. 25 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH wayfaring man may walk without wandering, and yet a way that can never be trodden by un- clean feet. 1 It is not only the noblest principle of selec- tion, but it is the highest exhibition of pro- phetic statesmanship. The will of God is the final law of successful action. It moves in the star-dust; it sounds in the feeble cry of the new-born babe ; it is the basis of all finite order, and the final cause of every form of life. This teacher knew how to make a platform available for all men throughout all ages. These doctrines, fine and lofty as they are, may seem impossible of application in the do- main of practical affairs. But the teaching of the Man of Galilee was a compound of universal principles with a plain illumination for the do- main of every-day life. Turning to His para- bles of the talents we rediscover His democ- racy under an economic form, and yet in per- fect harmony with his highest disclosures. There are three stories, each told to give a different lesson, and all combined revealing a complete practical philosophy. In the first one the doctrine is equality of reward where there is difference of ability. The rich man gave to one of his servants five talents, to another two, Isaiah 35:8. 26 JESUS AND DEMOCRACY to another one, according to his several ability, and to those who did what they could with their talent and capital he gave exactly the same rec- ognition, "Well done, thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things." * The second picture of life is the story of the men in the market-place waiting to be hired. A story which has suffered much at the hands of those who write commentaries, though the teaching is very plain. Those who went out in the morning to work in the vineyard or at the third hour, or even at the eleventh, received every man the same wages. Much did the hard workers complain of the burden and heat of the day, and of the injustice of the man who owned the vineyard, but the cryptic saying, * ' so the last shall be first and the first last," is a deep revelation of one of the sorest problems of human life. Men are expected to work as occasion offers. In a world of mixed good and evil many who are worthy and even gifted fail of adequate self-expression; and as the first parable teaches equality of reward for differ- ent abilities, so this parable teaches us in a perfect world there is equality of reward for different opportunities. 2 1 Matt. 25: 14-23. a Matt. 20 : 1-16. 27 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH We are in danger now of stumbling into one of the deepest pitfalls in the pathway of reform- ers, and that is the danger of placing npon the social group the burden that ought to belong to the capacity and responsibility of the individual. From such an ethical disaster we are saved in the parable of the nobleman, who called to him ten servants and gave to each a pound, and bade him ' ' occupy till I come. ' ' x When he returned he found that one had made ten pounds and another five, and each man was treated in ac- cordance with his service. The man of ten pounds was given authority over ten cities, while the man who had gained five pounds was made lord over five cities. We have here a new doctrine. The ten servants were given the same capital and the same opportunity, but they achieved different results, nor did they receive the same recognition. The doctrine is that in a perfect world there are differences of reward for differences of devotion. His revelation of God was sufficiently star- tling. It was given in no full or philosophic form; it was rather assumed as the common basis of all human life. He raised himself from peasantry to princedom by the sublime convic- tion, ' ' I and my Father are one. ' ' To identify a Luke 19: 13-19. 28 JESUS AND DEMOCRACY with God through Himself He called all men. This was the basis of His religious revolution. His new view of man was no less startling. His value depended upon the worth of the soul, and the free capacity of every human being to achieve greatness if he would. The laurel wreath withered and the crown vanished from the brow of the world's great men, because service and not mastery was the proper occupa- tion of the great. The good life might be a de- cency or a convention, but the good heart was the one ethical value in the sight of God. With these great revelations of man and life, it was inevitable that He should found a new society as a fuller expression of the commandment, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." He had been tracing not only the solidarity of the race, but all the comprehensive relation- ships of the universe. He had not only been speaking of the problems of time, but He had been flinging upon the canvas of the present the light of all the ages. Timeless, limitless, divine, He must found a society. His doctrine of the Kingdom of God was the outcome of all His teaching and it provided for the perpetual incarnation of His principles. His little group were to disciple the nations. This message of His was a little leaven that would at last make 29 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH the world united and glorified. This peasant Jew provides permanent vision in human his- tory, but it is an earthly vision and built upon the most fundamental realities. It can never perish until men have ceased to aspire, to struggle, to believe in greatness. We are look- ing into the fountain-head of the Ideals of De- mocracy. As the principles of Jesus furnished those ideas hitherto but partially expressed, and ap- parently fresh and inexhaustible, which have been the goal of the best men of the race since His time, so, in the person of Jesus, we see the essential Democrat. He is at home in every form of society. He is the companion of all classes of men. He does not, like Dante, turn away from the too-splendid vision of the divine. The august throne of God is His natural home. He knows Himself on the march thitherward. He does not aspire to the throne. It has been given Him of His Father. But He is also the friend of the helpless and the sinner. Yet in the gifts of strength and healing there is neither condescension nor obligation ; He does not stoop to the lowly. This divine man came into the world to share the fortunes of the outcast and to reveal to him an unspeakable glory. 30 CHAPTER n INFLUENCE OF PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY Jesus had furnished the idea of an ethical democracy. He had given his generation a good deal besides. But it is the fortunes of this idea that we wish to follow. He had gathered around him a few disciples with an apparent carelessness of choice that seems a reflection upon his shrewdness. He had spoken very lit- tle about organization or the future. He had apparently poured contempt upon worldly wis- dom. As He stood before Pilate, He asserted the ideal nature of his society. His kingdom is not of this world. His followers will not fight. In the order of history there are men who in- carnate special forms of life, and there are ideas which find for themselves a social body. The essential things of history are always so- cial. The individual is sure to perish. In the unfolding of physical life, nature thrusts aside, with a certain brutality, whatever is not a con- necting link between the past and the future. 31 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH The physical life to be significant must not only realize itself in its environment, but must also have a certain surplus of vitality to lend to the historic struggle for existence, and to live again in some nobler species. In like manner it is the social part of human life that has significance for history. The individual teacher is not im- portant unless his pupil can play the Plato to his Socrates. Aristotle did not live in the world because he was the teacher of Alexander; neither did Seneca because he gave lessons to Nero. The historic figures are those that fur- nish standards of conduct or forms of life, which survive in social groups. Was it the most superb skill of construc- tive genius, or was it the untimely fate of an enthusiast that caused Jesus to leave in the world no plan of government, nor definite church order, nor any statement systematic and precise that could furnish a rule for either opinion or conduct? If it was intentional, it was beyond the wisdom of the wisest men that have lived, for it will be discovered that pre- cisely because the glowing passion was clothed in so slight a raiment of organized life, and so must remain forever flexible and free, his mes- sage was preserved to the world. The city of Eome was the first world-city in 32 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY history. Other cities have been rich and great, but this capital, with consummate policy, made welcome the leaders of all the provinces; gave hospitality to all schools of thought and all forms of religion, and was catholic in a sense the world had never known before and has never equaled since. The Roman empire adapted itself with care- less liberality to the manners and customs of its dependent provinces. But it took from them their surplus wealth and covered the known world with a complete political and mili- tary organization. It was not in Rome only, but throughout the world, that a contest for supremacy was going on among the various religions. Splendid al- tars and strange rituals competed one with the other. Egypt and the Orient sent their mis- sionaries and established their cults in the capi- tal of the world. Upon what terms could the religion of a crucified Jew compete with the culture of Pa- ganism, the splendor of Egypt, or the mysti- cism of the Orient? There was neither politi- cal influence nor wealth; there was neither beauty nor intellect; there was none of the ordinary social forces of the world behind the new movement. Then it had to bear special 4 33 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH penalties because of its own nature. Though it was vague in statement, and weak in organiza- tion, it was essentially" intolerant, for it brooked no rivals and claimed the whole world as its own. By all the rules of history, it should have been even more easy to strangle the religion than it was to crucify its founder. When one considers the methods employed, the most significant thing about the whole problem is the rapidity with which the Chris- tian religion proceeded to conquer the world. The ancient society, enervated by wealth and corrupt in morals, was confronted by the se- verest standards of conduct and character. The small Christian communities that were founded were enmeshed in a social order, pol- luted and depraved. Paul, in his letter to the Romans, describes in terrible terms the moral condition of the ancient world, and all he has to say is more than confirmed by Juvenal. It is no wonder that, in his letters to his little so- cieties at Corinth, he should have to rebuke them for the remains of pagan vices, and to urge upon them a voluntary separation from the customary heathen rites. The marvel is not that Paganism defeated at her own altars often reappeared within the bosom of the church ; but the wonder is that in all the days of the church, 34 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY even those most depraved, she still bore wit- ness to the levels of life taught by her Master, even though living upon those levels seemed to be practically impossible. It has already been urged that an ethical de- mocracy was of the essence of the teaching of Jesus. If this be true, then the church, as the incarnation of his message to men, in so far as it was Christian at all, was bound to carry the seeds of democracy wherever she went, and consciously or unconsciously bear witness to human rights. The nature of the early Christian societies is perhaps more readily understood if they are looked at from the angle of the synagogue, and if primitive Christianity be regarded, in the be- ginning, as a sect of Judaism. The early Chris- tian societies were without question of the sim- plest character. It was only after they in- creased in number and in extent that the church took on the form of the Roman Empire, and local organizations became subordinate to pro- vincial, to metropolitan and to imperial methods. The Greek and Hebrew influence struggled for supremacy in the churches from the begin- ning. The New Testament scarcely veils the conflict between Paul, the apostle of the free 35 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH churches, and the leadership of the church in Jerusalem. When that city was destroyed by Titus, in the year 70 A. D., the new religion was set free from Judea. The Gali- leans, as they were called, retired to the East of the Jordan, and maintained a mixture of the old Judaism with the new faith until the Ebion- ites finally disappeared in the Fourth Century. The Greek influence, on the other hand, intro- duced an early humanism into Christianity, af- fected very much the church of Alexandria, and at the opposite pole from the Ebionites were the Gnostics, who lasted in the church for five hundred years. Meantime, in the unfolding of events, Greek theology, Hebrew worship, and Eoman organization all lent themselves to the development of a coherent form of church or- der which, with varying fortunes, was to live in the world for many centuries. It is a mis- take to suppose that the success of the early churches was wholly among the poor and igno- rant. It seems to have made a cross-section of society from top to bottom. The author of the letter to the Philippians proudly writes: "All the saints salute you, chiefly they that are of Caesar's household." * And Tertullian, in less than two centuries 1 Phil. 4:22. 36 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY after the beginnings of the Christian Church, writes : ' l We are of yesterday and yet we have occupied all that belongs to you." It is necessary to account first of all for the triumph of Christianity, and then to discover the effect of that triumph upon the structure of society. Gibbon recognizes the effect, though he does not do full justice to the extent of the success of the Christian faith. He says, "It will appear that it (the Christian Church) was effectually favored and assisted by the five following causes: I. The inflexible zeal of the Christians. II. The doctrine of a future life, improved by every additional circumstance which could give weight and efficiency to that important truth. III. The miraculous powers ascribed to the primitive church. IV. The pure and austere morals of the Christians. V. The union and discipline of the Christian Republic which gradually formed an independent and in- creasing state in the heart of the Roman em- pire." 1 The second and third reasons assigned may have had much to do with the rapid spread of the church. The first cause alleged must itself be accounted for. The fourth cause was doubt- gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire/ ' Chap. XV. 37 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH less a hindrance to an early and easy triumph, as it has been a barrier between the church and the world in all times. And the fifth is a result of the spread of Christianity rather than the cause of its success. The union of faith and life set forth in the great commandment: "Thou shalt love the Lord with all thy soul; and thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself/ ' by means of a common brotherhood where men sought the divine for strength, and the human for service, was the central power of the early church. This power conquered a worn-out world and supplanted all opposing faiths. It was the living miracle of love in a selfish world that kept alive the mustard seed, feeble and in- significant, which Jesus threw upon the earth, until it grew into a mighty tree, the shelter of the nations. The most striking tribute to the power of the early churches was their patronage by Con- stantine, Western Caesar in 306, sole Emperor in 323. A curious historical fatality seems to have prevented any clear view of the character of Constantine, or his place in history. Gib- bon 1 states that Constantine mingled patron- age of the historic paganism and of the new 1 Gibbon 's ' ' Decline and Fall of the Eoman Empire, ' ' Chap. XX. 38 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY faith for many years; and also intimates that Constantine may have been affected by the es- teem which he entertained for the moral char- acter of the Christians, and that it was un- doubtedly useful to him that his subjects should be persuaded to receive the "natural and civil obligations of society." The church historians on the other hand have rejoiced in the conversion of Constantine as one of the early triumphs of their faith, and have written in many forms the story of the appearance in the sky of the flaming cross with the words, "In this sign thou shalt conquer." These men have been influenced either by the historic or by the theological interest. The interest of the historic churches, so called, is bound up in the validity of an organization ec- clesiastically existent before Constantine, but recognized and enthroned by him. On the other hand the Christian churches generally have been interested in what is known as the Nicene Creed; the symbol of all orthodoxy and the fountain-head of all pure theology. Constantine deserved the title, "The Great," on account of his abilities as a soldier, his skill as a ruler, and a comprehension of his times which amounted to political genius. He was one of those men who deal with facts rather 39 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH than with theories. If we had a stenographic report of the conversation between Constantine and his brother Emperor, Licinius, at Milan, it would make plain many things. There can be little question that Licinius brought to him the news that the whole empire was honeycombed with the Christian faith; that churches and be- lievers were to be found everywhere; that in spite of occasional persecutions and martyr- doms, losses of property and position, the primitive Christians believed in their re- ligion in a sense known to the adherents of no other faith. The policy of Constantine was the result of the success of the new doctrine rather than its cause. His soldiers were ready to march under a Christian standard, and a vast empire was waiting to be consolidated by a common faith. One government, one sword, and one creed make an effective Trinity in the hands of power. The Edict of Toleration fol- lowed the conquest of Italy. It provided for the restitution of all the civil rights of Chris- tian believers; the restoration of their per- sonal property and their political prerogatives, as well as the giving back again to the churches their temples and their lands, which had been confiscated by earlier rulers. The Emperor did not, at this time, attempt 40 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY to suppress paganism, but what he did do was to give to his subjects the right of following the religion which they preferred. It was, in fact, going back to the easy tolerance of the earlier days, when any new god with a respectable number of adherents might gain an altar in the ' ' city of the seven hills. ' ' For many years Constantine continued the practice of the Pagan worship. Doubtless the influence of Chris- tian men, and the value of the Christian faith to social order, impressed him more and more. But long after the supposed vision of the cross in the sky, and long after the Edict of Toleration, Constantine continued to break, one by one, all the commandments of the deca- logue, and to stain his consummate policy with treachery and murder, not sparing rivals, foes, nor friends, and selecting even members of his own household for the slaughter. According to the teaching of many Christians in his day, bap- tism was effectual for the cleansing of the soul from sin. The baptism could be administered once only, and with a craft that well became him he put off the solemn rite of admission into the Christian church until just before his death. The breadth of his policy is further proved in his removal of the seat of empire from Eome to Constantinople, which he accomplished 41 DEMOCEACY AND THE CHURCH in the year 330. The effect of this removal upon the fortunes of the early church was not so great as it would seem from the forged tra- ditions of the donation of the city and its sur- rounding to the Bishop of Rome. That, of course, did not happen. But with the ascen- dency of the church, and the political decay of Eome, the Bishop came to have an influence which would not otherwise have been his. The recognition of the church by the government and the safeguarding of its property rights gave it opportunity to grow to an independent power. It was natural that, as a central church established branches, these should rely upon the mother church for advice, which soon took the form of authority. The Roman form of organization triumphed by those processes which tend to the consolidation of authority by the union of interests, and the consent of those who shared in the contents of a common social mind. It was not in the days of Constantine, nor for many generations thereafter, that the Bishop of Rome exercised undisputed authority over the Christian world. But the development of his power was one of the necessities of hu- man history, and one of the reasons for the making of the modern world. The Greek Spirit at work within the church 42 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY sought to formulate doctrines, and must needs express itself in theology. This resulted, of course, in the conflict of opinion. Alexandria, as the capital of learning, was the natural seat of the conflict; and here between Athanasius and Arius as the leaders there ensued a strug- gle which threatened the unity of the church, and so the unity of the empire, because they could not agree as to the nature of Jesus and the kind of a relation which he sustained to God and man. The wise Constantine saw at once the practical danger that was involved in theo- logical controversies, which in themselves did not appeal to his practical sagacity. Synods had been held frequently between representatives of neighboring churches, and some of them between churches from a wide area, but these had come together by the initia- tive of the leaders of the church, and their con- clusions had not possessed the sanction of a central authority. Constantine endeavored to quiet the theological unrest, but his advice fail- ing to stem the tide rolling on in fanatical fury, he at last called together a council of the bishops to consider the fateful debate. The general council was held at Nicsea and not in Rome, and the Bishop of Rome took no con- spicuous part in its deliberations. 43 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH The result of the council was in favor of what has ever since been known as the ortho- dox party. The Nicene Creed was promulgated by an almost unanimous vote, ratified by Con- stantine, who, forgetting the Edict of Tolera- tion between religions, threatened exile to those who would not accept the first authoritative statement of doctrine for the universal church. It is true that, for fully two generations, the conflict still waged, in spite of council and creed, but at last the orthodox party estab- lished its authority and with it the intellectual authority of the Christian organization. As Eoman organization fused the independent churches into organic union, so the final success of the Athanasian party fastened upon the church the authority of the forms of Greek thought. The organized church had a great deal to do and to bear in the generations which were to come. It was necessary that heart of oak should be in the timbers of any craft that was to sail the tempestuous social seas. Doubtless both creed and bishop had their uses in the process of historic development. It must not be supposed that paganism was extinct, or that the new faith was through with its opposition, but it was so organized that even from the hu- 44 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY man side it could not have any serious rival throughout the Koman empire. And its power was seen when Julian the Apostate attempted to revive a beautiful and cultivated paganism and failed to even shake the firm foundations that had been laid. This church, so organized, carried with it definite weapons of defence. It had not only secured the sanction of law, but afterward the suppression of heretics. Very early special privileges were granted to the church, in the settlement of its own disputes, and also in the discipline of its members. Along with the civil law there grew the statutes of the canon law, made by the church and administered by the church. Jesus had said, my kingdom is not of this world, but the church, not content with its hold upon the world to come, was also claiming the possession of the footstool of the Throne of God. Paul had unconsciously laid the foundation of the canon law when he declared that "the saints shall judge the world/ ' and denounced the habit of brother going to law with brother before the unbelievers. 1 Voluntary arbitration of differences between the members of the early communities seems to have been practiced from *I Cor. 6: 1-8. 45 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH the beginning. These judgments came at last to be recognized by the state, and courts were regularly authorized to settle disputes as well as manage affairs of the church. It was on ac- count of the relation between church and state that at last heresy was recognized not only as a sin, but also as a crime, and if the state pun- ished the offence, the church pointed out the of- fender. It would seem that such a church was simply another form of organized power, and could not possibly have in it a capacity for service in the development of a democracy. First of all, then, it must be noted that the services within the church were themselves a constant symbol of democracy. An order of priesthood, set apart from common men, was in charge of the mysteries of the Kingdom of God. At the altars of faith there knelt the noble and the peasant, and there was no difference. Even the Em- peror, himself, might not go behind the holy altar, but if he wished to receive the body and blood of Christ, he, too, must kneel like any other man. Here the church furnished a per- petual and visible symbol of democracy, ap- pealing to the imagination, entangled in the emotions, sanctified by prayers, and destined at last to work mightily in the fortunes of the world. 46 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY The priesthood had its grades from the low- est servant of the church to the highest bishop, throned in a palace. But though these men were set apart from the multitude, they were recruited from the multitude. The church al- ways needed men who were able to think and guide, and it was always careless of the place from whence they came. The boy cradled in a peasant's hut might within the church reach high places of dignity and power. Indeed, the church furnished the poor scholar the only am- ple career. Renewing herself constantly from the common people, the church, even when she knew it not, was preparing the way for an as- sertion of the final dignity of every common man. These two aspects of democracy within the church itself can scarcely be overestimated. Political and economic life have always fur- nished distinctions. Political organization and social manners have always recognized them. At birth, baptism, the gateway of the church; and later, the holy communion, the heart of the church, were given to all alike. They kept alive, in eternal pictures, the great word of the orig- inal teaching, "Whosoever will may come." The democratic organization of the church differed essentially from those occasional 47 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH translations from lower ranks of society to the nobility, or even to the occupancy of thrones. These distinctions might sometimes be won by great soldiers of mean birth. But it was the triumph of strength. When promotion in the church came from a reputation for sainthood, through sagacity or learning, it was quite a new pathway. And that it might be trodden by a man so poor as to be barefoot was an essential recognition of new values in human life, which had in themselves social authority. It would be a mistake to suppose that the au- thority of the church for its own members rested upon any assistance from the state. The Jews had a conception that they were a chosen people, but with them state and church were two sides of the same shield. The Christian church, at least for the early believers, was es- sentially a divine institution; their citizenship was in heaven. 1 The widespread belief in the early return of Christ to the world, when he should set up a visible kingdom, lent itself with peculiar force to a sense that all other relations were temporary ; but the relation to the church, whatever apparent disadvantage or even real torments might result from it, was the only sure way to become the heir of all the ages. There *Phil. 3:20. 48 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY was not only the symbol of the sacrament and the sacrifice of ordinary distinctions in chnrch organization, but there was much more: there was a belief in the presence of God in the church, so real and so vital, that the whole or- ganization became to them supernatural. The freedom of the religious services of the early church soon passed away with the devel- opment of the priesthood. The faith that all men who shared the doctrine and discipline of the apostles should, in the new kingdom, share with them thrones of power lent a vitality to the faith never lost even in the most corrupt days of the church, and made the saint a com- manding presence in every council and a fitting occupant of every place of power. The early church believed in foreign mis- sions. Not only did the apostles seek literally to obey the command of Jesus to go and carry his teaching to all nations, but whenever the church in any form felt the stir of new life, the same work was carried on with new vigor. The Eoman empire divided into the East and West, but the church spread beyond the bounds of the state. In the East, Armenia, Arabia, perhaps India, were early reached by missionaries, and in the West the gospel was preached and tribes were converted to the 5 49 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH standard of the Cross, who did not recognize any allegiance to the eagles of Eome. It was this zeal for spiritual conquest that sent Au- gustine to England, where he secured the con- version of Ethelbert, King of Kent, in 597, and from the center of Canterbury pushed outward in every direction until the South church was met, as it is believed by many, by an older British church in the North and all the Brit- ish Isles were covered with Christian temples. Long before this German and Gothic tribes had yielded their allegiance to the preachers of the new faith. Everywhere the church went it laid the foundations for a com- mon social life, a life maintained not by force, but by the influence of great beliefs, great hopes, and new modes of action. The Eastern church, torn by dogmatic dis- putes, for which it had the fatal Greek facility, maintained neither the authority nor the unity of the Western organization. The Council of Nicaea might recognize Borne, Constantinople, and Alexandria as churches of equal authority, but the fortunes of human history were with the Western church, not only on account of the dif- ference in the temper of the church, but on ac- count of the difference in the racial elements of which it was composed. 50 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY This new spiritual empire, wider in extent and more pervasive in influence than any other form of organization hitherto known, by its so- cial authority won recognition of the state ; and the united church, by the authority claimed on account of its divine character, was destined to spread through Europe definite forces essen- tially revolutionary. Two things the Christian church borrowed from Judaism: they were the Bible and the Sabbath. When Jerome translated the Bible into Latin he placed in the hands of men a great democratic document of peculiar fascination and authority. The Old Testament, from being the particular treasure of a people few in num- bers, though widely scattered, became the great text-book of the western nations. But that text- book contained a law essentially democratic, and with propositions bearing upon economic conditions that attempted to make concentra- tion of wealth impossible. It contained com- mentaries upon life and law in the Prophets, by which human wrongs in words from the lips of the eternal God himself received the most scorching rebukes and the promise of vengeance upon the heads of the oppressors. The Book was to play a part of untold significance in all the future of history. 51 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH The change of the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday was without social significance, but the extension of a weekly day of rest throughout Europe confirmed by both religious and secular authority was another momentous fact. The Jews could not keep their Sabbath in Egypt. They were slaves. The Sabbath, therefore, be- came to them the sign of the covenant be- tween themselves and Jehovah, who had deliv- ered them from bondage. God gave to cattle as well as to men one day in seven in which the holy hush of the supernatural stilled all the audacities of rank and power. The Sab- bath was for all men; the sign of the cove- nant with heaven. It was the day upon which they nourished their hearts with undying hopes. It was a day in which they were free from all bondage. It was not only a rest from a secular toil, it was the bow of promise upon the stormy sky of time, containing the pledge of seed time and harvest for the future democ- racy. The influence of Christianity upon Roman legislation from the time of Constantine on- ward is difficult to trace step by step, yet all students of the period agree that the Chris- tian faith found expression in secular law. Both Gibbon and Lecky recognize the effect 52 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY of Christianity upon legislation. 1 But there is some confusion in most of the writers between the general social spirit created by Christianity and the actual laws that were promulgated. Among the latter, however, it seems clear that crucifixion, as a mode of capital punishment, was abolished, and this was doubtless based upon the new sense of honor which attached to the Cross. Branding on the forehead was prohibited. This law was based upon the sanc- tity of the body. The severity of prison disci- pline was mitigated. Public relief of poverty was enjoined. The severity of the laws against debtors was modified. The exposure of infants, sickly or deformed, was prohibited. The gen- eral tendency of most of the laws was in the direction of sympathy and mercy. On the other hand crimes against chastity were much more severely punished than they had been for some centuries. 2 The changes of legislation can be more clearly seen by comparing the Roman law in pre-Chris- tian times with the Code, the Digest, and the In- stitutes of Justinian, promulgated in the sixth century. It is frequently stated that primitive Christianity was the source of the forces which 1 Lecky, ' ' Democracy in Europe, ' f Chap. VI. 2 Carr, "The Church and the Roman Empire/ ' pp. 35-36. 53 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH at last resulted in the abolition of slavery based upon the teaching of the brotherhood, and the explicit statement of Paul: "In Christ Jesus there are no distinctions, neither male nor fe- male, bond nor free." The doctrines stated in the Institutes of Justinian x are founded upon Christian authority. "Free men are those who have been manumitted from legal servitude. Manumission is the giving of liberty. For while any one is in slavery he is under the hand and power of another ; but by manumission he is freed from this power. This institution took its rise from the law of nations, for by the law of nature all men were born free and manumission was not heard of, as slavery was unknown, but when slavery came in by the law of nations, the boon of manumission followed." The entire book is meant, as was the Jewish law, to facili- tate freedom and to maintain it after it was be- stowed. A slave once set free could not be brought back again into bondage. "The ap- proval of the ground of manumission once given, whether the reason upon which it is based be true or false, cannot be retracted. ' ' 2 The law of Justinian also limits the ancient power of the father over his family. The an- *Lib. 1— Tit V. De Libertinis. •Lib. 1— Tit XI. De Libertinis. 54 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY cient doctrine was that the person and prop- erty of the child belonged to the head of the household, and in this respect the wife herself had the same standing as the child. The rights of the child, recognized first in the right of life to every child born into the world, were steadily protected by an increasing body of legislation, which has only flowered out in modern times. Dean Church states that the Roman principles in the construction of the institutions were: "The community should be governed by law, and the interest of the public is paramount to all others. ' ' 1 The principle that the community should be governed by law, though not dis- tinctly Roman, received among the Romans its most effective application. But the Christian interpretation of the interest of the public in all modern nations is not Roman. It recognized more and more the protection of the weak and the social duty of the care of the individual. The passing of a law, among the Romans as elsewhere, was not always equivalent to its con- sistent execution. For example, Constantine is said to have forbidden gladiatorial shows in the arena in 325, but in 404 the Roman people in the Coliseum were celebrating with the blood of *Dean Church's " Civilization Before and After Christian- ity," p. 18. 55 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH gladiators the anniversary of Honorius. It was the monk, Telemachus, who leaped into the arena forcing the swords of the combatants asunder, and was afterward beaten to death by the infuriated mob. But it was another illus- tration that martyrdom may be successful, for Honorius was forced to make a law which lasted, and gladiatorial shows were never seen again in Eome. Important and lasting as was the effect of Christianity upon Roman legislation, its social influence was far greater. The Roman law had mitigated the severity of the claims of the creditor, but the church did much more. It struck at the power of all wealth by a literal adoption of the Mosaic code, and interest on money loaned was condemned. Money might indeed be loaned to another, but twenty-eight councils and seventeen popes declared that there should be no usury or remuneration for the use of the money. For this was the original sense of the word usury. 1 The Roman law had encouraged the manumis- sion of slaves, but the church taught it as a re- ligious duty. And the manumission of slaves was regarded as an act of worship; was per- formed upon Sunday in the churches, and was 1 Lecky's ' ' Eationalism in Europe. " 56 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY regarded as an evidence of sanctity. The church went faster and further than did civil law, for it was Pope Alexander III who de- clared that slavery could not longer exist in Christian society. But it was a Christian clergyman, Charles Kingsley, who wrote for us the story of the martyrdom of Hypatia, the woman philosopher of Alexandria, in such form that we love the pagan and hate the bishop. The murder of Hypatia is an illustration of a great many simi- lar manifestations of power. But it was never because of Christianity, but always in spite of it, that these offences occurred. Human nature has an unclean way of using its strength. Eoman philosophy had encouraged suicide as the only dignified conclusion of life, when the attractions of life failed. It was the doctrine of the sanctity of the body, and the belief in a final resurrection, more than all statutes, which branded suicide not only as a crime, but as a sin never to be forgiven, and which on ac- count of this faith made self-murderers almost unknown wherever the authority of the church was spread. Christianity by its very spirit, and through the medium of the Christian church, freed slaves, cared for the sick, fed the poor, became 57 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH parents to orphans and elevated womanhood. Men may think as they please about the doc- trines concerning the Madonna and the worship which she has evoked, but the distinction be- tween the Venus of the Eomans, with her sensu- ous beauty and her incarnation of passion, and the Madonna with the Child in her arms, before whom scholars and ecclesiastics bowed pros- trate, is only an external symbol of the pro- found change which had taken place in the fundamental conception of human life. It would be untrue to history to intimate that the Christians as individuals were always con- sistent in their conduct or faithful to their own ideals. Once again it must be remembered that, in spite of the gentleness of the teaching of Jesus, there went with it, side by side, in the organization of the church, a certain intoler- ance, that was perhaps essential to its lofty claims in the minds of those who were still un- der the influence of the old uses of political power. Christianity claimed to be a lonely faith, and to demand the world for its inherit- ance. When she had power she easily fell into persecutions. There is another great event to which refer- ence must be made because of its influence upon the after fortunes of democracy. The Gothic 58 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY tribes had received a form of the gospel, but that had not prevented them from looking with eager eye toward the civilization and the wealth of Southern Europe. Pressed upon, East and North, by the Huns out of Asia, the lure of the Eoman Empire became more and more fasci- nating. The dark storms from the North had threatened Rome again and again, and they had been driven back as much by the luster of her history as by the strength of her armies. Citi- zens of Rome refused to vindicate the honor of their nation by fighting under the standard of the Empire. It was evident that the time must come when hired soldiers without honor quite as much as without patriotism, and with no emotion but greed, would fail to defend the mis- tress of the world. Alaric, with his Goths, came down in 410 and invested the city. They quietly sat down outside, ravaging the surrounding country, and waited for the city to starve. By treason from within or by strength from with- out at last they broke down the gates, swarmed through the streets to murder the citizens and to plunder the palaces. The beast in the men glutted itself with blood and gorged itself with plunder, but there was a power which even these conquerors, who knew none of the modern limi- tations of war, acknowledged as their superior. 59 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH They recognized the churches as places of asy- lum. They supported the refugees who had flocked thither, and later they sat at the feet of priests and monks and learned from them the Latin language, the Latin culture and the Ro- man law. The church had already become dominant in Eome, and now she had to bear the reproach that it was because of her that Rome had been ruined. This was the occasion of that great work of Augustine, "The City of God," in which he calls the church and the empire to earlier ideals and to nobler models. He argues that it was the corruption and vice naturally belonging to Paganism which had made the Roman the prey of his foes. Over against the earthly city with its wars, its struggles and its wealth, there stands the heavenly city with eter- nal victory, and peace never ending. Cain, the murderer, is the first city builder, visible and material, but the City of God, traced through the kingdom of David in the vision of the prophets, at last becomes the abiding refuge of the saints. Far more important than its phi- losophy, its doctrine, or its style, was its in- fluence in after history as a charter of the church, and perhaps in this respect it was more important than all the bulwarks of political 60 PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY power or economic fortune bestowed by its vari- ous patrons. The period and the event marked the transi- tion toward another time. It is a time when the empire of Eome, with all its traditions, has been swept away, and the church in its organic form is practically the only visible institution, left to maintain the social order, to continue education, to carry on works of mercy, and to conserve the great values which had come to the world during these centuries of history. CHAPTER III PAPACY AND LIBERTY St. Augustine, in * ' The City of God, ' ' pressed upon by the outward calamity of the City of Rome, and embittered by the sneers of the en- emies of the Christian church, had taken ref- uge in a form of ecclesiastical idealism, and the work still remains one of the great monuments in the literature of the early Christian church. The work was undeniably great with all its limitations, but it was neither history nor prophecy. The papacy grew, it was not made. Wher- ever human interests increase in importance, there arises definiteness of control. If a chief may only fight, and has no other function, it is an office about which there are no great de- bates; but if a king have palaces, parks, rev- enues, power, there must be laws of succession, and there are often competitors for the title. If a people have little property and the stand- ard of living is at the barbaric level, there is 62 PAPACY AND LIBERTY needed no body of legislation to determine rights, for the fact of possession, and the abil- ity to defend it, is about the only necessity. When wealth becomes complex as peoples grow rich, property rights must be defined with great care and defended by the state. The position of the Bishop of Eome cannot accurately be traced in the early generations simply because it was a place of no importance. The early brotherhoods had little property, less ambition, and no legal recognition. It may be that the earliest presidents of the various churches were appointed by the apostles who had founded them. It is quite evident that very early, perhaps even before the death of all the apostles, the presidents and bishops of the con- gregations were elected by the people. When a group of churches had grown from a single cen- ter each church was represented in the election whenever the episcopal seat was vacant. As the priesthood grew to definiteness and impor- tance the clergy became more and more the au- thoritative body, but even then the people in- general assembly were called upon to approve the choice. After the days of the Emperor Constantine the position of the Bishop of Eome became in- creasingly important. Wherever there is 63 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH power, whether in church or state, or in any other social organization, it is needful that au- thority be regulated by custom, and confirmed by law. Unfortunately the weakening of the Eastern, empire, notwithstanding the removal of the capital to Constantinople, the transfer of real power to the West and the matter of unsettled methods of election gave rise to many conflicts between church and state, based fundamentally upon whether the Emperor created the Pope or the Pope sanctified the Emperor. It was not until the middle of the eleventh century that the election of the Bishop of Eome, now become Pope, was reserved to the cardinals under defi- nite rules. But even then the people were ex- pected to give their consent and confirm the election. This was a relic of the ancient time when the Pope was regarded as essentially the Bishop of Rome. We have to consider in this chapter the relation of the Emperor to the Pope, and it will be seen that the conflict be- tween the two was in its essence a question of the relation of the Church to the Empire rather than of their respective heads. The Emperors had frequently appointed the Pope, and even lesser authority than the em- peror had claimed the papal throne as a piece 64 PAPACY AND LIBERTY v of political patronage. Even in modern times the conclave of cardinals for the election of Pope, though its powers were now become very- definite, and all persons were excluded except the cardinals, felt the influence of the national groups. French cardinals were influenced by the traditional nationalism of the Roman church in that country. Italy, by its large num- ber of votes, held control, save that the Italian cardinals were not always agreed among them- selves as to the proper policy. The right of veto, as it was called, was based upon the courtesy which permitted rulers to select the cardinals who were to be created among their own people, and it was natural that these rep- resentatives received direction from their gov- ernment as to their action in the conclave. It is well known that in the election of the last Pope Cardinal Rampolla would doubtless have been elevated to the papacy had not the Aus- trian government instructed its representatives to object. It was only in 1904 that Pius X, the present pope, issued a bull prohibiting the in- fluence of any outside government in the papal election, and it is one of the curiosities of history that the election of the pope is only finally free when the temporal power has been wholly swept away and the ruler of the Catholic 6 65 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH world is regarded as a prisoner in the Vatican. The duties of the papacy have changed very much in the progress of the years. The work of the church is now carried on under highly or- ganized bureaus, presided over by some of the ablest men of the church. The methods con- form practically to those of modern civil gov- ernments. In the old days a pope might go from one part of Italy to another. He might visit Germany or France upon errands of pol- icy, seeking here to inflame new zeal, and there to settle a quarrel, and at another place to sub- due those rebellious against his authority. He would make alliances with one sovereign, or a group of sovereigns, as the case might be, and he would change his alliance to serve his pur- pose. In the days after the office became valu- able, but before its tenure was definitely fixed, there were rival claimants to the papacy and the church listened at the same time to distinct but discordant voices. Some of the popes were improperly chosen, some were unfit for office, some were bad men, but the papacy grew from the vagueness of simplicity in its early form to the more than imperial power of the day of its glory by definite necessities of human so- ciety, and out of the reconciliation of appar- ently conflicting forces. 66 PAPACY AND LIBERTY It is necessary to retrace our steps and to take some account of the organization of the church and its constant movement toward unity and toward control. From the fourth century the church had sanctified the Eoman Empire as the empire had strengthened the church. The doctrine of the unity of the church in one form or other was confirmed by many of the church fathers. As a parallel there was the doctrine of the unity of the empire, and one church and one empire working together was the underlying concep- tion of the social life for many generations. It is difficult for many persons to see that the growth and the power of the papacy, culminat- ing at last in its triumph over kings and em- perors, was a vital and necessary thing in the evolution of the world, and in the production of those social conditions that have been the makers of modern liberty. The history of so- ciety, like the history of the planet, has been by no means an easy story to write. A chance visitor to the earth in the carboniferous age would not have understood that the huge growths in the forests and the living monsters that dwelt in them under the dark clouds were necessary steps in that development of life be- ginning with the first few cells and promising 67 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH to complete itself in a golden age when man shall have subdued the earth and made all things peaceful and beautiful. We do not discover in particular events alone the conclusion that without papal supremacy there had been no modern democracy, and yet the unity of the church and its ecclesiastical form was a necessary part of that unfolding of human life which makes the modern world at once so complex and so rich. In the Council of Nicaea there was the tri- umph of a universal creed, at least in theory. It took nearly a century to make the edicts of the council effective. This was the intellectual source of the unity of the church. On the face of it this looks like a suppression of the natural development and the foundation of a spiritual tyranny. As the Eoman Church had made creeds so the reformers in their turn felt it necessary to set up rival forms of faith. The Eastern church divided from the Western over questions that seem to us not only too foolish to have been thought about, but so far removed from us that we cannot even comprehend the seriousness of the combat. We are coming to see, however, that the history of the creeds is simply a theological interpretation of the men- tal life of the various ages of Christian history. 68 PAPACY AND LIBERTY When once it is recognized that theology has a history as well as the church, and dogma is a form of development, we suddenly find our- selves gifted with a new and splendid liberty. The creeds become alive with interest. The- ology becomes an intellectual interpretation of the age in which the theologians lived. It is seen at once that theology is a definite intellec- tual necessity, and that in the nature of the case it must become scientific. There is doubt- less a need for what is called religious freedom, but there can be no more religious freedom in theology than there can be scientific freedom in chemistry or physics. In every department every one is bound to accept both fact and law as soon as it is discovered. The creeds were prophetic of a final unitary system of thought, holy only because it has the authority of a sound scientific method, and needing for its support only exposition, but neither convention nor power. Such is the theology toward which the church is working to-day. But the creeds were an essential form of church unity, and were the promise of a rational theology. As the creeds represented the intellectual side, so the ecclesiastical organization was the outward and visible symbol of the strength of the church. It was a "kingdom within a king- 69 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHtJRCH dom." And this was to confront the world powers in such a way as to become an essential agent in the creation of modern civilized na- tions. It is not possible, neither is it neces- sary to this brief study, that the growth of the papal power should be traced in detail. But it must be traced in such a way as to show its in- fluence upon the making of modern democracy. We have seen that the Roman Empire, so far as the Western world was concerned, had been swept away, and that in the thought of Au- gustine the church was to find a refuge in a form of ecclesiastical idealism. The Eoman Empire disappeared out of the West, but the Eastern empire, seated in Constantinople, fur- nished for a long time material to fill the imag- ination with respect to the unity of secular au- thority. New forces arose and the Eastern em- pire weakened and faded out of the Western world. The organization of the Christian church practically adopted the Eoman constitution. It came to have its Pope as the counterpart of the Emperor, and with its metropolitan and pro- vincial organization grew in unity and power. Eome was still the capital city of the Western world and the chief man in it was its Bishop. The Latin culture had been spread northward and westward. New peoples were arising who 70 PAPACY AND LIBERTY had accepted the Christian faith, and with it a considerable part of the Latin culture became dominant. In spite of the conflict of forces and the break-up of political organizations there were still fundamental, in the thought and life of the time, the great powers, spiritual and temporal, each central and authoritative, which ought to work together. The first Bishops of Eome were poor and in- significant. But as the generations went on the church became wealthy. An epoch of the history of the church is re- vealed in the person and career of Pope Greg- ory the Great. Himself rich and of a noble family, a man of great strength of character and with a fine versatility of gifts, at once scholar, politician, liturgist, and perhaps a saint, he concentrated and increased the assets of the church, already considerable through the bounty of the faithful. He used his own inherited wealth to establish religious founda- tions, and he was one of a long line of great men who have added luster to the papal throne. Orderly political life had long ceased to exist in the unity of Italy. Incursions of the North- ern peoples continued and North Italy was set- tled in the sixth century by those German and Saxon conquerors, the Lombards. They ex- 71 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH tended their rule and threatened to overrun Italy. It was now that Pepin, King of the Franks, was invited to measure strength with the Lombards, and in the middle of the eighth century he decisively defeated them. He was glad to have fought and he was glad to have won. He represented the rising Western power which was to become more and more influential for two hundred years. The King of the Franks wanted something that Pope Stephen could give him and that was the legitimacy of his power, and also a spiritual alliance which meant more in those days than the gift of an army. On the other hand, Pope Stephen wanted something, and that was defi- nite authority, political as well as ecclesiastical. The two men came to terms and Pope Stephen received the City of Rome with its surrounding territory and so founded the temporal power which already largely existed in fact, because of the wealth and of the extensive estates of the church. What had been economic authority now became political, and was supported by the most powerful throne in the West. It did not need the pretended document, called "The Do- nation of Constantine, ,, in which it was alleged that, on establishing his capital at Constanti- nople, he had left the imperial authority with 72 PAPACY AND LIBERTY the Bishop of Eome, to secure the result. That was a clumsy and stupid forgery. The spirit- ual influence of the church and the strong arm of the king were quite enough to estab- lish the new relations between church and empire. A far greater man was to arise with a more magnificent program. Charlemagne, great as a warrior, able as an organizer, wise as a states- man, and devout as a Christian, came to the throne, enlarged his empire, made himself prac- tically master of Europe, and visited Rome on a pilgrimage as political as it was religious. The patronage of the empire was necessary to the church, but the church controlled the con- sciences of the people. The church was neces- sary to the empire. On Christmas day, in the year 800, Charlemagne was kneeling at the altar in St. Peter's in Rome, when Pope Leo III ad- vanced and, upon the head of the kneeling fig- ure, placed a golden crown while the enraptured multitude hailed him as the new Caesar. The Empire had received its crown from the papal over-lord. Charlemagne, on the other hand, increased the temporal dominions of the pope and guaranteed him security in his possessions. It was not a bad bargain for either party. From the days of Charlemagne until those of King 73 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH Emmanuel, the pope was a temporal prince en- trenched in the Eternal City, though ofttimes he had to struggle with turbulent nobles with- out and to fight powerful foes within. For practical purposes Charlemagne was master of a world empire. The great dream had come true. There was one throne and one pope who were joint masters of the world. It may be said that the view was provincial, since the world was only Europe. At the same time it embraced the territory that was then vital for human history. The situation cannot be understood, nor the after history, without tak- ing note of the fact that the empire was a con- centrated power rather than a distributed ad- ministration. Local affairs were managed by local authorities of various forms. There were no constitutions, no representative assemblies for making new laws, and the old Latin code was substantially the law of Europe, save as it was modified by customs hoary with antiquity. The emperor must be sustained by force. He must know how to control the nobles, or yield to them, and the feudal power was des- tined to play an important part in the develop- ment of history. With the growth of new in- fluences, special forms of culture, social centers of influence, there began slowly to emerge the 74 PAPACY AND LIBERTY national spirit. A universal Latin empire be- came impossible under any system with any ruler. The nations emerged, and those imme- diately significant to the papacy were France, Germany and Italy. It is not the purpose here to pursue all the various political alliances made by the papacy through dark generations, but John XII, pope from 955-964, weak though he was, marks an important epoch. Out of the civil leaders of the world he chose Otto the Great of Germany, simply because he was great; called him to his aid against Italian enemies, and after the conquest of Italy crowned him as the head of the whole Roman Empire. Otto was a ruler — Pope John was a shadow; but he was able to conspire against the new ruler after repenting of the favor he had granted him. When the pope's intrigues were discovered he was compelled to flee from the city, and the emperor named another man to take his place. The German emperor was hardly gone before the exiled John returned, drove out the new pope, and made it necessary for Otto to return to the city. Before he reached the place Pope John died, as some think, by poison. It is a confusing story to attempt to follow — popes and anti-popes, revo- lutions and counter-revolutions — but the Holy 75 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH Roman Empire, with its seat in Germany, re- mained in one form or other until modern times. No writer of history can ignore the many failures and corruptions of the organ- ized church, but it is necessary to look at them from the point of view of the times in which they existed, and the problems which the or- ganization had to face. The church, after the dissolution of the Ro- man Empire, was given almost wholly the task of social organization. It was the solitary po- liceman among warring factions and rival thrones. The civilized part of the world was corrupt with ancient vices. The church was face to face with the double problem of fur- nishing moral standards for people who did not desire them, and at the same time of secur- ing power sufficient to maintain itself upon the throne of the world. The tremendous difficulties which the church had to face are not usually fully estimated. Paul, in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, shows that, in the very lifetime of the founder of the Greek church, a small community had be- come infected with pagan vices, and how diffi- cult it was for the authority of even such a great man as the apostle Paul to maintain so- cial order. This was in a single church called 76 PAPACY AND LIBERTY out from the pagan world by the preaching of the primitive gospel, founded upon moral up- rightness and social brotherhood. It was to be expected that these early churches, puritan to the very core, would maintain their integrity, but they did not. The patronage of Constan- tine doubtless increased the early successes of the church, but these successes, founded upon imperial patronage, were too rapid to secure the best results. As the generations passed the church became exceedingly rich. Its great and continuous cor- poration lent itself to that result. When dead men could purchase heaven by property which they could no longer use, it was inevitable that the endowments of the church should grow. If the movement had not been checked by the dis- solution of monasteries and various move- ments, which were really economic revolts, by this time the church would have practically controlled the wealth of the world. It would not have been so rich a world as we have now, but it would have been a colossal religious trust. The monastic orders, which denied possessions to the individual member, increased the power of the institution. This situation arose : The wealth and power of the church gave to its distinctions great 77 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH value. Places in the church were sought by the most obvious motives of worldly ambition, and were often secured by methods notoriously cor- rupt. It is not worth while, therefore, to point out that John XII was not only a weak man, but was also a bad man. Nor is it remarkable that many of those who preceded and followed him were men without character and sometimes without ability. The gospel of Jesus was still in the bosom of the church, but it was wrapped about with so many titles and dignities that men could not read the sacred scroll. He had insisted that it would not answer for the rulers of the church to be men of world power. He bade them not to rule as the Gentiles did, but rather to learn how to serve, if they would achieve greatness. Outwardly the church was strong, but meantime its moral authority was everywhere in decay. Its sacraments were re- garded as a form of magic, and social morality was almost unknown. The pope was its em- peror, and the bishops were members of the feudal nobility. The wonderful thing about the whole story is that from time to time men of great ability and high character obtained notable positions in the church, and that when the life of the church 78 PAPACY AND LIBERTY seemed most in peril, from some quarter or other a new force, sometimes national, some- times economic, and sometimes political, but often spiritual, came to the defence of the im- periled cause. There were still saints in those days. Not only individuals, but also scattered communities, kept alive upon the altars of re- ligion the fires of the early faith. Some men in high places continued to be prophets of a better time. At a time when Italy seemed to have almost forgotten the vitalities of the ear- lier Christian life, the Church in England, work- ing upon Saxon material, was building better things. Dunstan, afterward called a saint, as Archbishop of Canterbury, framed the ecclesi- astical canons of King Eadgar. Among the prescriptions were three important matters: 1. It is the duty of the faithful to assist in building churches. 2. It is also their duty to help those in poverty. 3. It reaches its great climax by asserting that each man should free his slaves. Branches here and there might de- cay and be broken, but through all the years the roots of the church, like those of the Tree of Life, were strong to renew her vitality and to furnish some organism for her service. The monastery of Cluny, France, with its succession of great abbots, was such a manifes- 79 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH tation of life. Over against the influence of this Benedictine house and of some other seats of religion, was the general condition of degra- dation, moral and political, into which the papacy had fallen. We wander through a maze of popes and anti-popes, there are murders and imprisonments, places in the church are bought and sold like farms and castles. The crowning debasement was the election of Pope Benedict IX, a lad of twelve years of age, in 1033. The papal throne had become a mere appanage of the Counts of Tusculum. The degradation of the clergy may be imagined if popedom and bishoprics could be bought and sold with unblushing publicity, and could be filled by men of no character. Public worship fell into disorder, the only sanctity left in the church seemed to be in the vestments that were worn, and she herself had become the plunderer of the nations. It was in such times that, of poor parents, a child, afterward known as Hildebrand,was born in the year 1025, in a village of Tuscany. His only resource was an uncle, Abbot of the Clu- niac Monastery of St. Mary, in Rome. Scores of houses depending upon the original mon- astery at Cluny, and adopting her discipline, had been established in different countries. 80 PAPACY AND LIBERTY There are two qualities very important for influence in this world. The one of them is great talent and the other is great sanctity. The talent a man must have — the sanctity he may seem to have. In the midst of an age of desperate laxity of morals Hildebrand steps out upon the stage of the world. His abilities force him to the front. His energy was as great as his talents and his moral standards were equal to his other qualities. He was destined to be the chief adviser of the church during the rule of six popes, to be elevated to the Holy See himself, and to do that thing which men sometimes call impossible, namely, to create a reformation within a church without destroying its organization. On the other hand, it was his reformation alone which saved the church and which fought out one of the great strategic bat- tles in the history of the civilized world. Other men assisted in the work, and it is one of the chief difficulties of historical writing to properly apportion merit to men and to esti- mate the part each career plays in a great movement. It is enough that he was the con- spicuous character and leader in the most dra- matic events. The influence of Hildebrand from the first was among the people, and it was based upon his opposition to the evils and vices 7 81 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH of the great in both church and state. "Who does not know," he writes, "that princes exer- cise their authority over their fellowmen through pride, robbery, treachery and all other crimes led on by the Devil I" The first emperor who stands over against the movement of Hil- debrand was Henry III, who brought the Holy Roman empire to its greatest height. He strug- gled with his nobles, and he taught them that they were vassals and not rivals. He claimed authority over the states of Europe, but he ex- ercised authority over the church as well. Three popes were deposed by him, Gregory VI, Benedict IX and Sylvester III, and he placed upon the papal throne Clement II, the first of a line of German popes. Gregory VI, accompanied by Hildebrand, went to the Roman Synod, and here his patron resigned his place as pope with the confession, "Because of bribery and the malice of the Devil he had corrupted his election to the Holy See." Gregory VI had bought the place from the young Benedict of whom we have already spoken. There is a difference of opinion as to the exact process by which Gregory became pope. One story is that Benedict IX had been driven out of the city by the Romans, but it is certain that he had something to sell or his 82 PAPACY AND LIBERTY godfather would not have been the purchaser. Benedict, Sylvester and Gregory each claimed the papacy at the same time. They were in fact competing popes, notwithstanding the bargain and the resignation. The unhappy Clement II, who represented the German emperor, died sud- denly, as it was supposed from poison, admin- istered at the instigation of Benedict, who was reinstated once again as pope, but driven out of Rome in less than a year. To follow the fortunes of Hildebrand it is interesting to know that he went into exile with Gregory VI in Germany. This was of the high- est importance both to Hildebrand and to the future of the church. He learned what Ger- many was. He became master of its various forces, and in the future was able to calculate to a nicety what might be expected. However great a churchman the future pope might be, he was essentially a citizen of this world. When Henry III assumed authority over the church Hildebrand, on the other hand, sent letters to the rulers of every Catholic country demanding submission to the church as the one great in- clusive commonwealth, Mistress of the Nations. When Leo IX at a later date was appointed pope by the emperor, he was told by Hilde- brand that he ought not to accept the tiara 83 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH from secular hands. Together the two men made a humble pilgrimage to Rome, clad in modest garments, and there Leo was elected to the papal See, and upon the Roman election based his claim to rule. Hildebrand himself received the papacy in even a more dramatic manner. On the death of Alexander II, while the funeral rites were in progress, in the very- face of the dead, the whole audience commenced to shout, "Hildebrand, Hildebrand, he shall be pope!" The great emperor, Henry III, was dead and had been succeeded by Henry IV. The program of Hildebrand, both before he reached the papacy and after, included two dis- tinct elements. In the first place, he proposed to reform the church. The ecclesiastical offices should no more be bought and sold, nor should the clergy live lives of open immorality. The sacraments of the church should be adminis- tered by clean hands, and at least to a good degree the doctrine of the church and the life of the church should correspond. But in order to accomplish his reforms he must secure the freedom of the church. Ecclesiastical offices had been held as the possession of feudal lords. This must cease. Three doctrines at his behest were adopted by the Roman senate in 1075. First, the celibacy and chastity of the clergy. 84 PAPACY AND LIBERTY Second, prohibiting the sale of ecclesiastical offices. The third was a blow at feudalism by declaring that lay investiture was invalid. The church had bowed the knee to her ruler, for the conflict of Hildebrand was not alone with the political power of the empire — it was also with the clergy of Europe, and the first victory of Hildebrand was won over the church. It must not be supposed that the evils all ceased at once or indeed during this period, but they were now under ban. They were reduced in number and the whole tone of Europe was elevated. Hildebrand conquered the church, but he had also to fight his battle with the emperor. Henry IV had the spirit and the ambition of his father, but lacked his commanding will and his stead- fastness of purpose. Nevertheless he was swift to act. Hildebrand had been elected pope by a popular assembly. The validity of his election could be questioned both on grounds of ecclesi- astical order and because it was in defiance of the imperial authority. The emperor sent a message deposing him from the papal See, and he cited Hildebrand to appear before a council, which he himself had called and to which he sent an ambassador representing his authority. A lesser man might have submitted, but Hilde- brand, now Pope Gregory VII, instead of at- 85 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH tending the council or recognizing any right of the emperor, issued against him a bull of ex- communication. The emperor started from Speyer, a place from which we are to hear again in the fortunes of Martin Luther, be- tween whom and Hildebrand there are a num- ber of striking parallels. The empire and the church were to measure strength. Henry IV had the throne. He could summon an army, but Gregory was not without weapons. His first was a general alliance with the people of the North of Italy, who were en- gaged in a democratic movement. But more important was his alliance, more or less open, with the German princes, subdued by Henry III, but very restive under the imperial au- thority of Henry IV. It is a curious fact that this weapon, which was forged by Pope Gregory to smite the imperial power, became afterward a sword in the hand of Martin Luther to defy Eome and all its authorities. But the pope needed something more than feudal alliance, something more than great intellect, and even greater personal force. This other weapon was his appeal to the moral sense of mankind. He appeared to men as the great deliverer of their age. He sought to reform the manners and the morals of his time. No age is so cor- 86 PAPACY AND LIBERTY rupt but in some way or other it responds to sainthood. This holy man wished to make the clergy holy. The laity liked that — they always do. Inasmuch as his aims were chiefly ecclesi- astical and his basis was reform, he appealed to the imagination of the people as well as to the interest of German princes. The emperor upon his journey had re- ceived tokens in sufficient number of the conditions of the empire behind him and the dangers which were threatening that he did not need the advice said to have been given, nor the influence exercised by the men of Cluny, to secure his submission. Pope Gregory had taken refuge in Canossa, in the castle of a noble lady. Thither came Henry, and reached the place January 25, 1077. But it was not with an army to batter down the walls of the castle, nor was it with proclama- tions of deposition of the Holy Father, nor with assertions of the supreme authority of the im- perial state. He had discovered that in order to keep his crown he must submit to the head of the church and obtain his pardon. Clad in white, as became a penitent, and barefooted, so the story goes, he walked in the snow, to and fro, for four successive days, asking an audi- ence, only to be refused. At the end of the four 87 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH days' penance he was admitted, forgiven — the personal quarrel was over, and the supremacy of the papacy was an accomplished fact. Gregory VII was one of the greatest men of his century. But whatever men may think of the right or wrong of this particular conflict, no one must be allowed to forget that it was the son of a peasant in the robes of the church who humiliated an emperor and the son of an em- peror. The doctrines of Gregory are set forth in his letters, and here his attack upon the state is based upon the democratic doctrine that the organization of the state prevents equality among men, and is built up by violence and in- justice. It is because of what this man was and what he fought for that Canossa looms so large in human history. He fought for the holiness of the church as much as he did for the freedom of the church. His last years were clouded. The man who had broken social and political ties had yet to learn that organization requires authority. Moreover he utters his last words at Salerno: "I have loved justice and I have hated iniquity, therefore I die in exile. ' ' German princes profited by the triumph of the pope. But it was a triumph that always rankled in the Teutonic heart. The princes wished to take advantage of all occasions rather 88 PAPACY AND LIBERTY than to become the permanent servants of the papal power. Yet this struggle was one of the turning points of history. In a later conflict Count Bismarck said, "We will not go to Ca- nossa. ,, But without Canossa there had been no Luther, no Bismarck and no modern democ- racy. Just one hundred years later Frederick Bar- barossa, soldier, statesman, and every inch a king, having already held the stirrup for Pope Adrian IV, was compelled to recognize the free- dom of the cities of the North of Italy in the Treaty of Venice. He recognized Alexander III as the rightful pope, for there had been much question between popes and anti-popes, and the proud head of the Holy Eoman Empire knelt before the head of the church and kissed his feet. There is even a story that the pope placed his foot upon the neck of the emperor, quoting the words : ' ' Thou art Peter. ' ' But there was another conflict which shows that the Holy Eoman Empire was not the only theater for those perpetual rivals, King and Priest. Thomas a Becket had been the chief officer of the crown, but he preferred to become a servant of the church and rose to be Arch- bishop of Canterbury. Many were the conflicts which this man carried on against the civil 89 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH power in the name of a higher authority. Henry II of England was no easy man to deal with, but he had a people who were loyal to the church. From his tent in France there came his muttered words, "Will no one rid me from that turbulent priest !" Some knights, over- hearing the very secular prayer, mounted horse and rode away to perform the task. Shipping to Dover once again, they journeyed on, assailed the gates of Canterbury, clattered up the streets, made their way to the rear of the cathedral, dragged the Archbishop from his rooms, down the narrow stairway, and slew the troublesome priest before the very altars of his faith. When he was prepared for burial it was dis- covered that beneath his ecclesiastical robes he wore the hair shirt of a penitent. The crime shocked England and Europe. The hair shirt was a mark of sanctity. Thomas a Becket be- came a martyr, his tomb a shrine, and the king was also compelled to bow to the authority which he had sought to destroy. He made his journey to Canterbury, and baring his back, with bowed head, passed between two rows of monks, who beat him with rods until the flowing of the royal blood became a crimson witness to the royal crime. Space forbids to say how 90 PAPACY AND LIBERTY much this shrine had to do with making Britain a part of Europe, and now the crowds of pil- grims from every part of England, meeting upon the roads, deepened its social life, and how out of it all the genius of Chaucer was kindled to write the Canterbury Tales. It is impossible to treat of these times with- out some reference to that tremendous move- ment called the Crusades, which for some two hundred years stirred the imagination and ar- rested the attention of European nations. The logical successor to the work of Hildebrand was Urban II, and he it was who heard the appeal of Alexis, the Byzantine emperor, who sought aid against the Mohammedans. It was in France, at Clermont, in 1095, that he delivered an address calling upon Europe to make an armed pilgrimage to the Holy Land to rescue the tomb of Jesus from the hands of the in- fidels. There were many forces behind the move- ment for these crusades. The preaching of Peter the Hermit is popularly supposed to have been the chief reason for their existence. If we may believe the chronicles about him, he was a man of fiery eloquence, and he actually led one division of troops into Asia Minor. But neither Urban nor Peter, nor both together, could have 91 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH produced such a movement had there not been social conditions which made the thing inevi- table. For generations the conflict between Jesus and Mahomet for the possession of Europe had gone forward. Nor was it to cease even after the Crusades had spent their force. The struggle of pope against emperor, with the success of the church, had been followed by a religious revival that had reached all classes. People and princes were alike ready to give way to religious enthusiasm. The holy war was a safe method of giving vent to the military spirit, while it ensured the final salvation of the soul of the warrior. There were doubtless economic reasons on the part of the traders as well as political reasons that assisted in the enterprise. It is not necessary to detail the story of the various campaigns during the two hundred years. Jerusalem was won and lost. The wave of enthusiasm rolled back again into the heart of Europe and new enterprises were to engage the souls of men. It is always difficult to appraise historical movements and to write with a sure hand of the certain results that follow certain incidents, however great they may be. It has been so in dealing with the results of the Crusades. 92 PAPACY AND LIBERTY Whether the sacrifice of kings and nobles upon the various battlefields caused the weakening of feudalism or not, they certainly hastened its dissolution. Politically, France benefited be- cause it was the leader in the movement. The papacy increased and consolidated its power because it had appealed to a motive that seemed sacred, and men could not fight for the Cross save under the patronage and with the blessing of the church. The romances of Sir Walter Scott have much to say of the learning and courtesy of the men of the East. Doubtless some things were brought back to make for in- crease of human knowledge. Such facts, how- ever, were quite incidental. Teachers of social science bid us believe that much comes from the conflict of social groups as well as from their cooperation. This mili- tant movement is chiefly important for its effect upon the internal life of Europe. It no doubt enlarged knowledge. It set free the spirit of adventure. It satisfied curiosity. These were particular results. It sanctified new methods of taxation that were to continue and to have their influence upon the rise and importance of national governments. But it did more. It pervaded all ranks of men with a common pur- pose. It struck down the provincialism of Ger- 93 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH mans, of Frenchmen, of Italians and of Britons. Under the standards of religion, with whatever difference of speech or customs, they had be- come one people, and were all fighting in one cause. Incidentally this seemed to contribute chiefly to the prestige of the church. But in fact it was the recognition of a common human interest that tended to level all class distinc- tions in society. More than the depletion of the nobility, or the death of kings, or the growth of free cities, was this common human passion the interpretation of the great religious move- ment, and its vindication to history. The culmination of the power of the papacy occurred under Pope Innocent III, who suc- ceeded in making real all the dreams of Hilde- brand. It was he who declared, "The pope is above the secular power, as Christ is above Caesar, or the soul above the body, or time less than eternity." He set up kings, decided al- liances, compelled and revoked marriages, and freed subjects from their allegiance to their sovereigns. For a century the papacy main- tained its place at the head of the world. The climax of its claims is in the bull of Boniface VIII, called "Unam Sanctam." There is one holy church and it has two swords. Every man must submit in secular as well as in religious 94 PAPACY AND LIBERTY affairs or prepare for damnation in this world and in the next. For our problem of democracy, the scene changes to England and, under the rule of King John, Innocent III had consecrated Stephen Langton as Archbishop of Canterbury, but the king for six years prevented his accession to his office. Langton was a man of the most va- ried gifts, scholar, theologian, poet, and a man of affairs. The form of the political conflict in England was between the barons and the throne. It was a question fundamentally of despotism against constitutional government. King John started upon a campaign against his barons in the North of England, but was over- taken by the Archbishop of Canterbury at Northampton, who attempted, without success, to persuade him to make concessions. These men were to meet again, and it was at Runnymede, a few miles south of London, in 1215. By this time the victory for constitu- tional government was won, and they met here to settle the terms of peace. Stephen Langton had organized the strength of the nation with consummate skill, and was the moving spirit of the occasion. The Magna Charta was the document resulting from the convocation. It is usually spoken of as a concession to the barons, 95 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH but the barons never could have won it without the church. This great document, the real be- ginning of modern constitutional liberty, and the foundation of every subsequent campaign for the rights of men, begins with these words : 11 John, by the Grace of God, King of England, to the Archbishop, bishops, abbots, earls and barons.' ' In the rank of those days even an abbot came before an earl, but it was Langton's personality that made the victory possible. The sixty-third paragraph of the charter is itself a revelation in the statement, "Wherefore we will and firmly decree that the English church shall be free, and that the subjects of our realm shall have and hold all the aforesaid liberties." We have gone far afield from the simple be- ginning of Christianity. We have seen the church engaged in the fierce battles of world politics. She became at last the ruler of the earth. While she set up one ruler and pulled down another, none could stay her hand or say, What doest thou? During the long generations the attitude of the church was by no means consistent. Nor was the political policy of one pope identical with that of his successors. The cleavage between the doctrine of St. Augustine and the working policy of the church had be- come very deep. In the wreck of Eome he took 96 PAPACY AND LIBERTY refuge in an ideal city and a hope of immor- tality. The Rome of the popes embodied the doctrine of a corporate and earthly immortal- ity, and proposed to govern the world existent as well as to hold the keys to the gates of the world hoped for. The policy of the church in the beginnings of her power was to seek the patronage of emperors. That was necessary to temporal power, and to the security of visible interests, but it was a program of increasing dignity, and the hand which crowned emperors, to secure their protection, also humbled them when they were not obedient to the papal will. The fundamental question arises: How did the church secure a constituency strong enough to resist imperial power, and to grasp the prizes of the world? It was manifestly by an appeal to the people. The appeal was sometimes spiritual, promising to the faithful good in this world and glory in a better world. But sometimes it dealt with present power and such bounties as could be seen even by the most worldly. In the contests from the eleventh cen- tury onward there were two parties among the people, the one was named the Guelfs, which was the popular party — the other the Ghibel- lines, which represented imperial power. The 8 97 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH questions about which they struggled differed in Germany from those in Italy. Contests of national proportions took place, but there were others confined to factions in small towns, where the quarrels were carried on, not by armies, but by mobs. In all these contests as a rule the church allied herself with the party of the people — they were Guelf s. In the Magna Charta of England is seen the crowning victory of the church. It was not alone for her own freedom that she fought, but for the freedom of the people. Chapter thirty-nine declares : " No freeman shall be arrested or detained in prison or deprived of his freehold, or in any way mo- lested, unless by the lawful judgment of his peers and by the law of the land. ' ' This great declaration makes the charter the foundation of English liberties, as well as of the liberties of the church, and of the rights of the nobles. One curious provision is in Chapter fifty-five, which provides for the remission of unjust fines. The decision on these matters is to rest with the Archbishop of Canterbury. The greatest' lawyers and statesmen in England have com- bined in regarding this document as a revival of ancient privileges which had been taken away, as well as a permanent limitation on the power of the throne and a foundation upon 98 PAPACY AND LIBERTY which can be built the noble structure of the rights of men. It is true that when King John, in doubt of even retaining his throne, made peace with the pope, acknowledging that he held his kingdom from the Eoman See, and promised a yearly tribute for England and Ireland, having sur- rendered his crown to the papal legate only to receive it back again, Pope Innocent annulled the charter and suspended Langton. But the work had been too well done, and seven years after Langton was restored to his rightful po- sition as head of the church of England, and the charter has remained one of the great foun- dations of the English Constitution. The development of history was surely has- tening forward. The church had struck down the world powers, but she had also encouraged influences from which later ecclesiastical au- thority was to suffer. Nay, the time was to come when it should be broken in pieces to show that all visible organization is but the earthen vessel containing the divine treasure, while the excellency of the power is of God. A great king reigned in France, called Philip the Fair, 1285-1314. He quarreled with the papacy, because he was unwilling to see his own treasury empty and great church properties 99 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH free of taxation in every part of his kingdom. His influence secured the election of a French- man, Clement V, to the papal throne. At the behest of his imperial master he removed the papal residence to Avignon, in France, and Kome was deserted for two generations. It was called "The Seventy Years of Captivity.' ! The head of the church went back to Rome at length, and there were brilliant epochs in its imperial history, but since that long captivity the papacy has never been quite the same. It was a prophecy of the time when the pope should be prisoner in his palace by the Tiber. Through all her worldly ambitions, the tumult of war, the triumphs and defeats, within her bosom the church was always carrying the message of the Master. As Hildebrand was the reformer of the church and the great cham- pion of papal power, so there was to arise an- other man of a very different order, to take once again a few grains of mustard seed, and fling them upon the earth until the social fields bloomed with gracious harvests. In history he is called St. Francis. CHAPTER IV SOCIAL REVIVAL IN ITALY Defeated saints have found always a final stronghold in Mysticism. It stands over against the world of action quite as much as it does against the domain of the understanding, and when the world is evil, as well as when the rea- son fails, men retreat to some desert to com- mune with their own souls and to speak with God. If the church is chiefly busy with its own organization and forgets its great tasks in the world, once again the saintly soul turns away to pray. To men overwhelmed with the sense of the common evils of the world, too foul to be cured, and the problems of the world, too difficult to be solved, there are only two paths open, and one of them leads to despair, while the other conducts the feeble feet to some holy shrine. Bernard, as well as Schopenhauer, or any disciple of his, knew how bad things were, but had no such philosophy as Descartes, a kind of optimism, perhaps better sustained by good digestion and a good income than any phi- 101 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH losophy that was ever produced. So with his watchings and his fastings the saint sings: ' ' The world is very evil, The times are waxing late, Be sober and keep vigil, The Judge is at the gate \ The Judge who comes in mercy, The Judge who comes with might, Who comes to end the evil, Who comes to crown the right. ' ' In times when new knowledge disturbs the old faith it is the mystic who saves the day. If Hume denies miracles, the saint, even though vanquished in arguments, flings himself before the altars of religion imploring fresh miracles of grace. If Herbert Spencer leaves only the unknowable as the foundation of religion, that is quite enough, for on the islands of faith still left among the shining seas of new discovery a fresh vision comes, and the watcher beholds a form like unto the Son of Man. If criticism questions some facts, insists on fresh dates, or uncrowns traditional authors of the Bible, the believer remembers that "the Kingdom of God is within you," and he reinforces the written word by one within the soul, ' i quick and power- ful and sharper than any two-edged sword." Religion may take many forms. It is a funda- 102 SOCIAL REVIVAL IN ITALY mental fact in human experience. Research and science declare that it has been a part of the social life always. It continues to adapt itself to new conditions of human life, dominates every other interest, and proclaims itself in- destructible. These reformations suggest an explanation of Monasticism, for it needs an explanation since it did not belong to the original faith. Primi- tive Christianity was bright, naive, human. The early disciples were beaten and starved by other people; they did not have to mortify their flesh themselves. The message of Jesus was to the world in the open, though it is true he had selected disciples and quiet hours. But he rejected fasting, and he made as great a rep- utation for the convivial life among his con- temporaries as did Martin Luther. He was the natural successor of those choice prophets of hope who had declared that fastings and obser- vations were to give way to good deeds. No longer should a man afflict his soul and bow down his head as a bulrush, rather should he deal his bread to the hungry and clothe the naked ; for such a man the light breaks forth as the morning, and he is guarded by the glory of God. 1 1 Isaiah 58 : 5-8. 103 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH Though the eager preachers of the good news, with their stalwart faith in a risen Jesus, find such a delight in life that they even glory in tribulation, there always remains in human na- ture a certain element to which a life of seclu- sion could appeal. It was not christian, and yet it was human. The Monastic life was oriental. There were monks in India hundreds of years before Christ. It is said that, when the Eoman Catholic missionaries first saw the Buddhist monasteries of Thibet, they thought that their own methods, vestments, and ceremonies had been imitated by the Devil. It is not strange that the early Christian monastery was of the hermit type and began in Egypt. It was the triumph of individualism. Men fled the world to save their own souls. The church fathers praised the ascetic life which Jesus never taught, just as they made the mistake of interpreting too literally the doc- trine of giving to the poor, robbing multitudes of self-help through exertion, and so of pos- sible strength to grow. By the beginning of the fourth century the new form of life became well established near the banks of the Nile. St. Anthony is the name about which all the primi- tive tradition clusters. Athanasius says of him: "St. Anthony was never guilty of wash- 104 SOCIAL REVIVAL IN ITALY ing his feet." It is not in the eccentricities of hermits, nor in the more showy examples of pil- lar saints, like Simeon of Antioch, that the sig- nificance of the monastic order for history is disclosed. When the monastic life reached Europe it was certain to be something different from its oriental prototype. The order founded by St. Benedict in 516 endeavored to organize an in- stinct, control a motive, and make them both rational in a serviceable institution. He estab- lished a rule for the brothers who were to come together, but no monk was to rival another in self-denial. It was a community life he pro- posed to create. The three notes of his rules were: worship, work and study. The rules of the order were as binding upon the abbot, or the head of the house, as upon any other mem- ber. He proposed a rule of law and not of per- sonal desire or will. He bound his people to their house and to one another for life. It marked the beginning of a great development, not the church, truly, but its most important by-product. On the positive side the new institution was of great value. These Benedictines worked like peasants in the fields, and yet came after a time to rule like princes. They took places that were 105 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH like the wilderness and made them blossom like the garden of the Lord. They developed archi- tecture and then themselves became artists and scholars, bequeathing priceless treasures to the after ages. The monk at his best was a new and fine type of man. His vows of obedience, poverty and chastity separated him from the perennial desires of life. As worshiper, la- borer and scholar he united the three great functions that exalt human nature. He was himself a glorified democrat. Fundamentally he had no political or social significance, yet he came to shape the policy of nations and to change the occupations of thrones. The peas- ant serf saw him toil with his own hands, and knew that labor was noble. The order and beauty of the institutions spread by imitation from estate to estate. These monks built roads, opened fields, cre- ated houses as if by magic, and wherever they went carried civilization. But it became an easy life for the unworthy. They became wealthy, not alone by their own labor, but by the gifts of the rich and the great. Their houses were given special charters. They were generally set free from burdens of taxation. It was all too good to be true, and so after a time these houses became degraded both in character 106 SOCIAL REVIVAL IN ITALY and in morals. New institutions were founded to meet new needs. As St. Dominic established a preaching order to combat heresy, and Lo- yola, general of the Jesuits, developed a mili- tary order, which was to save the church reeling under the blows of the reformers, so in the vari- ous ages, when it seemed that the monastic life had descended to a contemptible level, great men would arise to promote reform and to fur- nish new vitality. Such a man was Bernard of Clairvaux. He wished his abbey to be simple, declared in favor of plain churches, and forms of worship less ornate. The Cistercian monks were reformers within the brotherhood of St. Benedict. He would have a more ascetic discipline. He won reputation as a saint because he afflicted his body to such an extent that he broke his health. Descended from a noble family, and renouncing all worldly aggrandizement, his unearthly char- acter gave him a superhuman power. Though not so learned as Abelard, he had the advan- tage of being a saint. Abelard might match him in argument, but he was bound to be van- quished in the controversy. With his spare figure, his lustrous eyes, and his tremendous will, he went to and fro as occasion required, rebuking, with unfaltering voice, princes, popes 107 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH and kings. In his time he was doubtless the most powerful man in Europe. The preacher was greater than his sermon, the ruler was stronger than his intellect. He represented sacrifice as the climax of power. Great monks might dominate popes, even as they compelled emperors to submit to their dic- tation, but we must pause a moment to point out the relations of the growth of monastic or- ders to the development of papal power. These orders became international in character. The abbot was independent of the bishop in whose diocese his house was established. When an order was approved by the pope it became le- gitimate and to the pope it owed its allegiance. The ecclesiastical importance, therefore, of these houses cannot be overestimated, and their influence upon society was equally wide. The poverty of the individual monk increased the corporate wealth of the institution, so that the economic success of the monasteries became at last a most fatal weakness. The eye of the spoiler was forever upon them. The life of history lies deeper than its exter- nal manifestations. We have seen that the au- thority of the church had won its victory. The power of popes and councils seems established beyond any further question, and Eome finds 108 SOCIAL REVIVAL IN ITALY herself the mistress of the world. Her external power had humbled the authorities of the state everywhere. The church had produced reform- ers like Hildebrand and saints like Bernard, but though her treasuries were glutted with the wealth of the world, and from her hand of power she bestowed crowns upon her favorite sons, once again it was found that ecclesiastical organization and authority were not enough to restrain men's passions, to establish justice in the world, or to make visible the great brother- hood, forerunner of the Kingdom of God. The old order was changing. Towns and cit- ies were increasing in population and the or- ganization of the church was not adequate to meet the new conditions. It had been based upon the old Roman organization, had been modified to conform to the development of the feudal system, and neither parish functionaries nor the distribution of their funds were ade- quate for the fresh tasks. The monasteries, as we have seen, from time to time received into their cloisters not only men who were eager to escape from the world and their sins, but num- bers who were eager to share the wealth and luxury which existed within the holy walls. In spite of all that had been done in the great movement of the eleventh century, the moral 109 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH condition of the clergy was very low, and the religions standards among the people were even more degraded. It was necessary that something else should happen. Over against the monks in their se- clusion and the parish priests in their incapac- ity and self-indulgence, there arose the great mendicant orders. The members of them earned the name of friar, because they were brothers of the people. It is enough to speak particularly of two of these brotherhoods, the Dominican and the Franciscan orders. Various forms of Puritanism have arisen as protest against social sins. It was so in these times. The Albigenses represented a popular movement for moral reform outside of the church, lasting from the beginning of the eleventh century for three hundred years. Its notable successes were in the South of France. The strength of its leaders among the people lay always in their ascetic practice. The Wal- denses, continuing to our time, later in origin than the Albigenses, seem to have worked from practically the same point of view. It was at first a form of Puritanism, existing within the church, and then became schismatic. There is no doubt that these unauthorized and unrecog- nized movements helped Hildebrand in the work 110 SOCIAL REVIVAL IN ITALY of reformation. So long as the Puritans re- mained within the church and did not attack its doctrines or its organization, no trouble arose. But Puritanism, insistent, reformatory, com- pelling, was a danger to be repressed. Hence the movement by St. Dominic and his associates accepted by the pope in 1216, after a dozen years of vigorous controversy with the Albi- genses, whom he convicted of heresy though he found it impossible to convince them. Innocent III had already identified heresy and treason and in 1223 Gregory IX employed the Dominicans as his personal commissioners to visit all suspected dioceses and inquire into the condition of the faith. Hence the later term " Inquisition. ' ' The early methods seem to have been from the point of view of the time irreproachable. The instrument was the ser- mon, the object was submission, and penance was reserved for the obstinate. This instru- ment continued until it flowered out in Spain under the infamous Torquemada in the fifteenth century, where the organization became supe- rior to all ecclesiastical authority as well as to secular government, and during more than one hundred years wrote one of the blackest chap- ters in religious history. It was very far from the early plan of Dominic, who proposed that 111 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH his companions should have no duties but to study and to preach; the care of no parishes and the possession of no property. Torque- mada was the Nero of the church, intoxicated with blood instead of wine and mad through the lust of power. Revivals of religion are not confined to mod- ern times, nor even to Christian history. Among savage tribes forms of what we know as ec- stacy are not uncommon. East India was al- ways full of such wonders, and the Greek and Roman cataleptic phenomena are well known. But religious revival is not all hysteria, though often accompanied by signs and wonders. The greatest leaders of revivals, such as Paul and Wesley, have always discouraged excesses. To Paul the sacred gifts were always to be subject to the wisdom of the recipient. And Wesley de- nounced the fainting fits of his converts as be- ing no sign of grace but rather evidence of the possession of the Devil. The truth is that forms of social hysteria are not confined to religious subjects. The war dances and the hunting dances, as well as religious festivals, were ac- companied by pathological emotions. Indeed revivals were not confined to religion, even re- vivals in the best sense. There are revivals of trade as well as revivals of learning. Human 112 SOCIAL REVIVAL IN ITALY history, like the world of nature, has its gift of seasons. Social development is not a monot- onous upward progress. It has its fields of ice and snow, its spring freshets, its joyous spring- time, and its rich harvests. "Whenever human life and history seem at their worst it is the moment for the prophet and he may safely preach glad tidings. Action and reaction is the method of the historical process, but with it all the tides of life are forever seeking higher levels. The thirteenth century found that it had ex- hausted ecclesiastical organization. Men had discovered that a church might be enthroned and at the same time be debased. From the Tiber her lines of power had gone out into all the earth, but miracles of mercy were ceasing. To the poor the gospel was not preached, while place and power satisfied human ambition. The great evangel did not minister to human needs. If there was permanent life, the life of Jesus in the soul of the church, the time had come for some fresh manifestation of its presence and its power. It was in the year 1182, in a village in the North of Italy, that a child was born who was to fill a strange place in his generation, and to become known among all men of every creed as St. Francis d'Assisi. All classes of 9 113 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH men, the secular, the Koman Catholic, and the Protestant, unite to do him honor. He gave the world no new theology. His brotherhood had scarcely any more organization in his time than the disciples of Jesus. His movement was a new manifestation of love. Bonaventura calls him, "Another angel ascending from the sun- rise and bearing the Seal of the living God." But he was something quite other than this dramatic representation of his great follower. The world has always refused to part with its treasures of truth, of beauty, and of goodness. The seed of the kingdom which the church car- ried down through the ages was vital with a perpetual life. In succeeding generations it fell upon new soil which bore fresh harvest. The doctrine of the movement we are consider- ing was more like that of Count Tolstoi than that of any other modern man. When a thought of brotherhood fell into the soul of St. Francis it sprang up in a beauty never seen since the days of the Master himself. Tolstoi had much to say about the need of the gospel, and was a great interpreter of it. St. Francis had no gift of intellect, but whatever of the gospel he understood grew through him into winsome life. A portrait is preserved of St. Francis in 114 SOCIAL REVIVAL IN ITALY which you see a man short and meager in fig- ure, with beard and mustache, the common face illumined by great mysterious eyes which seem to have looked into the very heart of things. The lower part of the forehead is full, showing that the man was twofold and had eager per- ceptives to correct his mysticism. He is clad in a coarse garb and his feet are bare. There is no beauty in him that men should desire him. So much legend has grown up about the career of St. Francis that it is difficult always to understand rightly. Some of his own people wished to paint his early life as profligate in order to show him the more a miracle of grace. He was given to eating and drinking and very fond of rich clothing, so say the " Three Com- panions.' ' On the other hand, Bonaventura said he was not wanton or greedy, but showed a certain generous compassion for the poor. We know that his father was a merchant of good position who desired his son to follow his busi- ness, and that the boy was attractive, poetic and shrewd. The truth doubtless lies between the two views. He was no saint in his youth, nor was he a great sinner. That he had a gift of poetry which wrote itself in the deeds of love rather than upon the pages of verse there can be no 115 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH doubt. The stir of action was in him. It was not that he desired the possession of more and richer wares than his father had, but when the service of a rich count was offered him, he was bent upon riding away to a nobler life, gar- nished with chivalrous deeds. A vision called him from possible knighthood, according to this world, to a career of glory, beyond all worlds. Had St. Francis been only the greatest of all mystics he would have left behind him a white light in the world. But he was very much more. He was gifted in a rare degree with a genius for organization, and he left the legacy of a great human movement. It is sometimes said that the genius for reflection and the genius for action are not usually found in the same man, but still more seldom do we find the man of supreme soul-consciousness who is also the man of action. This saint of all the ages was not only the supreme mystic, but he also knew what was in men and how to evoke from them their noblest qualities. He had a power over his as- sociates that may be imperfectly expressed by that much abused word, hypnotic. It was not the drive of a supreme will. It was rather the fascination of a supreme soul. He was a saint. The church 'has said so and the voices of all men place him in the world 's calendar. But he 116 SOCIAL REVIVAL IN ITALY was not austere. He had a profound love for his fellowmen, and his love was as catholic as that of Jesus. It embraced all classes. He was not a man of the people alone. He loved the fields, the flowers and the mountains. It is not strange that the legend has grown up that he preached a sermon to the birds, who stopped their own songs to listen to a sweeter voice. It was a time of visions. Angels and devils fought for men's souls. In the midst of an age of social chaos and rampant evils religion in quiet places assumed unearthly garments. Like the first patriarchs upon the Plains of Pales- tine, selected souls kept company with angels. St. Francis, too, had his celestial friends and enemies, but some visions came to him of quite another quality. The first revelation out of heaven came upon him in sleep and sounded all the depths of earthly misery. A pitiable leper drew near to him in his dream and the young man kissed his bleeding hand. The leper van- ished but the interview was photographed upon the soul of the sleeper. The a*bpeal was to the imagination of the man as well as to his heart, for the mind of St. Francis worked in pictures. This was a culmination doubtless of many im- pressions, waking and sleeping. When the morning came St. Francis exchanged his goodly 117 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH raiment for rags, and from dawn until dark he was companion to the beggars who, in those times, thronged the doors of the church. This was the first' apparition cff the greatest apostle of his age and the beginning of his vocation. The man was to fight great battles, but after a different fashion from that in which any fight- ing has been done since the world began. The gateways to the kingdom of heaven seemed lost. Indeed there was no visible road leading thitherward. But this man became as a little child and so entered in. We do not know much of the attitude of the personal friends of Jesus toward his teaching after he left the world. Paul so fills the whole canvas of apostolic his- tory that, though others are visible, they are not seen distinctly. It seems clear that even Paul, with all his self-sacrifice and enthusiasm, never understood the message of Jesus so com- pletely as did St. Francis. Eenouncing his claim upon his father's for- tune, he began to preach by the wayside, in the streets, wherever a few men were gathered to- gether. He did not know it was preaching. He was only speaking the word warm from his own heart. So far as we can see there was no fore- thought, no purpose in the movement, but it gathered force everywhere. A few men became 118 SOCIAL REVIVAL IN ITALY his disciples. It was the old, old story. The world will always respond to what it feels is a spiritual reality. The bad and worn-out world was hungry for some living message. It was found upon his lips. There was never any break on the part of St. Francis with the church. He always recognized its organization and its authority. One day attending service he heard the gospel read where Christ sent out the seventy by two and two. This scripture was the real charter of his order. He was struck with the fact that they were willing to be poor and to find their bread among those who heard their message. He regarded the ancient method as one of universal application, and with enthusiasm he taught his first con- verts they must give up staff and money and also superfluous clothing. He wished for di- vine guidance and he sought it in the book of the gospels. With shut eyes he opened the vol- ume thrice, after the manner of those who be- lieved that the accidental passage is the finger- post of divine guidance. The first passage which the hand touched was the story of the rich young man and the words which burned' into his soul were: "If thou wouldst be per- fect, go, sell all that thou hast and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven, 119 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH and come and follow me." The second passage was the commission to the disciples, "Take nothing for yonr journey, neither staves, nor scrip, neither bread, neither money, neither have two coats apiece.' * The third time the magical chance was invoked and now the man read: "Then said Jesus unto his disciples, if any man will come after me, let him deny him- self and take up his cross and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it, and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it." The rule of the order had been dis- covered. These words, by no means the com- plete message of Jesus, but very central to his teaching and largely neglected throughout all the world, became the great revelation of God to that generation. For a thousand years men within the church had been taking vows of poverty. Though they had still made it possible for their successors to live in comfort, the whole monastic movement was founded upon the idea of renunciation. St. Francis was different. Other men had talked about the poor, had even helped them, but he shared with them his whole life. Other men had been willing to make the great sacri- fice of giving up earthly honors and worldly possessions. This man regarded the surrender 120 SOCIAL REVIVAL IN ITALY as a great privilege. Many men have been wedded to their professions. Some men have gladly given their lives to a great cause. But there is a picture in the church of St. Francis at Assisi, said to be by the hand of Giotto, of the mystic marriage of St. Francis with Lady Poverty. More than any form of speech does this artistic conception reveal the spirit with which the new life was undertaken. Not even in the gospels did sacrifice take on so poetic a form. This simple life was not for him some hard though necessary duty. It was a life of new gladness. He loved the world because he loved men, and he loved men because he loved all things. Churchmen took an interest in the new gospel, and men and women throughout the North of Italy made it the chief subject of conversation. The priest, Sylvester of Assisi, is said to have had a vision of a cross of gold coming from the mouth of St. Francis, and by its light putting to flight the dragon. This was doubtless a contemporary tribute to a new form of eloquence. The company of his followers grew and they went everywhere preaching repentance and the coming of the kingdom. There were a few huts at Portiuncula surrounded by a forest. Here they gathered from time to time for meditation, 121 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH for prayer, and for receiving instructions from the lowliest master that had ruled among men in all generations. But what was to be the fu- ture of the movement? Should they make for themselves a home near Assisi and preach the gospel to such people as came to them? Should they betake themselves to lonely places, having left their interpretation of life to work its way with such vitality as it might have ? Or should they decide to be in the world and yet not of the world, and to show the great daring of living among men engaged in earthly occupations, while they themselves felt burning within them a heavenly mission? A few disciples retired with him and in the Valley of Spoleto upon these questions a great debate took place. It was the old debate between the apostle and the hermit, the monk and the man. The kindly vision came to St. Francis with an interpreta- tion, according to Bonaventura, and as the re- sult of it, "He chose to live rather for all men than for his single self. p ' The spell of the apos- tolic commission was still upon them. They were sent forth to give a living word to living men. They were to be friars and not monks. The rule had been founded in the gospel. The organization was completed as a company of friars minor, the little brothers of the people. 122 SOCIAL REVIVAL IN ITALY Hitherto nothing has been said of the place of woman in the movements of the church. There is no place more sweet and clean to rank her than in Assisi. "When St. Francis preached his first sermon in the cathedral, among the au- dience that gathered was Clara of the family of Sciffi, well placed in rank and property. She was such a one as are some of her sex in our own time, who, weary of the useless burden of an idle life, give themselves to social settle- ments or other work among the poor. It was the same spirit in another age. The wretched- ness of a life of luxury was laid bare to her. The beauty of love and service was revealed. For her also there was a new birth, and for her a religious vocation. After an interview in which each felt the divine quality of the other, it was arranged that on the night of Palm Sun- day, 1212, Clara should leave her father's cas- tle, go to Portiuncula and take the vows of pov- erty and service. It was a great and spiritual union between a great man and a great woman, in a greater cause. To her by the light of the candles was read once more the apostolic com- mission. Kneeling at the altar her luxuriant hair was cut off, and a short time after she had entered a house of Benedictine nuns to wait the open doorway of her own mission. Her sister, 123 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH Agnes, and other women soon joined her and the Benedictines gave to them the house and chapel of St. Damian. The women nursed the sick, cared for the poor, though, of course, it was impossible for them to adopt the mission- ary form of work that belonged to the friars minor. At St. Damian was founded at last the order of "Poor Ladies," under the leadership of St. Clara, a woman of personality and power only second to that of Francis himself. When St. Vincent de Paul, generations later, organ- ized his "Sisters of Charity," he doubtless had before him the model of the Franciscan women. It was well for the movement that this second order was founded. Men make theology and create institutions. Women experience re- ligion, and for the best of them service is the highest form of joy. The work grew. Everywhere that St. Fran- cis went men thought of the joy of his life rather than of its humility. The men and women of the North of Italy have often shown the temperament for religious enthusiasm. The great revival of 1219 throughout Tuscany, of which St. Francis was the center, differed from the other revivals chiefly in the desire to share with him the beauty of renunciation. It was a repetition of the same spirit that in the apos- 124 SOCIAL REVIVAL IN ITALY tolic church led men and women to sell their possessions and lay the price at the feet of the apostles. The city of Florence nearly went mad under the preaching of the little brother of the poor. Husbands and wives came to him in mul- titudes, wishing to separate from each other and break up their homes in order to lead the holy and useful life of poverty and service. The great passion was well-nigh universal. About the only sane man among them was the one man whose personality and preaching had awakened the emotional stream. He bade the men and women return to their homes and live, their lives, serving God in their daily tasks, but, as a result of the movement, he established what is known as the Third Order, the Order of Penance. This was really a great brotherhood within the church. It opened with a novitiate ; it was followed by a profession of faith, and indicated by the wearing of a habit. As the simple rule of the first order was a pledge to live "In obedience, without personal posses- sion and in chastity, ' ' so the three duties of the third order were, "worship, humility and char- ity. ' ' Some of the great men and women of the Eoman church have been enrolled in the third order. Among them, Louis IX of France, Lo- yola of Spain, Ferdinand of Castile, St. Vincent 125 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH de Paul, and Elizabeth of Hungary. From the days of the seventy sent forth by the Master on an evangelistic tour throughout Palestine, until the most recent days of progress within the Protestant churches, the laymen have al- ways been significant in every great revival of religion. Ecclesiastics write books, hold coun- cils, develop organizations, but the people are stirred by their own kind. Wesley sought to make preachers of them, if they had the gift, so Francis sought to make saints of them, if they had the vocation. It is no wonder that Leo XIII in our times should have issued a plea for a revival of the Third Order of St. Francis. St. Francis was undoubtedly a saint ; but was he also a reformer? He brought the gospel back again and made it at home in lowly places. He was the companion of the poor, the weak and the friendless. But it would not have been possible for him to have been a reformer in the ordinary sense and to have done his work. Jesus sought to reform men rather than society, knowing that reformed men would make a new world. So did St. Francis carry on his work. He taught no community of goods. He did not urge that the poor should take the place of the rich, nor did he preach the leveling of social distinctions. It may even be said to his dis- 126 SOCIAL REVIVAL IN ITALY credit that he made no formal demands for either social or political justice. But he did more. He made democracy and religion identi- cal. He sanctified the dress of the common peo- ple. Their colloquial language was the medium for his sermons. He lingered in their company because he loved them. He did not so much teach the doing away of poverty as he idealized it. Lady Poverty was consecrated, honored and espoused. He attacked the social problem in a way not common in our times. He made the saint shine out of the lowest places. He was the great leader against that egotism which is the most inveterate enemy of human progress. He taught his companions to give up their pos- sessions, simply because wealth in any amount was a burden and a hindrance. It was not a virtue to be poor, but poverty was a condition of usefulness, because it freed a man from cares. The great commission of Jesus taught that the people of Palestine could be trusted to care for the few material wants of those who went to preach among them. St. Francis be- lieved that the people of Italy were just as re- sponsive as those of Palestine. There are stories of miracles and we are learning that it is quite possible that some such stories in mediaeval times may have been founded upon 127 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH fact, just as similar stories in modern times often are. But these are only vagrant inci- dents upon the outskirts of the movement. His order multiplies, and he sends mission- aries to various parts of Europe in his own day. He himself goes to join the Crusaders. But the reports are vague and conflicting. The story is that he joined the army in Egypt and preached there, creating the most profound im- pression upon them. He was permitted to pass through the lines and to preach to the Saracens. Even the Sultan came to hear him. He seems to have had the belief that not spears and bat- tle axes, but love and the good news, were re- quired to conquer the infidel. It is said that he was permitted to pass into Syria and to visit all the holy places. These stories are accepted as true by most biographers, but, whether they be true or not, it is well to remember that the nature of the legend reveals the current opinion of the man. His relation to the organized church in the early years was a doubtful one. In shrewd councils the advisers of the pope spoke of the danger of the man, and the difficulty of dealing with his case. His rule received at length the approval of Pope Innocent III with some reser- vations for ecclesiastical control. It is even 128 SOCIAL REVIVAL IN ITALY said that the pope told his advisers that it was difficult to quarrel with a man who based his life and service upon the commission which Jesus gave to his own apostles. He had the same judgment of the relations of his followers to the church that Jesus had to the authorities of his time. " Whatsoever they command you, that observe and do," said the great Galilean. St. Francis bade his companions kiss the hands of priests and recognize authority ; and yet the church bowed to him. There is a painting by Benozzi of the meeting of St. Francis and St. Dominic. St. Francis wishes to reform men's lives — St. Dominic sought to save them by correct opinions. The former represents religion and the latter repre- sents theology. In the picture the face of Dom- inic is marked by thought and power — the face of Francis is touched by pain but glorified by. sympathy. Francis could not bow to Dominic ; he had effaced himself already. Nay, it is Dominic and theology, represented by him, that are bowing down in the presence of religion. It is the story of faith in all ages. The intellect yields to the heart in the homage of the great thinker paid to the greater saint. The con- trast between Pope Innocent and St. Francis is even more marked. As we have seen, Inno- 10 129 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH cent III represented the papacy at its very cli- max. In him the priest had become lord of emperors and king of kings. Yet Innocent III was not the head of the church. The real head of the church was St. Francis d'Assisi. He was the one who did not rule as the Gentiles did, but who became the greatest because he served. The knowledge of St. Francis came by intui- tion, and his personal power by unconscious psychology. Yet it was not always easy for him to control the movement which he had cre- ated, nor was there always perfect loyalty among his followers, even in his own lifetime. He himself knew how to utter curses, and one of them, dire, though impersonal, was upon those brothers who should in any way change or destroy any part of the fabric which he had erected. He did not know that history is a liv- ing thing, and that no human organization can remain static without at last perishing from the earth. The genius of Jesus was above that of all his followers, even the greatest of them in ancient or modern times. The Kingdom of God for Him was always a living thing, and it was to grow. He dealt always in principles, while his followers have been so devoted to structure and to precepts. How democratic the Christian religion really 130 SOCIAL REVIVAL IN ITALY is, how it exalts the common people, how it glorifies the darkest places of human life, is disclosed in the Franciscan revival of the thir- teenth century. The ecclesiastical triumphs for larger political liberty are small in compar- ison with its great revelations. Out of the darkness shines the wonderful figure of St. Francis, recognized not alone by the Eoman church, but by every man and woman who loves the best there is in human nature. The Fran- ciscan order became rich in the process of its development, as did the other orders, and at length it fell upon evil times. The succession of the work of this great leader was not in the Franciscan order, but it was in the life and work of every man inspired by his motives and who believed as he did that the cure of social evils is in the same love that is the cure of sin. Among the successors of St. Francis d'Assisi and St. Catherine of Siena as well are Wil- berforce, Howard, Abraham Lincoln, Elizabeth Fry, and Florence Nightingale. At last the mystic in him overcame the man of force. He gave himself to prayer and con- templation. The legend is that on his hands and feet and side there came marks of the wounds of the greater Master whom he adored. It may be true. In our time we are furnishing 131 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH new proofs for facts long doubted. We are finding ont in heaven and earth many un- dreamed-of things. When he was dead his resting place was guarded lest the body might be stolen away. He was all men's saint, and the name of Francis dims every other upon the calendar. CHAPTER V SOCIAL UPHEAVALS IN ENGLAND A saint had appeared in history in the per- son of St. Francis, and a great ideal in the brotherhood which he founded. His Little Brothers were to labor with their hands for their daily bread, and were only to beg when work failed. They were to possess no money and acquire no land. Poverty was not only enjoined upon the individual members, but also upon the entire fraternity. On the other hand, they were allowed to live the common life. No fastings or flagellations, no special penances were enjoined just as no novitiate in the begin- ning was required. It was a voluntary union of holy men, freed from the cares of the world, in order to preach the simple gospel as they understood it. In the time of St. Francis the brotherhood became an order, but after the death of its founder the last instructions of St. Francis were set aside and it was decided by Pope Greg- 133 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH ory IX that trustees might be appointed to re- ceive and administer money. The enthusiasm of the great revival was not confined to Italy, but disciples of St. Francis made their way to all the countries of Europe and indeed to the ends of the earth. The Franciscans found their way to England in the year 1224. Thirty years after there were more than twelve hundred of these friars, and they became a great force in the making of history. The Franciscans had in two generations become a great ecclesiastical and social organization. They had their own houses, differing from monasteries chiefly in that they were usually less splendid and not so well endowed. They continued to be recruited from among the poor and still held their in- fluence with the common people. On the other hand, they invaded the realm of scholarship, and with a very great departure from the early view of the order they came to honor by intel- lectual attainments. The Franciscans gave the world Eoger Bacon, Duns Scotus and Occam among others. If Thomas Aquinas had not been a Dominican this order could have claimed the most influential theologians of the middle ages. The first generation sought neither honor nor position, but in less than one hundred years from the threefold magic by which pov- 134 SOCIAL UPHEAVALS IN ENGLAND erty and the cross were indicated in the texts found in the gospels, the Franciscans came to the papal throne. One other change must be noted, and that is the inevitable weakening of the early discipline; the disguised or open use of the good things of this world ; and the Fran- ciscans passed through the alternate movements of achievement, degradation and reform that mark all forms of religious organization. From this time forward the interests of de- mocracy lie in England more than in any other country. But there, as throughout Europe, the various social forces were in conflict because their rights and powers were either undefined or were in process of change. Successful strug- gle registers itself in custom, in constitution or in law. The decay of authority reopens the question. New struggles — those of war, of au- thority, of wealth, of ideas — ensue and the re- sultant changes are once more registered in some apparently permanent form of the social will. The conflict of kings and nobles was not confined to England, nor was the contest be- tween bishops and barons limited to the valley of the Ehine. Wherever powers of opposing interests existed struggle was bound to follow. Even after definite settlement seemed to have been made the old questions were often re- 135 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH opened and there was no final authority but strength. It is necessary to sketch the rivalries that characterized England in the fourteenth cen- tury. There were conflicts between kings and nobles, the latter seeking to maintain the local authority which had been theirs since the time of the Norman Conquest, the king seeking to become the actual as well as the nominal head of a nation. Meantime the towns, with the in- crease of wealth, through manufacture and com- merce, grew in population and in importance. They, too, had to be reckoned with. The mon- asteries based their claims to independence upon ancient privileges guaranteed both by Pope and Monarch, and struggled to maintain their place against the towns, the nobles and the throne. The magnificent churches and glorious conventual buildings were the center of the best lands and originally in the midst of a sparse population. But the population in- creased. The town stood over against the monastery. It was a conflict of ancient privi- leges with new powers. The towns furnished men and money to the king and received royal recognition in consequence. The struggle was often largely economic. Thorold Rogers gives an account of the conflict between the town of 136 SOCIAL UPHEAVALS IN ENGLAND Canterbury and the friars and monks of Christ Church on the invasion of Robert Bruce. The following resolutions were passed by the bailiff and citizens assembled in mass meetings in the open fields: (1) "That they would pull down all the tenements in Burgate to the mill; (2) that no one under penalties, to be imposed by the city, should inhabit the prior's houses; (3) that all rents of 200 marks and upward should be levied for the benefit of the city; (4) that no one should buy, sell, or exchange drink or vict- uals with the monastery under similar penal- ties ; (5) that all carts and horses from the man- ors of the convent containing victuals or stock for the monastery should be seized and sold with their contents; (6) that if the prior or any of the monks go out of their church they should be spoiled of their clothes and goods and be at- tached; (7) that a deep ditch should be dug outside the great gate of the monastery, so that no one should go in or out; (8) that no stranger should enter the church, unless he take oath first that he will offer no gift to the shrine of St. Thomas or elsewhere; (9) each of the citi- zens swore that he would have from the shrine of St. Thomas a gold ring of the best, for each finger of each of his hands, from those which were hung up at the aforesaid shrine of St. 137 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH Thomas. It was a common custom, when gifts of money and jewels were made to the shrine, to acknowledge them, and inform the donor that the ring had been hung on the shrine. ' ' 1 The ecclesiastics regarded their political and secular rights quite as important as their re- ligious duties. The incursion of Dominicans and Franciscans into England introduced a new element. Whereas the monks had chosen the country and the fields, the friars chose the towns. Green says 2 * ' the work of the friars was physical as well as moral. ,, The brethren fixed themselves in the meanest and poorest quarters of the town. They settled in the lep- ers ' quarters or among the swamps. The Fran- ciscans soon outgrew their taste for the poorest places and the scantiest fare, but there is no doubt that in the beginning their colloquial form of preaching revitalized religion. And no doubt they entered also into the social needs as well as into the realm of faith. Conflict of monk and friar must of necessity take place. It was really the old conflict, as old as centuries, the struggle between priest and prophet. Only this time the friar prophets were received into men's houses rather than stoned. On the other 1 Thorold Bogers ' ' ' Six Centuries of Work and Wages, ' ' p. 363. 3 * 'England," by John Richard Green, Vol. I, p. 265. 138 SOCIAL UPHEAVALS IN ENGLAND hand, the work and influence of the friars tended to a reformation in the conduct of the monks and in the management of the monas- teries. The condition is not outlined without recur- rence to the towns. On account of contribu- tions to royal funds, some had received the monopoly of the manufacture of one article and some of another. There were merchant guilds as well as artisan guilds in the cities and towns, but it is supposed that the guilds came into England with William the Conqueror, though they were not important as social organizations until long afterward. The guild was the earliest form of monopoly. The merchants had the right to trade in the town where their guild was established, and those who wished to compete with them were compelled to pay for the privilege. With the monopoly of manufacture artisan guilds in- creased in number and in power. These special fraternities had the exclusive right to make particular articles and the wares of all other persons were excluded from the market. With the growth of the towns in the first half of the fourteenth century these guilds became more and more important. The artisan guilds in England, as in Germany, became more and 139 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH more the employers of labor, and the real arti- sans were excluded from their ranks. Natu- rally the journeymen, with the growth of class consciousness, began to set up fraternities of their own. These were the forerunners of the trade unions of modern times, though their in- fluence in England in the fourteenth century was not extensive. The merchant guilds and the craft guilds represented the interests and the authority. The guilds flourished according to the rights and the benefits bestowed upon them by the royal charters, and in the success of the guilds consisted the hope of the towns. New social structure is the result of a treaty of peace between social warriors or else it is the condition of peace imposed by the social conqueror. New laws are the authoritative ex- pression of new conditions in social relations. So long as a single power or allied powers con- trol social groups, there will be no change in social structure. When various social forces contest for supremacy, social changes are likely to ensue. For England, the middle of the four- teenth century was a time of dramatic conflicts and contrasts. Many forces at work slowly and silently for generations were to find visible expression. Edward III of England, 1312-1377, was one of the most brilliant monarchs of 140 SOCIAL UPHEAVALS IN ENGLAND Europe. It was he who laid low the pride of France at the battle of Crecy, and filled Lon- don with the spoil of his triumphs. A lover of pleasure, he robbed both France and Germany of their songs of chivalry, and with gay tourna- ments he sought to fill in history the role that King Arthur had occupied in legend. Soldier, knight and statesman, he knew also how to ap- peal to the imagination of his people. Such a glamour was round about his person that he was able to reverse all those simple moralities that lay at the heart of the Saxon people over which he ruled. His reputation as a warrior enhanced his skill as a diplomatist and he was for the time being practically the master of Europe. In local affairs he knew when to be imperious and when to yield. The pride of England was satisfied. The turbulent nobles were appeased. The army was his. The church was conciliated. And that triple alli- ance of monarchy, religion and land of which England was to know so much never seemed more complete or more powerful. There are elemental forces in human nature when aroused by a great passion that easily fling down outgrown social institutions; and there are elemental forces in nature which must always be reckoned with in framing any philos- 141 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH ophy of history. It was the poet Horace who long ago taught us that death is the greatest of all democrats, and the French preacher, Bos- suet, looking upon the dead face of his king, really took his text from the Latin poet, when he began his oration, " There is nothing great but God." So it was that the great plague beginning its scourge in central China and marching west- ward with legendary accompaniments of tern- \ pest and earthquake reached Europe at the end ^ of the year 1347. Twelve months later it had /y\ spread throughout Europe, and in August, 1840, - ^ it appeared in England. The chronicles are* naturally confused, and whether half the popu- lation perished or not it is impossible to say. But its effects were vital, economic, social, moral, and political. Men called the plague the Black Death, because of the dark blotches which appeared upon the skin as a sign of the disor- der. Some persons seized with the disease died almost instantly, doubtless through the effect upon the imagination. Others lingered for a day or two. The contagion spread from town to town; and attempt at isolation of the af- flicted centers of population was of no avail. The growth of the towns had taken place with- out any adequate sanitary arrangements. 142 SOCIAL UPHEAVALS IN ENGLAND Filthy and sewerless streets and polluted water supplies, together with congested population, invited and increased the disease. It is true now that cholera and other disor- ders are most fatal in the poorer quarters of the cities. It was among the common people that the ravages of the scourge were the great- est. But among the victims were members of the royal family, of the nobility, and of the superior clergy. All ranks of society were in- vaded. The plague reappeared in 1361 and 1369, so that we have a period of twenty years through which the social mind was affected by a great terror. The population of England was probably about four millions at that time, and by the lowest estimate it was reduced one- third. It is believed that there were twenty- five million deaths throughout Europe. It was a great blow against the center of civilization. The malign influence of the Black Death was not chiefly in the destruction of the population, for the population tended to increase rapidly as it always does in order to reach the normal lim- its of the economic standard of living that pre- vails among any people. The effect upon in- itiative and enterprise was paralyzing. Men were appalled, life had become so cheap that great efforts seemed unbearable. The stroke of 143 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH the terror was so benumbing that it left no ten- derness in human nature and no sensitiveness in the conscience of men. It seems to have been accompanied by moral degradation, and death was too familiar to be appalling. Many of the clergy had been cut off by the disease, and their places were filled by men with even less learning and character than their predeces- sors. Families were broken, domestic and so- cial relations were confused, and the whole fabric of the corporate life was rent by various discords. Harvests rotted in the fields in the summer, and in the springtime fields were left unplowed and unsown. Building operations ceased, as there were too many houses already for the shelter of the living. It was at such a time and in the presence of such a calamity that the common people awakened to a sense of liberty that is well-nigh lawless, and to a sense of power almost irresponsible. By this time sla- very in England had practically disappeared, though serfdom was in many places of such a nature that the distinction between the condi- tion of "villein" and of slave was rather to the advantage of the master. The serfs must pay taxes, and they had the doubtful privilege of appearing in court. Different parts of the 144 SOCIAL UPHEAVALS IN ENGLAND kingdom had different customs, but the men were regarded as owing a certain amount of ser- vice to the lord of the manor, even though they held lands of their own in tenantry. In the times when the feudal system was at its height the castle and its population were independent industrial units. They practically produced all they consumed, from field and shop and loom. With the rise of the towns and the evident eco- nomic advantages of the division of labor, the old system could not maintain itself. Exchange between the estate and the town took place as well as between one part of the country and another. We are coming to the time of a new form of economic arrangements. Eent and ser- vice might be paid in money instead of in goods or in labor. And to the break-up of the old system the reduction of the laboring population caused by the Black Death directly contributed. Whenever the amount of commodity is re- duced the prices rise. If the cost of living is increased, sooner or later the amount of wages must correspond. If the number of the usual agricultural laborers upon any estate is in- vaded, the lord of the manor must go into the marketplace in order to fill up the ranks. If the number of laborers is not at all adequate for the work to be done, the workmen may dic- ll 145 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH tate terms. The Black Death had swept into unmarked trenches half of the working classes. The conquering enemy of the dead poor, how- ever, was the disguised friend of the living. No such industrial crisis was ever seen be- fore or since. The masters who had been accus- tomed to control expected the half servile lower classes to perform the old-time labor upon the ancient terms. They were appalled to discover an insurgent spirit everywhere. Men who had crouched in the presence of their superiors now began to talk about their rights. But these men lacked leadership and had no practical program. Chaos reigned, for the deadly scourge had riven the social bonds. Landless men went about singly or in companies. Men by night, emerging from robber's dens, prowled about the towns or invaded estates and manor houses. Moral poison had infected the social life as deeply as the physical strength of the nation had been degraded. Meantime social order must be restored ; the day's work must be done ; fields must be tilled ; the spindle and loom must do their work; and human wants must be sup- plied. All this meant industrial reconstruction. The instant demand of the laborer was for in- creased wages; and, in secret, companies of workmen plotted together to secure economic 146 SOCIAL UPHEAVALS IN ENGLAND advantage. It was the beginning of a new time ; the opening campaign of a war that was to rage with various fortunes, with long truces, fierce hostilities, victory first upon one side and then upon the other, during a period of six hundred years. The rulers of England were amazed at the beginning of an industrial democracy. In 1349 was enacted the Statute of Laborers. The stat- ute contained eight clauses: " (1) No person under sixty years of age, whether serf or free, shall decline to undertake farm labor at the wages which had been customary in the king's twentieth year (1347), except they lived by mer- chandize, were regularly engaged in some me- chanical craft, were possessed of private means, or were occupiers of land. The lord was to have the first claim to the labor of his serfs, and those who declined to work for him or for others are to be sent to the common gaol. (2) Imprisonment is decreed against all persons who may quit service before the time which is fixed in their agreements. (3) No other than the old wages are to be given, and the remedy against those who seek to get more is to be sought in the lord's court. (4) Lords of man- ors paying more than the customary amount are to be liable to the same conditions, the ar- 147 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH tificers enumerated being saddlers, tanners, far- riers, shoemakers, tailors, smiths, carpenters, masons, tilers, pargetters, carters, and others. (6) Food must be sold at reasonable prices. (7) Alms are strictly forbidden to able-bodied laborers. (8) Any excess of wages taken or paid can be seized for the king's nse toward the payment of a fifteenth and tenth lately granted. The statute provides for the difference between summer and winter wages, and guards against the emigration of the town population to coun- try places in summer. In answer to complaints from the employers of labor, the Statute of Laborers is constantly reenacted, with accumu- lated penalties and precautions — penalties sometimes laid on the laborer only, sometimes on the employer, sometimes on both. ' ' * This statute was not repealed until the reign of Queen Elizabeth. The struggle for an in- dustrial democracy was to go forward under many phases. It is not only in our time that the real issue has been clearly defined. Mean- while the forms of industry have undergone many changes. The problems which became visible and acute at the time of the plague could have had no expression then had it not been for 1 ■ ' Six Centuries of Work and Wages, • ' by Thorold Kogers, p. 228. 148 SOCIAL UPHEAVALS IN ENGLAND the new sense of the value of the individual man which had found its way into the world. Pestilence in the pre-christian world was never the herald of a democracy. The truth was the world already had the idea and the scourge was its servant. We have briefly sketched the chaotic condition of human soci- ety; the breaking up of the old forms of life; the new sense of power felt by men who work with their hands, and the curious fact that when men looked day after day into the familiar face of death it did not quicken the moral sense or ennoble the survivors as might have been ex- pected. It is one of the curiosities of history that not pestilence, nor war, nor famine — those feeble imitations of hell in this world — have been strong to bring men to repentance; rather have they confirmed the survivors in their sins. Churches and priests failed to give leader- ship. The friars of all classes had by this time become corrupt. But in spite of their vices they still had a strong hold upon the people, for they lived in their midst and often upheld the new social doctrines against the ruling classes. Religion must find some fresh form of expression. The new conditions demanded a new voice, and over this social chaos there must 149 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH come a brooding spirit, out of which order may at last be born. At this point it is necessary to glance at the relation of the church to literature, and espe- cially to its dramatic forms. It was of the very nature of the case that there could be nothing but conflict between the Christian church and the classical drama. In Athens marble seats were reserved in the front rows for the occu- pancy of the priests in the great days of ^Eschylus and his companions. But Christian priests were early forbidden to enter the the- ater because the institution was both pagan and immoral. However, the dramatic instinct could not be suppressed. Indeed the Christian year with its saints and its seasons is essentially dra- matic. Liturgies were not enough, and miracle plays and moralities were invented. The Chris- tian drama was developed. Priests were the authors of the plays. Some of them were en- acted in the cathedrals and the final survival is in the great Passion Play of Oberammergau. The moralities where the virtues and vices of men were personified had entered into the thought and life of the people. When the preacher failed the actor came. This brief digression is necessary for our understanding of the nature and effect of the 150 SOCIAL UPHEAVALS IN ENGLAND poem known as the "Vision of Piers Plough- man/ ' by William Langland, 1332-1400. Strange as much of the poem is to our modern thought and feeling, it belonged to its own time, and it was as truly the incarnation of the de- mocracy of Christianity in the fourteenth cen- tury as was Homer or Virgil the interpretation of classical times. It may be true, as Skeat holds, that the poem was written by the man whose name it bears. It may be that it had as many authors as others say had the Iliad or the Pentateuch. But, in any event, it was the voice of its age. Nay, it was far more, it represented the scorn, rebuke and contempt of the people as well as their passion, aspiration and hope. It would not be correct to say that the poem created a new age. It is much nearer the fact to say that in this work more than elsewhere the struggling self- consciousness of the fourteenth century in Eng- land came to ample expression. Whether we accept the theory of the texts A, B and C, by the one author, or whether we regard the form of the work, now extant, as the joint produc- tion of a company of men, is a literary question, but is of no interest to the social problem. Whether one hand wrote it or five, there is no doubt that the book represents the purpose, and 151 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH as a whole is the protest of a new-born Eng- land. The book opens with a prologue in which the author flees from London to the peaceful Mal- vern Hills, where he falls asleep and dreams. In his dream the world passes by. It is a mot- ley company and represents all classes. There are plowmen and spendthrifts, merchants, jesters and beggars, pilgrims, priests and friars, lawyers, laborers and inn-keepers, and among the group a king is not wanting. Then follows an allegory giving an account of the relations of Falsehood, Flattery and Bribery, and ending with the marriage of Falsehood and Bribery. The people in the prologue are no shadows, but real men, and in the allegory the personifications are as real as human flesh and blood. In Canto V the poet awakens, but once more he falls asleep, for a second dream. The field is full of people; Reason preaches on the judgments of God. Sinners repent, and among them are Pride, Luxury, Envy, Wrath, Glut- tony, Sloth, as well as Robert the Robber. These sins are as real persons as such incarnate passions of Shakespeare as Macbeth, the Am- bitious; or Othello, the Jealous. The religious plays in the streets of the towns for genera- tions had prepared the people to understand. 152 SOCIAL UPHEAVALS IN ENGLAND It was all as valid as the descriptions of Bun- yan's "Pilgrim's Progress/ ' After the vision and the preaching the converted set out to seek the Truth. Now it is that the poet makes Piers Ploughman, the common working man, the one person who was able to lead these people to the Truth. It is the seed corn which has blossomed out in some popular plays of our own day. But Piers must first plough a half acre. In the meantime he scourges all men's sins. The knight is instructed in the duties of a land- owner ; he must fulfill his obligations and trgat well those who work for him, and this is based upon the social aristocracy which is the very heart of the gospel. In another world the mas- ter and his servant may change places. There are other standards than those of earth, and there is a final triumph of justice. So he says, "It may yet happen in heaven that he shall be in a worthier place and in more bliss than thou." The poet is no demagogue, for he scourges also the laborers for their sins and for their lack of willingness to toil. In the eleventh vision there are other impersonations, but Piers Ploughman changes from the common work- man to a person strangely like the Son of Man. It is he who knows the way to the Truth. At the foundation of the work is the gospel of 153 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH equality among men, an equality which is not mechanical but moral; teaching that there is work and duty for all men of every rank. The poem interpreted the feelings of the people and had an extraordinary vogue. The age of print- ing was not yet, but in writing, in whole or part, it was scattered throughout the country. Por- tions of it were committed to memory, and re- peated from lip to lip. It ornamented the ser- mons of those who preached. It was also the "Werther" and the "Wilhelm Meister ,, of its time. Indeed, Langland more than Goethe spoke the living word; and it was from the heart of an ethical democracy. Poetry was not the only form in which the spirit of the time found expression. Down in the county of Kent a "Mad Priest" arose, as he was named. But John Ball, neither priest nor friar, seems to have been a parochial helper with some minor clerical duties. He was evi- dently a man of powerful personality who voiced the new spirit in terms of the popular orator. He began preaching in the open air and in the country places and multitudes flocked to hear his fiery words. He insisted that the Black Plague had taught the equality of men, for the pestilence had spared neither high nor low. God had sent the Black Plague as the 154 SOCIAL UPHEAVALS IN ENGLAND teacher of social and economic equality. He denounced the serfdom of labor as well as the tithes of the church. He insisted that labor should be free and make its own bargains, and that religion should be supported by voluntary contributions. He denounced the sins of ec- clesiastical organizations, favored the marriage of the clergy, and with his new doctrine stirred the people in all the South of England. What- ever may be thought at this time of the various movements of the fourteenth century in Eng- land, there is no doubt that the common people were deeply moved by the new social teaching, sometimes mad, often unpractical, and yet, in spite of its errors, distinctly religious. It is a strange time. Neither is it easy to measure all the forces nor set in order the so- cial conditions. The outer affairs of England had prospered, but after Edward III had won his splendid victories from France the nation was left with his debts and his taxes. He was succeeded by Eichard II, a lad only eleven years of age. The parliament of 1380 met at Northampton and voted a poll tax of a shilling a head. This tax was farmed out to foreign creditors of the state and was handled very much after the manner of taxation in the prov- inces in the ancient days of Rome. It was not 155 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH a question of the money alone, it was the thing which the money represented. It was like the tea in Boston harbor. Whether Wat Tyler had been dishonored in his home, as is said, or not, does not affect the question. Mobs of people could not have been gathered because of one crime. Tyler had killed his tax collector and vengeance, if not justice, was satisfied. It was a peasant war after the fashion of those in various countries. It was the stir of an incoherent revolution. Thousands of men gathered together, and on June 12, 1381, they marched on London. As they journeyed they besieged jails and released the prisoners. The most famous among them was John Ball, who had been confined at Maidstone by the Arch- bishop of Canterbury. His eloquence still more inflamed the people. Thousands armed with such weapons as they could find found them- selves in London. The insurgents were some- thing more than a mob of peasants, as is evi- dent from the fact they were able to capture the Tower and slay all who were in it, including the Archbishop of Canterbury. The boy king, with a valor beyond his fifteen years, met the rebels and asked for their demands. The answer came, ' ' We will that you make us free forever ; ourselves, our heirs and our lands, and that we 156 SOCIAL UPHEAVALS IN ENGLAND be called no more bond or so reputed/ ' and Richard replied, "I grant it." In Smithfield he held a conversation with Tyler on the one side and a few of his men, including the mayor of London, upon the other. The lord mayor rode up and smote Wat Tyler to his death upon the spot. The man had been tricked to a con- versation by the kind of plot that is common among savage tribes. John Ball also was hanged at St. Albans in July 15, 1381. An army of forty thousand men was gathered together and King Richard marched through Kent and Essex, putting to the sword those who were suspected as leaders in the uprising. Unlicensed priests were ordered to be arrested, laws of repression were revived, and the old order seemed to conquer. Wat Tyler and John Ball were dead, but the movement which they represented was still alive, and at last the king was forced to grant freedom to the serfs and pardon to those in the insurrection. It is true that the ensuing parliament revoked all the grants of liberty which the king had made dur- ing the process of the rebellion, but the English land-owners, without legal compulsion, were yet forced to be the servants of the defeated move- ment. The democratic victory, in spite of the death of its principal leaders, was on the way, 157 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH and Queen Elizabeth completed the work when, in 1574, all laborers on the royal estates were enfranchised. The movement could not have had the success which followed it had it not been essentially an English movement. They probably could not have come within the streets of London had not the city itself been divided. We shall see that John Ball and Wat Tyler are the two names in an insurgency that included men of all ranks, and was not only wide as England, but as wide as Europe. John Wycliffe, 1320-1384, is the great per- sonality and center of the struggle between au- thority and freedom in a much broader manner than was possible to the influence of Langland, the preaching of Ball or the revolution led by Wat Tyler. Indeed, it was Wycliffe who brought the English movement into relation with the world life and earned for himself the title, ' ' The Morning Star of the Reformation. ' ' Wycliffe was an Oxford man, important as a philosopher and a teacher before he was thrown into the conflicts reaching down from the throne to the peasant. Scholar, philosopher and preacher, he was also a man of affairs, if not a politician. It is not my purpose to show his theological importance, but rather his relation to this whole English upheaval. That he was a 158 SOCIAL UPHEAVALS IN ENGLAND great popular author there can be no question. That his translation of the bible into English, the publication of his papers and addresses, gave him a supreme position in the development of English literature cannot be disputed what- ever may be thought of his religious activity. Wycliffe entered two distinct lines of work to which reference must be made. The first was his appeal in Latin books and tracts to his own University, the Universities of the world and to Christian scholars. He defended the king against the pope, and was really the Eng- lish founder of the doctrine of a national church. ' On the other hand, he denied the su- premacy of any human power, either king or pope, and asserted that all power, as well as all ownership, rested at last in God himself. The church was to have no power in civil matters. As for its claim to property, that was a thing unclean. The use of property as stewards of God was all either religious or secular persons might have, but authority depends upon right- eousness. If the church was unrighteous secu- lar powers might strip it of its goods. He did not carry out the doctrine to the logical con- clusion that if the king was unrighteous he, too, might be dethroned and despoiled. But he dealt with current economic conditions as well. 159 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH He denounced the guilds and municipalities of the towns as well as the greed and extortions of the clergy. He came to the point also of de- nouncing war and the taxations resulting from war with equal emphasis. This and much more was Wycliffe as a philosopher and a teacher, and in such work he influenced the mind of Europe. But there is another side to the character and tasks of Wycliffe which makes him much more significant for the people of England. The movement which he organized gave a conception to the idea of the church that long after was to have a new birth in the Puritan movement. From his home in Lutterworth, Wycliffe sent forth a company of his disciples to practice poverty after the model of St. Francis, but especially to preach in England the new doc- trines he himself had taught them. The trans- lation of the bible by Wycliffe and his compan- ions was by no means the first translation, but it was accompanied by commentaries which guided the thought and speech of the soft- spoken men who came to be called Lollards. The poor preachers were for the most part either laymen or secular priests. Wycliffe had attacked both friars and monks and he and his followers carried the nation with them. He 160 SOCIAL UPHEAVALS IN ENGLAND was able to avoid condemnation, and he had for his support the most powerful friends. Ox- ford was the natural home of the new doctrine, but it was also supported by many of the no- bility, and even rich men of the towns furnished money to a movement which, while it often seemed to denounce them, was more clearly a foe to conditions which interfered with the economic life and the growth of manufactures and commerce. Tracts and sermons were placed in the hands of the people, and the preachers with brown dress and staff in hand preached in the churches if they might, but in graveyards and public squares, in market places and on the street corners. The Archbishop of Canterbury secured the condemnation of the Lollards, but he could not quench the enthusiasm which had been aroused throughout the country. King Eichard II, in 1382, ordered every bishop to arrest the poor, priests in every diocese. In this he was sup- ported by the House of Lords. But so strong was the movement that the Commons compelled the king to withdraw his proclamation. By this time London was practically won over to the new cause and the West of England had ac- cepted the doctrine. From England the doctrines of Wycliffe had 12 161 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH spread to the Continent, and had rooted them- selves very deeply in Bohemia. John Huss was the spiritual child of John Wycliffe. The Bo- hemian people, responded to his leadership. Wycliffe had escaped the intrigues of powerful enemies, but the stress, of life and the shock of conflict had undermined the foundations of his physical strength. In 1384 it is said he was commanded to appear in Eome by Pope Urban VI. He did not go to Eome, but very soon after another messenger came and death called him to that eternal Presence before which one day kings and popes alike must stand. The nature of his movement can be discov- ered in the development of it by his followers after the death of their leader. He had doubt- less taught that the true church depended upon no formal authority or visible organization, but was rather a company of believers who prac- ticed the teachings of Jesus. He attacked the direct foundations of the Roman church in its doctrine of celibacy, of transubstantiation, of sacred services and of sacred places. He pro- posed a religion of the people, who were di- rectly responsible to God alone. The Council of Constance, 1414-1418, called to settle the claims of rival popes, to deal with heresy, secure the unity and authority of the 162 SOCIAL UPHEAVALS IN ENGLAND church, did not content itself with condemning John Huss as a heretic worthy of martyrdom, but sent its anathema across the sea and or- dered the body of Wycliffe to be torn from a dishonored grave. The Lollards had especially preached against war, but the martial spirit ran riot in the Saxon blood, and when the wars of France were renewed, it had been easy to stamp out a movement whose heresy was peace. Ten years after the Council of Constance the body was disinterred, burned to ashes and the ashes scattered upon the water flowing into the Avon. He was not dishonored by this impotent fury, for wherever winds blew or waters flowed they carried the seed of the new democracy. The upheaval in England, represented by lit- erature in Piers Ploughman, by an appeal to force in the mad rebellion urged on by John Ball and Wat Tyler, and by an appeal to the intellectual in Oxford and the religious among the people, though not wholly without guile, as represented by John Wycliffe, was only a part of the general life of the fourteenth century. The political church of the middle ages had done its work. The religious church founded by the teaching of Jesus, alive in all ages as the true soul of the visible church, manifesting itself in different great epochs under new forms 163 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH of life, could be nothing else than a protest against tyranny and a plea for the rights of men. Already it had achieved great results. It was to go forward by devious ways, to be be- set by strange foes, to suffer from the mistakes of unwise friends, but it could never die out in the world. CHAPTER VI LUTHER AND LIBERTY Martin Luther, 1483-1546, born of strong German peasant stock, not so poor as the Lu- ther stories generally describe, and much more intelligent, was destined to become the central name in the Protestant imagination and the chiefest hero of the German people. The new forms of Protestantism have needed Luther with his doctrine of private judgment ; teachers of the creeds have needed him as a stalwart theologian; German rulers have used his doc- trines to support civil authority ; and meantime all men have rejoiced in him, because he was elemental, genuine, perhaps most of all in his mistakes, so intensely human and a man of strength so deep and wide that, right or wrong, he dwarfs all other men of his time, and stands revealed one of the greatest leaders in human history. He was not so great a saint as he is described in Protestant Sunday-schools, nor 165 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH was he so dark a sinner as the Jesuits would have us believe. He was not the infallible Prot- estant Pope revered by some Lutheran theolo- gians. Neither was he a man easily put to rout by the doctors of the Roman Church, changing his principles as he did his clothes, and living a life of mere intellectual tumult, abundant in- deed in vitality but wholly lacking in clearness and consistency. We cannot quite trust his friends or his enemies. But he was brave as a soldier, if not always chivalrous as a knight. He was the embodiment of his time, the prophet of ages yet to be, and, though sometimes a jester and on occasions a man of pleasure, he was nevertheless a religious genius of the first rank. He preferred the Hebrews to the Greeks, and so he was never a humanist. He mixed in secular affairs, but his real interests were religious. In spite of the multitude of books about the man and his doctrines, it seems to me that his real place in the world's history has never been adequately disclosed. This is not an attempt to perform such a task; but to continue our study by estimating the relations of Luther to liberty. Luther's famous doctrine of Justification by Faith is not based upon the stone steps which he is said to have ascended upon his knees in 166 LUTHER AND LIBERTY Rome, but upon the teachings of one John Tauler. He was the same man who taught the duty of princes and prelates. "Likewise so far as it rests with them, let them be the first to do such works as they would wish to see their people do, for then their subjects must needs follow as they lead, even though they may have been beforehand inclined to all evil and vice and hostile to their superiors. ' ' 1 When the Black Death swept over Europe its influence took a religious form in the society known as the "Friends of God," and these societies, not an order nor yet a schism, laid a foundation throughout the whole of Germany for the doc- trines of inward piety as opposed to the exter- nal forms of religion. It is perhaps more correct to say that Luther appealed to the mystical element among his people rather than shared it. In his early life, however, long before he thought of the break with Rome, he passed through all the experi- ences that belonged to the men and women of various ages who are in search of the inner light. The life of Luther himself became hu- man, joyous, even self-indulgent, but the influ- ence of the mystics was upon him and his time. Long after it continued in the intellectual life Sermons of John Tauler, New York, 1858, p. 467. 167 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH of Germany and helped to make that country the home of speculative philosophy. Before proceeding to details we must sweep the horizon and seek the outlines of a world view. It became evident in the study of the Eng- land of Wycliffe that certain changes were tak- ing place in the general life of the time. What is known as the reformation is only a phase of a revolution which began in Europe when Paul crossed over and preached in Greece. His let- ters and the gospels which soon followed fur- nished a body of ideas which were to be historic. They attempted a social regeneration in the days of the Roman Emperor, Constantine. They had rooted in various soils and had sprung up in manifold social growths. The great days of the church and of the empire had left substantial institutions, but forces, some of them manifest and some unseen, were the promise of the greatest changes in all history. The church lost its political power partly from external changes, but partly from the de- cay of the empire itself. When the feudal lords were enfeebled by kings on the one side and by towns on the other, bishops and abbots also became less important. The complexities of European life gave rise to nations as it did to languages. We have a twofold process quite 168 LUTHER AND LIBERTY familiar to those acquainted with the operation of the law of evolution. On the one side there was a differentiation. The old monotonous or- ganization of life was broken up and the new powers were springing into existence every- where. On the other hand, new and intense so- cial relationships were being established. The discovery of printing by movable types made the thoughts of all great men common property. War meant something different with the invention of gun powder, and castles with their thick walls could shelter no longer. The spirit of adventure was guided by the mariners ' compass and a tremendous shock to the author- ity of secular science and religious dogma had come in the immense discovery of a new as- tronomy which dethroned the earth from its central place in the universe and laid the foun- dations for a new humility. The intellectual revolution connected with the name of Copernicus had doubtless a larger in- fluence upon the intellectual life of the world than was produced by the achievements of any other man. This founder of modern astron- omy, whose treatise upon the revolutions of the celestial orbs was only published to the world in the year of his death, passed away wholly unconscious of the importance of his service. 169 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH The new birth of civilization, called The Renaissance, was not a single form of life, but a new garden of Eden, crowded with divine growths. It resulted from the culmination and triumph of all the social and moral processes we have been considering, and many more be- sides. The discovery that the earth was a sphere sent Columbus sailing with three cara- vels to find a new way to India. All history was a continuous process as old as the world and as wide as the race. The complexity of the proc- ess and its inner relationship is better disclosed in the beginnings of what we call modern times than at any other period of history. It had taken the world thousands of years to complete the forms of art, of philosophy, of law and gov- ernment which flowered out in the classical world. It is not the slowness, but the swiftness, of the process by which the new world was con- structed upon the ruins of the old that should give us surprise. It was the tremendous dyna- mic of a universal missionary force based upon a doctrine that made all men of essential value. There was no longer Jew or Greek, bond or free. In the new world order the different states of Europe, characterized by language, by race, and by institutions, slowly emerged like continents elevating themselves above chaotic waters. 170 LUTHER AND LIBERTY Meantime, while political institutions became varied and distinct, the intellectual life of Europe was never so communal and the social bonds were never so strong. But deeper than any consciousness, individual or social, were the life forces that held the age together. At the very time when Columbus was sailing stormy seas a young man might have been seen in a garden in Florence, Italy. The Gar- den belonged to Lorenzo de 'Medici, and the young man was Michael Angelo. Scattered about were samples and fragments of Greek art, statues, torsos, basso relievos. Michael Angelo is busy with a mutilated old masque, representing a faun, but he was not dreaming about classical greatness; nor was he looking forward to a time when he might imitate the object under his hand. By the discipline of antiquity he was learning the technique for his productive genius, and the faun was mere plastic clay by which he fashioned a David and created a St. Peter's. Dante, in Florence, closed the old world, and Chaucer, in Eng- land, represented the beginning of a new move- ment in literature. The thunder of another voice was heard at the same time within the church, and Savonarola preached in Flor- ence when Columbus was embarking at Palos. 171 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH Briefly, we see that the new life had various forms. In science it was laying the founda- tions for the wealth of modern knowledge; in action it meant coasting ahout Africa, journey- ing to the Islands of the Atlantic, the travels of Marco Polo, and the discovery of America. Art had already forsaken the classical models because they were inadequate to express the imagination and aspiration of a new world. There are three names not often joined to- gether, but, after all, they seem to me the great trinity of this time. They are Copernicus, Michael Angelo and Martin Luther, represent- ing the three interests, knowledge, beauty and religion. These reflections do not identify what is known as the Eenaissance with what is some- times called the revival of learning. In the middle of the fifteenth century the Turk had flung himself with drawn sword in the pathway of the European nations, had captured Con- stantinople and wandering scholars came west- ward, carrying with them a few manuscripts to set up as schoolmasters in the West. But the thing called Humanism was something quite different from the knowledge of Greek authors. It was a fresh view of life, and in spite of all extravagances with it we return 172 LUTHER AND LIBERTY to the simple joyousness of Jesus contrasted with the ceremonial piety of an asceticism which was taught rather than observed. It is quite true that the study of the Greek language had a great revival, and that the Greek spirit gushed up from unsealed fountains in the hu- man heart. But the Greek learning had always dominated the Christian church. Aristotle had laid his tremendous spell upon theology, while Plato was cherished by those who sought di- rectness of vision rather than dialectic form. The spread of education, hitherto largely bound up with monasteries, was an adventure of new-found wealth. It was one of the natural expressions of the new municipal life. But neither the term revival of learning nor the broader term Humanism accounted for the great movement in Germany of which Luther was the mighty master. Humanism had per- haps its best exponent in the person of Eras- mus, 1465-1536. The wandering scholar who knew how to use satire against churchmen in his "Praise of Folly/ ' but who would not join forces with Luther, whom he disliked as a man both too turbulent and too serious, yet left as his chief monument an edition of the Greek Testament. It is quite absurd to talk about Humanism and the revival of learning as 173 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH though these were a basis of antagonism to the Eoman Church, as we shall see. The Vatican was the most conspicuous patron of the new learning, though the essence of the period was the development of a new freedom rather than the recovery of old knowledge. This much may be said. It was a new form of Greek freedom. The freedom won for themselves in Athens by great thinkers, poets and artists, was now on the way to be the inheritance of the whole world. Having found out how small his world is man was beginning to feel the possibility of his own greatness. Struggling out of his past of ignorance and fear in all ranks of so- ciety he was seeking to find a larger domain. He had the spirit for it, and he had the ma- terial. The further development of modern civilization was merely a matter of detail. It cannot be made too clear that the new free- dom covered the whole of life and was born as the result of the travail of all the centuries. Scholars moving from one intellectual center to another carried with them far more of the so- cial spirit than did the traders, who, in the earliest days, had been the only bond of influ- ence between distant tribes and peoples. But the traders, too, had multiplied with the rich- ness of life and just as the new nations became 174 LUTHER AND LIBERTY more definite in language and in social order, so became more multiplied the influences of a new European unity. The empire had meant a unity of force, and the church had stood for a unity of faith. But the new time is by no means so simple. Barons and bishops had sought for wealth and power in every local community. There came an in- sistent appeal that the increase of wealth should demand and secure a corresponding rich- ness of life. It was not political freedom, and it was not religious freedom that could explain the whole of the movement. Men were coming to know their world and to feel safe in its pos- session. The sense of a world order was grow- ing, and men felt more secure. New processes of manufacturing and a wider commerce had filled multitudes of homes with numberless com- forts. Travel, knowledge, successful enter- prise, new sources of wealth, combined to make at once a new man in a new world. This new man set out upon a social journey and the har- bor was further off and more difficult to reach than that which Columbus sought. It was a perilous journey, but, please God, one day it was to have a successful termination. The goal he sought was a democracy which should in- clude both political and religious freedom, but 175 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH with them vast treasures for all men which had never been recognized by statesmen and only dimly seen by the poets and the prophets. It was a time of action, of knowledge, of in- vention, of creation and of aspiration. The greatness of the time was not only an essential vitality, but a great variety in action. The great names come at once to the memory of every student. There were Erasmus, Sir Thomas More, and Cardinal Wolsey; Michael Angelo, Eaphael and Albrecht Diirer, Para- celsus as well as Copernicus; Luther, Calvin and Zwingli; besides Henry VIII, Leo X and Ignatius Loyola. We must return to our study of Martin Luther and his relation to his time. He is in- deed one of the most complex natures with whom the historian has to deal. His great and dominating personality is one of the phenom- ena of human history. In some respects he is more remarkable than Julius Caesar or Na- poleon Bonaparte. The modern social scientist may declare that "Martin Luther was a man of faith and not of knowledge. ' ' Roman authori- ties may belittle him both as a man and as a reformer. Protestants may bestow upon him indiscriminate praise. No single view is right, but he left a mark upon the world something 176 LUTHER AND LIBERTY like that made on Hebrew history by the prophet Elijah. It is true he was no such scholar as Melanchthon, nor such a citizen of the world as Erasmus, but he had more genius than either of them. He incarnated in himself forces that had been existent in the German character from the beginning. They had been described by Caesar and Tacitus. He loved liberty, and he was willing to fight for it. He also liked to rule, and he was willing to fight for that. His translation of the German Bible had an influ- ence only surpassed by the influence of the ver- sion of King James upon the English speech. He was a master of style, though he was often vulgar and virulent. He knew how to reach the human passions, and with what words to make his meaning clear. Luther must not be thought of, however, sim- ply as a reformer. As such he would not have appealed to men like Goethe nor to the whole German world. He was always greater than the things he did, and he was always better than his actions. We see this in the noblest souls. One thing that gives him his power over the world is the fact that he was so human. His Table Talk showed that he was no ascetic; in- deed, he has often been charged with being too fond of what are known as the good things of 13 177 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH this life. In that Table Talk he reveals a sense of humor, a shrewd insight into the deepest se- crets of life, a love of nature and a comradeship that redeemed him from the qualities of most reformers. Hans Sachs called Luther the "nightingale of Wittenberg, ' ' and it is a sug- gestive characterization. His own poem, ' ' The Death of Luther,' ' was a revolt against both nobility and clergy. He was a warrior as well as an orator, but he was also a poet and a lover of men. Martin Luther was not simply an idol breaker. He brought worship home to the people in a new and direct fashion. He made his pulpit a place of power. His doctrines and even his moral teachings may have limitations easily seen by wise critics. But his work was greater than his doctrines, and his hymn, "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God," was not only a battle hymn for Gustavus Adolphus, but it still goes singing its way through the generations, and it is a greater contribution to religious life than any Lutheran dogma ever expounded. If the time comes when men shall cease to sing it because they have become wiser than its words, its rhythmic power will still surge on forever renewed in the life-blood of the race. The power incarnate in Martin Luther was the great Gothic soul 178 LUTHER AND LIBERTY and the social forces which he represented are still at work in the making of the modern world. A review of the detail of the activities and teachings of Martin Luther will show strange contradictions. Were his influence confined to his place in the religious history of the world, this chapter could not have been written. But Goethe, Herder, Hegel, owe as much to Martin Luther as any Lutheran pastor. Nay, from him such men received much more. There is a contradiction between the begin- ning and the conclusion of his public career. He was too elemental a man to be consistent and too much the man of action to care whether he were or not. The movement that he repre- sented was not like the opening of new canals for peaceful commerce and quiet enrichment, it was the raging of a turbulent river overflow- ing its banks with a mighty freshet, often carry- ing away the good with the evil, but leaving the fields of human life with a deeper and more pro- ductive soil. Some men are so manifold and their life becomes the channel of such important social forces that it seems more easy to forgive their sins than to describe them, and to ignore their mistakes than to disclose them. But there must be some definite review of the work of 179 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH Martin Luther as it bears upon the problem of modern democracy. The career of every man, however, depends upon the institutions with which he comes in contact, and the men who represent them. Great as was the personality of Martin Luther, his work would have been impossible had not the political and economic conditions given it opportunity. We have already seen the break- ing forth of new life in the world, and have noted the spirit which filled Europe from Italy to England with a sense of freedom and of power. It is necessary to consider now some of the men and some of the conditions with which Martin Luther came vitally into contact. Turning our attention to Eome, in the same year that Columbus sailed for America, Alex- ander VI ascended the papal throne. This ruler of the church, perhaps more than any other man, weakened the moral foundations of the power of the papacy. His son, Caesar Borgia, had no moral scruples; betrayal and assassination were his constant weapons. As great in passion as he was in will, he controlled Rome and all its dependencies. Alexander's character was complicated by his love of pleas- ure and of ease on the one hand and by his am- bition for himself and his children upon the 180 LUTHER AND LIBERTY other. There was no vice of which he was not guilty, and there was no weapon which he shrunk from using. Sanuto gives an account of his death, in which he declares that the pope was poisoned by a box of sweetmeats which he intended for his guest, Cardinal Corneto. It is said that he won over the servant of the pope to change the sweetmeats by a gift of ten thou- sand ducats in gold. Another story is that it was a cup of wine that contained the poison. Some have thought that the Cardinal himself planned and carried out the poisoning of the pope on his own initiative. Whatever may be the truth of these narrations, there can be no doubt that Alexander VI left the papal states rid of some of their most dangerous enemies, while at the same time he betrayed the dignity of the position he occupied. Julius II succeeded Alexander in 1503, and for ten years he labored with energy to con- firm and extend the temporal power of the church. What he lacked in his self-control he made up in his power to control others. Ap- parently without fear of God or man he di- rected all his efforts toward extending his do- minions. In the tempest of battle he was able to control all his faculties. He was a warrior pope, and took the field in person, led the bat- 181 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH tie against the Venetians, extended his do- minions and made his palace the dwelling-place of a King of Men as well as of a Father of the Church. The nobility within his domain were entirely snbdned and he was regarded as one of the temporal rulers with whom monarchs must needs reckon. Such were the men who ruled the church dur- ing the early life of Martin Luther. But the man upon the papal throne through the critical years of his great revolt over its authority was Leo X, son of Lorenzo de 'Medici. Never was there a greater contrast between two men than between the Reformer and the Pope. Leo X was born in Florence, and upon almost every stone of that great center of art the family name is stamped. It was in his father's gar- den that we have seen Michael Angelo at work, and it was that artist who adorned the chapel of the Medici with some of his most impressive marbles. From the middle of the fourteenth century, the family had been supreme in Flor- ence or in Tuscany and for nearly four hun- dred years maintained their place. Lorenzo the Magnificent cared for art and letters as his ancestors had loved wealth and power. Gio- vanni, the second son, was destined for the church from childhood. He became a cardinal 182 LUTHER AND LIBERTY at seventeen and pope at thirty-eight years of age. All the splendors of the new Humanism were poured out upon his luminous mind and joyous life. Poets, philosophers and artists were his daily companions. When he came to the papal throne he neither shared the crimes of Alexander VI nor the martial spirit of Julius II, but he was a man of genius who would have been conspicuous in any place or at any time. Eome became the intellectual and artistic cen- ter of the world as well as its religious capital. He was the patron of Greek learning and was himself an intelligent critic of music and the drama. He was an able ruler and a shrewd diplomat, and met the difficulties of his position and the problems of his time with skill. He was not only a man of affairs but a man of the world. Booted and spurred, at nightfall, with a few companions, he would often leave his palace and dash off on horseback to some near- by resort. When the autumn came he loved to make his home in the country and to forget the cares of state. With a hawk at his wrist, like any knight, he went out to hunt, and in the for- ests and about Corneto he pursued the stag. In some of the lakes he found good fishing, and in all his temporary residences he was accom- panied by delightful companions. He was al- 183 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH most everything that a prince ought to be, in- tellectual, self-controlled, a lover of peace, gen- erous and high minded ; he was a lover of pleas- ure as well as a patron of learning, but he was also industrious in matters of business as well as fond of poetry, music and the theater. He avoided the gross sins of his predecessors and he attended to the usual religious observances prescribed by the church. If he was no saint, he was at least a gentleman. Luther had a sense of beauty also, but it was never developed, except in the direction of music and in the love of nature. When he took his journey to Eome, as he passed through Florence, it is said that he visited the hospitals, but not the works of art. At this time Luther was a medieval monk with a deeply religious nature that subjected him to alternate expe- riences of depression and exaltation. There seems no evidence that the visit to Eome shook his faith, for the suggestive and outstanding fact is that he visited the shrines and performed manifold devotions, and there seems no trace of any influence of the new intellectual life so abundant in beauty and freedom of which Leo X became the most conspicuous patron. The pope spent money freely upon his scholars and artists, as well as upon the members of his own 184 LUTHER AND LIBERTY family. He had no proper sense of financial affairs. With a lavish bounty he scattered all the money that he could lay hands on, and then replenished the depleted treasury by methods which were often doubtful. It was the financial necessities of Eome that led to the sale of indulgences, which might have been endured had it not been for the still larger drain from endowments by which the church in every country was impoverishing both peo- ples and princes. The political situation is a little more diffi- cult to make clear in a brief statement than is the condition of the church. Maximilian, 1459- 1519, was head of the Holy Roman Empire from 1493 until his death. The Holy Roman Empire, however, was by no means a complete and sys- tematic political organization covering a given territory. It had already lost the vigor of its ancient leaders. War took place between barons and princes without the consent of the throne and the emperor was chief of a more or less turbulent confederation rather than the head of the nation. He was succeeded by Charles V, 1500-1558, who became king of Spain, 1516, and was elected emperor upon the death of Maximilian and crowned at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1520. He had an 185 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH imperial name, but the power depended upon the personality of the man and his army. The German princes not only elected their emperor but, for the most part, got along very well with- out him. It is the strength of the German princes that must be counted one of the chief forces in the German reformation. The church had lost the power that it had in the day of In- nocent III long before the Reformation. The reforms of Hildebrand had in many parts of Europe fallen into decay. Bishoprics were con- trolled by princes and nobles ; the church lacked the old-time solidarity. On the other hand, the empire was threatened upon the East by the Turks, who deserve indeed to be prayed for in every Protestant ritual, for the diversion of their danger furnished occupation for both ruler and army, and left the German reformers an opportunity for action. The situation briefly summed up is this: The whole civilized world felt the culmi- nating influence of a multitude of spirit- ual and intellectual forces that made for a larger vision and laid claim to a freer, richer life. The church nominally united had almost lost its old imperial sway over the consciences of men, and neither the sensualism of Alexander 186 LUTHER AND LIBERTY nor the humanism of Leo was adequate to the task of meeting the new conditions. Increase of manufactures and commerce had multiplied human wants as well as increased the wealth of the world. A great middle class had arisen who were demanding and obtaining far more of the good and joy of life than their an- cestors had ever dreamed possible. The new centers of political life about which have been formed the modern nations were com- ing to self -consciousness and a new internation- alism disturbed the old order. The Holy Ro- man Empire was to continue for some time to come, but from it the scepter of absolutism had already departed. Despite the increase of wealth in the world the financial exigencies of the church and the enormous value of the en- dowments of the various orders created a dis- tinct economic problem. This problem was en- larged by the necessities of the new-forming nations and by the ambitions of princes who de- sired to be kings. Meantime below the middle classes were the multitudes of peasants, seeing with their dull eyes evidences of a larger world in which they had no share, of an increasing wealth which brought to them no comforts, and in a dull way responding also to the intellectual life of the 187 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH new time and beginning also to ask questions. Some of them were to be answered at no distant day, and some of them are still waiting for a new gospel of economics which the common peo- ple will gladly hear. Among the hills and forests of central Ger- many, far removed from the centers of the world's life, was born to Hans and Margaret Lnther, in the year 1483, the child Martin, whose name was to fill the world. It is not needful to spend time here upon the details of his early life. The earliest years were those of wretched poverty, out of which the sturdy Hans was to rise step by step; for though he began as a common miner he became an em- ployer of labor and the highest officer of his town. These German peasants were as fierce as they were sturdy, and ruled the child with a rod of iron. They were as godly as they were stern and brought their son up in the fear of God and of the church. His early years showed no signs of brilliant scholarship in Martin Luther, but it was only through the school that he could rise to distinction in the world. He begged and he sang his way through his early years until he found himself at last in the Uni- versity of Erfurt. He learned Latin and logic and really not much beside. Although in the 188 LUTHER AND LIBERTY education of the medieval world the prophet was Aristotle, it was only in after years that the Eeformer studied Greek and Hebrew in order to obtain a closer knowledge of the Bible. He began to study law, but suddenly he changed his mind and decided upon the re- ligious vocation. There are various stories about it. Some say it was the pestilence that carried off some of his friends, and others say that it was the shock of a thunderstorm, that broke in upon the calm of the young man 's soul. Not so are the great vocations of life de- termined. His whole early life was surrounded by an atmosphere of the supernatural, for was not this very country the favorite dwelling- place of fairies, gnomes, ghosts, and devils? Luther himself possessed a profound emotional and religious nature, and above the elemental forces of his character any scholarship that he had won at the University or was ever to win was like a thin crust over unspeakable deeps. He entered the Augustinian monastery at Er- furt, passed through his novitiate, which has for us the significant incident that there he discov- ered and read a copy of the Latin Bible. He was ordained a priest in 1508. Less than two years afterward he was called to teach in the newly founded University of Wittenberg. 189 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH After a year back he goes to Erfurt, though there is some doubt about the reason for the re- turn. The truth seems to be that it was to pre- pare for a change from teaching ethics to teach- ing theology. It is during this stay at Erfurt that he was sent upon the momentous journey to Eome as companion to von Mecheln on busi- ness connected with the monastic order. Of the business we hear little, and in it Luther seems to have had no real part. But he is out in the world. He had conversed with men and some priests had told him that they doubted the su- premacy and the infallibility of the pope. The Peasant-Reformer, brought up in privation and having always lived an austere life, was doubt- less shocked by many of the things which he saw and heard. This journey of Luther's was even more mo- mentous to the history of the world than the Italian journey of one of his later countrymen, von Goethe. In 1512 Luther is again in Wittenberg, which henceforth is his throne of power. He has be- come a doctor and teacher of theology, and two years later he became a preacher in the city church. He was successful as a teacher, but in an age which had few great orators he was soon enthroned as the mightiest preacher of his time. 190 LUTHER AND LIBERTY Simple, colloquial, vehement, passionate, at times his genius burned with a steady flame, and he was one of the great masters of the com- mon mind. He thought in pictures, but he un- derstood the human heart, and he always felt himself a prophet taught of God. With all this teaching and preaching, he was still an earnest churchman, and in 1515 was appointed as vicar in charge of the monasteries of the district in which he lived. In the year 1517 there began the great trag- edy of the Eoman Church. A certain Johann Tetzel, a man evidently of great popular power and belonging to the Dominican order, was the agent of the Primate of Germany. Indulgences had been sold long before, and the theory of the church with respect to them was quite cor- rect. That is to say, it was self-consistent. The penitent was pardoned by absolution of the priest ; he, therefore, had no longer the fear of hell, but there remained penance in this world or in the next. It was this penance from which men were set free by what was known as an in- dulgence. The doctrine was correct enough, but the practice came to mean something quite different. The indulgence came to be regarded as the valid work of an authorized agent of the papal throne and a perfect assurance of heaven. 191 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH Even this was not so bad as the commercial side of the transaction. We have already seen how prodigal in the use of money was Leo X and how careless he was of the measures by which he replenished his treasury. The old heroic days of Hildebrand with his reformation lay far behind, and Albert, Archbishop and Pri- mate of Germany, was compelled to pay an enormous sum for the confirmation of his of- fices. In return Pope Leo permitted the sale of indulgences for the benefit of the archbishop. The transaction was carried on through the Dominican monks. The regular clergy, of course, did not profit by it. The finances of the country were affected as well as those of the church, and some of the princes of Germany rebelled against the bargain. Tetzel at last drew near to Wittenberg and Luther denounced him from his pulpit. That did not content his eager soul. He proposed to debate the question and posted upon the door of his church the im- mortal ninety-five theses which he was willing to defend against all comers. The greatest deeds of the greatest men are doubtless never done of conscious purpose. Luther, himself, was as much astonished as any other man to discover that the blow of his ham- mer was heard resounding through the whole 192 LUTHER AND LIBERTY of Europe. The propositions were printed and circulated everywhere. They were the theme in all circles of society, and underneath every ec- clesiastical edifice those who were sheltered felt the shaking of an earthquake. The issues were made clear, as the following articles will show : 11. "The erroneous opinion that canonical penance and punishment in purgatory are the same assuredly seems to be a tare sown while the bishops were asleep.' ' 21. "Therefore those preachers of indulgences err who say that a papal pardon frees a man from all penalty and assures his salvation.' ' 28. "It is certain that avarice is fostered by the money chinking in the chest, but to answer the prayers of the church is in the power of God alone." 36. "Every Christian truly repentant has full re- mission of guilt and penalty even without let- ters of pardon." 50. "Christians are to be taught that if the Pope knew the exactions of the preachers of indulgences he would rather have St. Peter's church in ashes than have it built with the flesh and bones of his sheep. ' ' Ecclesiastics in Germany and elsewhere were all aroused except, it seems, Pope Leo X him- self. Luther was an Augustinian, Tetzel was a Dominican, and so the careless humanist is said 14 193 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH to have remarked, " It is only a quarrel between the German monks. ' ' It is not worth while to follow the transaction nor to characterize the Leipsic debate with John Eck. Whether Luther was overwhelmed in that controversy or not is a matter of no consequence. About it there are two opinions. There can be no difference of opinion about the spread of the great revolution. The printing press was perhaps a more important agent than public speech. Luther knew how to write to the people as well as to the princes. His style was vivid, direct, impassioned, sometimes it was coarse, brutal, and in controversy always barbed with invective. People read him then as they do now the most popular novelists. It was not only on account of what he had to say, but it was his elemental courage, afraid of neither men nor devils. Yet Luther was not even then intending to leave the church. In 1519 Luther wrote a let- ter of practical submission to Pope Leo X in these words: "I have never had the slightest wish to attack the power of the Eoman Church or Your Holiness. ... I also gladly prom- ise to let the question of indulgences drop and be silent if my opponents restrain their boast- ful and empty talk. ' ' 194 LUTHER AND LIBERTY In spite of this submission the rising tide swept him on, and in the next year he wrote the three great pamphlets which are the foun- dation and substance of his message to the world. The first was "To the Christian No- bility of the German Nation.' ' In this pamphlet he assails the three walls of the Bo- man church. ' ' The first wall is that, if the civil authority presses them, they affirm that civil government has no rights over them, but con- trariwise spiritual over temporal. Secondly, if one would punish them by the Bible, they op- pose it by saying that no one has a right to in- terpret the Bible except the Pope. Thirdly, if they are threatened with a general council, they pretend that only the pope has a right to sum- mon a council. So they have privily stolen three rods from us to remain unpunished, and they have entrenched themselves in these three walls to do all rascality and evil. . . . May God now give us one of the trumpets by which the walls of Jericho were thrown down. ,, But there were other parts of the pamphlet more important. The statement, " Germany gives more to the Pope than to the Emperor," shows the economic and political appeal. The church should be rid of its dignities, he said, and most of its offices should be abolished. The 195 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH civil power should be supreme; monasteries should be suppressed, and the legal authority of Eome should be done away. The second pamphlet, on ' ' The Babylonian Captivity of the Church," indicates how far he had gone since his letter of submission to Pope Leo, for it is essentially an attack upon the sacramental sys- tem of the church. He denies the seven sacra- ments and insists there are only three. He de- mands the cup for the laity in communion, and his doctrine of marriage is stated in terms that his best friends cannot defend. The third pamphlet on "The Liberty of Christian Men" is his essential declaration of independence. Among other things he says : " A Christian man is the most free lord of all, subject to none." This refers to external control. "A Christian man is the dutiful servant of all, subject to every one. ,, This statement is based upon the doctrine of that love which compels men to service. Men are saved by faith and not by works. Ecclesiastical distinctions are of no account. All believers are not only free kings of all, but are priests forever. Good works are indeed to be encouraged, but they do not make a good man. Eather a good man united to Christ by faith performs good works. 196 LUTHER AND LIBERTY We have in these three pamphlets the sub- stance of Luther's message to the world. The state must be free from the shackles of the church. The church must rid herself of her pomp and pride, but deepest of all the free hu- man soul has not only the right but the duty and necessity of finding God direct. The issue was clearly drawn and the struggle was mo- mentous. Princes and ecclesiastics were busy and every town and hamlet was full of the noise of battle. The emperor, Charles V, opened his national assembly, commonly called "The Diet of Worms,' ' composed of the greatest men of his realm, and having for its purpose the consoli- dation of the empire and the definition of the relations between empire and church. We have seen dramatic moments before, but nothing in the history of human freedom compares with the appearance of the discredited monk, Martin Luther, before his emperor and the most bril- liant assembly that the world could then com- mand. It was one mighty peasant fronting both church and state. It was demanded of him that he recant his heresies. His final an- swer rings through the ages : ' ' Unless I am con- victed by Scripture or by right reason, I neither can nor will recant anything, since it is neither 197 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH • right nor safe to act against conscience. God help me. Amen.'' In his own person he had incarnated the doctrine of private judgment, and in demanding freedom of conscience for himself as with a great voice out of heaven he demanded freedom for all men. He had received a safe conduct from the em- peror to attend the assembly. His friends, however, feared for his life. On his journey he was apparently captured, but the hands that seized him were the servants of the great Elec- tor of Saxony. He was conveyed to the Wart- burg, an old Gothic castle in one of the most splendid locations in the Thuringian forest. There are still to be seen the room in which Luther did his work and the spot upon the wall where smote his inkstand as he flung it at his ancient enemy, the devil. In spite of his mag- nificent courage and perhaps partly because of his life of inaction, he had days of deep depres- sion. But it was in the Wartburg that he un- dertook the translation of the Bible into Ger- man. It was revised by Melanchthon and others, and became the great popular version for his people. The Keformation spread, the religious houses were secularized, and the condemnation of Luther by the Diet of Worms had no effect. 198 LUTHER AND LIBERTY The Emperor was too busy with his political and military cares to carry on a warfare which had now become one, not against a recalcitrant monk, but against the body of the German peo- ple. It would seem to many readers an unwar- ranted statement, but doubtless history will eventually record that the real work of Martin Luther was practically accomplished before his return to Wittenberg, and that the rest of the movement would have been better in other hands. This revolution was wider than the church and greater than any single man. It was not a question of the relations between princes and priests, but fundamentally it meant a reorgani- zation of human society. The hour of the mod- ern world had struck. Forces which had been at work through generations were recasting the whole of human life. Luther, himself, had at- tacked rulers as well as ecclesiastics for the abuses of their power. He had developed the doctrine of private judgment and the freedom of the human conscience. He had declared not alone for the priesthood of the people, but for its kingship as well. It is not easy to start a great revolution, but it is still more difficult to control one after it is begun. When the people were freed from the control of authority in re- 199 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH ligion, they also began to revolt against au- thority in the state. Some of the same conditions which we have seen existent in England were to be found in Germany. There was tempest everywhere. The peasantry of the country were anxious to be rid of feudal burdens too grievous to be borne. The towns also had taken up the gage against the feudal system. On the other hand, the poor people in the towns were in conflict with its guilds and its merchants. Luther was a great leader of men, but these social forces were soon beyond his control, and men like Karlstadt, Strauss, Stein and Muenzer preached social re- form as the direct outcome of the religious re- volt. They declared that the book of Deuter- onomy should be put into practice. Luther him- self had declared against the exactions of the money lender. These men said that no interest should be exacted upon loans, and there should be a Mosaic year of Jubilee. Muenzer was a man of great vigor, and with the popular gift of speech. He and his fellows preached the doc- trine of a kingdom of saints and the baptism of believers. This kingdom of saints was to be visible upon the earth and was to be manifest in a community of goods. Tyrants and the un- godly were to be put to death. Martin Luther 200 LUTHER AND LIBERTY had given himself great freedom of speech in denouncing the oppressions of princes as well as the sins of priests and bishops, but he was startled when his doctrines were given such a political and social application as led to a crass individualism. He sought to stem the rising tide, but in vain. Outbreaks occurred simultaneously in different parts of the country. It was no longer a ques- tion of a new church, but of a new society. A manifesto containing the demands of the peas- ants was prepared by the Swiss priest, Schap- pler. It follows : 1. The right to choose their own pastors. 2. Only pay tithes of corn. 3. No longer to be treated as slaves. 4. Permission to shoot and fish. 5. The right to cut wood in the forests. 6. Hours of labor to be diminished. 7. Permission to all men to own land. 8. Taxes not to exceed the value of the prop- erty. 9. Tribute to princes not to be exacted from widows and orphans. 10. If these grievances are not well founded, let them be disproved by the word of God. This tenth proposition has a familiar flavor, and sounds like a quotation from Martin Luther 201 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH himself. Luther and Melanchthon both opposed the social demands of the peasants. Luther said, "Slavery is as old as the world/ ' He called upon the secular princes, whether Eoman or Protestant, to crush out the insurrection. It was done with a mighty hand and an out- stretched arm, and one hundred thousand peas- ants perished by the sword. The demands of the peasants seem simple enough from the point of view of modern con- ditions. We cannot understand what the trouble was all about, because these reforms and many more have become commonplaces of mod- ern life. Here was the first great failure of Martin Luther. He rather than Muenzer should have been the leader of the people. He should have sought to relieve oppressive social conditions by practical measures, and so should have con- trolled them. But he was still a peasant, and the peasant bowed down before the prince. He was dethroned as the popular idol. Perhaps it was largely because of the uns tilled tumult within his own soul. His answer to the Peasants' War was his sudden marriage with the ex-nun, Katherine, in the year 1825. The remainder of his life was an effort to moderate the freedom which he had 202 LUTHER AND LIBERTY preached in the beginning. He wrote to the King of Denmark in behalf of an endowed State Chnrch. He demanded of Zwingli that he should accept his doctrine of consubstantiation, and failing here he joined in the persecution of the followers of Zwingli and permitted them to be driven out of Germany. The fundamental distrust of his own doc- trines is indicated in his declaration of the in- capacity of the peasant. Also he taught the need of unification in religious teaching and the necessity of civil control. To Metsch he writes : "In order to avoid trouble, we should not, if possible, suffer contrary teachings in the same state. Even unbelievers should be forced to obey the ten commandments, attend church and outwardly conform. ,, In place of the creeds of the Eoman Church there came the Augsburg confession prepared by Melanchthon, approved by Luther, and ac- cepted by the Diet of Augsburg in 1530. The world can never be moved too far and too fast, neither can the greatest of men be scrutinized too closely. The twentieth century standards must not be used in measuring this marvelous man. The Lutheran church, with all the noble work it has accomplished, does not represent the task of Martin Luther. Its careful devices 203 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH for restoring the disturbed social order and for substituting the social for the individual judg- ment in religion were not fundamental to him. In spite of all limitations and mistakes his was the great democratic voice of his time. Though his later life was not equal to the prom- ise of his earlier career, he was still the su- preme prophet of the new dispensation. Once again had rung in the ears of men the victorious battle cry, "Ye are kings and priests unto God. ' ' The voice was never to die away. Nay, it was more than a voice, it was a new dispen- sation of life poured into the souls of men. The separation of the church into Protestant and Catholic was incidental, perhaps even calam- itous. In time some remedy may be discovered and the unity of the church will be restored. But the essence of the whole thing is to be found elsewhere. Social forms, whether politi- cal or ecclesiastical, will at length find adjust- ment. The final value is a free man in a free society. Toward this resultant, up to his time, no greater contribution was made by any man than was made by Martin Luther. He was not a conventional saint, and he was far from con- sistent. There was much to be desired in the immediate results which followed his revolt, but all in all he was one of the most useful leaders 204 LUTHER AND LIBERTY in the great upward struggle toward human freedom. No estimate of the Reformation would be complete that did not include an account of its influence upon the Roman Catholic Church. That institution was depleted of its strength and suffered under the shock of mighty blows from eager antagonists ; its life-blood was gush- ing forth from open wounds and the entire or- ganism seemed about to perish from the earth. The Roman church reeled under the blows, but eager hands stanched the wounds ; she steadied herself and stood upright in the world. The Counter-reformation was almost as im- portant as was the new development of re- ligious life. Out of Spain came Loyola, more a soldier after he entered the service of the church than he was in the service of his coun- try, called to his side heroic spirits who were willing to suffer all kinds of privations and go to the ends of the earth in defence of the old faith. The great leaders within the. church began to realize the seriousness of the crisis that was be- fore them, and in various countries movements were soon under way to reform the manners and the morals of clergy and people, to make more precise and definite the doctrines of the 205 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH church, and to defend them with skillful dialec- tic weapons. The work culminated at the Council of Trent, which issued decrees in con- demnation of the doctrines of the reformers and followed that work by the publication of the Tridentine profession of faith. Since those days, wherever Protestant churches have been strong, as in Germany, England and the United States, the Koman Catholic church has been an eager competitor in all good works ; and though Italy, Spain and Austria have largely furnished the rulers, to the Protestant countries must be given credit for the greatest names and the most shining virtues within the Eoman Church. CHAPTER VII SOCIAL INFLUENCE OF THE REFORMATION We have seen that reformations were inevi- table; that they were the result of vast social forces as well as the parents of the future. In a profound sense the movements led by the dif- ferent teachers were not so much a spirit of re- volt as the expression of new life, and each of them was part of one process, however dif- ferent the type of the reformations and how- ever various the apparent results. ULRICH ZWINGLI Zwingli was born in Switzerland, 1484, and was a son of the common people, though his parents were not poor. He studied in Basle and Berne as well as in the University of Vienna. At thirty-four years of age he became the i * Peo- ple's Priest' ' at the great Minster of Zurich. It is significant that at the very outset he stipu- lated that he should have liberty to preach the 207 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH truth as he understood it. He was hemmed in by the smallness of his nation and the limita- tions of his canton. At the same time there were certain advantages growing out of the Swiss spirit and its stout resistance to oppres- sion in many forms. Zwingli was influenced by the Humanists. He had studied Greek, and was the friend of Eras- mus. A people's priest, he preached sermons for the people based upon the New Testament in the spirit of the new learning, relying upon his own interpretations rather than upon the commentaries of the fathers. He also came to the doctrine of Justification by Faith, brt he never admitted that he had learned this from Germany, always claiming that he was no dis- ciple, but rather the predecessor, of Martin Luther. A Franciscan monk had been commissioned to sell indulgences in Switzerland just as Tetzel had been in Germany, but Bernard Samson had no recognition from the local bishops and as- sumed authority over the secular clergy. Be- fore the sacred peddler had reached Zurich, Zwingli, from the pulpit of the Cathedral Church, had aroused the people and the city of- ficials so successfully that the senate of the city denied him admission within its walls. Accord- 208 INFLUENCE OF THE REFORMATION ingly at the gates he was met by a deputation and ordered to depart from the Canton In 1522 Zwingli began his open career as an active reformer. He published pamphlets at- tacking especially three doctrines : that of fast- ing, of prayers to the saints, and of the celibacy of the clergy. At this time he resigned his commission as preacher received from the bishop, and accepted one from the Council of Zurich. The next year, in the presence of the clergy, representatives of the bishop and the civic authorities, he discussed the whole ques- tion of reform. He attacked the images in the churches, the Roman doctrine of the mass, and the form of baptism. He won an instant and complete victory. The celebration of the mass was prohibited in all the churches. Oral con- fession was abolished, pictures were removed from before the altars, and the religious houses were abolished. The convents became schools, hospitals, or almshouses. During the excite- ment of the new movement the people thronged in multitudes to the churches. After the new doctrines were established the people were con- tent without frequent attendance. There were three churches in the city, and the council is- sued an ordinance directing them to hold re- ligious services at the same hour on Sunday, 15 209 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH and added, "The mandate for church-going put out last year (1530) has been badly ob- served. ■ p By 1529 a Protestant league had been estab- lished between six of the cantons in Switzer- land. The forest cantons, however, remained faithful to Rome. The Protestant League, fear- ing that ultimately the reformation would be overcome, determined to conquer the forest cantons. The canton of Berne was willing to stop needed supplies, but did not wish to fight the foresters across the border. Out of the tumult of conflict came the first Peace of Kap- pel, based upon the agreement, ' ' No man ought to be forced in matters of faith. Protestant and all Catholic congregations are to remain as now, unless a majority wish to change." In this treaty the Catholic cantons agreed to re- tire from their alliance with Ferdinand of Hun- gary. This Peace could not last, and a battle occurred at Kappel, in which Zwingli was the real leader, and, though acting as chaplain, he yet carried the banner. Struck to the ground^ his identity was discovered. He was then slain and his body burned. The monument which marks the place of his death bears the inscrip- tion: " 'They may kill the body, but not the soul.' So spoke, on this spot, Ulrich Zwingli, 210 INFLUENCE OF THE REFORMATION who, for truth and the freedom of the Christian church, died a hero 's death. ' ' These reformers doubtless knew what bond- age was, but they had not yet learned the lesson of the freedom of the faith. Anabaptists were found in Zurich as well as in Germany who de- clared that there was no scriptural warrant for the baptism of infants. The order was given that Anabaptists should be drowned and it is said that there were at least three martyrs of these people, who, whatever their excesses or mistakes, were the great pioneers in teaching the doctrine of a free church in a free state. The quarrel with Luther over the sacrament had much to do with the campaign against the Catholics. Driven out of Germany, Zwingli felt the necessity of consolidating the Swiss in order to withstand future attacks. These reformers were often as bitter against each other as they were against Rome. Luther wrote, " Zwingli has sent me his foolish book and a letter writ- ten in his own hand, worthy of his haughty spirit, so gentle was he, raging, foaming and threatening, that he seems to me incurable and condemned by manifest truth. ' ' 1 Zwingli was a political reformer as well as a ^'The Life and Letters of Martin Luther,' ' Preserved Smith. 211 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH preacher. He wished to keep Switzerland free from outside alliances for the sake of her more democratic institutions. He frequently opposed the hiring of Swiss troops to fight in foreign wars, and when the peasants arose, in 1525, he took the side of the country districts against his own city, lightened some of their burdens and secured the abolition of serfdom. For Zwingli the state, of course, was essentially the city, and it was with the aid of the council of the city that he organized his type of church which was partly controlled by the city authori- ties and partly by a clerical synod. Most stu- dents feel that, whether Luther lived too long or not, it is at least certain that Zwingli died too soon. In the type of his thought he was more modern than any other of the reformers, and he was the one man who might have pre- vented the malign shadow of Genevan theology from obscuring the dial of the world. JOHN CALVIN Whatever one may think of his teaching, no man can deny that John Calvin was the su- preme theologian of the reformation. The tes- timony to his great genius is found in his "In- stitutes of the Christian Eeligion, ,, a book writ- 212 INFLUENCE OF THE REFORMATION ten when its author was only twenty-six years of age and which had more influence upon the Christian world for at least three hundred and fifty years than any work penned by any man since the days of the Apostles. It is easy in our time to sneer at the doctrines of Calvinism. It is impossible for any impartial .historian to deny their enormous influence in the history of Christian thought, or to withhold from the young author a place among the world's immortals. His stern and unpromising views do not appeal to the modern mind, and his austere personality is as repellent as it is compelling. He was feared more than he was hated, and he was obeyed rather than loved. John Calvin (1509-1564) was born in France, and his parents were people of some property and of local importance. He was destined for the church, studied in various French Universi- ties, having abandoned the promised place in the church for hope of distinction in the profes- sion of law. After having been under the influ- ence of the reformed opinions for some time, he passed through a profound psychological expe- rience full of mental agony and searching of heart, out of which he emerged with the con- viction that God had worked a miracle upon his 213 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH soul and that he was a chosen vessel for the sal- vation of men. Meantime William Farrel, another French- man, had carried the reformation into Switzer- land and had settled in Geneva in 1532. The reformation in Geneva was quite as much po- litical as it was religious. What the people of the town wanted was to be free from the rule of the Duke of Savoy, and incidentally they got release from Eome. After Farrel had been in Geneva four years, John Calvin, on a casual journey through the town, came under the in- fluence of the older man, who desired him for an assistant in his work. Of course, Calvin could never long be an assistant to anybody. Just as on the first journey in the stories told in the Acts of the Apostles, "Barnabas and Paul" were ordained to the work, but by the time they loosed from Paphos, Barnabas was lost sight of and the deputation was now called "Paul and his company,' ' so John Calvin him- self became at once the dominant spirit of the new movement. First of all the place must become orthodox and the itinerant preachers, Anabaptists, and the rest, must be suppressed. There seems no difference between the affair upon this small theater of Geneva and what happened at the Council of. Nicaea. Calvin 214 INFLUENCE OF THE REFORMATION drew up a statement of Christian doctrine, the citizens were brought before the leaders of the church in groups of ten and were not only asked whether they agreed to the new creed, but were bidden to profess and swear to the new confes- sion of faith. The Anabaptists and other here- tics were soon after banished from the city. Calvin had also the spirit of Hildebrand and determined that in religious matters the new church should not submit in any degree to the civil power. This perhaps would not have been so difficult to secure had not Calvin also sought to enforce upon the citizens through the govern- ment of the city regulations with respect to all the details of minor morals so characteristic of puritanism in all its forms. He failed to recog- nize the possible tyranny of the majority. An- other Frenchman, De Tocqueville, more world- ly-wise, at a later time, declared "The power to do everything which I should refuse to one of my equals, I will never grant to any number of them." The result of the quarrel was that Calvin and his colleagues were banished from the city after only two years of leadership. The absence of his strong hand was soon felt in social disorder and religious chaos, and after three years he returned to rule in Geneva for the rest of his life. It is quite interesting in 215 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH this connection to see how clear-sighted John Calvin was with respect to other people. In a letter to Melanchthon on the ' ' overbearing tyr- anny of Martin Luther' ' he says, "It is all over with the church when a single individual has more authority than all the rest. ' ' l Calvin, like the God he believed in, was a "Man of War" and engaged in many contro- versies. The most notable of them was with Michael Servetus, an escaped heretic. He tried the hospitality of Geneva, where at the instiga- tion of Calvin he was arrested, found guilty of heresy against the foundations of the Christian religion, and, by the authority of the Civil Coun- cil of Geneva, was put to death. Servetus was in a bad state because he was a heretic both from the Catholic and the Protestant point of view, and both Catholic and Protestant thought that heresy ought to be identified with crime and punished accordingly. If the knowledge of theological truth, accurate and adequate, be es- sential to salvation, they were undoubtedly cor- rect, and unless we are shocked by the doctrine we ought not to recoil too much at its results. It is said in vindication of Calvin that he of- fered the heretic his life, if he would recant, and that in any event he would have preferred ^'Letters of John Calvin/ » p. 443. 216 INFLUENCE OF THE REFORMATION his death by the sword rather than by fire. It is not necessary to pursue this melancholy cir- cumstance further. It was a dark incident that the modern world can scarcely understand. Geneva was a little Eepublic of about thirteen thousand of whom less than one-tenth were voters. Both church and state were essentially aristocratic in form and were practically united in organization and action. The early reform- ers believed in a state church in the interest of freedom from Rome, and a successful revolt. The church of Geneva was like a Jewish syna- gogue and the state of Geneva was like a He- brew Theocracy. These people had taken the bible for their teacher, but it was the Old Testa- ment rather than the New, and Moses was their prophet. On the other hand it must be recognized that the ends sought by the teaching of the church, as well as by the action of the little state, were justice and righteousness. They were seeking, as they understood it, to make a better world. JOHN KNOX John Calvin was the most fortunate of all the reformers because he had John Knox for a disciple, and his theology was transplanted to 217 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH Scotland. So he conquered the Anglo-Saxon world and under happier auspices became one of the chief foundations in the life of the New World and upon its strong roots was grafted the growth of a religious freedom, blooming first in America, but whose fragrance was to fill the world. A rough country was Scotland and inhabited by a rough and uncultured people. England had put herself in harmony with the new world movement, while whatever religion there was in Scotland was still under the direction of the Church of Eome. Small as the country was, north and south were often divided against each other and the hardy independence of the Highland chiefs recked little of the throne. Turbulent nobles quarreled with each other even to blood. It was a fierce people, com- pounded of Gael, Saxon and Scandinavian, and revolt ran riot in their veins. More than any other man John Knox was the creator of modern Scotland. Geneva has lost its place and but for his disciple Calvin would have little fame. Scotland has probably influ- enced the life of the modern world more than any similar social group since the days of Athens. But who is John Knox? Meager and shad- 218 INFLUENCE OF THE REFORMATION owy are the details of his early life, but clear and vivid is his place in certain historic trans- actions, and in both his faults and his virtues he is the authentic Scotchman. His parents were peasants. Their names we know, but not the date of the birth of their son. He seems to have studied and perhaps also taught at Glas- gow, and afterward we find him in the Univer- sity of St. Andrews. He seems to have become a priest of the church, but almost immediately he was found among the reformers who in little companies appeared in various parts of the country, particularly when led by the upper classes. There is some account of preaching at St. Andrews, and when the place was captured by the French fleet, Knox with others became a galley prisoner, working on the river Loire for nearly two years. It is not needful to relate how he was released, — some say by the request of Edward VI of England, — how he be- came a preacher of the new faith in that coun- try, declined a bishopric, and left England when Queen Mary came to the throne. But it was after his sojourn on the continent and his re- turn to Scotland that his real life began. The problem of civil authority took a new form in Scotland. For now the question arose : what should a reformer do when he was not 219 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH supported by the state? With Queen Mary of Scotland fresh from France to forbid the preaching of new doctrines in her kingdom, with the nobles divided, John Knox became the real King of Scotland. He preached his famous sermon at Perth against idolatry and the im- ages were broken. As he denounced popes and monks he aroused the people everywhere to a fury and, after his sermons, excited mobs at- tacked the monasteries. The towns soon came to his support, and a curious truce was estab- lished in 1559, by which every man "may have freedom to use his own conscience for a period of six months." The future of Scotland depended upon out- side politics. England by this time was nomi- nally Protestant. France was Roman Catho- lic and the Scotch lords made a treaty with England. A parliament met in 1560 at which a confession of faith was ratified by the estates of Scotland, "As wholesome and sound doctrine grounded upon the infallible truth of God's word. ' ' The first general assembly of the church was soon called and assumed the right to organize itself independent of the state. John Knox was the Protestant Hildebrand. In lieu of the old church endowments the new Presbyterian 220 INFLUENCE OF THE REFORMATION organization received stipends for the monas- teries, control of the public schools, and the administration of poor relief. When Mary Queen of Scots returned from France, in 1561, a widowed queen and a devout Catholic, she found herself the head of a nation really ruled by a clerical peasant. Much has been said of the interviews between Queen Mary and John Knox. It is said that she wept in his presence as he denounced both her person and her faith. He was ready now to declare that doctrine was derived from the bible and that the church has its authority from God alone. He preached at St. Giles, and the English ambassador said of him, "the voice of one man is able to put more life in us than six hundred trumpets. ' ' The organization he framed for the church of Scotland has survived until this present time, and has been translated to other lands, but his services are much larger than the establishing of the Presbyterian church. He pleaded the cause of the poor and claimed for them a share in the sequestered endowments that had be- longed to the old church foundations. The exigencies of his position compelled him to plead for the freedom of the church from the control of the state. In short what he proposed was that the church should manage its own bus- 221 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH iness and the state should foot the bills. He was compelled also by his position to take the view that the sovereign derives power from the people as over against the doctrine of the divine right of kings. Both the theology that he had adopted from Calvin and his own interpreta- tion of life compelled him to assert the dignity of the individual man. As he refused to be a bishop in the English church, so he declined to personally profit by his position in Scotland. He was doubtless narrow, intense, and "not easy to live with" but he was a man of superb personality and his hands were clean. We may think as we will of the validity of his creed or the nature of his church, but by the direct test his fame is secure. What the Scotch world was before the days of John Knox and what it has been since ; with her thrift and her intelligence, her crowds of scholars, poets, historians and workers, the whole world knows. Puritanism was a harsh thing and not lovely to look upon but under other skies its crushed granite was to make the soil in which should grow a finer type of social life than the world had hitherto be- held. 222 INFLUENCE OF THE REFORMATION THE ANGLO-SAXONS We have seen that it was by an alliance with England that the cause of the Beformation un- der John Knox made headway in Scotland. That alliance came about because France re- mained Catholic and England had broken with Eome. It is necessary, therefore, to retrace our steps to the time of Henry VIII to show how the new doctrines were received among Eng- lishmen. Erasmus seems to have cautiously endeavored to secure from the King of Eng- land assistance in referring the disputed theo- logical questions to a board of impartial judges. This was quite in harmony with both the temper of Erasmus as a scholar and his caution as a man of the world. It has seemed a pity that Erasmus did not have as much force of charac- ter as he had scholarship and intellect. The course of history might have been different and better. His plan came to nothing because Car- dinal Wolsey influenced Henry to condemn and burn Luther's books. The complicated character of Henry VIII is not easy of unfolding to the modern mind. He was certainly a great king and he believed him- self also a great scholar. With that infinite 223 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH deftness that so often goes with the makeup of the successful ecclesiastic, Cardinal Wolsey called the attention of his royal master to the "Babylonian Captivity" by Luther and inti- mated that he might serve the cause of religion by making a suitable reply. In 1521, therefore, Henry VIII published his answer to the Ger- man reformer. Erasmus had chosen for his ground of controversy with Martin Luther the question of the freedom of the will. It was ground well chosen by an adroit controversial- ist and the literary battle caused Erasmus no loss of fame. King Henry chose to discuss something much more vital to the practical ap- plication of religion, and accordingly wrote his treatise, "An assertion of the Seven Sacra- ments." This pamphlet he dedicated to Pope Leo X, who on account of it bestowed upon the English monarch the proud title "Defender of the Faith." The king of Protestant England still wears this Roman laurel upon his brow dearer than any other, though he has also be- come Emperor of India. Whatever may be thought of the argument of the King, there is no doubt of the vigor of his language. "What beast so pernicious as Luther has ever attacked the flock of Christ? What a work of Hell is he? What a limb of 224 INFLUENCE OF THE REFORMATION Satan? How rotten in his mind? How exe- crable his purpose V But Henry need not think that one Martin Luther ever lacked in vigorous invective. In his reply of the next year he speaks of him as "That King of lies, by God 's ungrace King of England for since with malice aforethought that damnable and rotten worm has lied against my King in Heaven, it is right for me to bespatter this English monarch with his own filth, and tram- ple his blasphemous crown under foot." It was a sorry quarrel of no consequence to us now, but showing well enough the spirit of the time and the improvement in manners since that day. It is difficult even at this late date to properly estimate such a man as Henry VIII. His per- son has been the center of controversy between Catholics and Protestants and also between the Church of England and the Nonconformists. He bitterly opposed Martin Luther as we have seen. Thirteen years after his attack upon the Eeformer, the English parliament passed the Act of Supremacy by which the English Church separated from Rome and became national in character. It is not needful to discuss the con- troversy about his divorce from Catherine of Aragon. Did the English King have a con- 16 225 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH science upon the question because she was the wife of his deceased brother, or was it that he wished to marry Anne Boleyn ! Was the Pope afraid of offending the Emperor Charles V, who was a nephew of Catherine's, or did he wish to uphold the validity of that sacrament of marriage which Henry himself had defended against Luther? These are problems that need not be discussed. It is certain that no other man who desired to be rated in history as a good husband and father ever had so many matrimonial infelicities as this stalwart mon- arch. But they err through lack of knowledge who suppose that a church is reformed and a nation changes its religion simply because a king wishes a new wife. The causes are vastly deeper and more permanent. In this case they were largely political and economic; political because of the new self-consciousness of the English nation ; economic because of the wealth of the Eoman Catholic institutions. In the beginning there was no reform as we now un- derstand the term. In England the church had become national and it changed popes, making its king the ecclesiastical as he was already the chief civil authority. How much of the old faith the English Church still maintained can be read in the 226 INFLUENCE OF THE REFORMATION "Act of the Six Articles' ' passed in 1539? They are these: 1. — Transubstantiation. 2. — The sufficiency of communion in one kind. 3. — The celibacy of the clergy. 4. — The maintenance of vows of chastity. 5. — The continuance of private masses. 6. — Auricular confession. The penalty behind the first doctrine was death. A man might deny the others once if willing to lose his property, but the death penalty followed the second offence. The movement of Henry VIII was a revolt and not a reformation. The real interests of Henry were personal and political rather than religious. He used, however, the change in faith and the change in time as a weapon for his purpose. As years went on he became more and more Protestant. He negotiated with the Lutheran princes of Germany, though there were no resultant al- liances. Whatever may be thought of him as a man, it has become clear to recent students that he was a great ruler. He was in many respects the founder of the English nation. Be- cause his plans required a new organ of author- ity upon the part of the nation, he developed a parliament and expanded its authority to stand over against the nobles and the church. The parliament was never really lost after his time, though it passed through varying fortunes, un- 227 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH til at last in our own day the House of Com- mons has become the instrument of the will of the nation. So far as the Keformation was concerned, it was probably checked rather than advanced by the career of this greatest of the Tudors. How much more England was Protestant than her King is revealed in the Articles of Religion and the Book of Common Prayer adopted during the reign of Edward VI. Whether the Articles were true or not, they were certainly Protestant. Meantime in Scot- land there was developing an intense Puri- tanism and, overflowing into England, it was there to meet and conquer the Lutheran theol- ogy and later to carry on the battle of humanity, though in a strange disguise. As Scotland had furnished a Protestant theol- ogy for England through the successes of John Knox, so in the person of James I a king was given to reign over united Britain who did more by his faults and weakness for the cause of liberty than many another man has done by his strength and virtue. On the one hand he declined to come to terms with the Puritan theo- logians, and on the other hand he secured laws of even greater severity against the Roman Catholics. But the outstanding fact of his 228 INFLUENCE OF THE REFORMATION reign was not in the affairs of the church, but it was that great declaration of parliament in 1621 which asserted that neither the affairs of the realm nor even those of the king could escape public scrutiny and debate on the part of the representatives of the people. It was reserved for the reign of Charles I to bring to culmination in Great Britain the in- tellectual and religious forces which had long been working in both Scotland and England. Charles proposed first of all to enforce upon Scotland the liturgy and the government of the Church of England. He harried the Noncon- formists, insisted upon uniformity of worship and made the names of Laud and Strafford, his servants in putting down dissenters, even more hated than his own. The hour had struck for another great stride forward in the evolution of liberty. The parliament of 1640 took up its struggle with the throne in the interest of a Puritan church and a Calvinist theology. It was a struggle that was to last for seven years and to end with the execution of the English king. This parliament wished not to make religion free but to make what they thought was religious truth dominant by force. It was the old story ; let him rule who can. The West- minster Assembly was called together for the 229 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH "settling of the liturgy and the government of the Church of England.' ' The outcome of years of deliberation by these divines was a Calvinistic confession of faith and appropriate catechisms. They were quite enough for Scot- land, but they would not do for England. One of the strongest and most notable men in history comes upon the world's stage in the person of Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658). This country farmer with his strange alternations of melancholies and enthusiasms, based doubtless partly upon physical and partly upon spiritual conditions, represented, as Carlyle has perhaps taught us too vehemently, all that was greatest in the revolt against tyranny both in church and state. He knew the power of passion, and his mighty prayer meeting before starting out to battle was as psychological as it was re- ligious. Beared in the Puritan spirit he was as much opposed to the establishment of the Pres- byterian church as he was to the maintenance by the state of any other form of church order. He was the greatest apostle of religious liberty since the days of that other apostle who wrote the epistle to the Galatians. Thus he says: 1 ' The state, in choosing men to serve it, takes no notice of their opinions.' ' Gaining possession of the army, he reduced the Presbyterian gen- 230 INFLUENCE OF THE REFORMATION erals from authority and once again declares: "He that risks his life for the liberty of his country, I hope may trust God for the liberty of his conscience. ' ' Meantime the parliament re- mained in session, still anxious to control both church and state. At length a scene unexam- pled in history occurred, when he goes to the House of Parliament and, striding up and down in front of the benches like an incarnate fury, abuses first one and then another of the peers and then cries out, ' ' You are not parliament : I say you are not parliament, I will put an end to your sitting/ ' His soldiers march in. Parlia- ment is dissolved and Cromwell is the state. He was named Protector. A new parliament was called and civil authority once more estab- lished. The new state confiscated some of the church lands which had been left by Henry VIII, but at least a part of the revenue was applied to the cause of education. Cromwell himself was fundamentally in favor of religious toleration. He says: "I had rather that Mo- hammedanism were permitted among us than that one of God's children should be perse- cuted. " As a matter of fact the religious toler- ation allowed by the state was for all kinds of Christians except Anglicans and Roman Catholics. It was Cromwell who first extended 231 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH toleration to the Jews and gave them their foot- hold in England. Oliver Cromwell had for his secretary one, John Milton, whose fame as a poet has almost made the world forget his value in the cause of liberty. His great work " Areopagitica ' ' in favor of the liberty of printing is the great de- fence of the right of free speech and the free press. He knows that without a free mind for the individual there can develop no real social mind, and so he says: "Give me the lib- erty to know, to utter, and to argue freely ac- cording to conscience above all liberties.' ' In- deed for him it is worse to destroy a book than to kill a man. The book represents the "sea- soned life" of man. To destroy books is "a kind of massacre whereof the execution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikes at the ethereal essence, the breath of reason itself — slays an immortality rather than a life.^ Cromwell and his protectorate passed away. The restoration came, bringing back the Stuarts and the English church. The next important period is the attempt of James II, himself become a Eoman Catholic, to reign over Protestant England, with the promise of freedom of conscience and liberty of 232 INFLUENCE OF THE REFORMATION worship for all men. This meant the coming from Holland of William, Prince of Orange, who had married Mary, the daughter of Charles I, on the invitation of Englishmen to lay claim to their throne and to restore their liberties. The thing that interests our study is the Dec- laration of Rights, drawn up and adopted by parliament and accepted by William and Mary as the new King and Queen of England. It denied the right of any king to suspend or dis- pense with laws, or to exact money save by consent of parliament. It asserted for the sub- ject the right to petition, to a free choice of representatives in parliament and for both houses of parliament liberty of debate. The free exercise of religion was demanded for all Protestants. This Declaration was the new evidence of that continuous movement since the days of Wykliffe, going on toward the enthronement of the rights of men. The main interest con- tinued to be religious, but the progress of civil and religious liberty went hand in hand. It took generations of debate to remove all relig- ious tests from Roman Catholic and Jews. It took a long series of battles to reform repre- sentative government and to extend, establish and safeguard popular suffrage. The battle 233 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH for political democracy in England has been substantially won. Ancient privileges still re- main. The state church still stamps upon the Nonconformist social and ecclesiastical in- feriority notwithstanding his liberty of wor- ship. The outcome of the battle of the reform- ers, often blind with mixed motives, and dark- ened councils, has come to a fuller and a freer issue of peace in England than anywhere upon the continent of Europe. What remains to be done so far as institutions are concerned is a matter of detail. But he has read history care- lessly who thinks that either England or any other country has yet reached the final goal of the race. A Frenchman has said that the United States is more Anglo-Saxon than England, and this in spite of the fact that by far the large majority of Americans have no Anglo-Saxon blood in their veins. It is not physical descent, how- ever, but the compacting of a people into a defi- nite social group, united by common ideas, faiths and institutions, which really makes a race. While James I, coming from Scotland to take the throne of Elizabeth, was conferring with Puritans and Catholics with reference to church order and discipline and endeavoring to find 234 INFLUENCE OF THE REFORMATION a middle ground by which a little more religious freedom might be allowed, historic events, greater than the conference at Hampton Court or any other such assemblage, were taking place quite in secret. Little groups of men and women seeking to worship God as they believed in simplicity and truth were hiding away from the hand of persecution and endeavoring to avoid public scrutiny. In 1606 the church at Scrooby was formed and its three leading men were William Brew- ster, William Bradford and John Eobinson; the latter educated at Cambridge, the Univer- sity of one John Milton, and many another rebel against old forms of life. In 1608 the Pilgrims, as they were afterward called, fled to Holland and reached Leyden just as Spain had given up the attempt of the conquest of the country. They were doubtless very much influenced by Holland, and the struggle of that country against Spain is one of the most heroic chapters in history, though it does not fall into the plan of this work to trace its events. It is a mistake, however, to suppose that the Dutch furnished the fundamental ideas of American life. These English pilgrims were given a hospitable re- ception and religious freedom, but they were English, and they wished to remain English. 235 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH This was thought to be impossible for so small a company surrounded by a foreign people, though by this time, after eleven years in Ley- den, they had increased to more than one thousand souls. They determined, therefore, to found a colony in America and in 1620, in a ship called the Mayflower, they set sail from England "to settle in the Northern parts of Virginia.' ' How correct they were in their view of the necessity of separation from Hol- land in order to remain English is discovered by the disappearance from history of the much larger number that were left behind. It was the one hundred and two men, women and chil- dren who reached the coast of Massachusetts that really counted. In the cabin of the May- flower was born a democracy which, founded upon freedom of religion, naturally included civil liberty. The forty-one men signed the Mayflower compact: "In the name of God, Amen! We whose names are under-written, the loyal subjects of our dread sovereign Lord, King James, by the grace of God, of Great Britain, France and Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith, etc., have undertaken for the glory of God and the ad- vancement of the Christian faith, and honor of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the 236 INFLUENCE OF THE REFORMATION first colony in the northern parts of Virginia; do by these presents, solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God and of one another cove- nant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic for our better ordering and pres- ervation, and furthermore of the ends afore- said; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute and frame just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices from time to time, as shall be thought most mete and convenient for the general good of the colony; unto which we promise all due submission and obedience. In witness whereof we have hereunto subscribed our names, at Cape Cod, the 11th of November, in the year of the reign of our sovereign Lord, King James of England, France and Ireland, the Eighteenth, and of Scotland the Fifty- fourth, Anno Domini 1620. ? ' The question has often been asked how it was that with such a beginning New England united church and state, burned witches, per- secuted Quakers, and banished Baptists. It is accounted for by the large immigration that came from England as a result of the failure of the Puritans to enthrone Calvinism and Pres- byterianism. The little Plymouth colony re- mained faithful to the early Separatist 's princi- ples as stated by John Robinson : 237 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH "That every particular church of Christ is only to consist of such as appear to believe in and obey him." "That any competent number of sugIi, when their consciences oblige them have a right to embody into a church for their mutual edifi- cation.' ' 1 1 That the officers, being chosen and ordained have no lordly, arbitrary, or imposing power, but can only rule and administer with the con- sent of the brethren." "That no churches or church officers what- ever have any power over any church or offi- cers to control or impose upon them; but are equal in their rights and privileges, and ought to be independent in the exercise and enjoy- ment of them." William Eobinson was not the only man who believed in religious freedom. Indeed the free- dom of the New England churches was based upon the rule of the majority of each particular congregation. In these same days England had men who saw clearer than the men of New England what must be the doctrine of the fu- ture. Said William Chillingworth, "Though your religion to us, and ours to you, if pro- fessed against conscience, would be damnable; yet, may it well be uncharitable to define it 238 INFLUENCE OF THE REFORMATION shall be so to them that profess either this or that according to conscience. ' ' But Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667), though a chaplain of Charles I, was not only "the Shakespeare of divines ' ' but in his ' l Liberty of Prophesying" lays altogether new foundations for religious unity. It is worth while to present a few citations from this writer, who as clearly as any man of any time taught the freedom of the individual in religious association with his fellows. "Few churches that have framed bodies of confession and articles will endure any person that is not of the same confession; which is a plain demonstration that such bodies of confes- sion and articles do much hurt, by becoming instruments of separating and dividing com- munions, and making unnecessary or uncertain propositions a certain means of schism and disunion. ' ' "Matters of opinion are no part of the wor- ship of God, nor in order to it but as they pro- mote obedience to His commandments: and when they contribute toward it are, in that pro- portion as they contribute, parts and actions and minute particulars of that religion to whose end they do or pretend to serve. And such are all the sects and all the pretenses of Christians 239 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH but pieces and minutes of Christianity if they do not serve the great end." "Although the Spirit of God did rest upon us in divided tongues, yet so long as those tongues were of fire, not to kindle strife but to warm our affections and inflame our chari- ties, we should find that this variety of opinions in several persons would be looked upon as an argument only of diversity of operations, while the Spirit is the same." "For if it be evinced that one heaven shall hold men of several opinions, if unity of faith be not destroyed by that which men call differ- ing religions, and if an unity of charity be the duty of us all, even toward persons that are not persuaded of every proposition we believe, then I would fain know to what purpose are all those stirs and great noises in Christendom; those names of faction; these are all become instruments of hatred ; thence come schisms and parting of communions, then persecutions, then wars and rebellions, and then dissolutions of all friendships and societies." The world has even now far to go before it arrives at the philosophy of this great and clear-sighted thinker. The Dutch in New York had obtained a charter which proposed to establish a new 240 INFLUENCE OF THE REFORMATION feudal system by giving to each man who would plant a colony of fifty souls sixteen miles of land over which he was practically to be feudal lord. The Dutch Company pledged itself to furnish negroes to the lords of the manors and the colonists were to establish plan- tations, but they were not to be allowed to manufacture woolen, linen or cotton, on penalty of exile. These privileges belonged to Holland. The compact of the Mayflower may be com- pared with these proposals. It is not needful to trace the history of the developments of the colonies during the next one hundred and fifty years. There were forces at' work, both social and natural, to create upon the new continent a new destiny for men. The development of thirteen colonies with their differences in religion and in tradition made religious liberty a necessity for any union among them. This was definitely discovered when the Constitution of the United States was framed. The New England ideas, represented by the men of the Mayflower, in spite of the fewness of their numbers, were destined to dominate the whole Republic. It was not only due to the inherent vitality of the ideas, for they were aided by social and political interests. One by one all religious tests were cast aside M 241 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH by every state in the union, and out of the mul- tiplicity of sects there came the unifying result- ant of equality for every religion before the law. The ideas of civil liberty cherished by the pil- grims were also destined to conquer. They, too, were aided by social and economic considera- tions. The land was wide and it was practically empty of men. The states of the Middle West were eager competitors for the incoming multi- tude of immigrants. Political freedom followed religious liberty, and manhood suffrage, with- out regard to property, having once been of- fered by one state, must at last be offered by all. In like manner free public schools, once es- tablished anywhere, were bound to be founded everywhere. Every colony in America had a religious foundation, though it would be idle to deny that the economic motive for immigration has been upon the whole the dominant one. In America the battle of institutions has been fought out and political democracy has won its final and conspicuous victory. In no other country since the dawn of time has simple manhood counted for so much or has the individual been fur- nished with so broad an opportunity. The re- sult has not been entirely satisfactory. The 242 INFLUENCE OF THE REFORMATION political and social fabric has its sneering crit- ics and these gentlemen are not wholly without reason. Nevertheless, all the best social, re- ligious and political influences the world has thus far known combined in the making of the American people. CHAPTER VIII DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION If religion be the most far-reaching experi- ence of self-conscious man, there will naturally be a very significant relation between the faith of a social group and its culture. Culture and worship are ancient synonyms, but E. B. Tyler informs us that ' l Culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man, as a member of soci- ety. ' ' The priest comes before the king, as the altar precedes the plow. The Greek poet in "Prometheus Bound" makes all the arts the gift of a god who loves the human race. The development of every form of beauty is associated with worship, and the whole history of art is another form of the history of re- ligion. Architecture, statuary, painting, music, and whatever other form of beauty there be, realizes itself among any people only as it is the expression of their faith in the divine and 244 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION the need of something fine in which to express their reverence. So temple surpassed palace; the statues of the god are nobler than those of men, and the portraits of the Madonna are lovelier than the daughters of men. It would be easy to show that music is born in the church, and that men learn to sing be- cause they wish to praise. More fundamental than any part of the discussion hitherto would be an exploration into the need and strength of the social bond. Students of social science now agree that any self-conscious social func- tion is distinctly human, but all students have not recognized that the relation between man and man is always profoundly ethical. Wher- ever a group of human beings come together, whether in a family, a tribe or a nation, their relationships take the form of rights and duties. Society may be guided by intelligence, but it must be founded upon conscience. That faculty is the human capacity for the recogni- tion of right and wrong. Conception of right and wrong gives rise to that of law; and faith in a divine law, however dimly outlined, always precedes faith in any human law what- soever. The history of the state must include the passage of human life from the reign of custom to that of law, from the caprice of the 245 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH personal will to the rule of the social will, ex- pressed in institutions and constitutions. It depends at last upon the nature and strength of its religion. Eeligion furnishes the distinc- tions between right and wrong, grounds them in the character of divine government, and makes justice both reasonable and necessary. Whatever may be the future of human society, hitherto the quickening of conscience and the extent of its control have depended upon the idea of God. Whenever any form of religion loses its power by undergoing change or decay, the form of society changes also. Eeligion is the trunk of which all the various social activities are the branches. If the trunk dies, there are no more blooms or fruit. If upon the old roots a new growth of religion is grafted, time must be given for the process and the new life no longer exhibits itself under the old forms. The relation of Christianity to culture is more definite than that of any other form of re- ligion and its results are more striking. The cult of the Galilean Peasant had a marked in- dividuality. With a careless catholicity it in- cluded all races and peoples as well as all ranks of society. But with an intensity never known before it insisted not only upon the worship of 246 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION one God, but upon a service of God more com- plete and self-abandoning than the world had ever seen. As it reconsecrated pagan temples for its own uses, so it made original contribu- tions to art and to knowledge. It did not compete with the Greeks in statu- ary, perhaps ever, but Greek and Hebrew music compared with that of Christianity was like the chirping of crickets to the songs of lark and nightingale. In beauty the Greek temple was supreme, but as a symbol of the highest aspira- tions of the human soul in worship the Gothic cathedral is the final achievement of imagina- tion and of faith. It was not accidental that Justinian framed a new code of Roman law. It was an effort to express the new idea of human relations. The tumults which look' like battle and sound like war throughout the early cen- turies of the Christian era between all human institutions were nothing less than the yeasty chaos of a new life which had not yet assimi- lated the material of the Old World. So long as Greek and Latin culture were re- garded as real expressions of life, there could be nothing but war to the death between them and the apostles of the faith of Jesus. The doctrine of Jesus was so alien and his revolu- tion was so profound that there could be noth- 247 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH ing like compromise. If paganism was to die, its culture must be abandoned also. The poetry, the history and the art of the classical world were expressive of a sensuous polytheism. Poly- theism and the culture which it had produced must perish together. When paganism as a living thing was once gone from the world, like relic-hunters, Christian scholars may gather up precious fragments of ancient beauty in manu- script or stone, and be delighted with their charm. The Christian faith demands the sur-"j render of every other faith, and with imperious> splendor claims the keys to the gateways of the-/ world. The case was different with the phi- losophy of Greece, for the philosophy of Greece was precisely the heresy of Greek life. As Soc- rates was put to death as an enemy of the Greek gods so philosophy was the occupation of Greek atheists. The ideas and the methods of thinking that had been destructive of the cause of Greece and Eome made friends with the Christian faith, whose sources of power were the conscience and the reason. Theology, born of a Hebrew father and a Greek mother, became the chief intellectual in- terest of Europe, and, despite all its bad for- tunes, it is doubtless the chief intellectual in- terest of the modern world. The Greek influ- 248 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION ence had spread because of Greek empire and Greek colonies. In like manner the Latin lan- guage spread with Roman rule. It so happened that the capital of the Christian world was Rome, and the Latin language became univer- sal. Greek practically disappeared because it was no longer the natural medium of the social life. Greek and Latin poets were cherished chiefly by Christian priests and monks. Indeed it was the church that carried in its institutions the chief survivals of classical learning. The conversion of various tribes and peoples made it necessary to translate the scriptures and prepare liturgies in the native languages. Christianity was for the common people as well as for their leaders, but it was only the leaders who knew Latin. A multitude of early versions made the early Christian teachers pioneers in a wider study of languages than had been at- tempted in the world before. They were pio- neers who crossed the boundaries of Latin cul- ture and carried at least some of its treasures into the regions beyond. Gaul may have been conquered by Caesar, but it was made Latin by Christians. As time went on the church grew. Syste- matic education was developed under Christian auspices. Every cathedral and every monastery 249 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH aspired to have connected with it a school, and, whatever diminution we choose to make on account of supposed exaggeration, many of these schools in France as well as Italy- boasted of great numbers and influence. The legend of Ireland rapidly becoming Christian and civilized as the intellectual center of Europe has at least some basis of fact Not only did Ireland have schools with thousands of students, but England had its centers of edu- cation as well. When Charlemagne wished to transform his court into an intellectual center, he called Alcuin, an English churchman, to be at the head of his great academy. We have now in addition to the church schools the palace school, but this would have been impossible without the church. There was the study of grammar, music, rhetoric and logic, as well as the classic poets. As early as the twelfth century there were groups of scholars meeting together with their pupils in certain centers of population which because of the scholars became also centers of learning. These early Universities depended upon teachers rather than upon places, and towns or princes often vied with each other in offering inducements to distinguished men to accept their patronage. The historic center of 250 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION this high learning was in the University of Paris, to which many English scholars often resorted. Ont of some obscurity Oxford emerged as a University town. Eome, Bologna, Naples and other cities sought to establish great schools of their own. These Universities, as they were called, though not directly con- nected with cathedral or monastery, were nevertheless always under the patronage of the church, and theology was the subject of first importance in their curriculum. They also taught civil and canon law, some history, usu- ally a good deal of logic and rhetoric. Very soon teachers of medicine were found in nearly all of them. The Universities of those days were associations of teachers and students, where instruction was given in theology, law and medicine, and everything else was subordi- nate or collateral. These foundations, some- times laid by the pope or bishop, sometimes by the king or noble, have broadened, increased and enriched until they have become the great seats of learning of modern times. Two things are often said which cannot both be true. The one is that medieval education was bound hand and foot to the study of the classics and of mathematics, and the other is that the church fettered the world until the knowledge of the 251 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH classics somehow or other broke her spell and set the captives free. "With the rise of the towns and the increase of wealth among the artisan and commercial classes, there came the ambition for schools suited to the wants of the general citizenship, and, after printing had made books cheap, it was the desire even of the peasantry to learn to read and so have for themselves a share in the knowledge and thought of the day. These schools were sometimes a municipal undertak- ing, were sometimes under private patronage, and sometimes were managed by the teachers themselves. In the days of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries these schools were not free and the fees varied according to the instruc- tion given and to some extent according to the wealth of the patrons. It is contended by so accomplished a scholar as Thomas Davidson that the universities of Europe owed their foundation to an imitation of the Mohammedan centers of learning. The Universities at Cairo, Bagdad and other places had their foundation in about the year 900, and except that of Cairo came to an end early in the twelfth century. There are some matters to consider in connection with this supposed influence of Moslem learning. At a very early 252 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION date pagan scholars and philosophers were converted to Christianity, and became fathers of the church. Christian theology in the begin- ning had its origin in an effort to harmonize the facts of faith with the doctrines of the Greek schools. The Gnostics, or the knowing ones, worked in the Greek spirit, but were outside the stream of the Catholic tradition. No one can believe that the cathedral and monastic schools owed their origin to outside influences. It is certain that the great Alcuin, who organized education for Charlemagne, was the disciple of no Arab, and the learning of Britain had a home in some kind of a university at Oxford about the time the University of Cairo was founded. There is no doubt that Christian scholars wished to study the teaching of Mohammed, because there was at that time as there is now only this rival in the world to contest the claims of Christian- ity. There seems little doubt that some ele- ments of Chemistry and some knowledge of Medicine came from the Arabs. But how futile is all this when one recalls that, as Paul was indebted to the Jew and to the Greek, so Mo- hammed was a debtor to Abraham and to Jesus. It would clear up the mind with respect to the question if men could remember that the faith 253 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH of Mohammed is based upon Jewish and Chris- tian sources. Had Eastern bishops been wise enough, the great Arab prophet would have been a Christian and the history of the world would have been changed. The great indi- vidual counts in self-conscious evolution as he does not in the ordinary processes of history. But such universities as the Arabs possessed were religious institutions. The University of Cairo exists to-day and is merely an open space with a stone floor attached to a mosque. It is no university in any modern sense, but it is a theological school and often upon the bare stones, and sometimes upon rugs spread over them, students may be seen in a crouching pos- ture or upon their knees reciting over and over again passages from the Koran or its com- mentaries, in the devout attitude of excited wor- shipers. Anyone who has visited such a uni- versity will know how far removed it is from the experiment, the comparison, and the reflec- tion of Western education. Another word must be spoken in this connec- tion concerning the revival of learning. That revival dates from no single time. The his- tory of learning passed through its definite phases. The Greek influence was early. This was supplanted by the Latin organization of 254 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION the Roman church. There were great scholars in the church long before the date which is as- signed to the revival of learning, and the fall of Constantinople, in 1453, is the merest inci- dent in the history of thought. Certainly An- selm (1033-1109) and Bernard were influenced by Plato, while the movement represented by Abelard (1079-1142) introduced the world to a critical method founded upon Greek logic and having for its purpose the development of a rational theology. We may agree with David- son in the statement that, " Abelard was the first modern man. ' \ There were private Greek teachers in many places in Europe more than fifty years before the fall of Constantinople, and the Vatican library, founded by Pope Nicholas V, before that date possessed many manuscripts in Greek and Latin. It is now also certain that from the schools of the Irish and Scotch monks the Graeco-Latin stream of culture flowed to the Continent. The marvel is that the Christian church did so much, placed as it was in the midst of a broken world, with- out orderly government, and scarcely was it through with the conquest of the Goths and Vandals before it was assailed in various quar- ters by the ravaging Norsemen. In the mean- time such parts of Europe as were not in dan- 255 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH ger from without were torn with conflict and dissension within, and yet, in spite of all these dangers as well as its own weaknesses and its sins, the church was throughout the centuries the chief social organ for the maintenance of scholarship and the spread of learning. The Eenaissance furnished us the New World and the New World brought in the Prot- estant Reformation. Martin Luther was not at all satisfied with the Burgher schools and said very harsh things with respect to the prevailing methods of edu- cation. In the matter of education it were easy to show that Martin Luther was the forerunner of Pestalozzi and Froebel. He demanded that children should be treated with tenderness, and that they should have a larger share of free- dom. He wished teachers of both sexes, but all of them carefully trained. But his main contribution was not so much in the matter of methods as it was in its popular tendency. He wanted schools that would reach the children of the laboring classes, and he urged that even those young people who were compelled to earn their living with their own hands should be per- mitted to attend school for one or two hours a day. This was the first voice raised in behalf of the education of all the people, and his glory 256 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION is not dimmed by criticism of his attitude to- ward the new astronomy or by contempt for the program of education which he proposed. John Knox has to his credit the leadership in the establishment of the parish schools of Scotland, and ever since his time the average of intelligence among the Scotch peasants has been higher than in any other European coun- try. It is no wonder that Thomas Carlyle, son of a stone mason, but educated in a Scotch university, should speak of John Knox in a way that seems to the sober reader like mere rhap- sody. Thomas Carlyle, rebel though he was, remained Calvinist to the core and has John Knox for his spiritual father. Not Carlyle alone, but the average Scotch boy, knows that through education he may rise from his pov- erty to at least a decent economic position in society as well as to a fuller and richer life for his own personality. For the men of New England the school- house was as important as the church, and pop- ular education was their early aim. Harvard University, in Massachusetts, was founded by a clergyman who had graduated at Cambridge, England, though the son of a butcher, and who gave three hundred books and half of his estate as the humble beginning of this important seat is 257 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH of learning. It was a short step from the ideal of popular education held by the people of New England to the development of a system of free schools finally established in every state of the Union. These schools, supported by public tax- ation, are the hope of democracy. They are the one social organ by which the vast immi- gration from the nations of Europe has been assimilated. The free public schools are des- tined to produce the future American, a com- posite of strange and varied human elements, but dominated by Anglo-Saxon convictions. Popular education was begun and continued by the church and taken over by the state as that institution became the most important representative of the common life of the people. But before there were free schools, the schools of the church sought out promising youths, whether among the rich or the poor, to train them for the service of the church. It was a question of ability. Many places were bought and sold, many priests were stupid, but the one gateway by which the son of the peasant might rise to a place of power was the open door into the church school. The "Republic of Letters' ' is a familiar phrase, but the democ- racy of scholarship is a fundamental fact. It 258 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION was true in the classical world that on occa- sion a boy of talent might find a patron in- terested in his future and willing to help him on his way. The church was an organized in- stitution. It had need of a multitude of work- ers and in its best days it wished for the best available human material. The genetic study of history indicates the in- fluence of manifold forces in the making of social forms. Examination of the life of any people shows that the kind of religion they have is the analogue of all other achievements. But it is more than an analogue, because it has al- ways been the most fundamental social neces- sity. Modern conflicts between scientists and theologians are responsible for an abundance of denunciatory literature as well as quite numerous and futile attempts to reconcile old forms of belief with modern discoveries. Now as ever it is vain to attempt to put new wine into old skins. However, conflicts between indi- viduals and upon special points are of no sig- nificance. The amazing thing about the vast controversies which have raged during the past fifty years has been the effort upon the part of men who have adopted scientific vocations to show that the conflicts are fundamental and that the church is really the natural enemy of 259 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH knowledge. The lack of perspective in all these histories of "warfare" is slightly irritating to those who would expect better things from men who affirm the doctrine of evolution. The neglected fact on the part of such men as Dr. White and Professor Draper is that con- flict is not an accident, but it is a necessary ele- ment in all progress. Such men look on joy- ously at what they call the * ' struggle for exist- ence' J and see as its final outcome a world full of beauty and order. This is the biological per- spective. Authorities in social science teach us the importance of conflict between social groups, and also between classes within the groups. Not only does the battle of ideas rage wherever men congregate, but the struggle of institutions is a part of the fabric of history. The ethical teachings of Jesus have con- tended with the bad passions of men in all gen- erations, and the victory is very far from being completed even in statutes and constitutions, to say nothing about individual life and character. Every new thought that comes into the world must of necessity fight for recognition, and every new science has been born through many pains. Ordinary discussions of the relations of the church to scientific discovery are a mere caricature of the facts. Churchmen were not 260 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION only the makers of theology, but they were the leaders in all intellectual effort. "Albertus Magnus' ' (1205-1280) gave foundations to Bot- any and Chemistry. He earned his title ' ' Mag- nus" because his works were regarded as a cyclopedia of all human knowledge in his time. And who was this Albert the Great? He was a Dominican monk. Eoger Bacon (1214-1294) was indeed imprisoned by the authority of the church; but who was Roger Bacon! He was a Franciscan friar. He wrote theology and phi- losophy, but it was his treatise upon geography that fell into the hands of Christopher Colum- bus, and was the leading influence upon his mind. It may be that America would have re- mained undiscovered for another hundred years but for that treatise. At any rate the finger of Roger Bacon pointed the way. He was also the founder of experimental sci- ence. It was he who declared that it was neces- sary to examine the fact and to verify the con- clusion. Experimental science, he declares, dis- covers new truths and investigates the secrets of nature. Some hundreds of years before this man the great Alcuin was not only the master of the palace school of Charlemagne but he was also engaged in gathering up such medical knowledge as existed, and Charlemagne is said 261 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH at his instance to have planted a garden for the growth of healing herbs. No one will dis- pute that the three great interests, law, medi- cine and theology, grew up under the patronage of the church. The sting in the mind of the ordinary critic is that the statement is too true, and that the process by which education has been set free from the church has been too slow. For illustration of what is meant by the critics, it is perhaps possible now to take a calm view of the English conflicts in which the church on the one side seems to stand over against a company of men, of whom the fore- most names are Darwin, Spencer and Huxley. But who was Charles Darwin f He was the son of pious parents. He came under the influence of Dr. Samuel Butler, the famous churchman and teacher at the boys* school in Shrewsbury, and afterward he was educated in Edinburgh and Cambridge. Herbert Spencer had for his most direct intellectual influence his uncle, the Reverend Thomas Spencer. Mr. Huxley seems to have had very few advantages save the all- important one, that he was an Englishman, brought up in the midst of an English and a Christian civilization. No bishop of England, however, attacked Darwin any more fiercely than did his fellow scientist, Agassiz. 262 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION Every advance of learning has been a con- flict between human inertia and the dynamic of freshly discovered facts or new scientific the- ories. But this is a universal law and has only incidental application to the church. The new method of doing business must fight all the old traditions until it proves its right of way by being cheaper and better. Every new inven- tion is doubted and sneered at until it makes money for its owner. This is not only a neces- sary part of the process of values, but with the best will in the world it is the only wise thing for sensible men. Of a thousand gravely pro- posed new scientific discoveries we are fortu- nate if one prove true. Most new methods of doing business end in bankruptcy, and the vast majority of labor-saving machines will not work, and become old iron. The English conflict of the middle and latter part of the nineteenth century was as intense as that arising from the Copernican astronomy or any other form of scientific heresy. These doctrines have been heresy to the church be- cause they have been first questioned or re- jected by the great body of living scholars. The church adopts the new theories after they have been approved by the experts. Charles Darwin, the central figure of the new 263 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH dispensation, did not have long to wait for cler- ical recognition. When he died England mourned the departure of a genius of the first order, and he was accorded a burial place in Westminster Abbey. He had acquired a place among Britain's poets, saints and heroes, but over his silent dust the hymns of the church surge on in victory. The critics of the intellectual position of the church fail to show anything like consistency. To begin with, they tell us that the church is the enemy of human knowledge. It has objected to geology, evolution, as well as in earlier times to geography and astronomy. Meantime the names of the discoverers were nearly always churchmen or trained in Christian schools. On the other hand we are informed that Christianity is like an absorbent sponge, and only valuable as it soaks up Greek paganism and Arab learning. It is the most hospitable of all religions. The critics should get together and agree among themselves. It remains to be noted that a few men with- out distinctly religious training, and who have been opposed to the doctrines of the Christian religion, have yet made important contribu- tions to human knowledge. It is not enough to say that the number is very few. It seems 264 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION best to meet the issue squarely and say that these men were only possible because of the faith which they rejected, and though they may have lacked particular religious train- ing, they appropriated the results of a Christian civilization from their surround- ings. The whole body of facts must be taken together. The individual is possible by what' goes before him and what surrounds him. This is the genetic view of life. Christianity has a right to lay claim to all the achievements by the men who have lived under a civilization which she has created and controlled. If it be urged that in recent years the church has less influence than formerly, and that we are producing a generation which will be eman- cipated from the old views, it may be remarked that it is rather too early to boast of the achievement. We have yet to see whether morals can exist without religion, imagination can flourish without worship, and men can achieve greatness without a soul. It is perfectly true that the church fathers conceived the earth as being flat and believed it to be the center of the universe. They also taught that the seas only covered one-seventh part of the earth. Curiously enough it was precisely upon the conviction of the shortness 265 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH of the voyage from Europe west to Asia that the journey of Columbus was made possible. i l Among the treasures of the library at Seville, there is nothing more interesting than a copy of this work (Imago Mundi) annotated by Co- lumbus himself: from this very copy it was that Columbus obtained confirmation of his be- lief that the passage across the ocean to Marco Polo 's land of Zipango in Asia was short. But for this error, based upon a text supposed to be inspired *, it is unlikely that Columbus could have secured the necessary support for his voy- age. It is a curious fact that this single theo- logical error thus promoted a series of voyages which completely destroyed not only this but every other conception of geography based upon the sacred writings. ' ' 2 It would seem according to Dr. White that theological mistakes have not always been vital, and according to him this particular error re- sulted in the discovery of America. As there has been a yesterday of life, so there has been a yesterday of thought. Nothing less was to be expected. We are not scandalized by a his- tory of thought as applied to Greek philosophy or German philosophy. Every school boy is *II Esdras 7. 2 ' ' Warfare of Science with Theology, ' ' Andrew D. White, Vol. I, p. 112. 266 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION familiar with the history of literature. One period comes upon the stage and passes away to be followed by its natural successors. In recent years emphasis has been placed upon both works of Literature and Art as expres- sions of the social life of the period in which they appeared. It was quite necessary that there should be a history of human knowledge. A scientific study of Archaeology is a thing of yesterday, and this study has reformed all accepted Chronology. There could be no theory of the antiquity of man until there had been a search for the earli- est remains of his activities based upon the principles of Roger Bacon. Physics, Chemis- try and all the other sciences have changed in theory as investigators have increased the num- ber of ascertained facts. All this is so hu- man, so natural, so in harmony with the whole process of development that the only wonder now is that any surprise should be expressed. Theology has always been a human effort to interpret the relation between man and God. Theology is a science and it also has had its history. The Roman Catholic church provides for new interpretations in the evolution of doc- trine, and Cardinal Manning nearly fifty years ago wrote a work on the "Temporal Mission 267 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH of the Holy Ghost" as an exposition of the con- tinuous teaching power of the church. On the other hand, Dr. Adolph Harnack, the Protest- ant authority of Germany, a few years ago, wrote a book on the "History of Dogma" in which he seeks to show the process by which Christian doctrines have been developed and the circumstances surrounding them. Both Catholic and Protestant agree to the evolution of doctrine in the Christian church. Theology, in the very nature of the case being an effort at rational statement, is compelled to deal with the forms of knowledge which are current from age to age. It is, therefore, never final, but a continuous attempt to reinterpret its fundamental beliefs in harmony with all known facts. This whole process is a movement toward intellectual freedom. The reason why the shock is greater when a theological change takes place is on account of the tremendous in- terests at stake in which the personal fortunes for time and eternity of every religious man seem to him to be involved. It has been very disturbing to note the changes that have been brought about in the domain of Physics in recent years. But the number of supposed atoms, or the nature of original substance, or whether matter be solid, 268 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION fluid or force, are not vital to human experi- ence. These theories have created no such dis- turbances in the religious world as Copernican Astronomy or the doctrine of Evolution, be- cause the facts of Physics have entered less into the consideration of Theology than those of Geology or Astronomy. There is something, however, deeper than all this : Wise men may debate stoutly about a theory, but brave men will battle fiercely for a soul. The freedom of teaching and the freedom of the faith are necessary to a final spiritual de- ! mocracy. They are also consistent with the development of a scientific theology. A scien- tific theology needs behind it the help of no councils, the authority of no creeds, and the aid of no church organizations. What it re- quires is the authority of ascertained truth. But the freedom of teaching is something quite as much required in political, economic and social questions as it is anywhere else. It is here that at the present moment the essential battle for liberty is being fought. In most countries to-day the preacher has more freedom than the professor, and particularly where the professor is under the control of great in- terests that require a static view of society for their permanence. 269 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH Here as elsewhere we are saved when we re- turn to the teaching of the Son of Man. His disciples saw men who had no place in their ranks casting out devils. The disciples would have prevented all this, but Jesus knew that a good deed was its own authority and asserted the doctrine that all seekers after goodness are forever one. The seekers after truth belong also to an imperishable brotherhood, and this brotherhood is a Democracy of Souls, for the " Truth shall make you free." The aristocracy of mind is the only success- ful enemy of the aristocracy of position. The few can control so long as the many are in ig- norance of their powers and their rights. Men who have the opportunity to carry up from the lowest ranks a sense of the humiliations of ab- ject poverty, not alone hot with the fire of angry passion, but clear with the rational insight of what society may be, can never be kept in sub- jection. The school is an aid to efficiency, but it is also the foe of tyrants. He who would keep men bound in mind or body must shut out the right of knowledge. The relation of the church to modern cul- ture is in her patronage of art, her creation of schools, and her multitude of teachers. But it is far deeper than all this: She de- 270 DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION throned ancient paganism, civilized the man- ners of barbarians, created new social bonds, and laid the foundations for modern culture. Her sons taught in the schools, explored the world, wrote the books, and she herself pre- sided at the birth of Science. But deeper and more vital is the relation of the church: She knew the beauty of art and the value of knowledge, but most of all she knew the worth of men. She has not always been faithful to her early vows at the altar of humanity, but, in spite of her errors or her treacheries, she comes back at last to the doc- trine of the right of every man to the best things, simply because every man is a son of God. It is this great faith that resulted at last in free popular education, the open gateway to individual aspiration, as well as the safe- guard of social institutions, and forever essen- tial to a successful democracy. CHAPTER IX SOCIAL SPIRIT OF MODERN CHRISTIANITY We men of to-day are too much the immediate product of the nineteenth century to judge it accurately, but we know at least that it is sure to be regarded as one of the greatest epochs in all history. Nothing in it was quite so pictur- esque as the discovery of America, or the cir- cumnavigation of the globe, nor quite so revolu- tionary as the astronomy of Copernicus, and nothing so beautiful was produced as a Greek Venus or a Gothic cathedral, but it invaded more fields, it destroyed more traditions, it made more discoveries, it did more constructive work, and, in all the range from the workshop to the library, it scattered its bounties with the lavish hand of enrichment. Its inventions and discoveries rearranged the structure of society. Steel, steam and electric- ity moved thousands of families from country homes and settled them in cities. The factory and the machine shop became standard forms 272 MODERN CHRISTIANITY of industrial activity. New inventions and new methods increased both the supply and variety of the comforts of life. The wealth of the world expanded beyond all computation. In Europe the remains of the old feudal system were rudely shaken, because the land was no longer the chief foundation of wealth and power. It was an economic dethronement of the old aristocracy. The new aristocracy of wealth arose, more virile indeed but less gentle than the social leadership of the past. Brewers became barons, peasants bought the estates where their ancestors worked as serfs, the im- perial power melted away, and kings and cabi- nets waited to hear from their bankers before deciding upon their policies. The prizes of the world were distributed among the captains of industry rather than among soldiers and states- men. The city problem created by the massing of factories for production, and the making of centers of distribution for commerce, presented new and visible disasters. In the great in- dustrial nations the laborers were not needed and could not live in country places. They were compelled to find work and a livelihood in the city. Great wealth was concentrated in a few hands, but the enormous production made 19 273 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH material comforts more widespread among the masses of the people than was ever known in the world before. At the same time conges- tion of population in factory districts in the cities gave birth to new forms of misfortune, and palaces at one end of the city with bar- baric display of wealth deepened the shame of wretched tenements at the other end of the city where the people became debased and de- bauched. Neither growth of wealth nor its unequal distribution, nor concentration of population, nor its resultant evils, are the chief expression of a time so rich in great men and in great deeds. The chief fact in government was the decline of personal power and the growth of constitu- tions. But what is known as liberalism in pol- itics was by no means the dominant note. The political changes of the time, studied closely, reveal a new dignity in the state, a new per- vasiveness of its authority, a new social im- perialism to take the place of decaying thrones. The vast authority, claimed and exercised by the state, humbled the authority of the home no less than that of the church as an organization. Practically in every country the secular author- ity proclaimed its supremacy. The battle with 274 MODERN CHRISTIANITY the church as a competitor of the state was fought out, and the church was finally defeated. In a still more marked degree did the enthrone- ment of the state mean the limitation of the home. The ideal of the Eoman home, with its authority in the head of the family, had become greatly dimmed throughout the ages, but now it was to be destroyed. The state in the in- terest of society claimed the right to prescribe the conditions upon which homes should exist, and the family, the primary social unit, was more profoundly affected than was the church. The latter might have lost much of its wealth and some of its prestige, many of its former duties were taken over by the state, but along with this there went a growing independence of the church in all matters of religion, so that in its own sphere there has never been a time in history when the church has been so free as now. But for the home were made prescrip- tions of every kind. Authority over the child has been taken from the parents; economic standards and standards of morality are alike defined and enforced; a man's cottage is no longer his castle, and the castle itself is sub- ject to the invasion of the policeman. The uni- versal authority of the state as the comprehen- sive organ of social life is everywhere recog- 275 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH nized. Through their government all the people act together, and secure the enforcement of the public will. In all respects this process is not complete, but it is on its way to finality. Ques- tions of public health, the organized adminis- tration of the social life, the regulation of con- ditions of labor, the right of eminent domain, authority over corporate and business activi- ties are all illustrations of a new social order. So much for social organization, but even more marked are the intellectual changes. The life of our modern time has been char- acterized by a new and intense curiosity. It is something more than the scientific spirit. The scientific spirit may offer a method, but it does not furnish energy. We are as far removed from the type of the men of the Renaissance as these were different from the old Greeks, who helped to inspire them. The world has re- newed its youth. It has been seized upon with a new wonder, and looks at all things with the eyes of a child, but with the imagination of a man. It is this curiosity which has digged up the ruins of ancient cities, interpreted old hiero- glyphics, recovered forgotten languages, found scholars able to write the history of lost na- tions and has made the pick and the spade rivals of the crucible or the mariner's compass. 276 MODERN CHRISTIANITY We do not know all that has happened in the ages that are gone, bnt it is quite within the bounds of modesty to say that we know as much of any age, take it all in all, as the people did who lived in it. "We do not know quite as much of Athens as did the Greeks, nor as much of Nineveh as did the Assyrians, but we know more of the world outside of Athens and Nine- veh in their own time than any of their schol- ars knew. The results of archaeology have checked up the results of old-fashioned history and its achievement is almost as great in what it has thrown away as false as in what it has added of new discovery. The gaps still left are being filled year by year, and scholarship is on its way to a complete recovery of the past. The middle of the last century was characterized by new studies in life of every form, and prac- tically all the sciences were rewritten. The latter half of the century was characterized by a fresh curiosity in regard to man himself, and the human sciences were developed. The final conclusions of the study of races, of social groups, and of the various forms of human life are not complete, but here, too, we are on the way. The effect of this modern curiosity is seen 277 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH not alone in the resultant discoveries, nor per- haps is it chiefly manifested in the accumula- tion of knowledge. There has been born a new form of social sympathy manifesting its activi- ties in many ways. In government it has given rise to large and complex organization, taking in various races, and making accommodation with easy tolerance for diverse and even antag- onistic manners and customs. It has produced such a phenomenon as the United States of America, where diverse races and alien faiths are brought together under a democratic gov- ernment as strong as it is elastic, and which is steadily fusing the mass into a new type of human kind. We are discovering that the forms of institutions are the result of the social mind within, the efficient cause of social con- ditions. People will at the last have as good institutions as they deserve. What is the best type in the state for one people will not do for another. As the same people progress their institutions must undergo a parallel develop- ment. This curiosity, become social sympathy, has bidden men look with other eyes upon diver- gent forms of faith. Time was when one re- ligion was true and all the rest were false. The time has come for a study of comparative re- 278 MODERN CHRISTIANITY ligion with a desire to find something good in every one of them, and to appraise each at its true value. The provincial temper is disap- pearing everywhere — races, nations, religions, are learning better manners. The process seems to have been first curiosity, then infor- mation, followed by tolerance, and resulting in sympathy. We may hope at last that the proc- ess of selection will follow, and the world will go on its way to a cosmic civilization. Many influences have been at work in produc- ing the results briefly sketched. It will not do to underestimate the importance of commerce, but commerce has been in the world since the earliest times; the Phoenicians were sailors as well as the English. National ambition has lent itself to the process, but the effort for world empire is not new, and Rome, though even more rapacious, was just as tolerant as Great Britain. It is to be doubted whether the human mind in modern times in any particular center has equaled that of the Greek in the Golden Days of Athens, but there has been a steady cumula- tion of certain forces working in the modern centuries, and which have found their fullest ex- pression in our own time. What has all this to do with democracy and the church? Very much. 279 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH The spread of Christianity began with an organized missionary movement that accepted literally the injunction "to preach the gospel to the nations.' ' This movement continued in full force for several centuries. In the devel- opment of the church organization, and in solv- ing the problems which it had to face, especially in Europe, missionary activity was greatly cur- tailed, though the missionary motive still re- mained. After the Keformation the Roman church, under the leadership of the Society of Jesus, developed world-wide missions of great significance, though of a special character. Early Protestantism regarded itself as chiefly in conflict with the Roman Catholic world, and did not compete with the strenuous labors of the Jesuit fathers. The movement of Loyola added much to the world's knowledge and was an important factor in the growth of social sympathy. The Protestant world in the last century awakened to a sense of the world-significance of the Christian faith. Missionary societies were organized and developed with a fine en- thusiasm but without much worldly wisdom. The early missionaries were almost as anxious to persuade the savages to wear European trou- sers as they were to make them accessible to 280 MODERN CHRISTIANITY new thoughts and new hopes. They attacked every religion of the heathen with a demand for its immediate surrender on the ground that it was wholly false. The by-products of missions seem to some people greater than their direct results. It was David Livingstone that quickened the imagina- tion about Africa and made Henry M. Stanley possible. The missionaries have made gram- mars and dictionaries. They have studied flora and fauna. They have been the chief source of knowledge in regard to the manners and cus- toms of foreign peoples. They have opened new roads for commerce. They have given foreign peoples a new point of view with respect to the soul of the English-speaking nations. Meantime the missionaries themselves have received an access of social sympathy. They have helped to interpret alien life in a new way. The early plea for missions helped to furnish an enthusiasm for humanity. Mission- ary operations have incidentally enlarged al- most every field of human knowledge, but di- rectly they have furnished more and more a fresh commentary upon the words spoken of old : ' ' God hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the 281 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH earth. ' ' ' A concrete illustration of the growth of social sympathy was found at the close of the Boxer massacre in China, when American missionaries knowing the laws and customs of China were able to make settlements for de- struction of life and property before the Chi- nese government acted directly, and before the intervention of the powers had become opera- tive, simply because the native villagers knew that it was cheaper and wiser to deal with the missionaries than with the invading armies, or with their own government. The world spirit of to-day has gone far be- yond the point of being a vague dream of uni- versal brotherhood. It is one of the most prac- tical things in every domain of affairs. It has given birth to a spirit of international politics, wholly unknown before our time. The great nations look far beyond their own boundaries to discover problems and duties. For the mo- ment this means great armaments on land and sea with the cloud of world war no larger than a man's hand, but which may fill all the sky and rain blood upon the earth. The movement for international peace is essentially a Chris- tian movement. One has said that "war is hell, ,, but it is something more: — It is a colos- 1 Acts 1 : 17-26. 282 MODERN CHRISTIANITY sal folly. Most of the problems for which men have consented to be shot down are capable of quite other solutions, and none of the prizes of war is at all adequate to meet the cost of it in men and money. The movement for inter- national peace finds its first argument and its stronghold in the teaching and organization of Christianity, but it also finds help from the mutual interests of commerce, and from the increasing number of social bonds that reach across the territorial boundaries of nations and combine peoples into unity. Local patriotism is not dying out — but the wider sense of citizen- ship of the World and the community of human interest are becoming stronger with every dec- ade. Every cable laid, every railroad built, every great canal dug, are essential reasons for world peace. Political and economic questions are no longer local issues, nor are they national prob- lems. A money panic in one capital spreads throughout the world. If depression of trade visits one nation, like a plague it spreads to kindred nations. All artificial barriers are be- ing swept away. The standards of values are world-wide. No nation can afford to have money that is not good in every market. Meth- ods of production must be learned from those 283 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH who are the most skillful, and those who refuse their lesson sink into poverty as shameful as it is base. The standard of living tends to equalize itself throughout all the civilized world. The gospel of Jesus prophetic of a cos- mic civilization is fulfilling itself before the eyes of all thoughtful men. The new world view is the telescopic vision of Him who said ' l Go disciple all nations, teach- ing them to observe whatsoever I have com- manded you." But the microscopic view has made the home problems of every people more distinct, more significant and more compelling. We have gone beyond the debate, am I my brother's keeper? We have come to the ques- tion, in what way shall I serve my brother so as to really help him, and neither cripple his energy nor his self-respect? This is the ques- tion for the individual and for the social group in every form. The conditions of modern times have not created all the social questions, but the truth is modern eyes alone have seen the social ques- tions. Communism of the modern city is a new thing in the world with its municipal water sup- plies and lighting, its street paving and its san- itation, its public works and its playgrounds, its free libraries and art galleries. It has given 284 MODERN CHRISTIANITY splendors to all the people, some of which never existed before, and those which were in existence were reserved for the pleasure of the few. We have seen the evolution of democracy from the teaching of Jesus, through many vicis- situdes in history, culminating in our time. But we hear many voices of the present proclaim- ing that the modern church is not at all ade- quate to its own tasks and does not live up to its own pretensions. This is a severe indict- ment given in many forms and deserves some attention. There are things which the church used to do formerly which it does not do at present. Many of these tasks have been taken over by the state. In nearly every European country wealth once given to the church has been taken over by secular authorities. The loss of these endowments by organized Chris- tianity has prevented the fulfilling of old ob- ligations. This fact has been to the advan- tage of all concerned, for the endowments of the church were too much of an economic burden. The division of the church in the Western world between Catholic and Protestant has compelled the church to act indirectly through the state, rather than by its own organization 285 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH in attacking many problems. The greater growth of the state and the increase of its power, one of the direct results of democracy, have given the state its wider sphere of influ- ence, and have compelled a far more active par- ticipation in local affairs than ancient govern- ments would ever have dreamed of undertaking. This does not mean, however, that Christianity has lost in any wise its influence upon the life of society. The ethics of Jesus have become the ethics of the state. The influence of Chris- tianity has become much wider than church organization. The Christian purposes and tra- ditions of the centuries have saturated litera- ture, created social ideals, influenced the edu- cation of statesmen and public leaders, and have dominated the social conscience through- out the world. It is not a reproach to the church if we are beginning to see in the world the outlines of a kingdom of God to be realized among men, larger than any ecclesiastical or- ganization, though inspired and guided by the fundamental spirit of its gospel. The new sense of social obligation and the new enthusi- asm for attacking visible evils are all tributes to the victorious vitality of the teaching of Jesus. In the multiplication of avenues of human 286 MODERN CHRISTIANITY action, in the formation of new organs for social service, the church as an institution no longer has so commanding a position as she had in days when she was so powerful that she was often insolent. But it must not be forgotten that the churches still carry on directly a large part of the charity work of the world. In Prot- estant countries the various sects meet together upon a common platform to found orphanages, to build hospitals, to care for the poor and to engage in all the various forms of social ser- vice. The Eoman Catholic church in England and in America, without government aid or pat- ronage, has developed an imposing structure of charitable work that remains the admiration of the world. It would not be a reproach to the church if it should be seen that it has be- come chiefly the teacher rather than the agent of good works. What it has lost as an institu- tion it may have gained as an inspiration. At any rate the men and women who have given the money for modern social movements and who have carried forward the great activities of social regeneration are the sons and daugh- ters of the church, and both publicly and pri- vately confess that they owe their activities to her urgency and their plans to her wisdom. It is often stated that agnostics or infidels exist 287 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH by millions in every so-called Christian country, but they unite together in no good work. If they have conquered the intellect of the time it has only been to paralyze its heart. If the Christian faith be in its death agony, even so it speaks with its latest breath the only signifi- cant word a world in pain is able to hear. The robust young skepticism has its heart seared with selfishness and its mind filled with the struggle for existence but the church in her weakness says, "Blessed are ye poor, yours is the Kingdom.' ' The dominant activity of the modern Chris- tian church has been social. This is particu- larly true of Protestantism in Great Britain and America. There has been no modern interest in theology as such; no new systems have been created ; the only effort has been* to simplify some of those already in existence, or to at- tempt to harmonize them with various forms of modern knowledge. The great emphasis of the church has been practical. The same is true of the Roman Catholic church since the Vatican Council, and the interest of that church between the German reformation and the Vatican Coun- cil was largely social and ethical, as it has been since 1870. Modern social service, however, has not al- 288 MODERN CHRISTIANITY ways been ecclesiastical, though it has been essentially Christian. The great leaders in all the social reforms of modern times, as well as the great philanthropists, have been sons and daughters of the church. The chief value of re- cent Christian activity has been in the inspira- tion of men rather than in the framing of in- stitutions. Even the comparatively few leaders in social reform who have not been directly connected with churches have been trained in a Christian atmosphere and are representatives of the Christian spirit. This must be true from the very nature of the case, because doubt and negation are al- ways destructive. The best they can do is to clear away ancient errors. It takes faith in men and faith in God to believe in a better world, and to work for it. There are certain fundamental questions that must always be asked. The foremost of these is: does the world improve by conscious and cooperative effort, or does it improve by natural and often unknown forces operating under a common law, vaguely called evolution? If conscious per- sonal and collective efforts are against the prac- tical interests of society, the martyr is not only useless but is also a fool. Faith in the work of man as a reformer and faith in men as ca- 20 289 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH pable of reformation are fundamental to the so- cial worker. This kind of faith is furnished by the Christian religion. There is another question quite as fundamen- tal and that is: Are social evils permanent? Many of them apparently are permanent. Their ravages may be traced in all human gen- erations. The men who think that social evils are permanent, of course, believe that they are incurable. Those who believe them incurable can never become reformers. The faith in the permanence of ancient wrongs is an indictment against all government, both human and di- vine. Human government becomes the part- ner of vice and the bulwark of privilege. Divine government has no meaning at all, and we might as well be atheists at once. For practical purposes an incapable God is the same as no God. Work for the improvement of society depends fundamentally upon the belief that nature is beneficent, and that man is capable. To say that nature is beneficent, put in the theological form, is to declare that there is a good God efficient to cooperate with good men in making a better world. To declare that man is capable, put in social terms, is to assert that if he will he can make natural resources yield to his proposals, and will build 290 MODERN CHRISTIANITY up political and economic institutions that can secure justice and provide plenty. The church has always declared that sin makes misery. The significant note, of modern Christianity is its discovery that misery fosters sin. It is, therefore, necessary to work at both ends of the problem. Viewed from the teach- ing of Jesus and the history of the church, the indictment upon her activity in our day is that misery has seemed to good people more appal- ling than sin. And that means that the social problem has interested the church more than the religious problem. It is not possible to survey the whole field of modern social movements, but it is enough to show that the doctrines already stated are abundantly illustrated in recent history. The state has a right to be judged by its statesmen and not by its yokels ; the art of any period by its poets, painters, sculptors, artisans, and not by its peasants. Every age becomes specially conscious in a limited number who spread their conquering gospel among the multitude in the ages that follow. It is less true of the church than of any other organization for human ac- tion. It would be as absurd to expect as it would be foolish to assert that the church at all times has recognized the direct applications of 291 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH the gospel of Jesus. The burden of paganism in the beginning was too great, and the bur- den of a changing civilization in the after gen- erations has made the thing quite impossible. The democracy of Jesus has furnished the ideals, and the training of the church, even at its worst, has furnished the social saints and heroes. In our own time democracy has taken two forms. The first form is a persistent work- ing out of participation in government by the great masses of the people. The second effort of the democracy has been to secure a correc- tion of social evils and a consequent larger good in the every-day life of the individual. The religious movement in England, called Methodism, is chiefly regarded by the casual readers of history as an emotional awakening in which popular orators went up and down the country preparing people for heaven. John Wesley (1703-1791), however, preached a social gospel. His social gospel was first directed against the evils which abounded. Members of his society were not allowed to smuggle nor to engage in the slave trade. He protested against bribery and corruption in politics. He organ- ized relief work for the poor. His relief bank for the poor, organized in London, seems to have been the first benevolent loan fund ever 292 MODERN CHRISTIANITY established. In his sound doctrine and prac- tical labors, John Wesley, the Methodist, took up the splendid traditions of St. Vincent de Paul, the Koman Catholic, and was later suc- ceeded by Thomas Chalmers, the Presbyterian. Wesley shows what faith in human nature can do even where economic inequality and social injustice are everywhere ascendant. He knew that his peasants and paupers were bound to succeed in life because no obstacle could with- stand the persistent attack of corporate vir- tues. It was corporate virtues which he pro- posed to organize in his societies. Among the evils that Wesley combated was the slave trade. There was no slavery in Eng- land, but there was an economic complacency that permitted commerce to find here a source of wealth. The great leader of the attack upon the slave trade was William Wilberforce (1759- 1833) ; though born of the favored classes, a University man, with everything favorable to a career, he threw himself soul and fortune, brain and position, into the fight of the slave trade which was finally abolished in 1807. It is sometimes said that slavery in America was defended by the church. The whole his- tory of the church had made it the intelligent foe of slavery. In the Southern states the ar- 293 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH guments that were used in defense of the "peculiar institution ' ' were drawn from the Old Testament and not from the New. But the great leaders in the anti-slavery movement were Christian men, and the great force in the Northern states that finally compelled the abo- lition of slavery was the force of the Christian churches. Wendell Phillips (1811-1884), with a political career possible to him unsurpassed by any other American, sacrificed it in the anti- slavery struggle. The Boston merchant could not forgive the fiery reformer. Wendell Phil- lips more than any other man was the prophet of the anti-slavery crusade, and this is what he says: "When I was a boy of fourteen years of age, in the old church in the North End, I heard Lyman Beecher preach on the theme, 1 You belong to God/ And I went home after that service, threw myself on the floor in my room, with locked doors. I prayed: *0 God, I belong to thee ; take what is thine own. I ask this, that whenever a thing be wrong it may have no power of temptation over me; when- ever a thing be right it may take no courage to do it/ From that day to this it has been so. Whenever I have known a thing to be wrong, it has held no temptation. Whenever I have known a thing to be right, it has taken no cour- 294 MODERN CHRISTIANITY age to do it." And the name of Lyman Beecher calls to mind some other of the greatest leaders in that struggle that ended in the emancipation proclamation of Abraham Lincoln. The prisons of England were no worse than those of other European countries, but they were bad enough. So bad that typhus fever, promiscuity of the sexes, starvation or rob- bery were everywhere present. John Howard (1726-1790) was the man who spent his life in agitating a reform which was a direct commen- tary upon the words "I was sick and in prison and ye visited me. ' ' The movement for prison reform which he began has been carried for- ward, not only to the point of cleanliness and order in prisons, but into an entire reconstruc- tion of the whole theory of penology. The code of Moses has gone down before the faith of Jesus, and the first object of prison discipline is not social reprisal, but the reformation of the offender. John Howard not only visited the prisons of England, but those of Europe. In 1729 he went to Russia to visit the prisons and in the military hospital he was attacked by camp fever and died. He was a Christian mar- tyr, not after the foolish fashion of dying for an opinion or a creed, but one who died as a 295 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH teacher and soldier in the holy war to make a better world. No better illustration of actual leadership in the church, full at the same time of prophecy for the future, can be suggested than the name of Charles Kingsley (1819-1875). He was by no means a man of the first rank intellectually, although he was a scholastic leader at Cam- bridge. It was rather his spiritual alertness and his social sympathy that gave him his char- acteristic place. He delights in the rugged Thomas Carlyle, and calls him, "that old He- brew prophet who goes to prince and beggar and says, 'If you do this or that, you shall go to hell.' " As a country curate he learned to understand the rough agricultural and unedu- cated peasantry of England. He mixed with their life, and illustrated the phrase, "muscular Christianity. ' ' He did not see the reason of the rural depression in England, growing out of the industrial revolution, but in "Yeast" he gave a picture of agricultural conditions in England, vivid of poverty and degradation. Later when he came to know London, he wrote "Alton Locke,' ' an appeal for the reform of the city, full of turbulent thinking and wild ap- pealing, and yet coming to the same conclu- sion, "No more of any system, good or bad, but 296 MODERN CHRISTIANITY more of the spirit of God can regenerate the world." The chartist agitation was on, in which Car- lyle and plenty of others had little hope, and yet the new charter had for its chief demands : 1 — Annual parliaments, 2 — Vote by ballot, 3 — Universal suffrage, 4 — No property qualifica- tion for parliament, 5 — Payment of members of parliament, 6 — Equalization of electoral dis- tricts. The proposals were moderate enough, but they were associated with industrial dis- tress. Mobs and uprisings and the great pro- cession intending to present the monster peti- tion melted away before the military precau- tions. Kingsley's view of this and other politi- cal agitations he briefly sums up: "God will only reform society on condition of our reform- ing every man his own self. While the devil is quite ready to help us mend the laws and the parliament, earth and heaven, without ever starting such an impertinent and personal ques- tion as that of, man should mend himself. ,, Yet Kingsley, perhaps even more than F. D. Mau- rice, was the leader of the movement known as Christian socialism. It was as long ago as 1851 that he preached in London his sermon on the "Message of the church to the working man." The storm broke because of its revolutionary 297 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH character. He was forbidden by the Bishop to preach in London and left for the Continent, broken in health and spirit. It was then he wrote l i Hypatia "asa rest to the tumult of his soul. A strange man was he, filled with a sense of the Greek beauty and an ardent lover of nature, so that it is possible that with him, as with many another man, the impulse to reform is not purely humanitarian, but partly because social and moral ugliness are an offence to the aesthetic sense. He came to see that a positive reform program is necessary and among the problems in which he worked were the better housing of the poor, sanitary reform, and the promotion of industrial cooperation. He re- garded the ills of the people as social sins. He declined to believe that what was wanted in an epidemic of cholera was special prayer, but he thought there should be a better water sup- ply, and the people should not be permitted to drink water out of the common sewers. He proposed to buy up the nests of fever and plague and clean them out. It was not in what he directly accomplished that Kingsley was significant, but it was that his literary gift lent itself to the social cause and he became the foremost in influence of that school of literary men, among whom were Victor Hugo, Charles 298 MODERN CHRISTIANITY Dickens, Walter Besant, and many others who preached the gospel, not in terms of theology, but, after the manner of their Master, in para- bles of life, so vivid and intense that men were stirred because they understood. The statesman of English social reform, whose labors have had results throughout civi- lization, was the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury (1801-1885). It was he who saw the degrada- tion that had come upon all England where household industries had been carried into fac- tories and where agricultural laborers had been compelled to move to the cities. "We can hardly read the story of the struggle for a ten-hour day without instruction as to the reasons why many reforms have moved slowly. So great and good a man as John Bright looked through the spectacles of the manufacturing class and could not see the needs and rights of his people. John Bright was not only a great orator, but a sincere Christian and an essential democrat. He illustrates as well as any other man the necessary obstacles which must be encountered in converting ideals into working institutions. If good men are slow, and bad and selfish men are eager antagonists, the victorious leader- ship does not rest upon the skill and ability of the leaders alone, but on their fidelity to an 299 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH essential force in human history which became vocal in Jesus and organic in his church. The labors of the Earl of Shaftesbury, and the great results he secured, mark him as the most important, practical man of his time in manifesting the social spirit of Christianity. The Ten Hours bill was carried in 1847; but that was not enough. The swift fingers of women and children were useful and cheap in managing the new machinery. Sanitary condi- tions were wholly neglected and the integrity and health of the English people were threat- ened. In 1874 the Factory Act for hours, sani- tation and child labor was passed. Shaftesbury also secured legislation to make the life of coal miners more secure and their labor less ardu- ous. But it was not alone in legislation that he saw the necessary conditions for a new and better world. He founded what was known as the ' ' Ragged School Union, ' ' having for its ob- ject the teaching of the children of the poor and furnishing a good cause with a very bad name. He established reformatories and ref- uges for prisoners. He knew that the labor- ing people needed not alone the help of legis- lation, but needed the uplift of social organiza- tion and of education. He interested himself, therefore, in institutes for working men and in 300 MODERN CHRISTIANITY the education of the working classes. He was the rallying point for a great circle of earnest men and women who felt a new seriousness in life, and who recognized almost for the first time that the best proof of salvation in any other world is a vigorous effort to redeem the homes and activities of men and women in this world. Shaftesbury was without any question more influential because he was a belted Earl than he could have been otherwise, but he was a social democrat in the best sense only because he was a Christian. He recognized other obli- gations besides those that have been mentioned, and he was one of the founders of the Young Men's Christian Association, and one of the most active promoters of foreign missions. These are illustrative heroes, who through faith have forsaken the Egypt of the visible to seek the Promised Land of the better life for the common man. They believed so intensely in the good life that wherever they have lived they have always desired a better country, and the reforms and the causes which they repre- sent, named here, are only illustrations of the great cloud of witnesses that compass us about out of the last three generations, and who have wrought against every social evil and for every. 301 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH common good, until the promise of the new life is already seen in greater opportunities, more abundant comforts, the shortening of labor, the lengthening of pleasure, the deepening of cul- ture, and the broad expansion of the common weal. The social spirit of Christianity has gone far beyond the direct and quiet activities of the church. It has provided parks and playgrounds, libraries and reading rooms, laws for public health, wiser as well as more abundant chari- ties ; and the great army of social workers have been the sons and daughters of the church. The money that has carried on the campaign has nearly all come from active members of the church. But most of all and deepest of all the great ideals of Jesus have inspired their souls, and His great commandments have compelled their lives. There still remain many battles to be fought, but he is blind to the lesson of our time who does not see that the social spirit is the soul of modern life, and that every- where the note of sympathy is the note of power. There are movements outside of the church in the interest of a larger democracy that have to be reckoned with, and one that is very char- 302 MODERN CHRISTIANITY acteristic is connected with the name of Giu- seppe Mazzini (1805-1872). Mazzini was the prophet of the revolutionary movements of 1848 which spread throughout all of Europe, and which for the most part seemed to fail, while in reality they succeeded in changing the rela- tions of government to people in practically every country of Europe. It was a rebirth of the French Eevolution in a new form. It was less dramatic, but it was more widespread. There was less blood and more intelligence. The new international spirit was awakened, and men began to see that political boundaries did not separate human needs. Mazzini, a young student at the University of Genoa, felt the throbbing of this new life. He early formed a group of students who shared his view. He* assisted in extending secret societies of revolu- tionaries. He turns from his early associates because there stirs in him the soul of a deeper revolt. He is not content with the material- ism of his associates. He is a leader of men at twenty-six, the head of a party called, ••Young Italy,'' and he visits Switzerland and France to extend his new movement. He is ex- pelled from France and the revolt of " Young Italy" is suppressed. In his absence he is tried and condemned to death, but his answer is the 303 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH organization of " Young Europe" in Switzer- land with headquarters at Geneva. As early as 1837, by the joint request of European governments, Mazzini was expelled from Geneva and at the age of thirty-two he finds a refuge in the city of London, where a certain company of men became his friends, and the center of the company was one Thomas Carlyle, who denounced all democracies, but who loved all democrats. The vital thing about Mazzini was his union of idealism with politics. He seemed to have little interest in social questions as ordinarily understood, nor did he believe that the gospel of political freedom, as it had been preached by the men of the revolution in France, as well as by Franklin and Jefferson in America, was final. As a matter of course all questions, political and economic, must be considered, but they were not fundamental. He found lib- erty itself was only a negative condition and the positive good was not the free individual but fellowship among all men. Hence the real aim of human life is to realize the Godlike in man under a human law in a progressive spirit- ual commonwealth. It was a vast dream he had and strangely like a new incarnation of the Gal- ilean dream of the Kingdom of God. 304 MODERN CHRISTIANITY He always insisted that his movement was a religious one. Though he felt himself a citizen of the world he was intensely an Italian. He declared that the mission of Italy was one of leadership. At the beginning it had sent forth the word that recreated the pagan world; then the word of the Eenaissance that developed modern life; and now it must send forth the third saving word of religious regeneration. In substance this is his creed : 1. — Politics accepts a man as he is; religion seeks to transform him. 2. — Eight is the faith of the individual; duty the collective faith. 3. — We believe in one God. 4. — We believe in one law, physical and moral. 5. — We believe in the progressive development of man. 6. — We believe in humanity, the collective being, r 7. — We believe in active association, expressive of faith in one God, one law, one humanity. For Italy he proposed a republic under law, in which there should be a free state and a free church. In 1846 Pius IX ascended the papal throne. These two men stand over against each other. Pius IX began his career with liberal promises. He evidently aimed at a union of the Italian states under papal su- premacy. Eome became a municipality. The papal states were granted a constitution and 21 305 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH the United Italy which had been compelled by the iron hand of Napoleon seemed about to re- appear, under the gloved hand of a great pope. But 1848 came, more concessions were de- manded by the people, and the new pope fled from the city. The greatest opportunity in his- tory for the Roman Catholic church was lost when Pius IX revoked his liberal concessions. For had he joined himself to the republican movement the papal throne would have by that one act won an immortality for at least a thousand years. Instead of the republic there came the French occupation, Mazzini is re- placed by Cavour, and the republic by Victor Emmanuel. It is one of those pathetic reversals in human history, that a reign which began with a reformation should complete itself with the Vatican Council, and whose decrees were pro- mulgated at the same time that the unity of Italy was proclaimed. The thing that makes Mazzini and his cause significant is that it opposes deeply the crude individualism of a certain form of democracy, which is nothing less than another kind of an- archy. He knew that the theory of human rights is the creed of revolution. He recognized that sacrifice must be the basis of great move- ments, and there can be no such thing as the 306 MODERN CHRISTIANITY common collective faith in duty when the in- terests even of the multitude became control- ling. On the other hand he declares "the Christ came and only asked a cross whereon to die in order to save the world." This deeper philos- ophy of faith is the source of the modern move- ment for social uplift. It is this that has sent Father Damien to live among the lepers, and Arnold Toynbee to burn out his life in East London. It is this that sends men and women of wealth and pleasure down to live in the slums to fight the social tigers who are living upon the life blood of women and children. The form of the modern creeds may vary and Chris- tian activity may not care so much for its rit- ual or its architecture as hitherto, but it is none the less pulsing with the divine life and performing a regenerating work. And since in all times men have never lived above their creed, and have never acted beyond the vital forces within ; so at last the splendid social im- pulse will need to refresh itself at the divine fountains and in some form or other there must be a saving sacrament to prepare men and women for the further toil and struggle that intervene before the race inherits the final glory of a new life. The criticism of the church in our time is not 307 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH that it has forgotten the social spirit of the teaching of Jesus, it is rather that it is in need of that source of wonder and awe, parent also of compassion for men, found in the experi- ence, "I and my Father are One." CHAPTEE X THE DEMOCRACY OF TO-MORROW Dean Swift never meant "Gulliver's Travels" to be regarded as a Baedeker. Re- flections on life, either individual or social, thrown into a form of fancy, must not be taken too seriously. Lord Macaulay in his essay, "Plato and Bacon,' ' seems to me to miss the humor of the situation when he says, ' ' An acre in Middlesex is better than a principality in Utopia." I have no idea that Sir Thomas More ever meant to make his blessed island a permanent and literal joy in prose, and at any rate the joys of one generation are often the despair of the next. For example, read this: "It is ordinary to have public lectures every morning before daybreak at which none are obliged to appear but those who are marked out for literature. Yet a great many, both men and women, of all ranks came to hear lectures of one sort or other, according to their inclination." It is scarcely necessary to make 309 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH even a comment in onr time npon a habit like that. Then think of this: "Throughout the island they wear the same sort of clothes with- out any other distinction except what is neces- sary to distinguish the two sexes.' ' With lec- tures at daybreak and no milliners, an acre almost anywhere would be better than the whole of Utopia. It is not, therefore, in the de- lightful vagaries of literary creation that we are to look for the life and wisdom that belong to a new world. It is rather by the interplay of deep and vital forces in the actual strug- gles of human history where by a selective proc- ess, human and divine, the good is saved and the bad is thrown away, generation by genera- tion. The essence of the meaning of the word de- mocracy for a long time was purely political. / It means the participation of the whole body of citizens in the affairs of state, and the more equal was the participation of citizens the more nearly the form of government approached a pure democracy. Such a state has not yet ex- isted except in comparatively small communi- ties, and in such communities the most of the people have been excluded from the ranks of the citizens, as was the case in pagan Athens, and in Christian Geneva. The 310 THE DEMOCRACY OF TO-MORROW evolution of the state has taken many forms which cannot here be traced, but for a state to have size and power it has been necessary for the government to become complex. The sav- age tribe may have a form of democracy when there is no property and no danger, but when a people have enough resources to stir the envy of greedy neighbors, and when the num- bers become large, it is necessary for the powers of the state to be distributed. The bar- baric chief who had assumed practically all the functions of government gave way to the civil- ized ruler who delegates his authority to priest and soldier, to judge and law-makers. The great change that has come over the world can be illustrated by comparing the action of Jus- tinian, who appointed a commission to make a Eoman code to which his will gave authority, with the modern law-making assembly which represents not the throne but the people, and to which the throne itself is compelled to bow. The division of the power of the state into three parts, the executive, the legislative, and the judiciary, in some way or other becomes typical of the modern state. In' England the extension of suffrage has been paralleled by the growth of the power of the House of Commons, which by recent events 311 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH has become the dictator of the English govern- ment. In the United States the question of equal suffrage for all men was long ago set- tled. But here the judicial authority with the aid of the constitution is perhaps greater than in any other country. Movements are now in progress to imitate in America the public as- sembly of Athens, and the democratic authority in Switzerland, through what are known as the Initiative and Eeferendum. No country has ever faced such difficulties of democracy as those which front the United States. In its population, made up of a complex of alien races, of diverse forms of culture, faiths and tradi- tions, there is wanting that coherent social mind which is always supreme over merely for- mal institutions. In spite of all the problems and all the failures, it has only been within the last twenty years that there has been any ques- tion among the masses of Americans as to the efficiency of a democratic form of government. Every kind of prosperity which America had because it was young and the country sparsely settled, and every form of evil that the coun- tries of Europe supplied because it was old and thickly settled, were charged to the account of the form of the state. It has been discovered that the form of de- 312 THE DEMOCRACY OF TO-MORROW mocracy is not sufficient to solve human prob- lems. In spite of manhood suffrage, canal boys and tailors becoming president, with op- portunity for political honor avowedly open to all, much remains to be done. One school of thinkers are willing to assert that the state should not attempt too much. Plato in the Laws taught that it was the object of the state to make its people virtuous. A modern re- former is sure that it is the end of the state to make the people comfortable. It has already been noted that the state has assumed an authority broader than ever before, and has assumed duties unknown to the politi- cal institutions of the past. With the growing power of the state, and with the multiplication of its activities, there has come also an increas- ing volume of discontent. The state, say the critics, should be more and should do more. It is not enough for the state to maintain the Marquis of Queensbury rules and insist upon fair play in that social and economical encoun- ter which we call the struggle for existence. An impoverished state is an unworthy state. It must protect the weak and care for the poor. If a man is starving, a loaf of bread is better than a vote. In the United States there is a widespread feeling that votes are manipulated 313 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH by experience and cunning, that legislation is often in the interest of the rich and the strong, that justice is sometimes too slow and too ex- pensive for the use of the poor, and that the ballot under the present forms of government is not of very great value. To add to the criticism bred by party organi- zation and control, comes another criticism with respect to the people themselves. If the elec- tion is close in any particular state, the result will depend upon the amount of money to be used — for there is everywhere a purchasable vote. That a man should be willing to sell his choice of public servants and public policies for a few dollars, if we knew no more of human life and its forces, seems an echo of the burial service over the grave of the Republic. The evolution of political democracy was an exceedingly slow and painful process. It is now practically completed in most civilized countries whatever may be the nominal form of govern- ment. From the days of the pre-revolutionary writers in France, for fully one hundred years, it was believed to be the final end of organized society. At the very moment when its success is greatest and most widespread there comes a universal skepticism of its efficiency. It is curious also that the skepticism is equally as 314 THE DEMOCRACY OF TO-MORROW general and as paralyzing among the masses of men whom democracy was supposed to serve as among any other rank of society. The skepticism is here, but somehow it is not in respect to democracy itself, for that is felt to be a term of far wider meaning than had been supposed, and men are asking for some new expression that will make it more efficient in human society. If free ballots and free par- liaments are not enough to secure the good of life, and if the state, as now organized, fails to provide the needed good, and suppress the dreaded evils, some new measure must be taken and some new form of organization must be found. Pending the search for a new interpre- tation of democracy, there is no serious pro- posal to give up the political liberty now en- joyed by the common man. There is plenty of defense for manhood suffrage, Bills of Eights, free constitutions and free assemblies : but even now there is a clamor in almost every country for more democracy. Sometimes it is Votes for Women, sometimes direct legislation, some- times the popular veto and sometimes the pub- lic censorship of the decisions of the courts. Beneath all the clamor there is a feeling that more democracy is only a means to an end. There is a purpose quite blind, if not wholly 315 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH dumb, to compel the state to sail uncharted seas; and to become the heroic instrument of human salvation from every evil that afflicts, and from every peril that threatens. Political de- mocracy has done much, but it has not done well enough, and many voices are heard to say that the only cure for what failures there are is still more democracy. Many men who turn their backs upon poliii- f> \ cal democracy as a worn-out achievement turn their faces toward what they call industrial democracy as the final solution of human ills. The doctrine of industrial democracy depends in the last analysis upon what is known as the economic interpretation of history. Eaces have grown great because of favorable soil and cli- mate and abundance of natural resources. Malthus is so far right that it seems to be con- ceded that population expands to the limit of the food supply. Numbers of authorities teach us that the kind of people in any country de- pends upon the kind of food they have to eat, and particularly was all this true before com- merce made all things common between the nations. Slavery came into existence to meet an agri- ^ cultural need and is bound to vanish when slav- ery is no longer profitable. Slavery, however, 316 THE DEMOCRACY OF TO-MORROW is a mitigation of human misery, because the property instinct makes the brute man more careful of his chattel than he is merciful to the perishing beggar. Serfdom differs from slavery in that there are certain services which the man must per- form for his master, and after that he is free. There are certain duties which he owes, but the law fixes bounds to the power of his lord. Serf- dom was a protection to the weak man quite as much as to the master who controlled him. If the master had a right to his services, he had a right to the soil upon which he lived, and the code of Justinian protects the serf in his per- sonal rights, and also in his rights to the land. An effort was made in various countries to limit the amount of tax which could be levied upon the serf, and also to deny to the land- owner the right of eviction. During the feudal system it was worth while to be the serf of some powerful noble, because in that way there was security of food and of life. With the de- cay of the feudal system there arose free ten- ants, and afterwards ownership of land by peasants. The thing has followed different courses in different countries. But as society has changed its form, it has altered the nature and order of human rights. 317 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH As modern life tended to set free the agricul- tural laborer, on the other hand it furnished new bounds for the artisan. Work by hand could not compete with work by the machine. The household spinning wheel was sent to the attic and the household loom was dumb. With the advent of the machine, the whole nature of industry was changed. The free cities, because of their wealth-breeding power, have won for the artisan relief from feudalism ; but there was a new feudalism born out of the union of capi- tal and skill. The master of the machine and of money knew what to do. This new feudalism has continued practically unbroken for a hun- dred years. Along with the new baronage, which too often has known no chivalry, has gone the tenement house landlord, and combin- ing with those who control the means of trans- portation by land and water has risen a great and successful power, in whose presence such phrases as " Equality before the law," "Justice for all," "The rights of man" are like sound- ing brass and clanging cymbals. Christian philanthropy for at least sixty years has been adding new laws to the statute books, which have defined new crimes and pro- duced new penalties. They have also fur- nished new protection for those who were too 318 THE DEMOCRACY OF TO-MORROW weak to help themselves. It has been a splen- did and heroic struggle against visible evils, but men and women who are in the midst of the fight feel that, in spite of all that has been done, the roots of the evil still sink deep into the earth, and the branches of it shut out the sun. The effort of industrial democracy, there- fore, is to destroy by some means or other the new feudalism. Many remedies have been sug- gested and more plans have been proposed than can be here detailed. The first effort of the industrial democracy to find itself came through combinations of workmen to secure larger wages and better con- ditions of labor, which has culminated in the trade unions and other labor organizations of our day. England being the great manufac- turing country, it was natural that there the problem should find its early form. Under the English common law all combinations on the part of the working people to affect wages and conditions were regarded as illegal. Since the men could not act publicly, the workers in shops and factories formed a large number of secret societies. The opening of the nineteenth century was signalized by an Act of Parlia- ment, making it a crime for persons to com- bine with others to advance their wages or to 319 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH decrease the amount of their work. After twenty-five years there was an effort by par- liament to permit association of masters, upon the one hand, and workmen, upon the other, to make mutual agreements. With much irrita- tion and friction the matter went forward and it was not until 1865 that trade unions had a legal existence. It was a long and bitter fight between employers and the employed. In America combinations of workmen did not commence so early, nor did they encounter in the beginning any such hostility. Since each state managed its own matters, the national government had neither the temptation nor the power to enforce restrictive legislation. The fight in England was practically a fight for Trade Unionism in all other countries. Ger- many did not become a manufacturing country to any large extent until the question of the right of the men to combine was practically set- tled. In recent years combinations of employ- ers, more secret and sometimes more far-reach- ing and powerful than the labor unions, have been organized. Some of these have been very significant in the United States. The object of the trade unions has been principally to se- cure shorter hours and higher wages, but inci- dentally in combination with other agencies 320 THE DEMOCRACY OF TO-MORROW they have sought to obtain laws in favor of the liability of employers for accidents to work- men; for improved sanitation, and for other benefits to those engaged in labor. The various trades have differed very much in the concession obtained from the employ- ers. In some of them the men have been so well organized that they have won easy vic- tories. In others the masters have been better organized and have had such large capital that they could afford to resist the demands of the men. On the whole the result of the struggle has been in favor of the man who works with his hands. Hours of labor have been steadily reduced, and wages have been increased. In many cases collective bargaining between the representatives of the unions upon the one side and of the employers upon the other has set- tled details of labor and wages for all the men engaged in a particular craft. The successes of skilled labor well organized have been at the expense, however, of that larger mass of labor in every country which is unskilled and which cannot be organized. The higher wages of the union men have increased the cost of living and the prices of goods manufactured under the new terms. The unskilled and unorganized men must pay more for their existence because 22 32i DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH of the successes of their fortunate brethren, who are the aristocrats of the working classes. It is not surprising that organized labor has made many mistakes, has often been rightly charged with violence; so much so that many wise men regard labor leaders as enemies of mankind. Students of society, whichever way their sympathies may be, see the armed neu- trality of every-day life, and the violent hostili- ties of open conflict when occasion arises, and are profoundly impressed that we are living in a state of industrial war. A truce may be de- clared for one or more years, but battle may be waged at any time. No one feels that the labor situation is set- tled or that the present organization is final. In some places opportunities of conciliation or arbitration with the right to advise simply have been established or proposed. Other groups of men think it better to provide for compul- sory arbitration in all labor disputes. This pro- gram is as much condemned by the work- men as it is by the employers. The value of the unions in the long struggle for a living wage and larger opportunity cannot be questioned. But the domination of the labor unions as the controlling factor in industrial society would set aside the state, would spoil the poorest of 322 THE DEMOCRACY OF TO-MORROW the poor, and bring in industrial chaos. But the workers had to fight the battle they have fought, and the world could not have got along without their victories. Were there no other reasons, the fact that the labor unions cared chiefly for their own interest and not for the interest of the unorganized and unskilled, makes it evident that we cannot find here the solution of the industrial democracy. The last century produced also Cooperation as a form of industrial organization. The early efforts were nearly all failures, but as time has gone on more and more fields have been suc- cessfully invaded. Families have combined to- gether to buy their own food and clothes, to eliminate the shopkeeper and to make incomes go further in securing the comforts of life. The procuring of merchandise has been one of the most successful forms of cooperation. In a number of countries it has been applied to the marketing of farm products, and to a more lim- ited extent in manufacturing. The British co- operators have organized their buying upon so large a scale that they bring whole cargoes of produce from foreign countries, and distribute them successfully and cheaply. In manufacturing enterprises the success has not been nearly so considerable. The rea- 323 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH son is not far to seek. The competition in man- ufacturing is very great and the success de- pends upon individual initiative, upon ability to buy the raw material and sell the finished product on the best terms, but especially to take advantage of new and improved methods in the production of the goods. As a rule, the ablest men do not voluntarily go into coopera- tion or remain in it, because there are for them larger prizes in other forms of commercial ac- tivity. In many places where cooperation has been tried it has been abandoned. But for lim- ited use, such as the marketing of common products on the one hand or the purchase of the common necessaries of life upon the other, it has evident advantages and manifest successes. Cooperation therefore is not sufficient to se- cure industrial democracy. Methods of the trades union and the methods of the cooperators alike are scorned by those who believe in the industrial functions of the state. The Hebrews believed that the land be- longed to God. The ancient theory was that the final ownership of the land was in all the people, organized as the state. The Eoman law, emphasizing the right of private property, has dominated the modern world. Gigantic combinations of capital are a part of modern 324 THE DEMOCRACY OF TO-MORROW history. The exclusion of the multitudes from the land in the older countries by landlords, whose final title often rested in the gift of plunderers; and in younger countries the pos- session of mines and forests, of great tracts of land by government donations to railroads, of water powers obtained by franchise upon terms that amount to common robbery, the ex- ploitation of municipalities by the private own- ership of public utilities, are part of the rea- sons for asserting that all the means of pro- duction of every kind should be owned by the state, and should be available on equal terms to all the people. It is difficult to discuss socialism as a form of industrial democracy, because the socialists in most countries are opportunists with a lim- ited and a different program. "In the house of socialism as in the house of God there are many mansions." 1 No authoritative creed of final socialism has ever been written, and no master of economic theory is recognized as the author of any working plan by which socialism can be applied to carrying on the opera- tions of production and distribution. The so- cialist promises relief from all social and in- dustrial ills in the new system which will be 1 H. G. Wells, "New Worlds for Old," p. 328. 325 -) DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH introduced whenever the new system is agreed upon. Meantime this is a little vague for prac- tical men. The strength of socialism lies in the fact that there are real evils to be com- bated, and that some men are disgracefully rich and others are disgracefully poor. It would be extremely difficult to reorganize society and hunt down the inequalities of for- tune to ancient sources and redress hoary wrongs. A new and increasing school of practical statesmen are of the opinion that greater equal- ity of fortune and of opportunity can be se- cured through new methods of taxation. Sam- ples of the proposed plans are the single land tax, inheritance taxes increasing in size as the fortune increases, a graduated income tax that would leave moderate incomes free and severely penalize those that are very large. Some of these methods with more or less caution are being employed in different countries. The argument against industrial democracy is much more persistent than that against polit- ical democracy as the interests are more inti- mate. Men say that initiative depends upon in- centive. Unless a man can reap all the re- wards of the struggle of brain and will, self- denial and patience, with all the other economic 326 THE DEMOCRACY OF TO-MORROW virtues, lie will not cultivate the virtues. It is urged that many of the richest men in modern times began poor, and their victories appear to some men as valorous as those ever won upon any field of human endeavor. In these matters it is urged that the struggle for exist- ence is still the law of life, and if you prevent the rewards of the fittest you will also pre- vent their survival, for industrially the fittest are the result of artificial selection. There is a noble passion for justice voiced in the demand for an industrial democracy. Many special privileges have passed away, others are sure to go. In some form or other the rights of the multitude are to receive a larger economic recognition. The weakness of industrial democracy is not in its clamor for a more equitable division of the product of toil, but its fatal weakness is that it does not pro- vide for an adequate increase in the product of toil, nor does it provide guarantees that larger means distributed among the people will be ac- companied by the wider knowledge and the greater self-control adequate for the success- ful use of the additional income. All the various theories of industrial democ- racy may be justly classed with the summing up of Socialism by Mr. Wells, one of its ablest 327 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH exponents: "But Socialism is no panacea, no magic 'Open Sesame' to the millennium. Socialism lights up certain once hopeless evils in human affairs and shows the path by which escape is possible, but it leaves that path rugged and difficult. Socialism is hope, but it is not assurance. Throughout this book I have tried to keep that before the reader. Directly- one accepts those great generalizations, one passes on to a jungle of incurably intricate problems through which man has to make his way or fail, the riddles and inconsistencies of human character, the puzzles of collective ac- tion, the power and decay of traditions, the per- petually recurring tasks and problems of edu- cation. ' ' 1 Another form of democracy which is making insistent claim for recognition in devious ways, for want of a better term, may be called "Vital Democracy." It is a movement that has en- listed both public and private forces, and some of the laborers are scarcely aware that others are at work in the same vineyard. It includes at the one end the custodial care of the feeble- minded and of the insane, and at the other end the proposals of Eugenics, sometimes called a science, and certainly furnished with an ex- 1 Wells, "New Worlds for Old," p. 332. 328 THE DEMOCRACY OF TO-MORROW cellent name. Both the legal custody and the public discussion are useful. It is not possible in this place to enter into any full discussion of the theories involved, but the whole move- ment may be briefly sketched. Various voices are calling for physical fitness for parenthood. The program would exclude such wards of the state as the feeble-minded, the insane and the pauper. In regard to these classes there can be no debate. Others would exclude from the sacred vocation all alcoholics and tuber- culous persons. Here we have a cross-section of society, for persons of these types are found in all the social classes. The question of maternity among the hard- working poor is quite a different problem. Many urge that the state in some way or other should see to it that every mother is not com- pelled to do hard labor or be deprived of nour- ishing food, or allowed to live in unwholesome surroundings prior to the birth of her child. The economic cost of the care of motherhood it is believed would be far more than compen- sated in the increased vitality and earning power of the coming generation. The new doc- trine is that the state owes something to the unborn child. It has a duty to see that the parents are physically fit and that the conditions 329 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH surrounding the coming into the world are such as to promise a sound physical organism. It is curious that with the definite movement in favor of the poor, than which nothing can be more soundly grounded in social argument, there seems to be no corresponding alarm for the well-being of the children of the well-to-do. It is comparatively easy to furnish mothers with proper food, and to give them a sufficient vacation from labor, but by what legal meas- ures can the motherhood of the better classes be safeguarded from all the social and per- sonal excesses which deprive the child of his natural birthright of health and vitality! The practical application of the rule that it is the business of the state to see that the child is well born will fail from top to bottom among all social classes unless the sacredness of the obli- gation is recognized by the individual, and wis- dom and love work together. Among depraved people maternity pensions and more food and drink may mean worse and not better chil- dren — just as among those who have plenty of money the greed for current pleasure is an appetite that must be fed even though it robs the vitality of the unborn child. It is probable that more children after they are born into the world suffer from the igno- 330 THE DEMOCRACY OF TO-MORROW ranee than from the vices of their parents. The state has invaded the home to say that parents who are too poor to care for their children, according to a proper physical standard, or too vicious to furnish proper moral standards, are to be deprived of the custody of their offspring. We are not yet prepared to adopt the doctrine of Plato that the state should care for the up- bringing of all the children, but society is seek- ing an increasing share in this work as a fixed social obligation. Beside the care of the children of the poor and of the vicious, in various forms a far greater movement for the improvement of hu- man life is in progress. The state declares that it will look after the purity of foods, see that the water and milk are clean and whole- some, and increasingly seeks to secure sanitary conditions in the dwellings of all the people. Much has been already done with respect to the housing problem: but much more remains to be done; perfect drainage and sewerage, light and air spaces, clean streets and alleys are only part of the program. It includes play- grounds for the children and parks for all the people. The modern tendency is for cities to break up their narrow limits and spread fur- ther and further into God's free light and air. 331 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH Filth diseases must be banished. Infectious and contagious diseases of every kind must be held within the narrowest limits, and the ac- tive war upon the " white plague' ' is only one vigorous form of assault upon all the enemies of human bodies. Public health lectures abound and a wider knowledge of the laws of life is furnished through the schools than ever before. People are learning how to organize diets to build a body, and to protect themselves against the inroads of disease. The success of the movement for a vital democracy is seen in the reduction of the death rate in nearly all the great cities of the world, and in an increase in the average of human life. There are some peculiar difficulties which stand across the path of this wide social move- ment. Alcoholism precedes and follows neuras- thenia. Even latent tuberculosis in one gener- ation often means feeblemindedness in the next, and the vices of the rich in most coun- tries are greater than the vices of the poor. The desire for a vital democracy is at once in- telligent and powerful, but the means to se- cure it must be something more than material comfort. Even so fine a race as the citizenship of Athens could not survive its own prosperity. f Political democracy is an effort to secure to 332 THE DEMOCRACY OF TO-MORROW the common man a voice in the affairs of gov- ernment. Industrial democracy is an effort to furnish him at least his fair share of the product of industry. Vital democracy is an effort to give to every child a sound body and the opportunity for successful physical devel- opment. All of these forms of democracy, in so far as they have been successful in the world, have succeeded because they are applications of the democracy of Jesus ; and the limitations and failures of them occur because they have rejected His basic teaching, which is ethical, and have failed to comprehend His final form of organization which is the kingdom of God. The failure of the political democracy con- sists in its enormous demand for intelligence and virtue among the common people. They are cheated by cheap party cries, they are won by the promises of immediate benefits, they are the prey of the shrewd, the sagacious, and the selfish. The strong men make the laws, and, when they do not make them, they know how to evade their operation. A political democ- racy is no doubt the finest form of government that the world has yet seen, but it can never be satisfactory until the men living under it have learned the practical application of ethics to life. Political democracy was so great a 333 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH gain that it seems a pity it was so great a dis- appointment. Industrial democracy is an effort to seek jus- tice and in some form or other deserves the support of every right-thinking man. But the basic view of industrial democracy is that vir- tue depends upon comfort. Cure the economic ills, and all the other evils will disappear. If you wish men to behave well, feed them well. Now all history proves exactly the opposite. Men rarely steal because they want something to eat. They steal because they do not wish to work. Men are rarely vicious because they have too little, their vices grow with the abun- dance of their possessions. It is the plain working people of any country who furnish the reservoir of its moral life. It is probable that the world now has as much comfort as its moral strength will support. It is even pos- sible that many of the evils of modern society arise from the possession of too much comfort. No doubt the dream of a perfect race, well born and well reared, is a necessary part of any beautiful program of the future. No word must be said to dim the vision or weaken the energy of those faithful men and women who have been working to this end. It is well, but it is not adequate. The saints, the poets, the phi- 334 THE DEMOCRACY OP TO-MORROW losophers, the prophets, the martyrs cannot be weighed upon scales, and measured in the pro- portions of Apollo. Many of whom the world has not been worthy have inherited weakness of the flesh, and then have burned that out with the imperial fires of a too eager soul. It has not been discovered that the Catilines, the Aaron Burrs, the Benedict Arnolds, and the whole rogues' gallery of a lesser breed have been antisocial in proportion as they have been weighed and measured and found wanting. The fatal weakness of the new teaching called Eugenics is in the supposition that man may be bred like other animals. But this is not true. The social forces that control him are more powerful than the physical organization of the individual. Great ideas and great passions have meant more to men than a great physique. Man is a good deal of an animal and something of a brute, but for all that he has a transcen- dental element. He has the citizenship of the universe and may feel within him the quicken- ing of the God-like. It all comes to this: the world so far as we can now see it will never have a democracy worth having upon any other terms than those of Jesus. He did not teach that material well- being and proper economic organization were 335 DEMOCEACY AND THE CHURCH the final end of the social order. He did teach that "a man's life consisteth not in the abun- dance of the things which he possesseth," 1 and bade his disciples beware of covetousness. A greedy democracy is no more lovely in His eyes than the brutality of Matthew or the sensuality of the rich young man. The movement for a better world has been progressive. The ground has been fought for inch by inch and the battle has been won step by step. The noblest men have had visions of a redeemed earth, only to die broken-hearted upon defeated battle-fields. Out of all the conflict of abhorrent forces it becomes clearer every day that the new earth can only come to a race that has conquered animalism and has risen to the ranks of a brotherhood founded upon love. Mere social, political or economic conventions are like trea- ties between nations, made to be broken as soon as some other arrangement seems more profit- able. The Kingdom of God cannot be had upon any such terms. Jesus came proclaiming a new Kingdom of God about to be born, but his warning hand held men back and bade them pause upon its threshold; for entrance to this holy place was only for those baptized with the Holy Spirit and with fire. The Kingdom of ^uke 12: 15. 336 THE DEMOCRACY OF TO-MORROW God was something too noble for those who were ignoble. John had well said, "His fan is in his hand, and he will thoroughly purge his floor." 1 But what was this Kingdom of God, the cen- tral thought of His good tidings? Was it after all a new institution, a discovery of an appli- cation of fresh laws of economics? Men were quickened by his speech and were eager for its early fulfillment. They thought it was some- thing to stand over against the Eoman empire and to restore the glory of the throne of David. But when the Pharisees asked when the kingdom of God should come, He chilled all earthly ambition with this statement: "The Kingdom of God cometh not with observation ; neither shall they say, lo ! here, or lo ! there. ' ' 2 But there was also the warmth of an inextin- guishable mystic glow in the further saying, "Behold the Kingdom of God is within you." All this is either nonsense or it is the deepest wisdom. Does He mean that we shall not seek to better earthly conditions or to improve the current forms of social life by such reforms as may be possible? By no means. He teaches that the outward Kingdom of God can be no fairer and no surer than the Kingdom created 1 Matt. 3 : 12. a Luke 17 : 20-21. 23 337 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH in the social mind, the social conscience, and the social will. More plainly does He put the doctrine in the Sermon on the Mount, when He declares that the Gentiles seek after food and raiment and all physical good, and then He commands, ' ' Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you." The Kingdom of God is for God-like men, and for no others. It is vain to maim the strongest so that their selfishness shall be ineffectual, if thereby we enthrone the weakest, for the selfishness of the latter will be ineffectual even with crown and scepter. It is only as the world is ruled by a new law that these problems can finally be solved. The race is coming into its new society be- cause more and more it is learning the lesson of Jesus. Never in all the centuries have so many men and women as now been ready to give their lives for the lives of others. An ever-increas- ing and glorious company in all ranks and pro- fessions are saying to the hungry world, Eat of my body and drink of my blood for I give you my life. With the widening of this ever- lasting sacrament, the inner kingdom of God will be answered by the glory of the outward kingdom of God, covering the world with plenty, with beauty, and with peace. The doctrine of 338 THE DEMOCRACY OF TO-MORROW Jesus is that a triumphant democracy must be an ethical democracy. From this final judg- ment of the Son of Man there is no appeal. It may be noted that some very wise and far- seeing men have always fought against democ- racy in every form. Carlyle was wrong in his opposition to Chartism, but he was fundamen- tally right in the philosophy upon which he based his opposition. There can be no just government except by the wise and the good. The government of the strong without wisdom is a brute tyranny, but the government of the wise without goodness refines the tyranny, while it makes it more permanent and more de- spoiling. The world waits for a democracy wise enough to rule and good enough to be self- forgetful. When the democracy of Jesus comes into the world it will be found that whosoever will lose his life shall find it. The world is so rich in all material possibilities, the mind of man is so cunning, and his capacity for achieve- ments is so great, that in that happy time men will have to search with a lighted candle for opportunities for self-denial. We have seen in the events of history already examined that the church, because she has car- ried in her bosom the teaching of Jesus, has been a perpetual witness for the elevation of 339 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH man. She has worked for his freedom, even when she knew it not. She has been something very human as well as very divine. Being human, she has had her own ambitions which her sons have often put above every other man- ifest interest. Being composed of men of all classes, the sacred cause has sometimes fallen into unholy hands. Yet in spite of every limi- tation and making every concession for obvious weakness and even baseness, it is plain that the political, industrial, and vital democracies of the world have found in the church their great- est champion as they have found in Jesus their loftiest prophet. The result of our study shows that the church deserves far more considerate treat- ment from the hands of her critics than she has generally received. Her work has not been perfectly done, but she has been in all times the world's chief est witness to justice between men, as well as to human brotherhood. In Protestant countries it is sometimes alleged that the churches are composed of the wealthy, and may be counted upon to side with privi- lege. Nothing is further from the truth. Con- spicuous churches here and there, few in num- ber and comparatively small in membership, may deserve the sneer of taking the form of 340 THE DEMOCRACY OF TO-MORROW the rich man's club, but the great multitude of the churches everywhere are fighting zealously, if not always wisely, in favor of every good cause, so far as the leaders can discover the issues. It is true that church people as a class are not among the very poor. The reason is not far to seek. To the extent that the disciples of Jesus practice the ethics of Jesus they come to self-control and to self-development. Self-con- trol and self-development are wealth-breeding. The church has often picked a grandfather out of the gutter and made the man of the third generation a gentleman. That is no reproach to the church. The church must not be identified with the kingdom of God. They are not interchange- able terms. The kingdom of God means a trans- figured human society; it means that politics, business, art, education, and the whole range of human life shall be governed by the teach- ing of Jesus. It is not improbable that as the Kingdom of God progresses the functions of the church as an institution will diminish. We have already seen many of the former duties of the church taken over by the state. Other social organs may develop, fulfilling social service in a way that may perhaps be 341 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH called secular. But the mission of the church will continue so long as the world lasts. It will not be so much institutional as inspirational. It will maintain holy altars. It will organize noble services of worship. It will teach rever- ence by proclaiming the great Presence. It will not perform all the functions even of a holy democracy, but it will furnish men the mood of democrats by showing them that they can- not love God unless they love their brother also. Forms of words, methods of ritual, days and architecture may change, but the tran- scendent man needs to nourish his soul on food that is not bread alone, and not less but more in the days to come will men see that worship with all that it implies is the cure for earth's sin and sorrow, and that the church, ever re- newing herself by fresh incarnations of the spirit of her Founder, remains the Mother of Human Greatness. BIBLIOGRAPHY The following is a partial list of the books con- sulted by the author in preparing this volume : Acton, Lord. History of Freedom. Anon. Aristokratie des Geistes als Losung der So- cialen Frage (Leipsig, 1885). Audin, J. M. V. Doctrines of Martin Luther. Baur. Martin Luther, ein Lebensbild. Blind, K. Luther and the Early German Struggles for Freedom. Bohtlingk, A. Doctor Martin Luther und Ignaz v. Loyola. Bournet, A. St. Frangois d 'Assise; etude sociale et medicale. Brewer, E. C. Political, Social, and Literary History of Germany. Brunetiere. L 'Action Sociale du Christianisme. Bryce, James. Historical Aspect of Democracy. Holy Eoman Empire. Calvin, John. Letters (translated by Bonnet). Tracts relating to the Reformation. Carr, Arthur. The Church and the Roman Empire. Chateaubriand. Le Genie du Christianisme. Church, R. W. Beginning of the Middle Ages. Civilization before and after Chris- tianity. Coulton, G. G. From St. Francis to Dante. Cunningham. English Industry. 343 DEMOCRACY AND THE CHURCH Currie. Letters of Martin Luther. Davidson, T. A History of Education. Delarc. Saint Gregoire et la Reforme de l'eglise. Draper, J. W. The Conflict Between Science and Religion. Dunning, W. A. History of Political Theories from Luther to Montesquieu. Eucken, R. Die Lebensanschaunngen der grossen Denker. Farrar, F. W. The Witness of History to Christ. Finch, G. A Selection of the Letters of Hildebrand. Fortesque, A. Gregory VII. Foster. Calvin's Programme for a Puritan State. French. Medieval Church History. Froude. Short Studies on Great Subjects. Gairdner, James. Lollardy and the Reformation in England. Gibbon. History of the Decline and Fall of Rome. Goffin, Arnold. S. Francois d 'Assise dans la legende et dans l'arts primitifs italiens. Gore, C. The Mission of the Church. Green. History of the English People. Grote. History of Greece. Gumplowicz. Geschichte der Staatstheorien. Hare. Vindication of Luther. Harnack. What Is Christianity? Haiisser. The Period of the Reformation. Hazlitt, Wm. The Table Talk of Martin Luther. Henderson. Select Historical Documents of the Mid- dle Ages. Huber. Pabst Gregor VII, seine Zeit, sein Leben und Werken. 344 BIBLIOGRAPHY Kidd. Documents of the Continental Reformation. Koestlin, Julius. Life of Luther. Lang, John Marshall. Expansion of the Church. Law, Henry. The Reformation; Its Heroes and Truths. Lecky. Democracy in Europe. Rationalism in Europe. Luthardt. History of Christian Ethics. MacDonell, A. Sons of Francis. Mackenzie, Lord. Studies of Roman Law. Matthews, S. Select Medieval Documents. Mazzini, J. Essays. McGiffert. Martin Luther, the Man and His Work. Milton, John. Eikonoklastes. Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. Mozley, J. B. Essays. Muirhead. Roman Law. Newman, J. H. Select Essays. Ozanam. History of Civilization in rbhe Fifth Cen- tury. Pater, Walter. Plato • u .. DtP P 1QCO Wl -y o li)o2 3 LD 21A-50m-3,'62 IT^S^^rtufL,!- (C7097sl0)476B B^kel^ VB 07247 / ■"**#. 304098 HN3I ^ 4 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY