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 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY
 
 Christianity and History 
 
 ^---^ BY 
 
 J. NEVILLE FIGGIS, M.A. 
 
 SOMETIME LECTURER ON MODEKN HISTORY IN S. CATHARINE'S COLLEGE, ANll 
 BIRKBECK LECTURER IN TRINITV COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE. 
 
 LONDON : 
 
 JAMES FINCH & CO., LTD. 
 
 ^;^ Paternoster Row, E.C. 
 
 1905
 
 To 
 
 Mistress 
 
 Ann Chaffey
 
 PREFACE 
 
 The following pages, are an essay not a treatise. 
 They represent certain reflections which have occurred 
 to the writer in regard to the relations between 
 Christianity and historical enquiry. They do not 
 seek to cover the whole ground. The question of 
 the origins of the Christian faith is only incidentally 
 discussed ; for I have neither the knowledge nor the 
 skill to offer an independent opinion upon the pro- 
 blems of early Christianity. What I have endeavoured 
 to do is to answer certain questions which the his- 
 torical enquirer may be supposed to put. Why 
 should I study Christanity, except as a matter of 
 religious feeling ? What good would it be to me if I 
 did study it ? I have tried to shew that no genuine 
 student can fail to study the Christian religion ; and to 
 indicate certain theoretical pitfalls from which it will 
 deliver the pilgrims of the past. I have not discussed 
 the question what Christians have to learn from his- 
 tory, or why they should have regard to its lessons. 
 I have tried to avoid any assumptions about the truth 
 or falsehood of the Christian creed, or the philosophi- 
 cal presuppositions which it implies. There is no 
 theology in the essay. All I have endeavoured to
 
 viii PREFACE 
 
 shew is, that the historical temperament, or whatever 
 you call it, to be genuine must be deeply impregnated 
 with the Christian story ; and that the method of 
 ecclesiastical history, as commonly understood (at any 
 rate until very recently) is inadequate and fallacious 
 because it is narrow. 
 
 This essay is not designed to make anyone a student 
 of Church History in the sense of Robertson or Perry,, 
 but to counteract in the few, who really care for the 
 study of human life in the past, the danger to fly from 
 a subject which seems to many only interesting to 
 clergymen or ritualists. History is not much honoured 
 just now. To a world intoxicated with theories of 
 electrons, and on fire for a knowledge of radium and 
 its meaning, the study of history seems insignificant, 
 purposeless and ignoble. If the true nobility of the 
 story of man is to be restored in the general imagina- 
 tion, we must widen our conception of our task. We 
 must strive to reconstruct, not only the ground plan 
 of the building in which man lived, but the thoughts of 
 his heart while he lived in it, and his "visions and 
 dreams in the night." If this were done men would 
 once more take interest in history. To do this means 
 to pay a very much larger attention than we have 
 done to the shaping ideas of the past. Incomparably 
 the greatest influence among these belongs to Chris- 
 tianity. That is why we are bound to study it. 
 
 I have to thank the publishers and authors of several 
 modern works for permission to cite passages that are 
 copyright. 
 
 J. NEVILLE FIGGIS.
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 
 
 Supposing that one of "the Martians," de- 
 picted by Mr. G. H. Wells in his " War of 
 the Worlds " had conquered the microbes of 
 our atmosphere, instead of succumbing to them, 
 as did all his co-planetaries ; and supposing 
 that the social and political affairs of earth 
 resumed their normal course, what features 
 would strii^e our strange visitor most acutely 
 and lead to the keenest enquiry on the part 
 of this spectator, ex hypothesi intellectual* 
 observant, and unscrupulous ? I think, that 
 Christianity both as a living influence, and as 
 the result of abiding historical forces, would be, 
 if not the sole, at least one of the main objects 
 of his attention and interest. He would find 
 the study of its history necessary if he were to 
 understand the world to-day, and interesting, 
 if he desired an acquaintance with the strangest, 
 the deepest, the rarest and yet also the com- 
 monest and most universal of all the activities 
 
 I
 
 2 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 
 
 of the human spirit. Observe that we pos- 
 tulate mere curiosity and interest in human 
 nature, as a phenomenon, we postulate no sym- 
 pathy or interest in religious belief as such. For 
 the Martian as described is a being for whom 
 religion is an impossibility and the Christian 
 ideal a subject for laughter. He would natur- 
 ally pass by our churches, ignore our religious 
 books and newspapers, and regard the denuncia- 
 tion of the advancing tide of infidelity by 
 Bishops and Archdeacons, as a proof that the 
 terrestrials are only still at the lowest rung of 
 the ladder, scaled already by the inhabitants of 
 Mars. Yet none the less such a beinof could 
 not be long upon earth, before he would be 
 driven to the conclusion that if he desired to 
 understand the civilization of Europe and 
 America, to enter into the meaning of its poli- 
 tics, its literature, its art, and even to appreciate 
 its political geography, there was one subject of 
 which he must strive to make himself a master 
 — the history of Christianity, of the manifold 
 forms which it has assumed, of the strange spell 
 cast by it upon the most practical of the races 
 upon earth, and the still stranger reactions 
 which it has exercised upon politics and culture. 
 F"or let us suppose that " the Martian " came 
 to England, and took up the newspapers or
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 
 
 
 
 entered into a police-court, what would he find ? 
 He would find in all parts of the country the 
 simultaneous prosecution of a large number of 
 persons, of respectable but common-place char- 
 acter and a middling position in life, for refusal 
 to make the usual payment to the rate-collector. 
 He would find that these individuals dis- 
 played most of them no other signs of 
 lawlessness beyond this one omission and a 
 desire for the display of indifferent rhetoric 
 despite magisterial veto ; that so far from re- 
 garding their action as discreditable they 
 claimed for it high merits and a noble name. 
 Moreover he would learn that this so-called 
 " Passive Resistance," while it was ridiculed as 
 insincere by one section of the community, was 
 applauded by others, that meetings and even 
 banquets were held in honour of the sufferers ; 
 and that it was the general belief, apart from 
 any question of the merits of the case, that 
 many previous supporters of the present govern- 
 ment would change sides at the polling booth on 
 account of the policy which led to these exhibi- 
 tions. If he were to ask for information as to 
 the meaning of such a sharp division and for 
 the history of the controversy which had pro- 
 duced it, he would be told that it was concerned 
 with the question whether or no the established
 
 4 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 
 
 church of the country should teach its own 
 children at the public expense. Passive 
 Resisters, he would learn, declared it to be 
 against their conscience to pay for the teach- 
 ing of a faith in which they did not believe. 
 Nothing would satisfy them but to emulate 
 the achievements of those whom they re- 
 garded as their spiritual ancestors, who by a 
 resistance similar in essence, if a trifle more 
 severe in form, had secured to the whole body 
 of their countrymen, that combination of tolera- 
 tion with public order which makes England 
 "the joy of the whole earth" and Englishmen the 
 admiration of one another. He would natur- 
 ally be led to enquire about these so-called 
 ancestors, and the meanino- of " Passive Re- 
 sistance," a phrase which seems a contradiction 
 in terms. " The Martian " would learn to his 
 surprise, that the existing divisions in English 
 society on the subject of religion draw their 
 origin from certain conflicts of opinions in the 
 sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These 
 arose out of a great religious revolution which, in 
 the opinion of one party, had not been carried far 
 enough. In those davs this conflict had even 
 produced a civil war, and that in its desire for 
 religious advancement the nation had sacrificed 
 its sovereiofn on the scaffold and submitted to a
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 5 
 
 rule which had every merit but those of toler- 
 ance and suitability to the people. During the 
 vicissitudes of this struggle, each side in turn 
 had persecuted the other in a manner rather 
 stupid than severe. These conflicts had left 
 their mark on the whole of English social 
 political life, and had embittered existing differ- 
 ences by adding to them the blood-feud of 
 hereditary animosity. The very name adopted 
 by the persons he had seen in court was 
 borrowed by them in a zeal, more conspicuous 
 for sincerity than erudition,^ from the contro- 
 versial phraseology of the Caroline divines ; in 
 a word, if the Martian really wanted to under- 
 stand the difficulties of popular education and its 
 political outcome in the twentieth century, he 
 must learn somethingof the political and religious 
 history of the past three hundred years, and rea- 
 lise that religious differences were so inwoven 
 with political and so deeply welded into the whole 
 structure of our social life, that it was idle to 
 dream of knowing the latter intelligently with- 
 out making himself acquainted with the former. 
 He would then naturally enquire wherein 
 lay the difference betw^een the two religions, 
 the Established and the Non-established, and 
 
 ^ The proper phrase is " Passive Obedience," not " Passive 
 Resistance."
 
 6 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 
 
 would be informed that they were not two 
 religions at all, but different ways of apprehend- 
 ing the same religion. On his expressing 
 surprise that adherents of the same faith should 
 be divided by enmities more bitter than is 
 commonly the case even with believers in 
 different gods, he would be told that for the 
 explanation of this fact he would need to 
 know the whole history of politics and religion, 
 since the down-fall of the system in vogue in 
 Western Europe in the middle ages, a system 
 half political and half religious, in which the 
 supremacy among the powers of Europe had 
 been reserved for him, who represented 
 with a humility,— whose disguise was a 
 proof of its sincerity — the Master who had 
 bidden His disciples take no thought for the 
 body what it should eat, or for raiment 
 what they should put on, and that he that 
 would be greatest must be the servant of all. 
 It was in token of this that His Vicar, as he 
 was called, was accustomed to prefix to His 
 official documents the title "slave of the 
 slaves of God," while at the same time His 
 supporters claimed for Him the prerogative of 
 " King of Kings and Lord of Lords." This 
 system which had at its disposal both the 
 courts of earth and the portals of hell, was
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 7 
 
 manipulated by a vast body of officials, had 
 developed an elaborate body of law, and 
 was intertwined with the literature, the art, 
 and the thought of the period known as the 
 Middle Ages. But the edifice of mediaeval 
 civilization had fallen with a crash some four 
 centuries ago, and though the chapel had been 
 rebuilt on a different plan, the world empire 
 which recognised an ineffectual secular and an 
 effective spiritual head, each the viceregent 
 of a divine but absent king, who had "gone 
 into a far country," had disappeared for ever. 
 Modern controversies are but the echoes of 
 that monumental catastrophe which has 
 affected not merely the religious life of 
 Christians — a matter in which our observer 
 takes no interest — -but has changed the face of 
 Europe, has influenced the alliances, altered 
 the boundaries of States, and is above all re- 
 sponsible for that conception of civil authority, 
 which is a part of the atmosphere of the 
 twentieth century. 
 
 If the Martian were desirious of knowing 
 something of the meaning of the system which 
 Luther attacked, he would learn that for this 
 purpose, he must go back to the state of Europe 
 another thousand years, and study the relations 
 between the barbarian races who overran the
 
 8 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 
 
 ancient Roman Empire and the Christian 
 Church which succeeded to its prerogatives. 
 That the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages 
 is "the ghost of the Roman Empire sitting 
 crowned on its grave," is a truth, which when 
 understood, throws light upon the law, the 
 politics, and the culture of the medieval world, 
 and furnishes the best rationale of those 
 changes which we call the Reformation. 
 But in order to understand it an arduous 
 enquiry into history is needed, and yet without 
 it neither the past nor the present is really 
 intellioible. 
 
 But now suppose our " Martian " to cross 
 the Channel and visit Paris. What would he 
 find there ? One of the first books offered for 
 sale would be the speeches of French Prime 
 Ministers on the Associations' Law, prefaced 
 with some passionate eloquence by the most 
 eminent of French litterateurs.^ On his 
 reading the book and asking questions about 
 it, he would be informed, that France was 
 undergoing one of the phases in a struggle 
 that was many centuries old — that between the 
 civil power and the religious orders. He 
 would be told that between these orders 
 and the parish priests, there was a long 
 
 ^ Anatole France.
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 9 
 
 standing jealousy, only surpassed by that 
 between the legal profession and the clergy ; 
 that in the days of the monarchy, the 
 greatest of these orders had fought many a 
 batde with the Parliament of Paris, and 
 some with the University. What he saw 
 now proceeding on was in fact nothing but 
 the latest — by no means likely to be the last 
 — phase of a conflict, which had been proceed- 
 ing from the days when Pasquier thundered 
 against the Society of Jesus, and Father Coton 
 won the ear of Marie de Medici. Further, he 
 would probably hear a good deal of discussion 
 about the visit of the French President to the 
 King of Italy, and the protest which it aroused 
 from the Pontiff, who affects to regard that 
 monarch as a usurper of his own legitimate 
 sovereignty. People, he would be told, alarmed 
 at the violence of the Papal protest, couched 
 in terms haughtier and more uncompromising 
 than a headmaster would employ to a fourth- 
 form boy, were speculating as to the possible 
 denunciation of the Concordat. On his beg- 
 ging for enlightenment on the meaning of 
 that term, he would be told that it was 
 an agreement between the greatest of modern 
 conquerors and the Pope, signed a hundred 
 years ago ; and that while its immediate
 
 lo CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 
 
 cause was the period of revolutionary tumult 
 to which it put a term ; yet its fundamental 
 principles must be sought in the Concordat 
 of Bologna, signed between the last of the 
 Renaissance popes and Francis I. in 1516; 
 and that this again needed for explanation 
 the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges ; which 
 itself was an expression of claims of inde- 
 pendence, known as the Gallican Liberties, 
 supposed to date from the reign of the sainted 
 crusader, Louis IX., the flower of catholic 
 chivalry and the model of kingly virtue to all 
 succeeding ages. 
 
 Can we not imagine the astonishment and 
 perhaps irritation of the " Martian," as he re- 
 flected upon public affairs in France or England 
 — nor would the result have been different, 
 had he betaken himself to different countries. 
 " To understand these people he would say, 
 observation alone is quite inadequate. Their 
 words, their acts are alike unintelligible except 
 through a long vista of historical development, 
 which appears to have determined not what 
 any man shall think but what every man shall 
 debate. But this is not all. Regarding re- 
 ligion, as an enlightened being must, as the 
 practical philosophy of undeveloped minds, and 
 its utility as at best a political weapon, I had
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY ii 
 
 thought there would be no need to take ac- 
 count of it, except as a proof of the inferior 
 culture of the terrestrials. Being well aware 
 of our own superiority to the race of earth, I 
 was prepareci to view with nothing but a tolerant 
 contempt the uninteresting spectacle of hundreds 
 of persons deliberately wasting their time in 
 the performance of ceremonies, of which the 
 highest praise would be that they were 
 meaningless. This indeed I do find. But 
 I find much more. Such it appears is the 
 Cimmerian twilight of this race of earth, that 
 in order to appreciate their current politics, 
 to put meaning into their overheard discussions 
 in the drawing-room or the railway train, I 
 find it incumbent upon me to pay attention to 
 their religious beliefs and the history of their 
 ecclesiastical institutions. They cannot as I 
 imagined be shut off from the main current of 
 life, and relegated to the dreamer, the partisan, 
 or the iconoclast. I am driven by the mere 
 desire of picturing their life intelligently to 
 enter upon the long and laborious process of 
 a study of the phenomenon of the Christian 
 relioion ; for I find that whether or no it be 
 the guiding star of the life of these people, it 
 is at any rate the goal of their controversial 
 efforts, and the ground of their most important
 
 12 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 
 
 groupings of Ideas in regard to their politics, 
 their art, and their social life. Indeed, the 
 influence of a fact so utterly incomprehensible 
 to me, as belief in Christianity must ever 
 remain, has so far as I can observe, an im- 
 portance only equalled in art by the beauty of 
 those edifices, which it is a pity to see were 
 not reared for the transaction of a business 
 more interesting and valuable than that of 
 religion. Driven then by my interest in human 
 life, at the same time that I am repelled by 
 my disdain for religious belief, I sit down to 
 the study of Christianity, as being not the only, 
 but quite certainly the main formative influence 
 which by action and reaction has produced that 
 state of civilization and culture which prevails at 
 the moment in Western Europe, and is, despite 
 all apologies for John Chinaman, the most ad- 
 vanced condition of the human race at present." 
 He would be right. Anyone who desires 
 from a perfectly outside point of view to come 
 to any tolerable understanding, not merely of 
 the ceremonies, the superstitions, and the creeds 
 of Western Europe, but of the stream and 
 tendency of its politics, the basis of its social 
 aggregations, and the spirit and significance 
 of its culture is compelled, unless he is 
 willing to see the whole thing out of propor-
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 13 
 
 tion, to take account of Christianity as a fact 
 and to study the historical development and 
 general influence of Christian institutions. 
 
 All this, however, is but another way of 
 saying that anyone who desires to secure one of 
 the main advantages which history can give 
 him, must place the Christian religion in the 
 forefront of his enquiries. Many, indeed, are 
 the purposes of historical study, but for the 
 moment we may confine ourselves to two : 
 The object of history is to help us to under- 
 stand the present by tracing its roots in the 
 past. History seeks to solve the problem : 
 " How human society in its existing form has 
 come to be ? " If we are indeed 'the heirs of 
 all the ages,'" what is the nature and value 
 of our inheritance ? What are the abiding 
 gifts of those that have gone before to us that 
 come after them ^ This is one side of histori- 
 cal study, and it has been shewn that for 
 this purpose, Christianity must be studied, if 
 we are to gain our end. But there is 
 another. History not only seeks to explain 
 the present, it strives to reproduce the past. 
 It seeks to tell us what the life of the past 
 felt like to the men who lived it. It at- 
 tempts to answer the question what did men 
 think and how did they act in the past.-* In
 
 14 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 
 
 what respect if any, were their motives and aims 
 different from our own ? What were the condi- 
 tions, economic, physical, poHtical under which 
 they lived ? What would their world look like 
 if we could see it ? What was the aspect of 
 their houses, their markets, their feasts, their 
 courts, their temples ? What went on in them ? 
 The historical enquirer seeks to do, what Mr. 
 Morris tries also, to think away the aspect of 
 the moment, and re-imagine one that is gone by. 
 
 Forget six counties overhung with smoke ; 
 Forget the snorting steam and the piston stroke ; 
 Forget the spreading of the hideous town ; 
 Think rather of the pack-horse on the down, 
 And dream of London small and white and clean, 
 The clear Thames bordered by the gardens green ; 
 Think that below bridge the keen-lapping waves 
 Smite some few brigs, that bears Levantine staves 
 Florence gold-cloth and Ypres napery 
 And cloth of Bruges and hogsheads of Guienne, 
 While nigh the thronged wharf Geoffrey Chaucer's pen 
 Moves over bills of lading. 
 
 This is what all historians at heart strive 
 to do. The fact indeed is the great justifica- 
 tion of that despised person the historical 
 novelist. Men like Scott and Thackeray 
 strove, and on the whole succeeded, in fulfillino- 
 a large part of the historian's office. They 
 are not mere romancers. We cannot say that 
 Macaulay is history and Esmond is not.
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 15 
 
 But the mention of this fact points us a little 
 further. The historian cannot stop at the out- 
 ward aspect of things. He asks not only 
 how men lived, but how they felt. He seeks 
 to do for the past what Mr. Henry James 
 does for the present, to lay bare the inner 
 world of thought and feeling, of which events 
 are only the occasion and external conditions 
 but the stimulus or the form. The historian 
 must always be trying by such indications, as 
 he has, to reproduce not merely the picture 
 (say) of a mediaeval town in all its mingled 
 squalor and beauty, but the mind of the 
 mediaeval man with its strange limited horizon, 
 its entrancing wistfulness, its vast and grandiose 
 aspirations? If you were set down in a 
 Cinque Port in the days of Edward I., what 
 would you hear the folk talking about, how 
 much of it would you understand ? And if you 
 could speak to the men on the quay, what 
 words or phrases of yours would they respond 
 to and how much would be meaningless ? 
 How much would reveal to them that the 
 unexpected had happened, and that what they 
 had looked for had not come about? If you 
 could overhear the conversation of the Canter- 
 bury Pilgrims in Chaucer's day, — what would 
 they have been discussing, and in their discus-
 
 i6 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 
 
 sion, what would they have taken for granted, 
 and what arguments would they have used ? 
 Would they be the same as we should use on a 
 similar topic, such (say) as the work of the 
 parish priest, or would they be different, and 
 if different, different in what way ? Would 
 they have expected the same things of their 
 pastors, or based their expectation on the same 
 grounds as we should, or would their demands 
 and their reasons alike have been different? It 
 is to help us to answer questions of this sort that 
 we study history. Chaucer, indeed, has given 
 us a very good hint of what we should hear on 
 the topic above suggested. We must never 
 forget that books like that of Chaucer or Dante 
 or Virgil in addition to their value as works of 
 art, are of almost untold worth as historical 
 documents/ Indeed, many a writer in himself 
 either worthless or pernicious becomes with the 
 lapse of time of great interest, for he helps 
 us to understand the state of things in which 
 he would write in the way he did. " Sandford 
 and Merton," for instance, is a document of 
 uncounted value to anyone who wants to under- 
 stand the educational ideals of a century ago, 
 and in a couple of centuries even the " Visits 
 
 1 The same is of course the case with styles of architecture, 
 painting and music, to say nothing of fashions in dress and 
 furniture.
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 17 
 
 of Elizabeth " may be the subject of learned 
 German monographs not complimentary to 
 England. 
 
 Thus then in addition to telline us what we 
 owe to the past, history attempts to tell us what 
 the past was in itself apart from any question 
 of what came out of it. We seek both the 
 abiding forces in human life, and also their 
 transient forms. Neither side can be neglected 
 without risk of error. History, which searches 
 in the past for nothing but its influence on the 
 present and the future will be abstract and over 
 much given to generalization. History which 
 seeks merely for 
 
 " The touch of a vanished hand 
 And the sound of a voice that is still " 
 
 will lay too much stress on mere colouring, and 
 be apt for illusion by superficial contrasts. We 
 need both sides. From the facts of human life 
 in the past we must seek both the chains of 
 causal connection, which prevents them being 
 a mere heap of pebbles, and also the living- 
 thoughts and personal reality which makes 
 them something more than "an unearthly ballet 
 of bloodless categ-ories." In our desire to o-et 
 from the past, what it has to give us, we must 
 not forget the men and women who gave it. 
 
 We may ask what they did for us but we must 
 
 2
 
 i8 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 
 
 also ask what they felt and thought themselves. 
 The former of these purposes is the most akin 
 to science, the latter to art. For the former 
 mainly tends to a definite arrangement of facts 
 under certain tendencies, the latter refreshes 
 the mind, weary with the turmoil of existence, 
 with the sense of contrast between our own 
 life and that of our forefathers, and with that 
 touch of serenity and peace that belongs to 
 
 " Old, unhappy, far ofif things 
 And battles long ago." 
 
 Now we have reason to believe that for the 
 first of these purposes, there is one fact or 
 group of facts, which, for Europe at least, is 
 more important than any other. We are 
 bound to come to grief in any attempt to win 
 the historical point of view in regard to the 
 present-day world, if we leave Christianity out 
 of account, or even relegate it to a subordinate 
 position ; for it is the most influential of the forces 
 which have made the world what it is. We cannot 
 understand the politics, the education, the art 
 or the architecture of Europe, without studying 
 the institutions which caused them to develop 
 in the way they did. Still less, as we shall find, 
 can we hope without such study to have 
 any true imaginative conception of the life 
 of our forefathers, whether in its external
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 19 
 
 appearance or its internal development. Yet 
 some people seem to imagine that they can 
 study what is called secular history, and remain 
 ignorant of the greatest historical force the 
 Western world has ever experienced. Now of 
 course a department of it such as the Penin- 
 sular or the Crimean War may be studied 
 by a specialist who takes no account of the 
 existence of the Christian religion, and results 
 in a field so severely limited could scarcely be 
 affected by such omission. But if we are 
 seeking answers to the question, what the 
 history of the past has to teach the modern 
 world, such neglect would not merely be an 
 error, but a vital flaw, which would vitiate all our 
 conclusions and lead to hopelessly one-sided and 
 inadequate conceptions. We should be making 
 the same sort of mistake which the late J. R. 
 Green used to ridicule in "the drum and trumpet 
 historian," who wrotealmost entirely about kings, 
 and battles and treaties, neglected the whole life 
 of the people, adding sometimes a perfunctory 
 chapter on social life, which only showed how 
 completely he misunderstood the subject. 
 
 Our error, however, would be worse than 
 this. The drum and trumpet historian had a 
 case. He could reply: — "All that you say is 
 true enough. It is desirable that the social
 
 20 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 
 
 and economic development be more fully investi- 
 gated [as it has been since those days]. But 
 that is not my business. I am not concerned 
 with human life as a whole, but with the state. 
 Men interest me only in so far as they have to 
 do with government. To me, man is not 
 merely a political animal. He is nothing else. 
 While there is a place for the economic and 
 social historian, no less than for those of archi- 
 tecture or painting of literature, it is not my 
 business to consider these things apart from 
 their influence on the organized life of the 
 state. History 'simply and stricdy so called' 
 has always been and always will be occupied 
 not with the whole range of human life, but 
 with that part of it which concerns statesmen. 
 This may be a poor subject. Many people think 
 it is. But it is the subject of the historian and 
 everything else comes in only as a irapepyov." 
 
 Such an answer might do very fairly for the 
 drum and trumpet historian pleading against 
 the attacks of Green. It would not do for the 
 "secular historian" pleading against the 
 dictum of Lord Acton : 
 
 "All understanding of history depends on 
 one's understanding the forces which make it 
 of which religious forces are the most active 
 and the most definite."
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 21 
 
 Of course this does not mean that there are 
 not branches of ecclesiastical history which may 
 be left to pure specialists. No ordinary student 
 needs to know much of the history of ritual 
 or of the minutiae of theological controversy. 
 He need not learn the structure of the *' mass," 
 or the meaning of imputed righteousness and 
 prevenient grace. But on the whole, 
 Christianity as a faith, as an interest, as an 
 institution, enters so largely into the historical 
 development of Europe, that it not only may 
 not be ignored, but for a long time at least 
 it must be treated as the dominant part. To 
 take an instance, the Papacy, whatever its 
 faults, has succeeded in developing the most 
 interesting political institution in the history of 
 the world, and to ignore it or thrust it into an 
 appendix is to misconceive the evolution of a 
 thousand years. The influence of the Papacy on 
 legal ideas is one of the salient facts of history. 
 There is no other single phenomenon which 
 plays so prominent a part, whether as an afflu- 
 ence in politics or as an instrument of culture, 
 as Christianity. We are not concerned with its 
 truth or falsehood, or even with the agreement 
 of any one or other of the numerous forms it 
 has assumed with the teaching and intentions 
 of its founder. We are not even concerned with
 
 22 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 
 
 the question whether or no its true founder was 
 S. Paul, or Jesus himself, or only a resuscita- 
 tion of an ancient mythical hero, developed out 
 of the artistic ingenuity of the Hebrew peasant.^ 
 What we are concerned with is the fact that 
 men believed themselves to be the followers of 
 a certain Hebrew teacher, who met an early 
 death at the hands of ecclesiastical authority ; 
 that around His name they collected a number 
 of stories of a strange and subtle beauty in 
 simplicity and singularly coherent with one 
 another even when they related preternatural 
 occurrences; that about His person they 
 elaborated a doctrine asserting that He was the 
 Son of God no less than the son of man, and 
 that they believed Him to have revealed to 
 man the truth of his own nature and to have 
 risen from the dead in token that there is a 
 world of spirits beyond ; and not merely to have 
 
 1 Compare Mr. J. M. Robertson's " Pagan Christs." I may 
 say, that one test of capacity to estimate historical evidence 
 appears to me to be the inability to accept such a travesty of 
 criticism as that practised by Mr. Robertson. Whatever critics 
 may decide about some of the facts connected with the life of 
 Christ,as recorded in the Gospels, the theory which dissolves Him 
 into a mere myth is the most hopelessly unhistorical of all, and 
 can only be maintained consistently by one like the late Mr. 
 Johnson, who denies historical reality to at least half of the 
 best known facts of the human story, such as Magna Charta 
 and the Crusades.
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 23 
 
 shown to the human race the highest, but 
 by His hfe and even more His death to have 
 wrought its deliverance from that strange 
 disease of the will, known theologically by the 
 name of sin. More than this, men thus bound 
 together by loyalty and affection to a Master 
 whom they regarded as living, were bound also 
 in a special closeness to one another ; and 
 hence there arose an organized society of 
 Christians, which after a life and death struggle 
 with the ancient empire became its favourite 
 and its heir. First the enemy and then the 
 favourite of the Roman Empire, the Catholic 
 Church ended by becoming its residuary legatee, 
 the means by which its gifts of order and law 
 and culture were impressed upon races vigorous 
 indeed and young, but innocent of discipline 
 and ignorant of the arts of life. This fact, and 
 what naturally resulted from it, determined 
 the course of mediaeval history ; and for five 
 hundred years la haute politique was occupied 
 in attempting to adjust with equity to other 
 interests the vast array of pretensions put 
 forward by the power which, rightly or wrongly, 
 believed itself to represent the eternal order in 
 a world of change, and to speak with the voice 
 of God to the sin-stricken children of men. 
 These facts are not merely an appendix to the
 
 24 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 
 
 story of human life, they are its dominating 
 feature for a long period in Europe. Even on the 
 the drum and trumpet theory Christian history is 
 probably the most important part of the subject. 
 As we shall see later, the source of all the finer 
 elements of life at this time was Christian. Edu- 
 cation, art, architecture, learning, philosophy 
 were pursued by officials of the Church under her 
 aegis ; or by bands of her servants devoted to her 
 interests. It was not an ideal but a fact to speak 
 of the state, or rather, since the very name is a 
 misnomer, the secular lords of the middle ages, 
 as performing an executive function in the 
 Church, Of this period it is true, or nearly so, 
 to say that the secular power existed for the 
 purposes of life, the spiritual for the good life. 
 Not merely was the Church of the middle ages 
 a state, it was the state. If we seek even in the 
 writings of a man so modern in spirit as Wyclif 
 for any words with the connotation of our 
 "state," the nearest approximation in ecclesia, 
 and that despite the fact that Wyclif em- 
 phatically repudiated the theory of the tutelage 
 of the lay power by the ecclesiastical. ^ The 
 
 1 The same is true of an earlier writer on behalf of the secular 
 power, in the struggle between Henry 11. and Becket. The 
 object of " Tractatus Eboracencis III." (printed in " Libelli de 
 Lite" vol. iii.) is not to assert the supremacy of the state over 
 the church, but the rightful position of the King as a ruler in the 
 church, the Civitas Dei,
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 25 
 
 famous words of Burke, that the state is a 
 partnership " in every science and in every art ; 
 in every virtue and in all perfection " are 
 true of no other social union in the Middle 
 Ages but the Catholic Church ; although it 
 may of course be doubted whether they are 
 true even of that. The fact remains that the 
 higher our ideal of the state, the more we 
 are driven to the conclusion that the only body 
 which attempted to fulfil it in the Middle 
 Ages, was the Church. The state of Bent- 
 ham and the old economists, whose duty is 
 merely a sort of bottle-holder of a perennial 
 prize fight, may possibly be paralleled in a 
 mediaeval monarchy, but the mortal god, as 
 conceived by Hegel, the embodied conscience 
 of humanity, directing the citizen to find his 
 true self in obedience to a law which is in the 
 highest sense right can only be found at all in 
 the period from the Sixth to the Fourteenth 
 century, by reading Church instead of state.^ 
 This was the result of many causes, of which 
 the influence of S. Augustine and the abilities of 
 the Popes were not the least important ; but 
 they all had their opportunity in the fact that 
 
 1 The Holy Roman Empire, the actual attempt to realise the 
 Civitas Dei of S. Augustine, though it has its secular side is 
 even then rather the civil embodiment of the Church, than a 
 secular state in the modern sense.
 
 26 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 
 
 in the Western Church there ruled the spirit 
 of the ancient Empire transmuted indeed and 
 touched to finer issues by the spell of 
 Christianity, but still there — legal, organising, 
 imperial. For everything that was to elevate 
 or to ennoble life, man looked to the Church 
 rather than the State, or if to the latter only 
 as it was inspired by the spiritual power, which 
 " is to the State as soul to body." In other 
 words, all that lent ideality to human life 
 in society, all that lifted it above the vulgar 
 level of daily needs or bodily security came or 
 was supposed to come from the Church. It 
 represented intellect as against brute force, 
 justice as against violence, beauty as against 
 ugliness, education as against ignorance, 
 culture as against barbarism.i We are not 
 saying that this ought to have been the case, 
 or that men were right in dreaming of the 
 Church as the power that added to every 
 department of life 
 
 " The light that never was on sea or land, 
 The consecration and the poet's dream." 
 
 But the point is that this was the way they 
 
 1 See John of Salisbury's Policraticus for evidence of this. 
 Nothing is more notable than that to this moderate and wide- 
 minded man, the civil power meant nothing but organized vio- 
 lence, and the strong hand and the spiritual the sole security 
 for justice and humanity. Perhaps he had learnt this in the 
 reign of Stephen.
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 27 
 
 did dream. Only the Pope could found a 
 university. The hospitals, the hotels, the 
 work-houses and the schools of the mediaeval 
 world were all alike to be found in religious 
 houses. The churches were at once their 
 theatres, their concert halls, and their picture 
 galleries. We may despise, if we are sufficiently 
 ignorant, the men whose labours have enabled 
 us to dispense with their help. But it cannot 
 be denied that as a general rule to an existence 
 tossed between savagery and a barbaric self- 
 indulgence, in which security was a goal not 
 an achievement, and comfort a far off ideal, 
 it was the Catholic Church that lent such 
 graces and adornments as it was capable of 
 receiving, and alone inspired men with the 
 courage to attack or the consolations to en- 
 dure the evils and corruptions of a time which 
 only ignorance can represent as idyllic. Only 
 indeed, as the middle ages were passing away 
 does this state of things tend to disappear. It 
 is true to say that the mediaeval world comes to 
 an end, so soon and in so far as the secular 
 control of culture succeeds to the ecclesiastical. 
 But the advocates of " secular " history might 
 say : " Doubtless this is all true, — ^or at least 
 we are not prepared to deny it. Nobody 
 ever supposed that mediaeval history could be
 
 28 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 
 
 written apart from church history. But this is 
 only one period — the nightmare of the 
 human race. And the historian who deals 
 with the modern world, at least since the close 
 of the thirty years' war, or with ancient history 
 up to the reign of Diocletian, need pay little or 
 no attention to Christianity — at any late a 
 couple of supplementary chapters would 
 suffice." 
 
 But is this true, or is anything like it true ? 
 Our opening illustration will afford some 
 grounds for thinking that it is not true. A 
 single week's reading of the newspapers will 
 convince any intelligent person that if he wants 
 to understand many of the most important 
 currents of modern life in Western Europe, 
 he must take into account the Christian re- 
 ligion, and not merely the Christian religion, 
 but the historical development of the Christian 
 Church and the problems to which it has given 
 rise. It is indeed the case that life has become 
 more complex since the fourteenth century, and 
 it is easier to treat every subject department- 
 ally ; national states and national religion make 
 universal history more difficult, though they do 
 not make it less important. The mediaeval ideal 
 of Western Europe conceived all Catholics as 
 bound together in a single society in the world
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 29 
 
 polity of the Holy Roman Empire with Its twin 
 heads, Emperor and Pope fighting like brothers. 
 So long as this remained even a dream, ^ so long 
 as the Emperors had to swear at their corona- 
 tion never to make an alliance with the infidel, 
 so long as the whole of European history best 
 treated together, and the Papacy as its central 
 point. That world, however, passed away in 
 the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The net- 
 work of lordships gave way to a number of 
 absolute princes, ruling over strong nations, or 
 at any rate compact territories. The feudal 
 magnate became either a sovereign or a subject. 
 The imperial dignity as a world power was 
 transmuted into an appanage of the House of 
 Hapsburg. The Papacy, for a long time the 
 only effective supreme governor in the Empire, 
 maintained its position for a considerable time. 
 Religious considerations became more, not less, 
 dominant in politics for the hundred and fifty 
 years succeeding the outbreak of the Religious 
 Revolution, but that did not last. The unity 
 of European civilisation may in some respects 
 be greater than it was in the middle ages, 
 
 1 Dante, for instance, though he was strongly opposed to the 
 Papal claims, only proposed to himself (in the De Monarchia) to 
 revise the internal arrangements of the Civiias Dei ; no more than 
 his adversaries did he look forward to a family of frankly secular 
 states co-equal and independent.
 
 30 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 
 
 but it is less obvious to the historian. For 
 him it is easier to take each nation apart 
 from the rest. It is the last and most difficult 
 result of scholarship to discern the universal 
 aspect of modern history.^ It is not surprising 
 then, if the same process applies to ecclesi- 
 astical as to general history, and it is split into 
 fragments and separated from secular affairs 
 for the past two centuries. But it remains true 
 that even of the eighteenth century, the most 
 secular of all periods, no adequate understand- 
 ing can be given without going into the history 
 of Christianity. In this, indeed, both the 
 adversaries and defenders of Christianity must 
 be included. The spirit, which ruled in the 
 Revolution, was the main theme of the 
 eighteenth century historian. The eighteenth 
 century, the age of the aufkidrung, was em- 
 bodied in Voltaire, perhaps more completely 
 than in any other single man. Yet to understand 
 Voltaire without a knowledge of Christianity 
 or the French Church, is as impossible as it is 
 to talk of the French Revolution without refer- 
 ring to Jean Jacques Rousseau. 
 
 If again we look at the Europe of the last 
 century, how can it be considered apart from 
 
 ^Cf. An article on Lord Acton at Cambridge by John 
 Pollock in the " Independent Review" for April, 1904.
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 31 
 
 the romantic movement, of which De Maistre 
 and Newman were the exponents no less than 
 Tieck and Novalis ; while as to England 
 alone and to pure politics there is not a Parlia- 
 ment which can be understood without a 
 knowledge of Church History. The struggles 
 over Catholic emancipation, university tests, 
 the admission of Jews and atheists to Parlia- 
 ment, Irish Disestablishment all show how in- 
 extricably religious is still bound up with 
 political history. It is worthy of remembrance 
 that the best known of all the cartoons of Punch 
 is that which depicts Lord John Russell as the 
 naughty boy chalking up " No Popery " and 
 then running away. 
 
 With the most characteristically English 
 institutions it is the same. The laws and 
 liberties of this country owe their preservation 
 to the relio-ious animosities of the seventeenth 
 
 o 
 
 century. Had not the dissensions of the civil 
 war and the struggle against James II. been 
 stimulated by a strong religious sentiment, 
 there is little doubt that despotism which 
 triumphed everywhere but in Holland would 
 have been victorious even here. We must not 
 allow what happened in England to blind us to 
 its improbability. But for the temporary 
 Gallicanism of Louis XIV., and for the
 
 32 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 
 
 0- 
 
 fortunate bigotry of James 11.,^ it can hardly 
 be conversant with the poHtics of either 
 Charles II. or Queen Anne," that monarchy 
 which destroyed constitutionaHsm everywhere 
 else, must have rendered it impotent even 
 here. 
 
 The very ideas of the glorious Revolution 
 and the triumph of limited monarchy in 1689, 
 which have been perhaps more than anything 
 else the o^ift of England to mankind, cannot be 
 understood without going back to their most 
 able previous expression in what is known 
 as the Conciliar movement of the fifteenth 
 century. There we find much that is distinctive 
 of Whiggism, the treatment of the monarch as 
 the minister of his people, the claim to depose 
 for misgovernment, the belief in a "mixed" or 
 limited government with a balance of powers 
 all proclaimed on the highest ground, that of 
 Divine right and applied not to mere secular 
 lords, but the sovereign of the Church militant 
 and Vicar of Christ.^ 
 
 With regard to the history of the world before 
 Christ, it may be briefly stated that what will 
 
 1 See on this point Seeley, " Growth of British Policy." 
 
 2 Cf. Lecky " History of England," chapter I. 
 
 ^ See a paper of mine, " Politics at the Council of Constance," 
 "Transactions of Royal Hist : Soc, 1899.
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 33 
 
 be said later, as to the preparation for Christ 
 in history amply justifies the inclusion of it as a 
 part of the Christian view of history ; although 
 of course nobody means that the records of 
 Greek conflicts or Roman conquests need the 
 definite introduction of Christian ideas to ex- 
 plain them. All this will have made clear 
 some at least of the grounds for asserting that 
 nobody who is striving for the historical habit 
 of mind and who desires to view the present 
 and the future by the light of the past can do 
 other than pay a large, though not an ex- 
 clusive, attention to Christianity. As this is 
 the most important and obvious use of history, 
 and all subjects have now to justify them- 
 selves on the score of utility, it has seemed 
 right to dwell thereon at some length.^ 
 
 But as we said, this is not by any means the 
 sole ground for which we study history. 
 There are some who desire to escape from the 
 passion and controversies of the hour into an 
 atmosphere which is attractive owing to its very 
 difference from the present, and in the still 
 world of the dead to try and re-imagine the life 
 of the past, and picture to themselves the in- 
 
 ^ Of course it may be doubted, how far the historical attitude 
 is desirable. Few would maintain that it alone is sufficient for 
 the conduct of life. It is liable to degenerate into conservatism 
 or antiquarianism. Its real dangers are admirably pointed out 
 by Nietzsche " Unzeitgemasse Betrachtungen " I. 2, 
 
 3
 
 34 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 
 
 fluences which enobled and dignified it. Now 
 when we study history from this point of view 
 and ask what it was that gave to men's lives 
 their highest value, and made them most in- 
 teresting to themselves, it is even more certainly 
 true that we cannot ignore the Christian religion, 
 than it was in treating of history as the record 
 of the activities that subserve social development. 
 Whether or no Christianity is founded upon 
 truth, whether or no it has made men happier 
 or better, it has indisputably been the influence 
 which has given the highest value to their 
 moments and inspired them with the power to 
 do work which should outlast their personal 
 remembrance. If we seek to know wherein lay 
 the highest aspirations of the thirteenth century, 
 what power it was that pulled out of men more 
 than they thought they had in them, it is only 
 necessary to walk through the aisles of some 
 building, such as York Minster or Rouen 
 Cathedral. Of all the monuments of past ages 
 which have come down to us, none assuredly are 
 so impressive or so significant as those "mystic 
 and massive piles which rise above the roofs of 
 our ancient cities," and speak to us as nothing 
 else can of the deepest longings and dearest 
 thoughts of the unknown architects who planned 
 and the forgotten labourers who reared them.
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 35 
 
 "All else for which the builders sacrificed all 
 their living interests and aims and achievements 
 has passed away. We know not for what 
 they laboured, and we see no evidence of their 
 reward. Victory, wealth, authority, happiness 
 — all are departed, though bought with many a 
 bitter sacrifice. But of them and of their life 
 and toil upon earth, one reward, one evidence 
 remains to us in those grey heaps of deep- 
 wrought stone. They have taken with them to 
 the grave their powers, their honours and their 
 errors — but they have left us their adoration."^ 
 
 To those foolish and ignorant persons who 
 mass together the history of a thousand years 
 under the contemptuous title of the dark ages, 
 the best answer that may be given is to ask 
 them to contemplate such a building, as Salis- 
 bury Cathedral and compare it with Waterloo 
 Station or the Hotel Metropole as the symbols 
 of nineteenth century culture. But if we reflect 
 that these buildings are not like the remains of 
 ancient city castles, or the few relics we have 
 of old city walls, merely a spectacle for the 
 curious, or a problem for the learned, but are 
 still the home of human souls on fire with the 
 love of the highest ; that they still breathe 
 from their serene spaces of nave and transept 
 
 Ruskin, "The Seven Lamps of Architecture," p. 28.
 
 36 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 
 
 the same message of peace amid strife and 
 rest after labour, that their soaring roofs and 
 springing vaults still echo to the old strains of 
 uplifting and self-forgetfulness ; assuredly the 
 coldest and most unbelieving observer must 
 feel that, (even should religion be false, and 
 Christianity a dream) it is as a matter of 
 fact that form of dreaming which has had for 
 longest the power to exalt and refine the human 
 spirit and testifies more than anything else to 
 the presence of the abiding amid the transient. 
 Of course it may be argued that other build- 
 ings, such say, as a Greek temple, would 
 awaken the same sentiment. But this is denied. 
 The sense of sublimity indeed may be as great, 
 and the artistic perfection even greater, but it is 
 assuredly the case, that there would be absent 
 that sense of aspiration beyond earth, which is 
 the irresistible attraction of a Gothic buildino-. 
 Indeed, one of the main grounds for studying 
 Christianity is, that to the Western world at 
 least, it alone gives us insight into the char- 
 acteristic differences of classical and romantic 
 art, and these differences come out most com- 
 pletely in regard to architecture !^ 
 
 ^ For this purpose we may take the definitions proposed by Mr. 
 Theodore Watts, that of classical art as " simple representation," 
 romantic as " apparent pictures of unapparent realities. "
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 37 
 
 A visit to a country churchyard would arouse 
 a similar feeling, except that here the sense of 
 sublimity would be less, and that of the unity o 
 the past with the present and the influence of the 
 religious spirit on the common joys and sorrows 
 of life would be heiorhtened. One of the reasons 
 for the slight hold, which Gray's Elegy, despite 
 its perfection of form and detail, has upon the 
 average reader is surely this : — The poem does 
 not give utterance to the natural and universal 
 feelings of the human heart in the scene de- 
 scribed. Its point of view is snobbish ; and the 
 author is solely concerned to point out what a 
 pity it is that the names of the villagers are 
 unknown to '* society " and unregarded of the 
 great world. He implies that they ought to be. 
 
 But the churchyard does not awaken this 
 feeling any more than the cottage does, if so 
 much. What it does excite is a sense of 
 reverence for the common faith of many 
 generations, of kinship between the past and 
 the present, the known and the unknown, of 
 trust in the power that proclaims rest to the 
 tired and the sorrowful in all ages, of the 
 continuity and essential community of human 
 life, and of the recognition of it all in the 
 Christian faith and its symbolic expression in 
 outward form. Gray spends the time in
 
 38 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 
 
 medltatine on the difference between "the 
 rustic" and "the polite." The natural thought 
 is assuredly the opposite. A country church- 
 yard teaches more deeply than any creed or 
 preacher, that human life has in it an eternal 
 element, that what binds men together is real, 
 and what separates them is transient and 
 superficial ; and that the aspirations, the regrets, 
 and the achievements of the human spirit, 
 diverse in form and in circumstance and in 
 historical setting, are like the goal of its hopes 
 and the source of its abiding peace, essentially 
 and universally the same " yesterday, to-day, 
 and for ever." 
 
 If we turn from architecture to painting, we 
 find results not so impressive, yet equally signi- 
 ficant. Nowadays it is the complaint of the 
 half-educated, that all the great galleries are 
 filled or nearly filled with pictures illustrating 
 religious subjects, that they are weary of 
 Madonnas, and that the Holy Family, the 
 Crucifixion, the Martyrdom of S, Sebastian are 
 uninteresting both in subject and treatment. 
 Were this criticism as true as it is silly, it would 
 be even more remarkable than it is, that art 
 should have reached its highest, only in con- 
 templation of such subjects. It has taught us 
 the lesson that the idealisation of human life at
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 39 
 
 its simplest is also its highest. This which is 
 the supreme truth of the teaching of Jesus, is 
 also the noblest discovery of art. For it may 
 be taken as the verdict of all competent judges, 
 that painters as a body have never produced 
 anything approaching to the efforts of Italian 
 genius — even if there be parallel cases of indi- 
 vidual excellence. This fact does not indeed 
 prove the truth of Christianity — with which we 
 are not concerned— but its influence with which 
 we are. For it shows that no other theme, but 
 the stories connected with the Incarnation, has 
 yet had the power so to elevate the minds (or 
 string the nerves, if you will) of a large school of 
 workers, not an unaccountable genius, that they 
 have left to posterity a mass of distinguished 
 work, which impresses all but the vulgarest, 
 and has ever fresh lessons for the student and 
 the lover of beauty. 
 
 It is perhaps needless to add to these illustra- 
 tions of the truth, that Christianity as a fact, is 
 the influence which has raised human thought 
 and teeling to its highest power. But it may be 
 mentioned that since the barbarian invasions, 
 no single work has given to the world the im- 
 press of reality as the " Divina Commedia," and 
 that since the Reformation no writer for sub- 
 limity and mastery of the grand style has
 
 40 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 
 
 approached the author of" Paradise Lost," and 
 that both these poets were not artists working 
 purely for art's sake, i.e,, with no idea beyond 
 the decorative adornment of Hfe, but each had 
 a passionate faith in the importance of righteous- 
 ness, each though very differently was an ardent 
 Christian, and each was possessed of the tre- 
 mendous issue offered to the choice of the human 
 will by the conditions of earthly existence. 
 
 Music has been called pre-eminently the 
 Christian Art. How far that view is correct as 
 regards its modern developments need not be 
 here discussed. Yet it may be asked of those 
 who know by one who is ignorant, whether in 
 all the wealth of modern compositions, weird and 
 brilliant though it be, there is anything which 
 touches the universal heart so deeply as these 
 familiar strains in which Handel rendered yet 
 more moving the most pathetic passages of 
 Isaiah. 
 
 If we turn from the arts and probe a little 
 further into the arcana of the human spirit, we 
 shall find once more that Christian forces 
 have caused man to dive deepest into himself. 
 It is Christianity even more than Philosophy that 
 has caused man to "know himself; " and of all 
 the expressions of the human spirit in its most 
 intimate and isolated self-communings, there are
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 41 
 
 none that penetrate so profoundly as the Con- 
 fessions of S. Augustine, the Pensees of Pascal, 
 or the De Imitiatione of Thomas a Kempis. If 
 we compare any of them with the meditations 
 of the great emperor, or the discourses of 
 the greater slave,^ we cannot but discern in 
 the Christian saints not indeed, intellectual 
 superiority, but a depth of spiritual vision for 
 which elsewhere we seek in vain. Such books 
 are only one among the many evidences — of 
 which the writings of Luther are another — that 
 of all the methods by which man has been made 
 interesting to himself, none is comparable to 
 Christianity. This, again, does not bear directly 
 on the question of its truth. But the historian 
 can but note the fact that neither any other 
 religion nor any non-Christian philosophy, 
 neither love for any art nor the pursuit of 
 any science has made life so well worth living 
 to its adherents as Christianity, and that none 
 has penetrated so profoundly into the "abysmal 
 deeps of personality." Of all the words attributed 
 to Jesus Christ, none has been more thoroughly 
 borne out by the facts of history than this, " I 
 have come that they might have life, and that 
 they might have it more abundantly." The 
 seeker then, after the thoughts of men in the 
 
 ^ Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus.
 
 42 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 
 
 past and the meaning put upon their deepest 
 experiences, cannot avoid whether or no he dis- 
 like it, the duty of treating Christianity as a 
 phenomenon. For none other that he knows, 
 has either elevated human nature to such other- 
 wise undreamed of heights, and none other has 
 so probed into such (before) invisible depths — 
 none has helped the will to soar so far beyond 
 its previous grasp, and none has driven the mind 
 to sink so far beyond its wont in psychological 
 self-knowledge/ 
 
 Having thus shewn, that for the two chief 
 purposes for which history is studied, that of 
 throwing light on the present, and that of re- 
 picturing the past, Christianity forms a very 
 important part of the work of the historical 
 enquirer, we have at the same time indicated 
 the disastrous results of allowing it to be treated 
 as a thing apart. These results are not merely 
 dangerous to the ordinary " profane " historian, 
 who gets an ill-proportioned view of his subject, 
 and a wrong estimate of human life, but they 
 are equally dangerous to the so-called ecclesi- 
 
 1 Cf. The words of Walter Pater on the Monna Lisa. " Set it 
 for a moment beside one of these white, Greek goddesses or 
 beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled 
 by this beauty into which the soul with all its maladies has 
 passed."
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 43 
 
 astical historian, who approaches his material 
 with a mind either bent to some theological 
 prejudice whether defence of truth or anti- 
 theological, or else insufficiently trained in the 
 methods of historical enquiry, and ignorant of 
 the broad lines of social evolution. It was 
 this habit of treating Church History as a 
 thing apart that caused Dr. Hort to say of 
 a certain writer: " He is a very fair specimen 
 of the English ecclesiastical historian, who 
 cannot so much be said to be opposed to 
 truth, as to have no notion that there is such a 
 thing." It may also be added, that some of the 
 vagaries of the wilder school of critics and 
 sociological enquirers are due to their having 
 no other knowledge of historical or literary 
 investigation, but that which is employed for 
 this one special purpose. An acquaintance 
 with the general principles of literary evidence 
 would have prevented such exhibitions, as 
 certain critics have recently treated the world to, 
 and made impossible the history pour rire of 
 Mr. J. M. Robertson in his " Pagan Christs." 
 
 These errors have another cause in the un- 
 conscious bias afforded by the study of pre- 
 historic history. There can, I think, be no 
 doubt that there are two fundamentally differ- 
 ent ways of approaching historical documents,
 
 44 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 
 
 the first, which believes in the probable 
 truth of a story or a tradition, and refuses to 
 discredit the authenticity of a work, until 
 the fact be demonstrated ; the second, very 
 prevalent to-day in the study of Christian 
 origins, assume that a story is improbable 
 merely because it exists, and treats every 
 record as guilty of being a fabrication until 
 it is proved to be innocent. These two 
 presuppositions will affect all the conclusions 
 of the enquirer. So far as historical times are 
 concerned, the former is very much more 
 correct than the latter. Unfortunately the 
 training of many of those, who proclaim the 
 incredibility of the early records of Christianity, 
 has resulted in an unconscious bias, derived 
 from a study of savage races or early myths, 
 in which conjectures on all sides are necessary, 
 and the probability is against any custom or 
 name meaning what it is given out to mean. 
 There is all the difference in the world between 
 the temperament which pure historical research 
 generates, and that produced by anthropo- 
 logical theorising. Recent discoveries in Egypt 
 and Crete have shown the value of discredited 
 traditions. The sober historian must always 
 beware of the desire to transmute his material, 
 and remember that the hypercritical attitude of
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 45 
 
 mind must inevitably lead not merely to the 
 denial of religious stories but of all history. 
 
 These extravagances come from the one- 
 sided study of Christian history and literature, 
 and the attempt to isolate from the main 
 stream of human development one of its most 
 important influences. One of the main lessons 
 which the historian should derive from reflec- 
 tion upon the Christian religion is the need 
 for any philosophic treatment of history of 
 considering the development of civilisation 
 as a whole. Isolated subjects no less than 
 separate periods, may, and indeed must be, 
 investigated by different enquirers. But when 
 we are seeking for the light which history 
 throws upon human life we cannot rule out 
 any part of it ; we must in fact proclaim 
 that the unity of history is a truth no less in 
 respect of all the activities of human life at a 
 given moment, than it is in respect of all 
 the phases of human life in the relation of 
 present to past. Both of these lessons can be 
 learnt from reflection on the Christian religion. 
 It shows us the absurdity of trying to isolate 
 our conception of history into absolutely 
 separate periods ; it shows us the vanity of 
 trying to rule out of our picture of the world of 
 human life any of its chief interests, and the
 
 46 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 
 
 futility of trying to compensate for this by 
 treating the interests as a separate compart- 
 ment/ 
 
 What has been already said illustrates the 
 latter of these topics, and has some bearing on 
 the former. It may be well to develop this a 
 little further. Christianity teaches the unity of 
 history more than any other subject. It is the 
 bridofe which connects the ancient and modern 
 world. The life of Christ is the watershed 
 that makes the supreme division in history, 
 just as the Incarnation is its profoundest philo- 
 sophy. Our chronological terminolgy is justified 
 
 ^ It is fair to say that Mr. Robertson professedly writes in the 
 interest of a dogma, the dogma of secularism. He does 
 not profess to be a merely disinterested enquirer. Amid much 
 that is ingenious, and a little that is even valuable — it is for 
 instance very possible that the worship of Mithras has had an 
 influence on the ceremonies and even the phrases of the 
 Christian cult, it would be strange if it had not — Mr. Robertson 
 goes out of his way to declare his suspicion that Montanus was 
 not a historical person. Buddha and Jesus Christ are, it goes 
 without saying, mere figments of the pious imagination. It will 
 only take a few more centuries for an author of a similar 
 temperament to assure us and develop his assurance with 
 superficial plausibility and an array of sceptical argument 
 that Socrates or Peter the Hermit were equally imaginary. 
 The famous "Historic Doubts" ofWhately showed how 
 the thing can be done. This whole book, however, is an 
 unconscious tribute to the truth of the main thesis of this 
 essay.
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 47 
 
 by the fact that history leads up to and down 
 from the story of Jesus/ 
 
 Leads up to it — we must bear this in mind. 
 The hfe of Jesus is not to the Christian a mere 
 theophany. It is not a vision of the eternal 
 apart from terrestial conditions. It is the life 
 of a man under the ordinary circumstances of 
 human life at a particular epoch. The language, 
 the illustrations,^ the thoughts take the colour, not 
 of our own age or of a northern people, but of 
 the Hebrew people under the Roman yoke. If 
 history is forced to a reverent study of Christi- 
 anity as a phenomenod, it is study and not mere 
 hagiology to which it is drawn. There is no 
 fact related of Christ, which does not require to 
 be examined, and our knowledge of Him rests 
 on certain documentary evidence and traditions, 
 which must be interrogated like all other 
 historical testimony. But we must not allow 
 
 1 Even if the view that Jesus is unhistorical were adopted, this 
 would still remain true. Only instead of Jesus we should have 
 to put the belief in Him. But since all sane historical criticism 
 has long been agreed on this point, there is no need to do more 
 than indicate the fact, that writers of ability and learning have 
 allowed their bias so to run away with them as to uphold the 
 opposite view. 
 
 2 It may for instance be regarded, as certain that the illustra- 
 tion of the vine and the vineyard would be replaced by some 
 other, had the life of Christ been spent among a northern 
 nation.
 
 48 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 
 
 our veiw of the miraculous to determine un- 
 consciously our view of the genuineness of the 
 documents. The question of miracles can never 
 be decided by evidence alone/ No evidence can 
 be strong enough to overcome the presumption 
 against miracles in some minds, while certainly 
 to many in the past the presumption was not a 
 bit stronger than that against any one player 
 having all the trumps in a deal of the cards. 
 
 What is essential is that the picture of Christ 
 be really historical, drawn upon grounds of 
 evidence, not from an abstract theory of his 
 person : and placed in the 7nilieu in which he 
 lived upon earth, and not treated in isolation 
 by the method of theological or imaginative de- 
 duction from scholastic premises. If such be the 
 case with some of the detailed criticisms of the 
 Abb6 Loisy — and to the writer they seem very 
 startling — nothing but praise is to be given by 
 all true historical students to his refusal to 
 allow the interpretation of difficult passages, 
 such as the predictions of the second advent, 
 to be decided apart from the known circum- 
 
 ^ M. Langlois and Seignobos, in their " Introduction to the 
 study of history," regard it as a fundamental canon of historical 
 criticism that " miracles do not happen." This is to put the cart 
 before the horse, and to lay down before proceeding to the 
 record of experience as a. priori rule an to what experience must 
 and must not be.
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 49 
 
 tances of Christ's life by arguments drawn 
 from the Christology of the fourth and fifth 
 centuries. The Hfe of Christ is to be treated 
 as a historical fact, and His mission is to be 
 understood amid the circumstances in which it 
 took place. His influence was able to work 
 just because he came "in the fulness of time." 
 Harnack has recently pointed out the incal- 
 culable importance of this truth, which is 
 commonly expressed in the words : " the pre- 
 paration in history for Christ." Indeed, all 
 the evidence seems to show that the Roman 
 world would have found a new, and perhaps 
 an invigorating", religion had Jesus never lived 
 upon earth. But it would not have been 
 Christianity. No admiration for the ideas which 
 Christianity expresses can do away with the 
 fact that it is a historical religion, that it was 
 developed under historical conditions and took 
 up into itself ideas and usages derived from 
 many sources, raised them to a higher level, 
 and gave them a deeper significance.^ The 
 most disastrous of all forms of Christian apolo- 
 getics is that which is so intent upon showing 
 
 ^ Supposing, for instance, the image of Jesus as the " Lamb of 
 God," were derived from Mithraism, this in no way militates 
 against the soteriological conception of Christ, for it only con- 
 cerns the form it assumed. 
 
 4
 
 50 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 
 
 the unique character of the Christian religion 
 that it tries to treat it in isolation from all 
 others, and thus implicitly denies the claim that 
 it satisfies the universal instincts of humanity. 
 That the Christian Church in its cult, in its 
 organisation, in its theology, assimilated and 
 transmuted notions and usages of many peoples, 
 nations and languages, is a historical fact, and 
 is an objection to the Christian Religion only 
 in the minds of those who confuse origin with 
 significance, and think that what has developed 
 from a simpler state may be judged by the 
 criterion of its earlier form. The true nature 
 of a thino- is not what it starts with but what it 
 becomes. Years ago, Mrs, Carlyle said in her 
 pithy way that it did not interest her to know 
 whether or no her grandfather was an oyster, 
 as she certainly was not one herself, a saying 
 which implies the only true method for re- 
 garding any historical institution. 
 
 Long ago, John Henry Newman saw the 
 fact that Christianity did not develop in 
 isolation, but by assimilation. 
 
 "The doctrine of a Trinity is found both in 
 the East, and in the West ; so is the ceremony 
 of washing ; so is the rite of sacrifice. The 
 doctrine of the Divine Word is Platonic ; 
 the doctrine of the Incarnation is Indian ; of
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 51 
 
 a divine kingdom is Judaic ; of angels and 
 demons is Magian ; the connection of sin 
 with the body is Gnostic ; ceHbacy is known to 
 Bonze and Talapoin ; a sacerdotal order is 
 Egyptian ; the idea of a new birth is Chinese 
 and Eleusinian ; belief in sacramental virtue is 
 Pythagorean ; and honours to the dead are a 
 polytheism." 
 
 There is nothing alarming in this to the 
 Christian, but it is of great importance to the 
 historian. It demonstrates the unity of history 
 more impressively than any other single phe- 
 nomenon. " Christianity," said the same writer, 
 •' has always been a learned religion," — by 
 which he did not mean that it only appealed to 
 the learned, but that it cannot be understood 
 adequately apart from the knowledge of 
 previous history and current philosophy. If 
 it points this way, it also points the other — it 
 shews us the true nature of historical changes. 
 They are never changes in vacuo, isolated 
 from the normal course of things, yet they are 
 real changes. Christianity is like the house- 
 holder who brinois of his treasure " thinpfs new 
 and old," but it makes them all afresh by its own 
 special creative force. Religious teachers, like 
 all workmen, do not create their material, they 
 arrange it. But the result is "a new heaven
 
 52 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 
 
 and a new earth." Change in history is not 
 the violent irruption of the unexpected ; it is 
 the significant entrance of a new spirit. The 
 British Constitution may have been, as Free- 
 man thought, latent in the folk moots of Uri 
 and Unterwalden ; but it is not the same thing. 
 The great reformers of history, whether 
 political or religious are men like Abt Vogler, 
 who had the power, 
 
 " Out of three sounds to make not a fourth sound, but a star," 
 
 The attempt to explain away Christianity or 
 indeed any other institution or belief, by merely 
 analysing its elements is to make the same 
 error as the man would do who attempted to ex- 
 plain away the appeal of the Sistine Madonna 
 by exhibiting in a series of little pots the exact 
 amount of each material used in painting 
 the picture. 
 
 There is little need here to develop elabor- 
 ately the way in which Christianity took up 
 the old elements of Hebrew religion and Greek 
 culture. It is a familiar story how just at the 
 moment when the Jews had lost all likelihood of 
 regaining their kingdom, they were by their dis- 
 persion throughout the Roman Empire, enabled 
 to give and receive impressions upon other races 
 in a way their peculiar characteristics had pre-
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 53 
 
 vented in the past ; how, at the same time, the 
 genius of Rome, which had destroyed all 
 distinctions of race and state in the interests of 
 universal order, was singularly lacking in 
 ideals, and needed a faith to breathe life into 
 the dry bones of material force. After various 
 other experiments, Christianity on the prin- 
 ciples of natural selection was accepted, as 
 the only living power capable of doing this. 
 It was the actual form, in which the 
 cachet of the Hebrew people, its genius 
 for religion, paused to influence the Western 
 world. No less was it the form in which 
 Greek thought, while itself transmuted, passed 
 on to the mediaeval world. It is probable that 
 just at present the influence of Greek thought 
 on Christian theology is rather over than under- 
 rated. But at any rate it is clear that the 
 Christian theology absorbed into itself very 
 much of what was most distinctive in Greek 
 culture, and passed it on to a world which 
 knew no Greek. Until the Renaissance, the 
 Christian Church was the form in which 
 Hebrew and Hellenic ideas reached the 
 Western world, no less than it was the means 
 by which the Roman genius for order and 
 discipline educated the child-races that poured 
 into the Empire. Christianity, in fact, affords
 
 54 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 
 
 a philosophy of history which even those who 
 disHke it can hardly ignore. 
 
 In addition, however, to its lesson of the 
 unity of human life, Christianity teaches us 
 another. It guards us from the danger which 
 besets all those to whom this unity presents 
 itself, of undue systematisation, of attempting 
 to deny the real operation of personal causes. 
 In days when the categories of natural science 
 are apt for employment in other subjects, there 
 is always a risk that history, which as the 
 record of human life ought to be the best pre- 
 servative against this error, should itself be the 
 victim of it, and the whole development o 
 human affairs represented, as the inevitable 
 outcome of the principles of natural selection 
 or whatever form of mechanical causation be at 
 the moment In fashion. Thus the very subject 
 which looked at with honest and unbiassed 
 eyes, gives the coup de ^rdce to the mechanical 
 theory of the universe, is made by ingenious 
 manipulation and a plausible though superficial 
 method of presentment to minister to the 
 actual mental vice it seemed designed to 
 avoid. 
 
 Such works as the late Mr. Buckle's 
 " History of Civilisation in England," or Mr. 
 Spencer's exhibition of what the unhistorical
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 55 
 
 temperament can do with the facts of history, 
 in his " Political Institutions," may be taken as 
 instances of this. The true principle on which 
 they proceed is that of the continuity of human 
 affairs, and the necessity of studying the 
 milieM as well as the man — for even the 
 greatest man will fail to affect the main course 
 of human development, if he be not in some 
 way, whether by sympathy or contrast, fitted 
 for the condition in which he lives ; while it is 
 also true, that very large numbers of men let 
 themselves be swayed by their environment, 
 and only a few rise above it by an act of choice. 
 These truths are, as we have already seen, 
 exemplified in the life of Jesus Christ and the 
 history of the Church. We need to study the 
 nation in which Christ lived if we would under- 
 stand His teaching. His influence, and His 
 death ; we need to study the condition of 
 culture, worship, and thought of the early 
 Christian Church if we can appreciate the 
 significance of Christian doctrine and ecclesias- 
 tical organisation.^ As M. Loisy says, we 
 need to supplement to the notion of philosophic 
 relativity, with which from the days of the 
 schoolmen all statements of doctrine must be 
 qualified, the much more modern conception of 
 historical relativity which is only beginning to
 
 S6 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 
 
 be generally apprehended. Moreover, the 
 loud-voiced emphasis and uncritical dogmatism, 
 with which the personal aspect of history was 
 preached by Carlyle and still more by Froude, 
 and the worship of the strong man apart from 
 his morality, provoked a natural reaction on 
 the part of those who saw that history was 
 something- more than a sta^e for the exhibition 
 of individual eccentricities against the back- 
 ground of the passions and interests of the 
 crowd. Besides if it be merely the strong 
 man, like Henry VIII. or Napoleon, whose 
 actions are of such importance, it might be 
 possible to explain history on a purely mechani- 
 cal theory of things.^ " He speaks of me as a 
 person, I am not a person I am a thing," said 
 Bonaparte. The writer who in recent years 
 has resuscitated the belief in the strong man, 
 whose philosophy is the (unconscious) but 
 heartfelt inspiration of men such as Jay Gould 
 or Whittaker Wright (to omit any reference 
 to the living) did as a matter of fact develop 
 his theory of the superiority of greatness to 
 morality on the basis of a purely physiological 
 
 ^ See an interesting essay by the late Mr. R. H. Hutton, on 
 the " Limits of Free Will in Aspects of Scientific and Religious 
 Thought." It is because much of popular writing ignores these 
 limits, that the pure tieterminist is able to attract so many 
 votaries.
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 57 
 
 doctrine. Nietzsche claims to teach only the 
 logical development of Darwinism, considered 
 as a philosophy of life, not merely as a 
 science of natural forms. ^ The true and final 
 refutation of the mechanical theory of life can 
 never be afforded by a contemplation of 
 great military or political conquerors, dealing 
 with material forces by material motives, 
 rating (as Machiavelli bade them) human 
 nature, as essentially bad, i.e., moved only 
 by self-interest and fear. Bismarck or Cavour, 
 Metternich or Richelieu, in so far as they were 
 successful, are not insurmountable obstacles to 
 the naturalist conception of human life. 
 
 It is in the great spiritual personalities of the 
 world that lies the final impossibility of accepting 
 a theory which does such violence to ordinary 
 consciousness as the mechanical.^ Besides the 
 facts of our own inner life, it is men like Luther, 
 S. Paul, S. Francis of Assisi, John Wesley, 
 Ignatius Loyola, which render impossible to 
 
 ' The same may also be said, though here the reference is of 
 course largely unconscious, of Machiavelli. Of him Nietzsche is 
 really only a modern exponent expansion. 
 
 ^ It can never be too often repeated that the theory of pure 
 determinism declares the whole inner life of man to be a lie, 
 and the involuntary presupposition of all human society and 
 every moral judgment to be a delusion. No religious theory 
 ever was so mistaken as this.
 
 58 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 
 
 the candid inquirer a conception of history 
 which denies that personality is real. Now, 
 of all these instances there is none which is 
 comparable to that of the life of Christ himself, 
 even apart from the fact that everyone of the 
 others believed himself to have attained his 
 power to work (moral) wonders only by belief in 
 this greatest of all personalities. If Christianity 
 is essentially a historical religion, it is also 
 fundamentally personal. " Der ganze Inhalt der 
 religion, des Leben in Gott, die Vergebung 
 der Sunde, den Trost in Leiden bindet sie an 
 diese Person." This is the dictum of the 
 great German, who despite all limitations and a 
 certain bias against the supernatural, remains 
 one of the supreme historians of the day — 
 Adolf Harnack. "Christianity is not a system 
 of doctrine, not an organisation, not even a 
 church first and foremost. It means 
 a Person — Jesus" — these were the words of 
 another scholar occupying a very different 
 position, dogmatically and ecclesiastically, 
 whose studies had been mainly in a 
 different period, the late Bishop of London. 
 This agreement of two men, who with all their 
 differences were both of them essentially students 
 — i.e. seekers after truth — may be taken as 
 illustrative of a fact, which is apparent to every-
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 59 
 
 one who looks below the surface of theological 
 controversies. Christianity is remarkable for the 
 variety of forms which it has assumed, and its 
 adaptation to very different psychological cli- 
 mates. But amid all the varieties, all the super- 
 stitions, all the crimes to which it has given rise 
 one point has always remained fixed at least in 
 the aspirations of its believers, however little 
 their life or some of their doctrines might be 
 consistent therewith — that Christianity means 
 Christ. Loyalty to a person is of its essence, 
 whatever else be an accident. 
 
 This is the case, however diverse be the 
 views that are held about the meaning of this 
 loyalty. This it is which unites men so 
 diverse as Harnack, Martineau, Newman and 
 Arnold, and forms a gulf between them and 
 men such as Huxley, Mill, Comte or Carlyle, 
 despite the moral elevation and intellectual 
 passion which distinguishes the latter more 
 than it does very many of those who profess 
 the Christian name. Some, like Dr. Harnack, 
 may hold as in the essay as above quoted that, it 
 is to the general impression which Jesus as the 
 Revealer made that the Christian is bound, and 
 that narratives, like the miraculous birth, or the 
 resurrection story cannot, even if true, be the 
 essence of our faith. Others will regard such
 
 6o CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 
 
 a position as not merely erroneous, but almost 
 a blasphemy/ Some, like the Abbe Loisy, will 
 hold that the doctrine of the Incarnation as 
 expressed in the Catholic creeds is a statement 
 of the mysterious truth of the Person of Jesus, 
 in the intellectual forms of an age dominated 
 by the notion of the Divine transcendence and 
 by the methods of Greek philosophy, and that 
 it needs restatement in terms of present day 
 thought and according to the standpoint of 
 modern philosophy which recognises the truth 
 of the Divine immanence. Others will hold 
 the very demand of any restatement as dis- 
 honouring to the divine Lord, and that the man 
 who makes it is rather more dangerous than an 
 athiest. Some will teach that Jesus founded 
 a society, which exists to express his will, to 
 teach all nations, mighty to build up, to break 
 down, to destroy, certain of enduring inspira- 
 tion from his spirit, and in the strength of his 
 promise the pillar and ground of all truth. 
 
 ' " Das Christenthum und die geschichte." Reden and aufsatze. 
 The closing paragraphs of the essay may seem as if the Professor 
 were taking away with one hand what he has given with the 
 other. But a comparison with the essay on "Pagan Christs" 
 will show that this is not the case. Harnack, in the opinion of 
 the writer is far more limited by German academic Protestantism 
 than he imagines ; but he is a historian, not a mere theorist, 
 stretching the past on the Procrustean bed of a priori anti- 
 religious dogmatism.
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 6i 
 
 Others will assert that the main purpose of his 
 life was to draw man away from all instruments 
 and media of which even the church only 
 claims to be the highest, and to set him up- 
 right apart and alone in the presence of the 
 eternal Father. Some will declare that Jesus 
 is to be honoured as above all the Redeemer 
 who bore man's sins upon the cross, and 
 relieved us by an act of self-sacrifice from the 
 penalty which was justly laid upon us. Others 
 will declare that such a view is alike impossible 
 and immoral, that it is dishonouring to the 
 nature of Eternal love, and false to the facts of 
 human experience. Some will see in Jesus 
 the greatest of Socialists, the enemy of all 
 inequalities of wealth and position, who preached 
 a gospel for the poor, and warned off the rich 
 from the kingdom of heaven ; others will see in 
 him a purely spiritual enthusiasm, or an aloof- 
 ness from earthly concerns, political or social, cry- 
 ing to those who strove to make him a partisan — 
 "who made me a judge or a divider," and brought 
 at last to his death through teaching that " My 
 kingfdom is not of this world." But whatever as- 
 pect be seized upon, and whatever interpretation 
 of the Person of Jesus be accepted or denied, each 
 claims its authority as being the expression of the 
 mind of Christ, each claims as its ideal of conduct
 
 62 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 
 
 the hope of pleasing- Him. All alike confess 
 that in some unique sense Jesus is the very- 
 Christ, the anointed of God, the Redeemer, the 
 Master, the Friend of man, who showed to 
 man what God is and what man may be, and 
 gave to him the means of becoming it — by 
 faith in Him, who was son of God and Son 
 of Man/ 
 
 Now it is this fact that Christianity is so 
 intensely personal a faith that has enabled it to 
 develop so deeply the conception of personality, 
 and to teach man better than any other creed 
 the dignity of himself. But it does more than 
 this. It forms the supreme refutation of the 
 impersonal view of history. We have seen 
 some of the grounds for regarding Christianity 
 as one of the most influential of the forces that 
 have made the world what it is ; how it affects 
 all that we do and all that we admire. This it 
 must be borne in mind is true of non-Christians 
 no less than of Christians. 
 
 Such a book as that of Mr. Cotter Morrison 
 on " The Service of Man " would have been 
 
 ^This is true even of a view so dangerously defective from 
 the ordinary standpoint as that of Dr. Harnack in "Das 
 Wesen des Christenthum." For the purpose of the historian 
 such a view must be treated as merely an expression of 
 Christianity, whatever the theologian may say of it.
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 63 
 
 an impossibility but for the Christian atmos- 
 phere in which the writer had lived. Chris- 
 tianity is in fact so much a part of our 
 world, that one of the difficulties of missions 
 arises from the entanglement of its essential 
 religious truth with a special phase of 
 civilisation, which it is neither possible nor 
 desirable to transplant. 
 
 What inferences for historical enquiry 
 are we to draw from the transcendent 
 power which Christianity has shown in 
 the past, that of overcoming all reasonable 
 calculation ? 
 
 Nothing, for instance, could have been more 
 improbable than the triumph of Christianity in 
 the Roman Empire. No attempts to show the 
 contrary after the fact will avail to overcome 
 the antecedent impossibility, as it must have 
 seemed to all but the strongest faith. It is the 
 verdict of mere common sense which Agrippa 
 uttered "Paul thou art beside thyself." All 
 the great triumphs of history are spiritual, 
 and all are improbable and even impossible 
 from the standpoint of common sense. All 
 ordinary calculations of probability are based 
 on the assumption that there are no personal 
 or spiritual forces, or at any rate none that 
 can do more than keep the existing ideal of
 
 64 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 
 
 righteousness in the ascendent. The stock- 
 exchange and the economist only reckon 
 with the normal selfishness of the normal 
 business man in normal conditions. And 
 for a large number of what may be called 
 " short period " values, this calculation is 
 reasonable. But all such calculatious are from 
 time to time shown to be based on an in- 
 adequate view of human nature, and to ignore 
 the spiritual, i.e. the personal element in man. 
 This was the mistake of the Roman curia about 
 the outbreak of the Lutheran revolt. It is the 
 mistake of the historian who attempts to treat 
 all history as if it were inevitably dependent on 
 climate or economic needs, and aims at one day 
 reducing it to a branch of mathematics. Now, 
 Christianity is not the only, but it is the 
 grandest and most moving corrective of this 
 error. Not only does it depend for its original 
 force on the power of personality, so that a 
 non-Christian writer can say : — 
 
 " The moral progress of mankind can never 
 
 1 If the reader desires evidence of this in regard to ordinary 
 affairs, let him read Gentz, "Consideration on the Balance of 
 Power in Europe," written in 1806, when Europe was groaning 
 under the Napoleonic empire. It is against the belief in the 
 impossibility of resistance that the writer classes himself That 
 the victory over Napoleon was the triumph of spiritual forces 
 over material is shown by Seeley in his Life of Stein.
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 65 
 
 cease to be distinctively and intensely Christian 
 as long as it consists of a gradual approximation 
 to the character of the Christian founder. 
 There is indeed nothing more wonderful in 
 the history of the human race than the way in 
 which that ideal has traversed the lapse of ages, 
 acquiring a new strength and beauty with each 
 advance of civilisation, and infusing its beneficent 
 influence into every sphere of thought and 
 actio 1," 
 
 The fact that the greatest of all the formative 
 forces of history was personal is surely a proof 
 that, whatever the justice of Christian belief, no 
 theory of history which attempts to treat per- 
 sonality as the mere resultant of mechanical 
 forces is likely to lead to valid results. For 
 it is not only true of the original force of 
 Christianity, but of the frequent reformations 
 to which it has been subject. 
 
 " The organisation of the Church, following 
 the law of organisations, has frequently sought 
 to limit and define the means by which God 
 could be known, the sphere within which He 
 might be worshipped. Such efforts have 
 been termed vain. The individual has always 
 risen to protest against the tyranny of the 
 society. . . . Christianity is always deterio- 
 
 ^Lecky : Rationalism in Europe, 1337. 
 
 5
 
 66 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 
 
 ratine in the hands of the multitude, and 
 is always being restored by the enlightened 
 conscience of the individual." ^ 
 
 Both in its conflicts with the world, and its 
 internal development, Christianity witnesses 
 more than any other historical phenomenon, to 
 the truth that personality is a real cause and 
 not merely the meeting point of other forces, it 
 gives the lie to the conscious automaton theory 
 of history, so far, that is, as any record of fact 
 can give it the lie. Facts can always be fitted 
 into the mechanical theory by some ingenious 
 plausibility, provided we are prepared to do 
 violence to all our inner life, and to treat the 
 whole development of our personality as 
 an illusion. The person who has ceased to 
 believe in himself is not likely to be restored 
 by a contemplation of Christianity. But it 
 may arrest the process of disbelief and moral 
 decadence, which is so characteristic of our 
 time ; and it will certainly come as a corrective 
 to the force with which the strongest believer 
 in personality, i.e. in the humanity of man, will 
 now and then be assailed by the sophistries of 
 
 1 Sermon on "Liberty," by M. Creighton. "The Mind of 
 S. Peter," 85. The whole sermon is an admirable exposition 
 of the relations of "Christianity" to human history.
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 6-; 
 
 science, masquerading as a philosophy. ^ The 
 cardinal difference between human beings, on 
 the side at least of belief, is between those who 
 believe and those who do not believe in human 
 personality. Not merely this ; it is the cardinal 
 error in the treatment of history to disregard it. 
 A good deal of the atmosphere of popular thought 
 is in favour of this error ; the reaction against 
 the merely dramatic view of history is also in 
 favour of it ; the truth, that history is one, and 
 that genius needs conditions to work in may, if 
 not properly understood and guarded, be also a 
 wandering fire which will lure the student into 
 the bypath meadow of impersonal formulae, 
 hard by the stronghold of the Giant Despair, 
 Fatalism. The contemplation of the facts of 
 psychology, so far as the individual is con- 
 cerned, is the best preservative against this 
 danger.^ But an unbiassed study of human 
 history, as a whole, is also a help towards the 
 same end, and of this whole, as we saw, 
 Christianity forms a considerable part. Valuable 
 to the student in many ways, its highest worth 
 
 nt has often been pointed out that "naturalism" is not 
 science any more than "idealism " ; in such writers as Grant Allen 
 it is a special metaphysic or anti-metaphysic which professes 
 to be nothing more than pure science. 
 
 * See William James, " The Will to Believe."
 
 68 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 
 
 perhaps lies in this that it shows to him that 
 "not once nor twice," but through a long history 
 development is not inevitable ; that progress is 
 only the law of our being in the sense, that is 
 the true purpose of our life, which it rests with 
 us to realise or to defeat ; that the vital truth 
 of our own experience of 
 
 The living will that shall endure 
 When all that seems shall suffer shock 
 
 is not belied by reflection and turned into a 
 
 delusion by science, provided that the reflection 
 
 be upon all the facts of human life, and science 
 
 is the ordered arrangement of what we know, 
 
 and not the a p?^iori dogmatism of abstract 
 
 theorizers. 
 
 Connected with, and a consequence of the 
 
 fact, is it the case that freedom is the child of 
 the Christian Church. If it be true to say 
 
 that history is the record of the process towards 
 
 freedom, that the East recognised that one 
 
 is free, the ancient world that some are 
 
 free, and the modern that all are free ; even 
 
 though the lesson be imperfectly carried out it 
 
 is certainly the case that the progress of 
 
 Christianity is the formal means by which it 
 
 has been taught. This is not to say that 
 
 Christianity comes as a programme of political 
 
 liberty, or that it is incompatible with any one
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 69 
 
 or other particular form of government. That 
 would be to make a worse mistake than the 
 upholders of the Divine right, of kings a couple 
 of centuries ago. Christianity does not, as 
 such, come to men recommending despotic or 
 aristocratic or democratic government. 
 
 What it does do is to assert the principle of 
 the infinite worth of the individual, and of the 
 brotherhood and the duty of mutual service. 
 It asserted these truths and left it to time and 
 circumstance to work them out. It did not 
 destroy slavery, but it made the servile habit 
 of mind impossible, to all who sincerely realised 
 its meaning It does not attack despotism, but it 
 trains its members to freedom. And this, 
 despite all the many acts of tyranny and crime 
 with which ecclesiastical organisation has 
 been justly charged. No abuse of authority 
 can do away with the fact that liberty is the 
 result of the recognition of the spiritual nature 
 of man. This it is which is the significance 
 of Christian history, and more especially of the 
 conflicts of sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 
 It can hardly be said that any of the religious 
 bodies really believed in liberty as we conceive 
 it — but they believed in the transcendent im- 
 portance of character as moulded by their own 
 religious system. For this reason and this
 
 70 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 
 
 reason only was it impossible for them to 
 be overcome by the general trend in favour 
 of despotism and the utilitarian arguments of 
 writers like Barclay, who asked whether any 
 suffering caused by a tyrant was equal to that 
 of civil war. The answer is in the negative, 
 and it is only as liberty is seen to have its true 
 ground in the inalienable right of human 
 character to be its best that there ever is or 
 ever will be any adequate defence against the 
 the claim of organisation to consider only 
 efficiency or the desire of administrators to 
 think of order before righteousness. In the 
 actual and direct acquisition of political liberty, 
 it is easy to claim too large a part for the 
 Church ; in the indirect and fundamental basis 
 of freedom her part is larger, than even her 
 own representatives have often either known 
 or desired. There is, for instance, no ground 
 whatever for alleging that S. Paul was opposed 
 to slavery or even that he disliked it as a system. 
 Those who strive so to manipulate his language 
 as to prove that he did, do an ill-service to 
 Christianity and the Apostle whom they would 
 turn from a great and successful preacher of 
 spiritual ideas, into a mere futile and ineffectual 
 agitator for political measures. But it is indis- 
 putable that S. Paul laid down principles of
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 71 
 
 which the natural and impHed consequence was 
 the abolition of ordinary slavery. That he 
 saw the result is not probable, nor was it need- 
 ful. The parable of the grain of mustard seed 
 is so familiar that its significance is often for- 
 gotten. Its significance is indeed a large part of 
 the lesson that Christianity has to teach the his- 
 torical enquirer that once a new principle be ac- 
 cepted in human life, it may be left to develop 
 institutions, and philosophy influenced by all 
 the means to hand ; that it is bound to use those 
 means and is certain to do so. It is not cir- 
 cumstances that generate ideas, but ideas that 
 absorb and control external material — or in 
 other words " all things work together for good 
 to them that love God." No event, no 
 condition, no state, but may subserve the ad- 
 vancement of a great idea. None so alien but it 
 may wrest them to its purpose. None so trivial 
 but it may use it as an instrument. True great- 
 ness in human life lies not in the application of 
 principles — it lies in the bringing them into 
 men's minds, where, of themselves, they will 
 bear fruit. All real originality is an originality 
 of thought and will. So much is, or ought to 
 be, clear to the student of the Christian history, 
 woefully though it has been forgotten by the 
 exponents of ecclesiastical systems. It is the
 
 72 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 
 
 error of all such men that they confuse the 
 end with the means, the idea with its temporary- 
 expression, and the nobility of spiritual force 
 with the mobility of ecclesiastical machinery. 
 
 Such are, it seems, to the writer, some 
 of the reflections which in those who seek 
 to master the meaning of historical study, the 
 phenomenon of Christianity is bound to excite. 
 Firstly it demands attention, it cannot be 
 ignored. Secondly it shews us the futility of 
 treating human life in water-tight compart- 
 ments, or in trying to separate arbitrarily, 
 sacred and secular history. Thirdly, it shews us 
 how, for a long period at least, Christianity was 
 inwoven with the politics, the art, and the 
 thinking of the civilised world, so that without 
 some knowledge of, and even sympathy with 
 this many sided institution, culture, as modern 
 Europe understands it, is impossible. Fourthly, 
 it demonstrates, as nothing else does, the 
 unity of past and present, and shews that, 
 however convenient for temporary purposes 
 may be the hard-and-fast divisions of history 
 they are merely relative and inadequate ; above 
 all, it shews the error of judging the whole of 
 human life by a part. On the other hand 
 Christianity is the most impressive of all the 
 social institutions which teach us the fallacious-
 
 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 73 
 
 ness of the mechanical view of human life ; for 
 again and again in the life both of its founder 
 and its greatest exponents it brings out the 
 importance of personality as a factor in history, 
 and the futility of supposing all events to 
 be the inevitable and unalterable result of the 
 clash of impersonal forces. In this sense — 
 apart from any question of the truth and merits 
 of its theology — Christianity, as a fact, enforces, 
 though it does not demonstrate, the spiritual 
 view of human life, which allows us to say, 
 
 I think we are not wholly brain 
 
 Not merely cunning casts in clay 
 
 Magnetic mockeries — not in vain 
 
 Like Paul with beasts I fought with death. 
 
 This fact and not any special pre-dilection 
 
 in favour of a particular political theory is at 
 
 the basis of the claim, that Christianity has 
 
 done more than any other influence to bring 
 
 about freedom because it recognises, and by 
 
 recognising enhances the dignity and worth of 
 
 human nature. Finally, its history guards us 
 
 against the danger inherent in mankind of 
 
 paying too much regard to machinery and too 
 
 little to ideas, of mistaking the temporary 
 
 applications of truth for its eternal reality. On 
 
 these grounds, it may fairly claim, that those who 
 
 desire to attain the historical mind, those who 
 
 6 
 
 r^
 
 74 CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 
 
 are disinterestedly endeavouring to seek from 
 history its answer to the question what is the 
 best that has been known and thought in the 
 world are (so far as their historical studies 
 are concerned), free to adopt any attitude they 
 please to the system of Christian doctrine or the 
 forms of the Christian organization, but that only 
 at the risk of losing that which they seek, and of 
 acquiring notions false to the whole truth of 
 human life or viewing out of perspective the 
 panorama of human development, can they 
 either ignore the fact of Christianity, or refrain 
 from devoting to it a large, though never an 
 exclusive, attention. 
 
 The treatment of Church History as a thing 
 apart is an evil. It plays into the hands of 
 the fanatic, and strengthens the bias of the 
 partisan. It ministers to the superstitions of 
 believers and infidels with impartial noxious- 
 ness. It makes the subject dry and technical 
 and denudes it of attractions and utility, for 
 all save the ecclesiastic and the specialist. 
 
 A still worse evil however it is to treat of 
 secular history in abstraction from Christianity. 
 The contemplation of the world apart from 
 religious influence tends inevitably to pessimism. 
 History so seen is truly nothing but " the record 
 of the crimes, the follies and the misfortunes of
 
 CHRISTIAMTY AND HISTORY 75 
 
 mankind." It leads to an external view of 
 human life, and promotes an unreal simplicity 
 in our catagories of motives. It treats men 
 too much on a level, for to its view are not 
 apparent the finer influences and the higher 
 aims. In the development of human life such 
 an abstract method substitutes anatomy for 
 psychology and seeks to analyse the mechanism 
 and institutions instead of realising the spirit of 
 natural life. Only in so far as we include in 
 our survey the eternal mystery-play of the gospe^ 
 and its appeal to the human heart, shall we 
 gather hope instead of despair from the spectacle. 
 Only so can we catch the glimpses of romance 
 behind the sordid and squalid representation of 
 ofreed and selfishness which is too often in the 
 foreground of our picture ; only so is it possible 
 even in the spectacle of shipwrecked nations, 
 and iieeting glories to discern the true dignity 
 of man's destiny and the splendour of his un- 
 dying aspirations, for only so through the 
 twiliofht of social insincerities and individual 
 
 o 
 
 iniquities shall there dawn for the patient 
 watcher the vision and the wonder of the 
 past. 
 
 The lesson of history to the patient seeker 
 after truth, is when all is said, one and the 
 same with the supreme message of the gospel.
 
 'je CHRISTIANITY AND HISTORY 
 
 The picture of human life in the past tends to 
 produce weariness and despair, except in so far 
 as it be illuminated by Hope and transfigured 
 by Love. 
 
 THE END.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Acton, Lord, 20, 2>on. 
 
 Agrippa, quoted, 63. 
 
 Allen, Graat, 67;?. 
 
 Anne, Queen, policy of, 32. 
 
 Architecture, Church, sublimity 
 
 of, 35-38. 
 
 Arnold, reference to, 59. 
 
 Art and poetry, religious sub- 
 jects in, 38-40. 
 
 Associations' Law, reference to, 
 8. 
 
 Aurelius, Marcus, reference to, 
 41. 
 
 Barclay, 70. 
 
 Becket, St. Thomas a, reference 
 to, 2^n. 
 
 Bismarck, reference to, 57. 
 
 Bonaparte, Napoleon, Concor- 
 dat signed by, 9 ; reference 
 to, 56. 
 
 Buckle, Mr., 54. 
 
 Buddha, reference to, ^6n. 
 
 Burke, quoted, 25. 
 
 Carlyle, Mrs., 50. 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas, reference to, 
 
 56, 59-. . 
 
 Caroline Divines, the, 5. 
 
 Catholic Church, civilizing in- 
 fluence of, in Middle Ages, 
 8, 25-27. 
 
 Catholic Emancipation Bill, 
 reference to, 31. 
 
 Cavour, 57. 
 
 Charles II, policy of, 32. 
 
 Chaucer, reference to, 16. 
 
 Christianity 
 
 A living influence, 1-2, 11- 
 
 13, 18, 21, 34, 39,63. 
 Development of, from 
 Hebrew and Greek ele- 
 ments, 52-54. 
 Forms of, 59 60. 
 Historical character of, 49- 
 
 50. 
 Liberty, the principle of, 
 
 68-71. 
 Moral progress of mankind, 
 
 influence on, 64, 65. 
 Refining influence of, on 
 education and art, 24-27, 
 38-40. 
 Reflections from the study 
 
 of, 72. 
 Roman Empire, under sway 
 of, 23. 
 Civitas Dei^ 2472, 25^, 29/;. 
 Comte, reference to, 59. 
 Conciliar movement, the, 32. 
 Concordat of Bologna, the, 10. 
 Concordat, the, of 1801, 9-10. 
 " Consideration on the Balance 
 of Power in Europe " refer- 
 ence to, 64?/. 
 Colon, Father, 9. 
 Creighton, Dr. Mandel, Bishop 
 of London, 58, 66/?.
 
 7S 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Dante, reference to, 29/;. 
 
 Darwinism, 57. 
 
 De RTaistre, reference to, 31. 
 
 De Monarchia Dante's, refer- 
 ence to, 29//. 
 
 "Divina Commedia," reference 
 to, 39-40. 
 
 Divine right, 32. 
 
 Emmanuel, Victor, King of 
 Italy, President Loubet's 
 visit to, 9. 
 
 Epictetus, reference to, 4in. 
 
 Esmond, reference to, 15. 
 
 France, Anatole, reference to, 8;/. 
 
 Francis I, Concordat of 15 17 
 signed by, 10. 
 
 Freeman, reference to, 52. 
 
 French Government, Religious 
 Orders and, struggle be- 
 tween, 8-9. 
 
 Froude, reference to, 56. 
 
 Gallican Liberties, reference to, 
 
 10. 
 Gould, Mr. Jay, 56. 
 Gray's Elegy, reference to, 37- 
 
 38. 
 Green, Mr. J. R., 19, 20. 
 
 Handel's " Isaiah," reference to, 
 
 40. 
 Hapsburg, House of, 29. 
 Harnack, Dr. Adolf, 49, 58, 59, 
 
 ton, 62«. 
 Henry II, reference to, 24^';. 
 " Historic Doubts " reference to, 
 
 46//. 
 Historical study, purpose of 13, 
 
 Historical tradition, method of 
 treating, 44-45- 
 
 " History of Civilisation in Eng- 
 land," reference to, 54. 
 
 History, pre-Christian, 32-33. 
 
 History, Church and Secular 
 
 relation between, 74-76. 
 Hort, Dr., ciuoted, 43. 
 Hutton, Mr. R. H. 56^. 
 Huxley, reference to, 59. 
 
 Incarnation, doctrine of the, 53. 
 
 "Independent Review" refer- 
 ence to, 30;?. 
 
 Irish Disestablishment, refer- 
 ence to, 31. 
 
 James II, reference to policy 
 
 of, 31, 32. 
 James, Mr. Henry, 15. 
 James, Mr. William, Gyn. 
 Jesus Christ — — 
 
 Interpretation of His doc- 
 trine, 59-62. 
 
 Relation of, to history, 46- 
 
 50, 55- 
 John of Salisbury, reference to, 
 
 26;/. 
 Johnson, Mr., 22n. 
 
 Langlois, M., 48/7. 
 
 Lecky, reference to, 32/z, 65;?. 
 
 Leo X, Pope, Concordat signed 
 
 with Francis I. 10. 
 Loisy, Abbe, 48-49, 55, 60. 
 Loubet, President, Italy, visit 
 
 to, 9. 
 Louis IX, 10. 
 Louis XIV, 31. 
 Luther, reference to, 7, 41, 46//., 
 
 57- 
 
 Macaulay, reference to, 15. 
 Machiavelli, reference to, 57;?. 
 Martineau, reference to, 59. 
 Mediaeval world, state of, 26-29. 
 Medici, Marie de, 9. 
 Metternlch, reference to, 57. 
 Mill, John Stuart, reference to, 
 
 59- 
 Miracles, veracity of, 48. 
 Mithras, worship of, 46;/.
 
 INDEX 
 
 79 
 
 Monna Lisa, the, reference to, 
 
 42 «. 
 Morris, Mr., quoted, 14. 
 Morrison, Mr. Cotter, 64. 
 Music, " the Christian Art," 40. 
 
 Newman, John Henry, Cardinal, 
 reference to, 31, 59; quoted, 
 50-52. 
 
 Nietzsche, P^riedrich, ^m. 
 
 Novahs, reference to, 31. 
 
 " Pagan Christs," reference to, 
 
 43- 
 Papacy, the, influence on history, 
 
 21 ; secular power of, 6-7, 
 
 23-24, 28-29. 
 " Paradise Lost,'' reference to, 
 
 .39-40. 
 Parliament, Religious cjuestions 
 
 and bills in, 31. 
 Pascal, the Pensees of, 41. 
 Pasquier, 9. 
 
 " Passive Resistance," 3-5. 
 Pater, Walter, 42'?. 
 Peter the Hermit, reference to, 
 
 46;?. 
 Pius Vn, Pope, Concordat 
 
 signed by, 9. 
 Pius X, Pope, 9. 
 Plato, reference to, 53. 
 "Political Institutions," reference 
 
 to, 55. 
 "Politics at the Council of 
 
 Constance" reference to, 
 
 32;?. 
 Pollock, Mr. John, 30/;. 
 Pope, temporal power of the, 
 
 6-7, 23-24, 28-29. 
 Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, 
 
 reference to, 10. 
 Punch, 31. 
 
 Reformation, the, 6-8. 
 Religion 
 
 Established and Non-estab- 
 lished, 5-6 
 
 Politics and, connection be- 
 tween, 5, 6, 7, 12, 18, 29, 
 
 31- 
 
 Revolution of 1689, effects of, 
 
 32- 
 
 Richelieu, Cardinal, reference 
 to, 57. 
 
 Robertson, Mr. J. M., reference 
 to, 22«, 43, 46;?- 
 
 Roman Empire, Christian 
 Church and, relation be- 
 tween, 8, 23. 
 
 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, refer- 
 ence to, 30. 
 
 Ruskin, quoted, 34-35. 
 
 Russell, Lord John, 31. 
 
 " Sandford and Merton," refer- 
 ence to, 16. 
 
 St. Augustine, reference to, 25 ; 
 Confessions of, 40-41. 
 
 St. Francis of Assisi, reference 
 to, 57. 
 
 St. Ignatius Loyola, reference 
 to, 57. 
 
 St. Paul, reference to, 57 ; 
 Liberty, preached by, 70-71. 
 
 St. Thomas a Kempis, De 
 Iviitatione of, 41. 
 
 Salisbury Cathedral, 35. 
 
 Scott, reference to, 14. 
 
 Secularism, dogma of, 4672. 
 
 Seeley, reference to, 32/z, 64«. 
 
 Seignobos, M., 48;?. 
 
 " Service of Man" the, reference 
 
 to, 62. 
 Sistine Madonna, the, 52. 
 Society of Jesus, reference to, 9. 
 Spencer, Mr., 54. 
 
 Thackeray, reference to, 14. 
 Tieck, reference to, 31.
 
 8o 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Virgil, reference to, i6. 
 
 " Visits of Elizabeth," reference 
 
 to, 16-17. 
 Vogler, Abt, 52. 
 Voltaire, reference to, 30. 
 
 "War of the Worlds," reference 
 
 to, I. 
 Watts, Mr. Theodore, 36^. 
 
 Wells, Mr. H. G., 1. 
 
 Wesley, John, reference to, 57. 
 
 Whately, Archbishop, reference 
 to, 46«. 
 
 Wyclif, reference to, 46;/., tem- 
 poral power of the Pope, 
 attitude towards, 24. 
 
 York Minster, 34. 
 
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