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SHORT STUDIES
ON
GREAT SUBJECTS.
LONDON
PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO.
NEW-STREET SQUARE
SHORT STUDIES
ON
GREAT SUBJECTS.
BY
JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE, M.A.
LATE FELLOW OF EXETER COLLEGE, OXFORD.
_SECOND EDITION._
LONDON:
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
1867.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
THE SCIENCE OF HISTORY 1
TIMES OF ERASMUS AND LUTHER:
Lecture I 26
Lecture II 50
Lecture III 75
THE INFLUENCE OF THE REFORMATION ON THE SCOTTISH CHARACTER 102
THE PHILOSOPHY OF CATHOLICISM 124
A PLEA FOR THE FREE DISCUSSION OF THEOLOGICAL DIFFICULTIES 133
CRITICISM AND THE GOSPEL HISTORY 159
THE BOOK OF JOB 185
SPINOZA 223
THE DISSOLUTION OF THE MONASTERIES 265
ENGLAND'S FORGOTTEN WORTHIES 294
HOMER 334
THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS 363
REPRESENTATIVE MEN 384
REYNARD THE FOX 401
THE CAT'S PILGRIMAGE:
Part I 419
Part II 422
Part III 427
Part IV 430
FABLES:
I. The Lions and the Oxen 433
II. The Farmer and the Fox 434
PARABLE OF THE BREAD-FRUIT TREE 436
COMPENSATION 439
THE SCIENCE OF HISTORY:
A LECTURE DELIVERED AT THE ROYAL INSTITUTION
FEBRUARY 5, 1864.
Ladies and Gentlemen,--I have undertaken to speak to you this evening on
what is called the Science of History. I fear it is a dry subject; and
there seems, indeed, something incongruous in the very connection of
such words as Science and History. It is as if we were to talk of the
colour of sound, or the longitude of the rule-of-three. Where it is so
difficult to make out the truth on the commonest disputed fact in
matters passing under our very eyes, how can we talk of a science in
things long past, which come to us only through books? It often seems to
me as if History was like a child's box of letters, with which we can
spell any word we please. We have only to pick out such letters as we
want, arrange them as we like, and say nothing about those which do not
suit our purpose.
I will try to make the thing intelligible, and I will try not to weary
you; but I am doubtful of my success either way. First, however, I wish
to say a word or two about the eminent person whose name is connected
with this way of looking at History, and whose premature death struck us
all with such a sudden sorrow. Many of you, perhaps, recollect Mr.
Buckle as he stood not so long ago in this place. He spoke more than an
hour without a note--never repeating himself, never wasting words;
laying out his matter as easily and as pleasantly as if he had been
talking to us at his own fireside. We might think what we pleased of Mr.
Buckle's views, but it was plain enough that he was a man of uncommon
power; and he had qualities also--qualities to which he, perhaps,
himself attached little value, as rare as they were admirable.
Most of us, when we have hit on something which we are pleased to think
important and original, feel as if we should burst with it. We come out
into the book-market with our wares in hand, and ask for thanks and
recognition. Mr. Buckle, at an early age, conceived the thought which
made him famous, but he took the measure of his abilities. He knew that
whenever he pleased he could command personal distinction, but he cared
more for his subject than for himself. He was contented to work with
patient reticence, unknown and unheard of, for twenty years; and then,
at middle life, he produced a work which was translated at once into
French and German, and, of all places in the world, fluttered the
dovecotes of the Imperial Academy of St. Petersburg.
Goethe says somewhere, that as soon as a man has done anything
remarkable, there seems to be a general conspiracy to prevent him from
doing it again. He is feasted, feted, caressed; his time is stolen from
him by breakfasts, dinners, societies, idle businesses of a thousand
kinds. Mr. Buckle had his share of all this; but there are also more
dangerous enemies that wait upon success like his. He had scarcely won
for himself the place which he deserved, than his health was found
shattered by his labours. He had but time to show us how large a man he
was--time just to sketch the outlines of his philosophy, and he passed
away as suddenly as he appeared. He went abroad to recover strength for
his work, but his work was done with and over. He died of a fever at
Damascus, vexed only that he was compelled to leave it uncompleted.
Almost his last conscious words were, 'My book, my book! I shall never
finish my book!' He went away as he had lived, nobly careless of
himself, and thinking only of the thing which he had undertaken to do.
But his labour had not been thrown away. Disagree with him as we might,
the effect which he had already produced was unmistakable, and it is not
likely to pass away. What he said was not essentially new. Some such
interpretation of human things is as early as the beginning of thought.
But Mr. Buckle, on the one hand, had the art which belongs to men of
genius; he could present his opinions with peculiar distinctness; and,
on the other hand, there is much in the mode of speculation at present
current among us for which those opinions have an unusual fascination.
They do not please us, but they excite and irritate us. We are angry
with them; and we betray, in being so, an uneasy misgiving that there
may be more truth in those opinions than we like to allow.
Mr. Buckle's general theory was something of this kind: When human
creatures began first to look about them in the world they lived in,
there seemed to be no order in anything. Days and nights were not the
same length. The air was sometimes hot and sometimes cold. Some of the
stars rose and set like the sun; some were almost motionless in the sky;
some described circles round a central star above the north horizon. The
planets went on principles of their own; and in the elements there
seemed nothing but caprice. Sun and moon would at times go out in
eclipse. Sometimes the earth itself would shake under men's feet; and
they could only suppose that earth and air and sky and water were
inhabited and managed by creatures as wayward as themselves.
Time went on, and the disorder began to arrange itself. Certain
influences seemed beneficent to men, others malignant and destructive,
and the world was supposed to be animated by good spirits and evil
spirits, who were continually fighting against each other, in outward
nature and in human creatures themselves. Finally, as men observed more
and imagined less, these interpretations gave way also. Phenomena the
most opposite in effect were seen to be the result of the same natural
law. The fire did not burn the house down if the owners of it were
careful, but remained on the hearth and boiled the pot; nor did it seem
more inclined to burn a bad man's house down than a good man's, provided
the badness did not take the form of negligence. The phenomena of nature
were found for the most part to proceed in an orderly, regular way, and
their variations to be such as could be counted upon. From observing the
order of things, the step was easy to cause and effect. An eclipse,
instead of being a sign of the anger of Heaven, was found to be the
necessary and innocent result of the relative position of sun, moon, and
earth. The comets became bodies in space, unrelated to the beings who
had imagined that all creation was watching them and their doings. By
degrees, caprice, volition, all symptoms of arbitrary action,
disappeared out of the universe; and almost every phenomenon in earth
or heaven was found attributable to some law, either understood or
perceived to exist. Thus nature was reclaimed from the imagination. The
first fantastic conception of things gave way before the moral; the
moral in turn gave way before the natural; and at last there was left
but one small tract of jungle where the theory of law had failed to
penetrate--the doings and characters of human creatures themselves.
There, and only there, amidst the conflicts of reason and emotion,
conscience and desire, spiritual forces were still conceived to exist.
Cause and effect were not traceable when there was a free volition to
disturb the connection. In all other things, from a given set of
conditions, the consequences necessarily followed. With man, the word
law changed its meaning; and instead of a fixed order, which he could
not choose but follow, it became a moral precept, which he might disobey
if he dared.
This it was which Mr. Buckle disbelieved. The economy which prevailed
throughout nature, he thought it very unlikely should admit of this
exception. He considered that human beings acted necessarily from the
impulse of outward circumstances upon their mental and bodily condition
at any given moment. Every man, he said, acted from a motive; and his
conduct was determined by the motive which affected him most powerfully.
Every man naturally desires what he supposes to be good for him; but to
do well, he must know well. He will eat poison, so long as he does not
know that it is poison. Let him see that it will kill him, and he will
not touch it. The question was not of moral right and wrong. Once let
him be thoroughly made to feel that the thing is destructive, and he
will leave it alone by the law of his nature. His virtues are the result
of knowledge; his faults, the necessary consequence of the want of it. A
boy desires to draw. He knows nothing about it: he draws men like trees
or houses, with their centre of gravity anywhere. He makes mistakes,
because he knows no better. We do not blame him. Till he is better
taught he cannot help it. But his instruction begins. He arrives at
straight lines; then at solids; then at curves. He learns perspective,
and light and shade. He observes more accurately the forms which he
wishes to represent. He perceives effects, and he perceives the means by
which they are produced. He has learned what to do; and, in part, he
has learned how to do it. His after-progress will depend on the amount
of force which his nature possesses; but all this is as natural as the
growth of an acorn. You do not preach to the acorn that it is its duty
to become a large tree; you do not preach to the art-pupil that it is
his duty to become a Holbein. You plant your acorn in favourable soil,
where it can have light and air, and be sheltered from the wind; you
remove the superfluous branches, you train the strength into the leading
shoots. The acorn will then become as fine a tree as it has vital force
to become. The difference between men and other things is only in the
largeness and variety of man's capacities; and in this special capacity,
that he alone has the power of observing the circumstances favourable to
his own growth, and can apply them for himself. Yet, again, with this
condition,--that he is not, as is commonly supposed, free to choose
whether he will make use of these appliances or not. When he knows what
is good for him, he will choose it; and he will judge what is good for
him by the circumstances which have made him what he is.
And what he would do, Mr. Buckle supposed that he always had done. His
history had been a natural growth as much as the growth of the acorn.
His improvement had followed the progress of his knowledge; and, by a
comparison of his outward circumstances with the condition of his mind,
his whole proceedings on this planet, his creeds and constitutions, his
good deeds and his bad, his arts and his sciences, his empires and his
revolutions, would be found all to arrange themselves into clear
relations of cause and effect.
If, when Mr. Buckle pressed his conclusions, we objected the difficulty
of finding what the truth about past times really was, he would admit it
candidly as far as concerned individuals; but there was not the same
difficulty, he said, with masses of men. We might disagree about the
characters of Julius or Tiberius Caesar, but we could know well enough
the Romans of the Empire. We had their literature to tell us how they
thought; we had their laws to tell us how they governed; we had the
broad face of the world, the huge mountainous outline of their general
doings upon it, to tell us how they acted. He believed it was all
reducible to laws, and could be made as intelligible as the growth of
the chalk cliffs or the coal measures.
And thus consistently Mr. Buckle cared little for individuals. He did
not believe (as some one has said) that the history of mankind is the
history of its great men. Great men with him were but larger atoms,
obeying the same impulses with the rest, only perhaps a trifle more
erratic. With them or without them, the course of things would have been
much the same.
As an illustration of the truth of his view, he would point to the new
science of Political Economy. Here already was a large area of human
activity in which natural laws were found to act unerringly. Men had
gone on for centuries trying to regulate trade on moral principles. They
would fix wages according to some imaginary rule of fairness; they would
fix prices by what they considered things ought to cost; they encouraged
one trade or discouraged another, for moral reasons. They might as well
have tried to work a steam-engine on moral reasons. The great statesmen
whose names were connected with these enterprises might have as well
legislated that water should run up-hill. There were natural laws, fixed
in the conditions of things: and to contend against them was the old
battle of the Titans against the gods.
As it was with political economy, so it was with all other forms of
human activity; and as the true laws of political economy explained the
troubles which people fell into in old times, because they were ignorant
of them, so the true laws of human nature, as soon as we knew them,
would explain their mistakes in more serious matters, and enable us to
manage better for the future. Geographical position, climate, air, soil,
and the like, had their several influences. The northern nations are
hardy and industrious, because they must till the earth if they would
eat the fruits of it, and because the temperature is too low to make an
idle life enjoyable. In the south, the soil is more productive, while
less food is wanted and fewer clothes; and in the exquisite air,
exertion is not needed to make the sense of existence delightful.
Therefore, in the south we find men lazy and indolent.
True, there are difficulties in these views; the home of the languid
Italian was the home also of the sternest race of whom the story of
mankind retains a record. And again, when we are told that the Spaniards
are superstitious, because Spain is a country of earthquakes, we
remember Japan, the spot in all the world where earthquakes are most
frequent, and where at the same time there is the most serene disbelief
in any supernatural agency whatsoever.
Moreover, if men grow into what they are by natural laws, they cannot
help being what they are; and if they cannot help being what they are, a
good deal will have to be altered in our general view of human
obligations and responsibilities.
That, however, in these theories there is a great deal of truth is quite
certain; were there but a hope that those who maintain them would be
contented with that admission. A man born in a Mahometan country grows
up a Mahometan; in a Catholic country, a Catholic; in a Protestant
country, a Protestant. His opinions are like his language; he learns to
think as he learns to speak; and it is absurd to suppose him responsible
for being what nature makes him. We take pains to educate children.
There is a good education and a bad education; there are rules well
ascertained by which characters are influenced, and, clearly enough, it
is no mere matter for a boy's free will whether he turns out well or
ill. We try to train him into good habits; we keep him out of the way of
temptations; we see that he is well taught; we mix kindness and
strictness; we surround him with every good influence we can command.
These are what are termed the advantages of a good education: and if we
fail to provide those under our care with it, and if they go wrong, the
responsibility we feel is as much ours as theirs. This is at once an
admission of the power over us of outward circumstances.
In the same way, we allow for the strength of temptations, and the like.
In general, it is perfectly obvious that men do necessarily absorb, out
of the influences in which they grow up, something which gives a
complexion to their whole after-character.
When historians have to relate great social or speculative changes, the
overthrow of a monarchy or the establishment of a creed, they do but
half their duty if they merely relate the events. In an account, for
instance, of the rise of Mahometanism, it is not enough to describe the
character of the Prophet, the ends which he set before him, the means
which he made use of, and the effect which he produced; the historian
must show what there was in the condition of the Eastern races which
enabled Mahomet to act upon them so powerfully; their existing beliefs,
their existing moral and political condition.
In our estimate of the past, and in our calculations of the future--in
the judgments which we pass upon one another, we measure responsibility,
not by the thing done, but by the opportunities which people have had of
knowing better or worse. In the efforts which we make to keep our
children from bad associations or friends we admit that external
circumstances have a powerful effect in making men what they are.
But are circumstances everything? That is the whole question. A science
of history, if it is more than a misleading name, implies that the
relation between cause and effect holds in human things as completely as
in all others, that the origin of human actions is not to be looked for
in mysterious properties of the mind, but in influences which are
palpable and ponderable.
When natural causes are liable to be set aside and neutralised by what
is called volition, the word Science is out of place. If it is free to a
man to choose what he will do or not do, there is no adequate science of
him. If there is a science of him, there is no free choice, and the
praise or blame with which we regard one another are impertinent and out
of place.
I am trespassing upon these ethical grounds because, unless I do, the
subject cannot be made intelligible. Mankind are but an aggregate of
individuals--History is but the record of individual action; and what is
true of the part, is true of the whole.
We feel keenly about such things, and when the logic becomes perplexing,
we are apt to grow rhetorical about them. But rhetoric is only
misleading. Whatever the truth may be, it is best that we should know
it; and for truth of any kind we should keep our heads and hearts as
cool as we can.
I will say at once, that if we had the whole case before us--if we were
taken, like Leibnitz's Tarquin, into the council chamber of nature, and
were shown what we really were, where we came from, and where we were
going, however unpleasant it might be for some of us to find ourselves,
like Tarquin, made into villains, from the subtle necessities of 'the
best of all possible worlds;' nevertheless, some such theory as Mr.
Buckle's might possibly turn out to be true. Likely enough, there is
some great 'equation of the universe' where the value of the unknown
quantities can be determined. But we must treat things in relation to
our own powers and position; and the question is, whether the sweep of
those vast curves can be measured by the intellect of creatures of a day
like ourselves.
The 'Faust' of Goethe, tired of the barren round of earthly knowledge,
calls magic to his aid. He desires, first, to see the spirit of the
Macrocosmos, but his heart fails him before he ventures that tremendous
experiment, and he summons before him, instead, the spirit of his own
race. There he feels himself at home. The stream of life and the storm
of action, the everlasting ocean of existence, the web and the woof, and
the roaring loom of time--he gazes upon them all, and in passionate
exultation claims fellowship with the awful thing before him. But the
majestic vision fades, and a voice comes to him--'Thou art fellow with
the spirits which thy mind can grasp--not with me.'
Had Mr. Buckle tried to follow his principles into detail, it might have
fared no better with him than with 'Faust.'
What are the conditions of a science? and when may any subject be said
to enter the scientific stage? I suppose when the facts of it begin to
resolve themselves into groups; when phenomena are no longer isolated
experiences, but appear in connection and order; when, after certain
antecedents, certain consequences are uniformly seen to follow; when
facts enough have been collected to furnish a basis for conjectural
explanation, and when conjectures have so far ceased to be utterly
vague, that it is possible in some degree to foresee the future by the
help of them.
Till a subject has advanced as far as this, to speak of a science of it
is an abuse of language. It is not enough to say that there must be a
science of human things, because there is a science of all other things.
This is like saying the planets must be inhabited, because the only
planet of which we have any experience is inhabited. It may or may not
be true, but it is not a practical question; it does not affect the
practical treatment of the matter in hand.
Let us look at the history of Astronomy.
So long as sun, moon, and planets were supposed to be gods or angels; so
long as the sword of Orion was not a metaphor, but a fact, and the
groups of stars which inlaid the floor of heaven were the glittering
trophies of the loves and wars of the Pantheon, so long there was no
science of Astronomy. There was fancy, imagination, poetry, perhaps
reverence, but no science. As soon, however, as it was observed that the
stars retained their relative places--that the times of their rising and
setting varied with the seasons--that sun, moon, and planets moved among
them in a plane, and the belt of the Zodiac was marked out and divided,
then a new order of things began. Traces of the earlier stage remained
in the names of the signs and constellations, just as the Scandinavian
mythology survives now in the names of the days of the week: but for all
that, the understanding was now at work on the thing; Science had begun,
and the first triumph of it was the power of foretelling the future.
Eclipses were perceived to recur in cycles of nineteen years, and
philosophers were able to say when an eclipse was to be looked for. The
periods of the planets were determined. Theories were invented to
account for their eccentricities; and, false as those theories might be,
the position of the planets could be calculated with moderate certainty
by them. The very first result of the science, in its most imperfect
stage, was a power of foresight; and this was possible before any one
true astronomical law had been discovered.
We should not therefore question the possibility of a science of
history, because the explanations of its phenomena were rudimentary or
imperfect: that they might be, and might long continue to be, and yet
enough might be done to show that there was such a thing, and that it
was not entirely without use. But how was it that in those rude days,
with small knowledge of mathematics, and with no better instruments than
flat walls and dial plates, those first astronomers made progress so
considerable? Because, I suppose, the phenomena which they were
observing recurred, for the most part, within moderate intervals; so
that they could collect large experience within the compass of their
natural lives: because days and months and years were measurable
periods, and within them the more simple phenomena perpetually repeated
themselves.
But how would it have been if, instead of turning on its axis once in
twenty-four hours, the earth had taken a year about it; if the year had
been nearly four hundred years; if man's life had been no longer than it
is, and for the initial steps of astronomy there had been nothing to
depend upon except observations recorded in history? How many ages would
have passed, had this been our condition, before it would have occurred
to any one, that, in what they saw night after night, there was any kind
of order at all?
We can see to some extent how it would have been, by the present state
of those parts of the science which in fact depend on remote recorded
observations. The movements of the comets are still extremely uncertain.
The times of their return can be calculated only with the greatest
vagueness.
And yet such a hypothesis as I have suggested would but inadequately
express the position in which we are in fact placed towards history.
There the phenomena never repeat themselves. There we are dependent
wholly on the record of things said to have happened once, but which
never happen or can happen a second time. There no experiment is
possible; we can watch for no recurring fact to test the worth of our
conjectures. It has been suggested, fancifully, that if we consider the
universe to be infinite, time is the same as eternity, and the past is
perpetually present. Light takes nine years to come to us from Sirius;
those rays which we may see to-night when we leave this place, left
Sirius nine years ago; and could the inhabitants of Sirius see the earth
at this moment, they would see the English army in the trenches before
Sebastopol; Florence Nightingale watching at Scutari over the wounded at
Inkermann; and the peace of England undisturbed by 'Essays and Reviews.'
As the stars recede into distance, so time recedes with them, and there
may be, and probably are, stars from which Noah might be seen stepping
into the ark, Eve listening to the temptation of the serpent, or that
older race, eating the oysters and leaving the shell-heaps behind them,
when the Baltic was an open sea.
Could we but compare notes, something might be done; but of this there
is no present hope, and without it there will be no science of history.
Eclipses, recorded in ancient books, can be verified by calculation, and
lost dates can be recovered by them, and we can foresee by the laws
which they follow when there will be eclipses again. Will a time ever
be when the lost secret of the foundation of Rome can be recovered by
historic laws? If not, where is our science? It may be said that this is
a particular fact, that we can deal satisfactorily with general
phenomena affecting eras and cycles. Well, then, let us take some
general phenomenon. Mahometanism, for instance, or Buddhism. Those are
large enough. Can you imagine a science which would have[A] _foretold_
such movements as those? The state of things out of which they rose is
obscure; but suppose it not obscure, can you conceive that, with any
amount of historical insight into the old Oriental beliefs, you could
have seen that they were about to transform themselves into those
particular forms and no other?
It is not enough to say, that, after the fact, you can understand
partially how Mahometanism came to be. All historians worth the name
have told us something about that. But when we talk of science, we mean
something with more ambitious pretences, we mean something which can
foresee as well as explain; and, thus looked at, to state the problem is
to show its absurdity. As little could the wisest man have foreseen this
mighty revolution, as thirty years ago such a thing as Mormonism could
have been anticipated in America; as little as it could have been
foreseen that table-turning and spirit-rapping would have been an
outcome of the scientific culture of England in the nineteenth century.
The greatest of Roman thinkers, gazing mournfully at the seething mass
of moral putrefaction round him, detected and deigned to notice among
its elements a certain detestable superstition, so he called it, rising
up amidst the offscouring of the Jews, which was named Christianity.
Could Tacitus have looked forward nine centuries to the Rome of Gregory
VII., could he have beheld the representative of the majesty of the
Caesars holding the stirrup of the Pontiff of that vile and execrated
sect, the spectacle would scarcely have appeared to him the fulfilment
of a rational expectation, or an intelligible result of the causes in
operation round him. Tacitus, indeed, was born before the science of
history; but would M. Comte have seen any more clearly?
Nor is the case much better if we are less hard upon our philosophy; if
we content ourselves with the past, and require only a scientific
explanation of that.
First, for the facts themselves. They come to us through the minds of
those who recorded them, neither machines nor angels, but fallible
creatures, with human passions and prejudices. Tacitus and Thucydides
were perhaps the ablest men who ever gave themselves to writing history;
the ablest, and also the most incapable of conscious falsehood. Yet even
now, after all these centuries, the truth of what they relate is called
in question. Good reasons can be given to show that neither of them can
be confidently trusted. If we doubt with these, whom are we to believe?
Or again, let the facts be granted. To revert to my simile of the box of
letters, you have but to select such facts as suit you, you have but to
leave alone those which do not suit you, and let your theory of history
be what it will, you can find no difficulty in providing facts to prove
it.
You may have your Hegel's philosophy of history, or you may have your
Schlegel's philosophy of history; you may prove from history that the
world is governed in detail by a special Providence; you may prove that
there is no sign of any moral agent in the universe, except man; you may
believe, if you like it, in the old theory of the wisdom of antiquity;
you may speak, as was the fashion in the fifteenth century, of 'our
fathers, who had more wit and wisdom than we;' or you may talk of 'our
barbarian ancestors,' and describe their wars as the scuffling of kites
and crows.
You may maintain that the evolution of humanity has been an unbroken
progress towards perfection; you may maintain that there has been no
progress at all, and that man remains the same poor creature that he
ever was; or, lastly, you may say with the author of the 'Contrat
Social,' that men were purest and best in primeval simplicity--
When wild in woods the noble savage ran.
In all, or any of these views, history will stand your friend. History,
in its passive irony, will make no objection. Like Jarno, in Goethe's
novel, it will not condescend to argue with you, and will provide you
with abundant illustrations of anything which you may wish to believe.
'What is history,' said Napoleon, 'but a fiction agreed upon?' 'My
friend,' said Faust to the student, who was growing enthusiastic about
the spirit of past ages; 'my friend, the times which are gone are a book
with seven seals; and what you call the spirit of past ages is but the
spirit of this or that worthy gentleman in whose mind those ages are
reflected.'
One lesson, and only one, history may be said to repeat with
distinctness; that the world is built somehow on moral foundations;
that, in the long run, it is well with the good; in the long run, it is
ill with the wicked. But this is no science; it is no more than the old
doctrine taught long ago by the Hebrew prophets. The theories of M.
Comte and his disciples advance us, after all, not a step beyond the
trodden and familiar ground. If men are not entirely animals, they are
at least half animals, and are subject in this aspect of them to the
conditions of animals. So far as those parts of man's doings are
concerned, which neither have, nor need have, anything moral about them,
so far the laws of him are calculable. There are laws for his digestion,
and laws of the means by which his digestive organs are supplied with
matter. But pass beyond them, and where are we? In a world where it
would be as easy to calculate men's actions by laws like those of
positive philosophy as to measure the orbit of Neptune with a foot-rule,
or weigh Sirius in a grocer's scale.
And it is not difficult to see why this should be. The first principle
on which the theory of a science of history can be plausibly argued, is
that all actions whatsoever arise from self-interest. It may be
enlightened self-interest; it may be unenlightened; but it is assumed as
an axiom, that every man, in whatever he does, is aiming at something
which he considers will promote his happiness. His conduct is not
determined by his will; it is determined by the object of his desire.
Adam Smith, in laying the foundations of political economy, expressly
eliminates every other motive. He does not say that men never act on
other motives; still less, that they never ought to act on other
motives. He asserts merely that, as far as the arts of production are
concerned, and of buying and selling, the action of self-interest may be
counted upon as uniform. What Adam Smith says of political economy, Mr.
Buckle would extend over the whole circle of human activity.
Now, that which especially distinguishes a high order of man from a low
order of man--that which constitutes human goodness, human greatness,
human nobleness--is surely not the degree of enlightenment with which
men pursue their own advantage; but it is self-forgetfulness--it is
self-sacrifice--it is the disregard of personal pleasure, personal
indulgence, personal advantages remote or present, because some other
line of conduct is more right.
We are sometimes told that this is but another way of expressing the
same thing; that when a man prefers doing what is right, it is only
because to do right gives him a higher satisfaction. It appears to me,
on the contrary, to be a difference in the very heart and nature of
things. The martyr goes to the stake, the patriot to the scaffold, not
with a view to any future reward to themselves, but because it is a
glory to fling away their lives for truth and freedom. And so through
all phases of existence, to the smallest details of common life, the
beautiful character is the unselfish character. Those whom we most love
and admire are those to whom the thought of self seems never to occur;
who do simply and with no ulterior aim--with no thought whether it will
be pleasant to themselves or unpleasant--that which is good, and right,
and generous.
Is this still selfishness, only more enlightened? I do not think so. The
essence of true nobility is neglect of self. Let the thought of self
pass in, and the beauty of a great action is gone--like the bloom from a
soiled flower. Surely it is a paradox to speak of the self-interest of a
martyr who dies for a cause, the triumph of which he will never enjoy;
and the greatest of that great company in all ages would have done what
they did, had their personal prospects closed with the grave. Nay, there
have been those so zealous for some glorious principle, as to wish
themselves blotted out of the book of Heaven if the cause of Heaven
could succeed.
And out of this mysterious quality, whatever it be, arise the higher
relations of human life, the higher modes of human obligation. Kant, the
philosopher, used to say that there were two things which overwhelmed
him with awe as he thought of them. One was the star-sown deep of space,
without limit and without end; the other was, right and wrong. Right,
the sacrifice of self to good; wrong, the sacrifice of good to
self;--not graduated objects of desire, to which we are determined by
the degrees of our knowledge, but wide asunder as pole and pole, as
light and darkness--one, the object of infinite love; the other, the
object of infinite detestation and scorn. It is in this marvellous power
in men to do wrong (it is an old story, but none the less true for
that)--it is in this power to do wrong--wrong or right, as it lies
somehow with ourselves to choose--that the impossibility stands of
forming scientific calculations of what men will do before the fact, or
scientific explanations of what they have done after the fact. If men
were consistently selfish, you might analyse their motives; if they were
consistently noble, they would express in their conduct the laws of the
highest perfection. But so long as two natures are mixed together, and
the strange creature which results from the combination is now under one
influence and now under another, so long you will make nothing of him
except from the old-fashioned moral--or, if you please,
imaginative--point of view.
Even the laws of political economy itself cease to guide us when they
touch moral government. So long as labour is a chattel to be bought and
sold, so long, like other commodities, it follows the condition of
supply and demand. But if, for his misfortune, an employer considers
that he stands in human relations towards his workmen; if he believes,
rightly or wrongly, that he is responsible for them; that in return for
their labour he is bound to see that their children are decently taught,
and they and their families decently fed and clothed and lodged; that he
ought to care for them in sickness and in old age; then political
economy will no longer direct him, and the relations between himself and
his dependents will have to be arranged on quite other principles.
So long as he considers only his own material profit, so long supply and
demand will settle every difficulty; but the introduction of a new
factor spoils the equation.
And it is precisely in this debatable ground of low motives and noble
emotions--in the struggle, ever failing, yet ever renewed, to carry
truth and justice into the administration of human society; in the
establishment of states and in the overthrow of tyrannies; in the rise
and fall of creeds; in the world of ideas; in the character and deeds of
the great actors in the drama of life; where good and evil fight out
their everlasting battle, now ranged in opposite camps, now and more
often in the heart, both of them, of each living man--that the true
human interest of history resides. The progress of industries, the
growth of material and mechanical civilisation, are interesting, but
they are not the most interesting. They have their reward in the
increase of material comforts; but, unless we are mistaken about our
nature, they do not highly concern us after all.
Once more; not only is there in men this baffling duality of principle,
but there is something else in us which still more defies scientific
analysis.
Mr. Buckle would deliver himself from the eccentricities of this and
that individual by a doctrine of averages. Though he cannot tell whether
A, B, or C will cut his throat, he may assure himself that one man in
every fifty thousand, or thereabout (I forget the exact proportion),
will cut his throat, and with this he consoles himself. No doubt it is a
comforting discovery. Unfortunately, the average of one generation need
not be the average of the next. We may be converted by the Japanese, for
all that we know, and the Japanese methods of taking leave of life may
become fashionable among us. Nay, did not Novalis suggest that the whole
race of men would at last become so disgusted with their impotence, that
they would extinguish themselves by a simultaneous act of suicide, and
make room for a better order of beings? Anyhow, the fountain out of
which the race is flowing perpetually changes--no two generations are
alike. Whether there is a change in the organisation itself, we cannot
tell; but this is certain, that as the planet varies with the atmosphere
which surrounds it, so each new generation varies from the last, because
it inhales as its atmosphere the accumulated experience and knowledge of
the whole past of the world. These things form the spiritual air which
we breathe as we grow; and in the infinite multiplicity of elements of
which that air is now composed, it is for ever matter of conjecture what
the minds will be like which expand under its influence.
From the England of Fielding and Richardson to the England of Miss
Austen--from the England of Miss Austen to the England of Railways and
Free-trade, how vast the change; yet perhaps Sir Charles Grandison would
not seem so strange to us now, as one of ourselves will seem to our
great-grandchildren. The world moves faster and faster; and the
difference will probably be considerably greater.
The temper of each new generation is a continual surprise. The fates
delight to contradict our most confident expectations. Gibbon believed
that the era of conquerors was at an end. Had he lived out the full life
of man, he would have seen Europe at the feet of Napoleon. But a few
years ago we believed the world had grown too civilised for war, and the
Crystal Palace in Hyde Park was to be the inauguration of a new era.
Battles, bloody as Napoleon's, are now the familiar tale of every day;
and the arts which have made greatest progress are the arts of
destruction. What next? We may strain our eyes into the future which
lies beyond this waning century; but never was conjecture more at fault.
It is blank darkness, which even the imagination fails to people.
What then is the use of History? and what are its lessons? If it can
tell us little of the past, and nothing of the future, why waste our
time over so barren a study?
First, it is a voice for ever sounding across the centuries the laws of
right and wrong. Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall,
but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity. For every false
word or unrighteous deed, for cruelty and oppression, for lust or
vanity, the price has to be paid at last: not always by the chief
offenders, but paid by some one. Justice and truth alone endure and
live. Injustice and falsehood may be long-lived, but doomsday comes at
last to them, in French revolutions and other terrible ways.
That is one lesson of History. Another is, that we should draw no
horoscopes; that we should expect little, for what we expect will not
come to pass. Revolutions, reformations--those vast movements into which
heroes and saints have flung themselves, in the belief that they were
the dawn of the millennium--have not borne the fruit which they looked
for. Millenniums are still far away. These great convulsions leave the
world changed--perhaps improved,--but not improved as the actors in them
hoped it would be. Luther would have gone to work with less heart, could
he have foreseen the Thirty Years' War, and in the distance the theology
of Tubingen. Washington might have hesitated to draw the sword against
England, could he have seen the country which he made as we see it
now.[B]
The most reasonable anticipations fail us--antecedents the most apposite
mislead us; because the conditions of human problems never repeat
themselves. Some new feature alters everything--some element which we
detect only in its after-operation.
But this, it may be said, is but a meagre outcome. Can the long records
of humanity, with all its joys and sorrows, its sufferings and its
conquests, teach us no more than this? Let us approach the subject from
another side.
If you were asked to point out the special features in which
Shakespeare's plays are so transcendently excellent, you would mention,
perhaps, among others, this, that his stories are not put together, and
his characters are not conceived, to illustrate any particular law or
principle. They teach many lessons, but not any one prominent above
another; and when we have drawn from them all the direct instruction
which they contain, there remains still something unresolved--something
which the artist gives, and which the philosopher cannot give.
It is in this characteristic that we are accustomed to say Shakespeare's
supreme _truth_ lies. He represents real life. His dramas teach as life
teaches--neither less nor more. He builds his fabrics as nature does, on
right and wrong; but he does not struggle to make nature more systematic
than she is. In the subtle interflow of good and evil--in the unmerited
sufferings of innocence--in the disproportion of penalties to desert--in
the seeming blindness with which justice, in attempting to assert
itself, overwhelms innocent and guilty in a common ruin--Shakespeare is
true to real experience. The mystery of life he leaves as he finds it;
and, in his most tremendous positions, he is addressing rather the
intellectual emotions than the understanding,--knowing well that the
understanding in such things is at fault, and the sage as ignorant as
the child.
Only the highest order of genius can represent nature thus. An inferior
artist produces either something entirely immoral, where good and evil
are names, and nobility of disposition is supposed to show itself in the
absolute disregard of them--or else, if he is a better kind of man, he
will force on nature a didactic purpose; he composes what are called
moral tales, which may edify the conscience, but only mislead the
intellect.
The finest work of this kind produced in modern times is Lessing's play
of 'Nathan the Wise.' The object of it is to teach religious toleration.
The doctrine is admirable--the mode in which it is enforced is
interesting; but it has the fatal fault, that it is not true. Nature
does not teach religious toleration by any such direct method; and the
result is--no one knew it better than Lessing himself--that the play is
not poetry, but only splendid manufacture. Shakespeare is eternal;
Lessing's 'Nathan' will pass away with the mode of thought which gave it
birth. One is based on fact; the other, on human theory about fact. The
theory seems at first sight to contain the most immediate instruction;
but it is not really so.
Cibber and others, as you know, wanted to alter Shakespeare. The French
king, in 'Lear,' was to be got rid of; Cordelia was to marry Edgar, and
Lear himself was to be rewarded for his sufferings by a golden old age.
They could not bear that Hamlet should suffer for the sins of Claudius.
The wicked king was to die, and the wicked mother; and Hamlet and
Ophelia were to make a match of it, and live happily ever after. A
common novelist would have arranged it thus; and you would have had your
comfortable moral that wickedness was fitly punished, and virtue had its
due reward, and all would have been well. But Shakespeare would not have
it so. Shakespeare knew that crime was not so simple in its
consequences, or Providence so paternal. He was contented to take the
truth from life; and the effect upon the mind of the most correct theory
of what life ought to be, compared to the effect of the life itself, is
infinitesimal in comparison.
Again, let us compare the popular historical treatment of remarkable
incidents with Shakespeare's treatment of them. Look at 'Macbeth.' You
may derive abundant instruction from it--instruction of many kinds.
There is a moral lesson of profound interest in the steps by which a
noble nature glides to perdition. In more modern fashion you may
speculate, if you like, on the political conditions represented there,
and the temptation presented in absolute monarchies to unscrupulous
ambition; you may say, like Dr. Slop, these things could not have
happened under a constitutional government; or, again, you may take up
your parable against superstition--you may dilate on the frightful
consequences of a belief in witches, and reflect on the superior
advantages of an age of schools and newspapers. If the bare facts of the
story had come down to us from a chronicler, and an ordinary writer of
the nineteenth century had undertaken to relate them, his account, we
may depend upon it, would have been put together upon one or other of
these principles. Yet, by the side of that unfolding of the secrets of
the prison-house of the soul, what lean and shrivelled anatomies the
best of such descriptions would seem!
Shakespeare himself, I suppose, could not have given us a theory of what
he meant--he gave us the thing itself, on which we might make whatever
theories we pleased.
Or again, look at Homer.
The 'Iliad' is from two to three thousand years older than 'Macbeth,'
and yet it is as fresh as if it had been written yesterday. We have
there no lessons save in the emotions which rise in us as we read. Homer
had no philosophy; he never struggles to impress upon us his views about
this or that; you can scarcely tell indeed whether his sympathies are
Greek or Trojan; but he represents to us faithfully the men and women
among whom he lived. He sang the Tale of Troy, he touched his lyre, he
drained the golden beaker in the halls of men like those on whom he was
conferring immortality. And thus, although no Agamemnon, king of men,
ever led a Grecian fleet to Ilium; though no Priam sought the midnight
tent of Achilles; though Ulysses and Diomed and Nestor were but names,
and Helen but a dream, yet, through Homer's power of representing men
and women, those old Greeks will still stand out from amidst the
darkness of the ancient world with a sharpness of outline which belongs
to no period of history except the most recent. For the mere hard
purposes of history, the 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey' are the most effective
books which ever were written. We see the Hall of Menelaus, we see the
garden of Alcinous, we see Nausicaa among her maidens on the shore, we
see the mellow monarch sitting with ivory sceptre in the Marketplace
dealing out genial justice. Or again, when the wild mood is on, we can
hear the crash of the spears, the rattle of the armour as the heroes
fall, and the plunging of the horses among the slain. Could we enter the
palace of an old Ionian lord, we know what we should see there; we know
the words in which he would address us. We could meet Hector as a
friend. If we could choose a companion to spend an evening with over a
fireside, it would be the man of many counsels, the husband of Penelope.
I am not going into the vexed question whether History or Poetry is the
more true. It has been sometimes said that Poetry is the more true,
because it can make things more like what our moral sense would prefer
they should be. We hear of poetic justice and the like, as if nature and
fact were not just enough.
I entirely dissent from that view. So far as Poetry attempts to improve
on truth in that way, so far it abandons truth, and is false to itself.
Even literal facts, exactly as they were, a great poet will prefer
whenever he can get them. Shakespeare in the historical plays is
studious, wherever possible, to give the very words which he finds to
have been used; and it shows how wisely he was guided in this, that
those magnificent speeches of Wolsey are taken exactly, with no more
change than the metre makes necessary, from Cavendish's Life.
Marlborough read Shakespeare for English history, and read nothing else.
The poet only is not bound, when it is inconvenient, to what may be
called the accidents of facts. It was enough for Shakespeare to know
that Prince Hal in his youth had lived among loose companions, and the
tavern in Eastcheap came in to fill out his picture; although Mrs.
Quickly and Falstaff, and Poins and Bardolph were more likely to have
been fallen in with by Shakespeare himself at the Mermaid, than to have
been comrades of the true Prince Henry. It was enough for Shakespeare to
draw real men, and the situation, whatever it might be, would sit easy
on them. In this sense only it is that Poetry is truer than History,
that it can make a picture more complete. It may take liberties with
time and space, and give the action distinctness by throwing it into
more manageable compass.
But it may not alter the real conditions of things, or represent life as
other than it is. The greatness of the poet depends on his being true to
nature, without insisting that nature shall theorise with him, without
making her more just, more philosophical, more moral than reality; and,
in difficult matters, leaving much to reflection which cannot be
explained.
And if this be true of Poetry--if Homer and Shakespeare are what they
are, from the absence of everything didactic about them--may we not
thus learn something of what History should be, and in what sense it
should aspire to teach?
If Poetry must not theorise, much less should the historian theorise,
whose obligations to be true to fact are even greater than the poet's.
If the drama is grandest when the action is least explicable by laws,
because then it best resembles life, then history will be grandest also
under the same conditions. 'Macbeth,' were it literally true, would be
perfect history; and so far as the historian can approach to that kind
of model, so far as he can let his story tell itself in the deeds and
words of those who act it out, so far is he most successful. His work is
no longer the vapour of his own brain, which a breath will scatter; it
is the thing itself, which will have interest for all time. A thousand
theories may be formed about it--spiritual theories, Pantheistic
theories, cause and effect theories; but each age will have its own
philosophy of history, and all these in turn will fail and die. Hegel
falls out of date, Schlegel falls out of date, and Comte in good time
will fall out of date; the thought about the thing must change as we
change; but the thing itself can never change; and a history is durable
or perishable as it contains more or least of the writer's own
speculations. The splendid intellect of Gibbon for the most part kept
him true to the right course in this; yet the philosophical chapters for
which he has been most admired or censured may hereafter be thought the
least interesting in his work. The time has been when they would not
have been comprehended: the time may come when they will seem
commonplace.
It may be said, that in requiring history to be written like a drama, we
require an impossibility.
For history to be written with the complete form of a drama, doubtless
is impossible; but there are periods, and these the periods, for the
most part, of greatest interest to mankind, the history of which may be
so written that the actors shall reveal their characters in their own
words; where mind can be seen matched against mind, and the great
passions of the epoch not simply be described as existing, but be
exhibited at their white heat in the souls and hearts possessed by them.
There are all the elements of drama--drama of the highest order--where
the huge forces of the times are as the Grecian destiny, and the power
of the man is seen either stemming the stream till it overwhelms him,
or ruling while he seems to yield to it.
It is Nature's drama--not Shakespeare's--but a drama none the less.
So at least it seems to me. Wherever possible, let us not be told
_about_ this man or that. Let us hear the man himself speak; let us see
him act, and let us be left to form our own opinions about him. The
historian, we are told, must not leave his readers to themselves. He
must not only lay the facts before them--he must tell them what he
himself thinks about those facts. In my opinion, this is precisely what
he ought not to do. Bishop Butler says somewhere, that the best book
which could be written would be a book consisting only of premises, from
which the readers should draw conclusions for themselves. The highest
poetry is the very thing which Butler requires, and the highest history
ought to be. We should no more ask for a theory of this or that period
of history, than we should ask for a theory of 'Macbeth' or 'Hamlet.'
Philosophies of history, sciences of history--all these, there will
continue to be; the fashions of them will change, as our habits of
thought will change; each new philosopher will find his chief employment
in showing that before him no one understood anything; but the drama of
history is imperishable, and, the lessons of it will be like what we
learn from Homer or Shakespeare--lessons for which we have no words.
The address of history is less to the understanding than to the higher
emotions. We learn in it to sympathise with what is great and good; we
learn to hate what is base. In the anomalies of fortune we feel the
mystery of our mortal existence, and in the companionship of the
illustrious natures who have shaped the fortunes of the world, we escape
from the littlenesses which cling to the round of common life, and our
minds are tuned in a higher and nobler key.
For the rest, and for those large questions which I touched in
connection with Mr. Buckle, we live in times of disintegration, and none
can tell what will be after us. What opinions--what convictions--the
infant of to-day will find prevailing on the earth, if he and it live
out together to the middle of another century, only a very bold man
would undertake to conjecture! 'The time will come,' said Lichtenberg,
in scorn at the materialising tendencies of modern thought; 'the time
will come when the belief in God will be as the tales with which old
women frighten children; when the world will be a machine, the ether a
gas, and God will be a force.' Mankind, if they last long enough on the
earth, may develope strange things out of themselves; and the growth of
what is called the Positive Philosophy is a curious commentary on
Lichtenberg's prophecy. But whether the end be seventy years hence, or
seven hundred--be the close of the mortal history of humanity as far
distant in the future as its shadowy beginnings seem now to lie behind
us--this only we may foretell with confidence--that the riddle of man's
nature will remain unsolved. There will be that in him yet which
physical laws will fail to explain--that something, whatever it be, in
himself and in the world, which science cannot fathom, and which
suggests the unknown possibilities of his origin and his destiny. There
will remain yet
Those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things;
Falling from us, vanishings--
Blank misgivings of a creature
Moving about in worlds not realised--
High instincts, before which our mortal nature
Doth tremble like a guilty thing surprised.
There will remain
Those first affections--
Those shadowy recollections--
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day--
Are yet the master-light of all our seeing--
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the Eternal Silence.
FOOTNOTES:
[A] It is objected that Geology is a science: yet that Geology cannot
foretell the future changes of the earth's surface. Geology is not a
century old, and its periods are measured by millions of years. Yet, if
Geology cannot foretell future facts, it enabled Sir Roderick Murchison
to foretell the discovery of Australian gold.
[B] February 1864.
TIMES OF ERASMUS AND LUTHER:
THREE LECTURES
DELIVERED AT NEWCASTLE, 1867.
LECTURE I.
Ladies and Gentlemen,--I do not know whether I have made a very wise
selection in the subject which I have chosen for these Lectures. There
was a time--a time which, measured by the years of our national life,
was not so very long ago--when the serious thoughts of mankind were
occupied exclusively by religion and politics. The small knowledge which
they possessed of other things was tinctured by their speculative
opinions on the relations of heaven and earth; and, down to the
sixteenth century, art, science, scarcely even literature, existed in
this country, except as, in some way or other, subordinate to theology.
Philosophers--such philosophers as there were--obtained and half
deserved the reputation of quacks and conjurors. Astronomy was confused
with astrology. The physician's medicines were supposed to be powerless,
unless the priests said prayers over them. The great lawyers, the
ambassadors, the chief ministers of state, were generally bishops; even
the fighting business was not entirely secular. Half-a-dozen Scotch
prelates were killed at Flodden; and, late in the reign of Henry the
Eighth, no fitter person could be found than Rowland Lee, Bishop of
Coventry, to take command of the Welsh Marches, and harry the
freebooters of Llangollen.
Every single department of intellectual or practical life was penetrated
with the beliefs, or was interwoven with the interests, of the clergy;
and thus it was that, when differences of religious opinion arose, they
split society to its foundations. The lines of cleavage penetrated
everywhere, and there were no subjects whatever in which those who
disagreed in theology possessed any common concern. When men
quarrelled, they quarrelled altogether. The disturbers of settled
beliefs were regarded as public enemies who had placed themselves beyond
the pale of humanity, and were considered fit only to be destroyed like
wild beasts, or trampled out like the seed of a contagion.
Three centuries have passed over our heads since the time of which I am
speaking, and the world is so changed that we can hardly recognise it as
the same.
The secrets of nature have been opened out to us on a thousand lines;
and men of science of all creeds can pursue side by side their common
investigations. Catholics, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Lutherans,
Calvinists, contend with each other in honourable rivalry in arts, and
literature, and commerce, and industry. They read the same books. They
study at the same academies. They have seats in the same senates. They
preside together on the judicial bench, and carry on, without jar or
difference, the ordinary business of the country.
Those who share the same pursuits are drawn in spite of themselves into
sympathy and good-will. When they are in harmony in so large a part of
their occupations, the points of remaining difference lose their venom.
Those who thought they hated each other, unconsciously find themselves
friends; and as far as it affects the world at large, the acrimony of
controversy has almost disappeared.
Imagine, if you can, a person being now put to death for a speculative
theological opinion. You feel at once, that in the most bigoted country
in the world such a thing has become impossible; and the impossibility
is the measure of the alteration which we have all undergone. The
formulas remain as they were on either side--the very same formulas
which were once supposed to require these detestable murders. But we
have learnt to know each other better. The cords which bind together the
brotherhood of mankind are woven of a thousand strands. We do not any
more fly apart or become enemies, because, here and there, in one strand
out of so many, there are still unsound places.
If I were asked for a distinct proof that Europe was improving and not
retrograding, I should find it in this phenomenon. It has not been
brought about by controversy. Men are fighting still over the same
questions which they began to fight about at the Reformation. Protestant
divines have not driven Catholics out of the field, nor Catholics,
Protestants. Each polemic writes for his own partisans, and makes no
impression on his adversary.
Controversy has kept alive a certain quantity of bitterness; and that, I
suspect, is all that it would accomplish if it continued till the day of
judgment. I sometimes, in impatient moments, wish the laity in Europe
would treat their controversial divines as two gentlemen once treated
their seconds, when they found themselves forced into a duel without
knowing what they were quarrelling about.
As the principals were being led up to their places, one of them
whispered to the other, 'If you will shoot your second, I will shoot
mine.'
The reconciliation of parties, if I may use such a word, is no
tinkered-up truce, or convenient Interim. It is the healthy, silent,
spontaneous growth of a nobler order of conviction, which has conquered
our prejudices even before we knew that they were assailed. This better
spirit especially is represented in institutions like this, which
acknowledge no differences of creed--which are constructed on the
broadest principles of toleration--and which, therefore, as a rule, are
wisely protected from the intrusion of discordant subjects.
They exist, as I understand, to draw men together, not to divide
them--to enable us to share together in those topics of universal
interest and instruction which all can take pleasure in, and which give
offence to none.
If you ask me, then, why I am myself departing from a practice which I
admit to be so excellent, I fear that I shall give you rather a lame
answer. I might say that I know more about the history of the sixteenth
century than I know about anything else. I have spent the best years of
my life in reading and writing about it; and if I have anything to tell
you worth your hearing, it is probably on that subject.
Or, again, I might say--which is indeed most true--that to the
Reformation we can trace, indirectly, the best of those very influences
which I have been describing. The Reformation broke the theological
shackles in which men's minds were fettered. It set them thinking, and
so gave birth to science. The Reformers also, without knowing what they
were about, taught the lesson of religious toleration. They attempted to
supersede one set of dogmas by another. They succeeded with half the
world--they failed with the other half. In a little while it became
apparent that good men--without ceasing to be good--could think
differently about theology, and that goodness, therefore, depended on
something else than the holding orthodox opinions.
It is not, however, for either of these reasons that I am going to talk
to you about Martin Luther; nor is toleration of differences of opinion,
however excellent it be, the point on which I shall dwell in these
Lectures.
Were the Reformation a question merely of opinion, I for one should not
have meddled with it, either here or anywhere. I hold that, on the
obscure mysteries of faith, every one should be allowed to believe
according to his conscience, and that arguments on such matters are
either impertinent or useless.
But the Reformation, gentlemen, beyond the region of opinions, was a
historical fact--an objective something which may be studied like any of
the facts of nature. The Reformers were men of note and distinction, who
played a great part for good or evil on the stage of the world. If we
except the Apostles, no body of human beings ever printed so deep a mark
into the organisation of society; and if there be any value or meaning
in history at all, the lives, the actions, the characters of such men as
these can be matters of indifference to none of us.
We have not to do with a story which is buried in obscure antiquity. The
facts admit of being learnt. The truth, whatever it was, concerns us all
equally. If the divisions created by that great convulsion are ever to
be obliterated, it will be when we have learnt, each of us, to see the
thing as it really was, and not rather some mythical or imaginative
version of the thing--such as from our own point of view we like to
think it was. Fiction in such matters may be convenient for our
immediate theories, but it is certain to avenge itself in the end. We
may make our own opinions, but facts were made for us; and if we evade
or deny them, it will be the worse for us.
Unfortunately, the mythical version at present very largely
preponderates. Open a Protestant history of the Reformation, and you
will find a picture of the world given over to a lying tyranny--the
Christian population of Europe enslaved by a corrupt and degraded
priesthood, and the Reformers, with the Bible in their hands, coming to
the rescue like angels of light. All is black on one side--all is fair
and beautiful on the other.
Turn to a Catholic history of the same events and the same men, and we
have before us the Church of the Saints fulfilling quietly its blessed
mission in the saving of human souls. Satan a second time enters into
Paradise, and a second time with fatal success tempts miserable man to
his ruin. He disbelieves his appointed teachers, he aspires after
forbidden knowledge, and at once anarchy breaks loose. The seamless robe
of the Saviour is rent in pieces, and the earth becomes the habitation
of fiends.
Each side tells the story as it prefers to have it; facts, characters,
circumstances, are melted in the theological crucible, and cast in
moulds diametrically opposite. Nothing remains the same except the names
and dates. Each side chooses its own witnesses. Everything is credible
which makes for what it calls the truth. Everything is made false which
will not fit into its place. 'Blasphemous fables' is the usual
expression in Protestant controversial books for the accounts given by
Catholics. 'Protestant tradition,' says an eminent modern Catholic, 'is
based on lying--bold, wholesale, unscrupulous lying.'
Now, depend upon it, there is some human account of the matter different
from both these if we could only get at it, and it will be an excellent
thing for the world when that human account can be made out. I am not so
presumptuous as to suppose that I can give it to you; still less can you
expect me to try to do so within the compass of two or three lectures.
If I cannot do everything, however, I believe I can do a little; at any
rate I can give you a sketch, such as you may place moderate confidence
in, of the state of the Church as it was before the Reformation began. I
will not expose myself more than I can help to the censure of the divine
who was so hard on Protestant tradition. Most of what I shall have to
say to you this evening will be taken from the admissions of Catholics
themselves, or from official records earlier than the outbreak of the
controversy, when there was no temptation to pervert the truth.
Here, obviously, is the first point on which we require accurate
information. If all was going on well, the Reformers really and truly
told innumerable lies, and deserve all the reprobation which we can give
them. If all was not going on well--if, so far from being well, the
Church was so corrupt that Europe could bear with it no longer--then
clearly a Reformation was necessary of some kind; and we have taken one
step towards a fair estimate of the persons concerned in it.
A fair estimate--that, and only that, is what we want. I need hardly
observe to you, that opinion in England has been undergoing lately a
very considerable alteration about these persons.
Two generations ago, the leading Reformers were looked upon as little
less than saints; now a party has risen up who intend, as they frankly
tell us, to un-Protestantise the Church of England, who detest
Protestantism as a kind of infidelity, who desire simply to reverse
everything which the Reformers did.
One of these gentlemen, a clergyman, writing lately of Luther, called
him a heretic, a heretic fit only to be ranked with--whom, do you
think?--Joe Smith, the Mormon Prophet. Joe Smith and Luther--that is the
combination with which we are now presented.
The book in which this remarkable statement appeared was presented by
two bishops to the Upper House of Convocation. It was received with
gracious acknowledgments by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and was placed
solemnly in the library of reference, for that learned body to consult.
So, too, a professor at Oxford, the other day, spoke of Luther as a
Philistine--a Philistine meaning an oppressor of the chosen people; the
enemy of men of culture, of intelligence, such as the professor himself.
One notices these things, not as of much importance in themselves, but
as showing which way the stream is running; and, curiously enough, in
quite another direction we may see the same phenomenon. Our liberal
philosophers, men of high literary power and reputation, looking into
the history of Luther, and Calvin, and John Knox, and the rest, find
them falling far short of the philosophic ideal--wanting sadly in many
qualities which the liberal mind cannot dispense with. They are
discovered to be intolerant, dogmatic, narrow-minded, inclined to
persecute Catholics as Catholics had persecuted them; to be, in fact,
little if at all better than the popes and cardinals whom they were
fighting against.
Lord Macaulay can hardly find epithets strong enough to express his
contempt for Archbishop Cranmer. Mr. Buckle places Cranmer by the side
of Bonner, and hesitates which of the two characters is the more
detestable.
An unfavourable estimate of the Reformers, whether just or unjust, is
unquestionably gaining ground among our advanced thinkers. A greater man
than either Macaulay or Buckle--the German poet, Goethe--says of Luther,
that he threw back the intellectual progress of mankind for centuries,
by calling in the passions of the multitude to decide on subjects which
ought to have been left to the learned. Goethe, in saying this, was
alluding especially to Erasmus. Goethe thought that Erasmus, and men
like Erasmus, had struck upon the right track; and if they could have
retained the direction of the mind of Europe, there would have been more
truth, and less falsehood, among us at this present time. The party
hatreds, the theological rivalries, the persecutions, the civil wars,
the religious animosities which have so long distracted us, would have
been all avoided, and the mind of mankind would have expanded gradually
and equably with the growth of knowledge.
Such an opinion, coming from so great a man, is not to be lightly passed
over. It will be my endeavour to show you what kind of man Erasmus was,
what he was aiming at, what he was doing, and how Luther spoilt his
work--if spoiling is the word which we are to use for it.
One caution, however, I must in fairness give you before we proceed
further. It lies upon the face of the story, that the Reformers
imperfectly understood toleration; but you must keep before you the
spirit and temper of the men with whom they had to deal. For themselves,
when the movement began, they aimed at nothing but liberty to think and
speak their own way. They never dreamt of interfering with others,
although they were quite aware that others, when they could, were likely
to interfere with them. Lord Macaulay might have remembered that Cranmer
was working all his life with the prospect of being burnt alive as his
reward--and, as we all know, he actually was burnt alive.
When the Protestant teaching began first to spread in the
Netherlands--before one single Catholic had been illtreated there,
before a symptom of a mutinous disposition had shown itself among the
people, an edict was issued by the authorities for the suppression of
the new opinions.
The terms of this edict I will briefly describe to you.
The inhabitants of the United Provinces were informed that they were to
hold and believe the doctrines of the Holy Roman Catholic Church. 'Men
and women,' says the edict, 'who disobey this command shall be punished
as disturbers of public order. Women who have fallen into heresy shall
be buried alive. Men, if they recant, shall lose their heads. If they
continue obstinate, they shall be burnt at the stake.
'If man or woman be suspected of heresy, no one shall shelter or protect
him or her; and no stranger shall be admitted to lodge in any inn or
dwelling-house unless he bring with him a testimonial of orthodoxy from
the priest of his parish.
'The Inquisition shall enquire into the private opinions of every
person, of whatever degree; and all officers of all kinds shall assist
the Inquisition at their peril. Those who know where heretics are
concealed, shall denounce them, or they shall suffer as heretics
themselves. Heretics (observe the malignity of this paragraph)--heretics
who will give up other heretics to justice, shall themselves be pardoned
if they will promise to conform for the future.'
Under this edict, in the Netherlands alone, more than fifty thousand
human beings, first and last, were deliberately murdered. And,
gentlemen, I must say that proceedings of this kind explain and go far
to excuse the subsequent intolerance of Protestants.
Intolerance, Mr. Gibbon tells us, is a greater crime in a Protestant
than a Catholic. Criminal intolerance, as I understand it, is the
intolerance of such an edict as that which I have read to you--the
unprovoked intolerance of difference of opinion. I conceive that the
most enlightened philosopher might have grown hard and narrow-minded if
he had suffered under the administration of the Duke of Alva.
Dismissing these considerations, I will now go on with my subject.
Never in all their history, in ancient times or modern, never that we
know of, have mankind thrown out of themselves anything so grand, so
useful, so beautiful, as the Catholic Church once was. In these times of
ours, well-regulated selfishness is the recognised rule of action--every
one of us is expected to look out first for himself, and take care of
his own interests. At the time I speak of, the Church ruled the State
with the authority of a conscience; and self-interest, as a motive of
action, was only named to be abhorred. The bishops and clergy were
regarded freely and simply as the immediate ministers of the Almighty;
and they seem to me to have really deserved that high estimate of their
character. It was not for the doctrines which they taught, only or
chiefly, that they were held in honour. Brave men do not fall down
before their fellow-mortals for the words which they speak, or for the
rites which they perform. Wisdom, justice, self-denial, nobleness,
purity, highmindedness,--these are the qualities before which the
free-born races of Europe have been contented to bow; and in no order of
men were such qualities to be found as they were found six hundred years
ago in the clergy of the Catholic Church. They called themselves the
successors of the Apostles. They claimed in their Master's name
universal spiritual authority, but they made good their pretensions by
the holiness of their own lives. They were allowed to rule because they
deserved to rule, and in the fulness of reverence kings and nobles bent
before a power which was nearer to God than their own. Over prince and
subject, chieftain and serf, a body of unarmed defenceless men reigned
supreme by the magic of sanctity. They tamed the fiery northern warriors
who had broken in pieces the Roman Empire. They taught them--they
brought them really and truly to believe--that they had immortal souls,
and that they would one day stand at the awful judgment bar and give
account for their lives there. With the brave, the honest, and the
good--with those who had not oppressed the poor nor removed their
neighbour's landmark--with those who had been just in all their
dealings--with those who had fought against evil, and had tried
valiantly to do their Master's will,--at that great day, it would be
well. For cowards, for profligates, for those who lived for luxury and
pleasure and self-indulgence, there was the blackness of eternal death.
An awful conviction of this tremendous kind the clergy had effectually
instilled into the mind of Europe. It was not a PERHAPS; it was a
certainty. It was not a form of words repeated once a week at church; it
was an assurance entertained on all days and in all places, without any
particle of doubt. And the effect of such a belief on life and
conscience was simply immeasurable.
I do not pretend that the clergy were perfect. They were very far from
perfect at the best of times, and the European nations were never
completely submissive to them. It would not have been well if they had
been. The business of human creatures in this planet is not summed up in
the most excellent of priestly catechisms. The world and its concerns
continued to interest men, though priests insisted on their nothingness.
They could not prevent kings from quarrelling with each other. They
could not hinder disputed successions, and civil feuds, and wars, and
political conspiracies. What they did do was to shelter the weak from
the strong. In the eyes of the clergy, the serf and his lord stood on
the common level of sinful humanity. Into their ranks high birth was no
passport. They were themselves for the most part children of the people;
and the son of the artisan or peasant rose to the mitre and the triple
crown, just as nowadays the rail-splitter and the tailor become
Presidents of the Republic of the West.
The Church was essentially democratic, while at the same time it had the
monopoly of learning; and all the secular power fell to it which
learning, combined with sanctity and assisted by superstition, can
bestow.
The privileges of the clergy were extraordinary. They were not amenable
to the common laws of the land. While they governed the laity, the laity
had no power over them. From the throne downwards, every secular office
was dependent on the Church. No king was a lawful sovereign till the
Church placed the crown upon his head: and what the Church bestowed, the
Church claimed the right to take away. The disposition of property was
in their hands. No will could be proved except before the bishop or his
officer; and no will was held valid if the testator died out of
communion. There were magistrates and courts of law for the offences of
the laity. If a priest committed a crime, he was a sacred person. The
civil power could not touch him; he was reserved for his ordinary.
Bishops' commissaries sate in town and city, taking cognizance of the
moral conduct of every man and woman. Offences against life and property
were tried here in England, as now, by the common law; but the Church
Courts dealt with sins--sins of word or act. If a man was a profligate
or a drunkard; if he lied or swore; if he did not come to communion, or
held unlawful opinions; if he was idle or unthrifty; if he was unkind
to his wife or his servants; if a child was disobedient to his father,
or a father cruel to his child; if a tradesman sold adulterated wares,
or used false measures or dishonest weights,--the eye of the parish
priest was everywhere, and the Church Court stood always open to examine
and to punish.
Imagine what a tremendous power this must have been! Yet it existed
generally in Catholic Europe down to the eve of the Reformation. It
could never have established itself at all unless at one time it had
worked beneficially--as the abuse of it was one of the most fatal causes
of the Church's fall.
I know nothing in English history much more striking than the answer
given by Archbishop Warham to the complaints of the English House of
Commons after the fall of Cardinal Wolsey. The House of Commons
complained that the clergy made laws in Convocation which the laity were
excommunicated if they disobeyed. Yet the laws made by the clergy, the
Commons said, were often at variance with the laws of the realm.
What did Warham reply? He said he was sorry for the alleged discrepancy;
but, inasmuch as the laws made by the clergy were always in conformity
with the will of God, the laws of the realm had only to be altered and
then the difficulty would vanish.
What must have been the position of the clergy in the fulness of their
power, when they could speak thus on the eve of their prostration? You
have only to look from a distance at any old-fashioned cathedral city,
and you will see in a moment the mediaeval relations between Church and
State. The cathedral _is_ the city. The first object you catch sight of
as you approach is the spire tapering into the sky, or the huge towers
holding possession of the centre of the landscape--majestically
beautiful--imposing by mere size amidst the large forms of Nature
herself. As you go nearer, the vastness of the building impresses you
more and more. The puny dwelling-place of the citizens creep at its
feet, the pinnacles are glittering in the tints of the sunset, when down
below among the streets and lanes the twilight is darkening. And even
now, when the towns are thrice their ancient size, and the houses have
stretched upwards from two stories to five; when the great chimneys are
vomiting their smoke among the clouds, and the temples of modern
industry--the workshops and the factories--spread their long fronts
before the eye, the cathedral is still the governing form in the
picture--the one object which possesses the imagination and refuses to
be eclipsed.
As that cathedral was to the old town, so was the Church of the middle
ages to the secular institutions of the world. Its very neighbourhood
was sacred; and its shadow, like the shadow of the Apostles, was a
sanctuary. When I look at the new Houses of Parliament in London, I see
in them a type of the change which has passed over us. The House of
Commons of the Plantagenets sate in the Chapter House of Westminster
Abbey. The Parliament of the Reform Bill, five-and-thirty years ago,
debated in St. Stephen's Chapel, the Abbey's small dependency. Now, by
the side of the enormous pile which has risen out of that chapel's
ashes, the proud Minster itself is dwarfed into insignificance.
Let us turn to another vast feature of the middle ages--I mean the
monasteries.
Some person of especial and exceptional holiness has lived or died at a
particular spot. He has been distinguished by his wisdom, by his piety,
by his active benevolence; and in an age when conjurors and witches were
supposed to be helped by the devil to do evil, he, on his part, has been
thought to have possessed in larger measure than common men the favour
and the grace of heaven. Blessed influences hang about the spot which he
has hallowed by his presence. His relics--his household possessions, his
books, his clothes, his bones, retain the shadowy sanctity which they
received in having once belonged to him. We all set a value, not wholly
unreal, on anything which has been the property of a remarkable man. At
worst, it is but an exaggeration of natural reverence.
Well, as nowadays we build monuments to great men, so in the middle ages
they built shrines or chapels on the spots which saints had made holy,
and communities of pious people gathered together there--beginning with
the personal friends the saint had left behind him--to try to live as he
had lived, to do good as he had done good, and to die as he had died.
Thus arose religious fraternities--companies of men who desired to
devote themselves to goodness--to give up pleasure, and amusement, and
self-indulgence, and to spend their lives in prayer and works of
charity.
These houses became centres of pious beneficence. The monks, as the
brotherhoods were called, were organised in different orders, with some
variety of rule, but the broad principle was the same in all. They were
to live for others, not for themselves. They took vows of poverty, that
they might not be entangled in the pursuit of money. They took vows of
chastity, that the care of a family might not distract them from the
work which they had undertaken. Their efforts of charity were not
limited to this world. Their days were spent in hard bodily labour, in
study, or in visiting the sick. At night they were on the stone-floors
of their chapels, holding up their withered hands to heaven, interceding
for the poor souls who were suffering in purgatory.
The world, as it always will, paid honour to exceptional excellence. The
system spread to the furthest limits of Christendom. The religious
houses became places of refuge, where men of noble birth, kings and
queens and emperors, warriors and statesmen, retired to lay down their
splendid cares, and end their days in peace. Those with whom the world
had dealt hardly, or those whom it had surfeited with its unsatisfying
pleasures, those who were disappointed with earth, and those who were
filled with passionate aspirations after heaven, alike found a haven of
rest in the quiet cloister. And, gradually, lands came to them, and
wealth, and social dignity--all gratefully extended to men who deserved
so well of their fellows; while no landlords were more popular than
they, for the sanctity of the monks sheltered their dependents as well
as themselves.
Travel now through Ireland, and you will see in the wildest parts of it
innumerable remains of religious houses, which had grown up among a
people who acknowledged no rule among themselves except the sword, and
where every chief made war upon his neighbour as the humour seized him.
The monks among the O's and the Mac's were as defenceless as sheep among
the wolves; but the wolves spared them for their character. In such a
country as Ireland then was, the monasteries could not have survived for
a generation but for the enchanted atmosphere which surrounded them.
Of authority, the religious orders were practically independent. They
were amenable only to the Pope and to their own superiors. Here in
England, the king could not send a commissioner to inspect a monastery,
nor even send a policeman to arrest a criminal who had taken shelter
within its walls. Archbishops and bishops, powerful as they were, found
their authority cease when they entered the gates of a Benedictine or
Dominican abbey.
So utterly have times changed, that with your utmost exertions you will
hardly be able to picture to yourselves the Catholic Church in the days
of its greatness. Our school-books tell us how the Emperor of Germany
held the stirrup for Pope Gregory the Seventh to mount his mule; how our
own English Henry Plantagenet walked barefoot through the streets of
Canterbury, and knelt in the Chapter House for the monks to flog him.
The first of these incidents, I was brought up to believe, proved the
Pope to be the Man of Sin. Anyhow, they are both facts, and not
romances; and you may form some notion from them how high in the world's
eyes the Church must have stood.
And be sure it did not achieve that proud position without deserving it.
The Teutonic and Latin princes were not credulous fools; and when they
submitted, it was to something stronger than themselves--stronger in
limb and muscle, or stronger in intellect and character.
So the Church was in its vigour: so the Church was _not_ at the opening
of the sixteenth century. Power--wealth--security--men are more than
mortal if they can resist the temptations to which too much of these
expose them. Nor were they the only enemies which undermined the
energies of the Catholic clergy. Churches exist in this world to remind
us of the eternal laws which we are bound to obey. So far as they do
this, they fulfil their end, and are honoured in fulfilling it. It would
have been better for all of us--it would be better for us now, could
Churches keep this their peculiar function steadily and singly before
them. Unfortunately, they have preferred in later times the speculative
side of things to the practical. They take up into their teaching
opinions and theories which are merely ephemeral; which would naturally
die out with the progress of knowledge; but, having received a spurious
sanctity, prolong their days unseasonably, and become first unmeaning,
and then occasions of superstition.
It matters little whether I say a paternoster in English or Latin, so
that what is present to my mind is the thought which the words express,
and not the words themselves. In these and all languages it is the most
beautiful of prayers. But you know that people came to look on a Latin
paternoster as the most powerful of spells--potent in heaven, if said
straightforward; if repeated backward, a charm which no spirit in hell
could resist.
So it is, in my opinion, with all forms--forms of words, or forms of
ceremony and ritualism. While the meaning is alive in them, they are not
only harmless, but pregnant and life-giving. When we come to think that
they possess in themselves material and magical virtues, then the
purpose which they answer is to hide God from us and make us practically
into Atheists.
This is what I believe to have gradually fallen upon the Catholic Church
in the generations which preceded Luther. The body remained; the mind
was gone away: the original thought which its symbolism represented was
no longer credible to intelligent persons.
The acute were conscious unbelievers. In Italy, when men went to mass
they spoke of it as going to a comedy. You may have heard the story of
Luther in his younger days saying mass at an altar in Rome, and hearing
his fellow-priests muttering at the consecration of the Eucharist,
'Bread thou art, and bread thou wilt remain.'
Part of the clergy were profane scoundrels like these; the rest repeated
the words of the service, conceiving that they were working a charm.
Religion was passing through the transformation which all religions have
a tendency to undergo. They cease to be aids and incentives to holy
life; they become contrivances rather to enable men to sin, and escape
the penalties of sin. Obedience to the law is dispensed with if men will
diligently profess certain opinions, or punctually perform certain
external duties. However scandalous the moral life, the participation of
a particular rite, or the profession of a particular belief, at the
moment of death, is held to clear the score.
The powers which had been given to the clergy required for their
exercise the highest wisdom and the highest probity. They had fallen at
last into the hands of men who possessed considerably less of these
qualities than the laity whom they undertook to govern. They had
degraded their conceptions of God; and, as a necessary consequence, they
had degraded their conceptions of man and man's duty. The aspirations
after sanctity had disappeared, and instead of them there remained the
practical reality of the five senses. The high prelates, the cardinals,
the great abbots, were occupied chiefly in maintaining their splendour
and luxury. The friars and the secular clergy, following their superiors
with shorter steps, indulged themselves in grosser pleasures; while
their spiritual powers, their supposed authority in this world and the
next, were turned to account to obtain from the laity the means for
their self-indulgence.
The Church forbade the eating of meat on fast days, but the Church was
ready with dispensations for those who could afford to pay for them. The
Church forbade marriage to the fourth degree of consanguinity, but
loving cousins, if they were rich and open-handed, could obtain the
Church's consent to their union. There were toll-gates for the priests
at every halting-place on the road of life--fees at weddings, fees at
funerals, fees whenever an excuse could be found to fasten them. Even
when a man was dead he was not safe from plunder, for a mortuary or
death present was exacted of his family.
And then those Bishop's Courts, of which I spoke just now: they were
founded for the discipline of morality--they were made the instruments
of the most detestable extortion. If an impatient layman spoke a
disrespectful word of the clergy, he was cited before the bishop's
commissary and fined. If he refused to pay, he was excommunicated, and
excommunication was a poisonous disease. When a poor wretch was under
the ban of the Church no tradesman might sell him clothes or food--no
friend might relieve him--no human voice might address him, under pain
of the same sentence; and if he died unreconciled, he died like a dog,
without the sacraments, and was refused Christian burial.
The records of some of these courts survive: a glance at their pages
will show the principles on which they were worked. When a layman
offended, the single object was to make him pay for it. The magistrates
could not protect him. If he resisted, and his friends supported him, so
much the better, for they were now all in the scrape together. The next
step would be to indict them in a body for heresy; and then, of course,
there was nothing for it but to give way, and compound for absolution by
money.
It was money--ever money. Even in case of real delinquency, it was
still money. Money, not charity, covered the multitude of sins.
I have told you that the clergy were exempt from secular jurisdiction.
They claimed to be amenable only to spiritual judges, and they extended
the broad fringe of their order till the word clerk was construed to
mean any one who could write his name or read a sentence from a book. A
robber or a murderer at the assizes had but to show that he possessed
either of these qualifications, and he was allowed what was called
benefit of clergy. His case was transferred to the Bishops' Court, to an
easy judge, who allowed him at once to compound.
Such were the clergy in matters of this world. As religious instructors,
they appear in colours if possible less attractive.
Practical religion throughout Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth
century was a very simple affair. I am not going to speak of the
mysterious doctrines of the Catholic Church. The creed which it
professed in its schools and theological treatises was the same which it
professes now, and which it had professed at the time when it was most
powerful for good. I do not myself consider that the formulas in which
men express their belief are of much consequence. The question is rather
of the thing expressed; and so long as we find a living consciousness
that above the world and above human life there is a righteous God, who
will judge men according to their works, whether they say their prayers
in Latin or English, whether they call themselves Protestants or call
themselves Catholics, appears to me of quite secondary importance. But
at the time I speak of, that consciousness no longer existed. The
formulas and ceremonies were all in all; and of God it is hard to say
what conceptions men had formed, when they believed that a dead man's
relations could buy him out of purgatory--buy him out of purgatory,--for
this was the literal truth--by hiring priests to sing masses for his
soul.
Religion, in the minds of ordinary people, meant that the keys of the
other world were held by the clergy. If a man confessed regularly to his
priest, received the sacrament, and was absolved, then all was well with
him. His duties consisted in going to confession and to mass. If he
committed sins, he was prescribed penances, which could be commuted for
money. If he was sick or ill at ease in his mind, he was recommended a
pilgrimage--a pilgrimage to a shrine or a holy well, or to some
wonder-working image--where, for due consideration, his case would be
attended to. It was no use to go to a saint empty-handed. The rule of
the Church was, nothing for nothing. At a chapel in Saxony there was an
image of a Virgin and Child. If the worshipper came to it with a good
handsome offering, the child bowed and was gracious: if the present was
unsatisfactory, it turned away its head, and withheld its favours till
the purse-strings were untied again.
There was a great rood or crucifix of the same kind at Boxley, in Kent,
where the pilgrims went in thousands. This figure used to bow, too, when
it was pleased; and a good sum of money was sure to secure its
good-will.
When the Reformation came, and the police looked into the matter, the
images were found to be worked with wires and pulleys. The German lady
was kept as a curiosity in the cabinet of the Elector of Saxony. Our
Boxley rood was brought up and exhibited in Cheapside, and was
afterwards torn in pieces by the people.
Nor here again was death the limit of extortion: death was rather the
gate of the sphere which the clergy made, peculiarly their own. When a
man died, his friends were naturally anxious for the fate of his soul.
If he died in communion, he was not in the worst place of all. He had
not been a saint, and therefore he was not in the best. Therefore he was
in purgatory--Purgatory Pickpurse, as our English Latimer called it--and
a priest, if properly paid, could get him out.
To be a mass priest, as it was called, was a regular profession, in
which, with little trouble, a man could earn a comfortable living. He
had only to be ordained and to learn by heart a certain form of words,
and that was all the equipment necessary for him. The masses were paid
for at so much a dozen, and for every mass that was said, so many years
were struck off from the penal period. Two priests were sometimes to be
seen muttering away at the opposite ends of the same altar, like a
couple of musical boxes playing different parts of the same tune at the
same time. It made no difference. The upper powers had what they wanted.
If they got the masses, and the priests got the money, all parties
concerned were satisfied.
I am speaking of the form which these things assumed in an age of
degradation and ignorance. The truest and wisest words ever spoken by
man might be abused in the same way.
The Sermon on the Mount or the Apostles' Creed, if recited mechanically,
and relied on to work a mechanical effort, would be no less perniciously
idolatrous.
You can see something of the same kind in a milder form in Spain at the
present day. The Spaniards, all of them, high and low, are expected to
buy annually a Pope's Bula or Bull--a small pardon, or indulgence, or
plenary remission of sins. The exact meaning of these things is a little
obscure; the high authorities themselves do not universally agree about
them, except so far as to say that they are of prodigious value of some
sort. The orthodox explanation, I believe, is something of this kind.
With every sin there is the moral guilt and the temporal penalty. The
pardon cannot touch the guilt; but when the guilt is remitted, there is
still the penalty. I may ruin my health by a dissolute life; I may
repent of my dissoluteness and be forgiven; but the bad health will
remain. For bad health, substitute penance in this world and purgatory
in the next; and in this sphere the indulgence takes effect.
Such as they are, at any rate, everybody in Spain has these bulls; you
buy them in the shops for a shilling apiece.
This is one form of the thing. Again, at the door of a Spanish church
you will see hanging on the wall an intimation that whoever will pray so
many hours before a particular image shall receive full forgiveness of
his sins. Having got that, one might suppose he would be satisfied; but
no--if he prays so many more hours, he can get off a hundred years of
purgatory, or a thousand, or ten thousand. In one place I remember
observing that for a very little trouble a man could escape a hundred
and fifty thousand years of purgatory.
What a prospect for the ill-starred Protestant, who will be lucky if he
is admitted into purgatory at all!
Again, if you enter a sacristy, you will see a small board like the
notices addressed to parishioners in our vestries. On particular days it
is taken out and hung up in the church, and little would a stranger,
ignorant of the language, guess the tremendous meaning of that
commonplace appearance. On these boards is written 'Hoy se sacan
animas,'--'This day, souls are taken out of purgatory.' It is an
intimation to every one with a friend in distress that now is his time.
You put a shilling in a plate, you give your friend's name, and the
thing is done. One wonders why, if purgatory can be sacked so easily,
any poor wretch is left to suffer there.
Such practices nowadays are comparatively innocent, the money asked and
given is trifling, and probably no one concerned in the business
believes much about it. They serve to show, however, on a small scale,
what once went on on an immense scale; and even such as they are, pious
Catholics do not much approve of them. They do not venture to say much
on the subject directly, but they allow themselves a certain
good-humoured ridicule. A Spanish novelist of some reputation tells a
story of a man coming to a priest on one of these occasions, putting a
shilling in the plate, and giving in the name of his friend.
'Is my friend's soul out?' he asked. The priest said it was. 'Quite
sure?' the man asked. 'Quite sure,' the priest answered. 'Very well,'
said the man, 'if he is out of purgatory they will not put him in again:
it is a bad shilling.'
Sadder than all else, even as the most beautiful things are worst in
their degradation, was the condition of the monasteries. I am here on
delicate ground. The accounts of those institutions, as they existed in
England and Germany at the time of their suppression, is so shocking
that even impartial writers have hesitated to believe the reports which
have come down to us. The laity, we are told, determined to appropriate
the abbey lands, and maligned the monks to justify the spoliation. Were
the charge true, the religious orders would still be without excuse, for
the whole education of the country was in the hands of the clergy; and
they had allowed a whole generation to grow up, which, on this
hypothesis, was utterly depraved.
But no such theory can explain away the accumulated testimony which
comes to us--exactly alike--from so many sides and witnesses. We are not
dependent upon evidence which Catholics can decline to receive. In the
reign of our Henry the Seventh the notorious corruption of some of the
great abbeys in England brought them under the notice of the Catholic
Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Morton. The archbishop, unable to
meddle with them by his own authority, obtained the necessary powers
from the Pope. He instituted a partial visitation in the neighbourhood
of London; and the most malignant Protestant never drew such a picture
of profligate brutality as Cardinal Morton left behind him in his
Register, in a description of the great Abbey of St. Albans. I cannot,
in a public lecture, give you the faintest idea of what it contains. The
monks were bound to celibacy--that is to say, they were not allowed to
marry. They were full-fed, idle, and sensual; of sin they thought only
as something extremely pleasant, of which they could cleanse one another
with a few mumbled words as easily as they could wash their faces in a
basin. And there I must leave the matter. Anybody who is curious for
particulars may see the original account in Morton's Register, in the
Archbishop's library at Lambeth.
A quarter of a century after this there appeared in Germany a book, now
called by Catholics an infamous libel, the 'Epistolae Obscurorum
Virorum.' 'The obscure men,' supposed to be the writers of these
epistles, are monks or students of theology. The letters themselves are
written in dog-Latin--a burlesque of the language in which
ecclesiastical people then addressed each other. They are sketches,
satirical, but not malignant, of the moral and intellectual character of
these reverend personages.
On the moral, and by far the most important, side of the matter I am
still obliged to be silent; but I can give you a few specimens of the
furniture of the theological minds, and of the subjects with which they
were occupied.
A student writes to his ghostly father in an agony of distress because
he has touched his hat to a Jew. He mistook him for a doctor of
divinity; and on the whole, he fears he has committed mortal sin. Can
the father absolve him? Can the bishop absolve him? Can the Pope absolve
him? His case seems utterly desperate.
Another letter describes a great intellectual riddle, which was argued
for four days at the School of Logic at Louvaine. A certain Master of
Arts had taken out his degree at Louvaine, Leyden, Paris, Oxford,
Cambridge, Padua, and four other universities. He was thus a member of
ten universities. But how _could_ a man be a member of ten universities?
A university was a body, and one body might have many members; but how
one member could have many bodies, passed comprehension. In such a
monstrous anomaly, the member would be the body, and the universities
the member, and this would be a scandal to such grave and learned
corporations. The holy doctor St. Thomas himself could not make himself
into the body of ten universities.
The more the learned men argued, the deeper they floundered, and at
length gave up the problem in despair.
Again: a certain professor argues that Julius Caesar could not have
written the book which passes under the name of 'Caesar's Commentaries,'
because that book is written in Latin, and Latin is a difficult
language; and a man whose life is spent in marching and fighting has
notoriously no time to learn Latin.
Here is another fellow--a monk this one--describing to a friend the
wonderful things which he has seen in Rome.
'You may have heard,' he says, 'how the Pope did possess a monstrous
beast called an Elephant. The Pope did entertain for this beast a very
great affection, and now behold it is dead. When it fell sick, the Pope
called his doctors about him in great sorrow, and said to them, "If it
be possible, heal my elephant." Then they gave the elephant a purge,
which cost five hundred crowns, but it did not avail, and so the beast
departed; and the Pope grieves much for his elephant, for it was indeed
a miraculous beast, with a long, long, prodigious long nose; and when it
saw the Pope it kneeled down before him and said, with a terrible voice,
"Bar, bar, bar!"'
I will not tire you with any more of this nonsense, especially as I
cannot give you the really characteristic parts of the book.
I want you to observe, however, what Sir Thomas More says of it, and
nobody will question that Sir Thomas More was a good Catholic and a
competent witness. 'These epistles,' he says, 'are the delight of
everyone. The wise enjoy the wit; the blockheads of monks take them
seriously, and believe that they have been written to do them honour.
When we laugh, they think we are laughing at the style, which they admit
to be comical. But they think the style is made up for by the beauty of
the sentiment. The scabbard, they say, is rough, but the blade within it
is divine. The deliberate idiots would not have found out the jest for
themselves in a hundred years.'
Well might Erasmus exclaim, 'What fungus could be more stupid? yet
these are the Atlases who are to uphold the tottering Church!'
'The monks had a pleasant time of it,' says Luther. 'Every brother had
two cans of beer and a quart of wine for his supper, with gingerbread,
to make him take to his liquor kindly. Thus the poor things came to look
like fiery angels.'
And more gravely, 'In the cloister rule the seven deadly
sins--covetousness, lasciviousness, uncleanness, hate, envy, idleness,
and the loathing of the service of God.'
Consider such men as these owning a third, a half, sometimes two-thirds
of the land in every country in Europe, and, in addition to their other
sins, neglecting all the duties attaching to this property--the woods
cut down and sold, the houses falling to ruin--unthrift, neglect, waste
everywhere and in everything--the shrewd making the most of their time,
which they had sense to see might be a short one--the rest dreaming on
in sleepy sensuality, dividing their hours between the chapel, the
pothouse, and the brothel.
I do not think that, in its main features, the truth of this sketch can
be impugned; and if it be just even in outline, then a reformation of
some kind or other was overwhelmingly necessary. Corruption beyond a
certain point becomes unendurable to the coarsest nostril. The
constitution of human things cannot away with it.
Something was to be done; but what, or how? There were three possible
courses.
Either the ancient discipline of the Church might be restored by the
heads of the Church themselves.
Or, secondly, a higher tone of feeling might gradually be introduced
among clergy and laity alike, by education and literary culture. The
discovery of the printing press had made possible a diffusion of
knowledge which had been unattainable in earlier ages. The
ecclesiastical constitution, like a sick human body, might recover its
tone if a better diet were prepared for it.
Or, lastly, the common sense of the laity might take the matter at once
into their own hands, and make free use of the pruning knife and the
sweeping brush. There might be much partial injustice, much violence,
much wrongheadedness; but the people would, at any rate, go direct to
the point, and the question was whether any other remedy would serve.
The first of these alternatives may at once be dismissed. The heads of
the Church were the last persons in the world to discover that anything
was wrong. People of that sort always are. For them the thing as it
existed answered excellently well. They had boundless wealth, and all
but boundless power. What could they ask for more? No monk drowsing over
his wine-pot was less disturbed by anxiety than nine out of ten of the
high dignitaries who were living on the eve of the Judgment Day, and
believed that their seat was established for them for ever.
The character of the great ecclesiastics of that day you may infer from
a single example. The Archbishop of Mayence was one of the most
enlightened Churchmen in Germany. He was a patron of the Renaissance, a
friend of Erasmus, a liberal, an intelligent, and, as times went, and
considering his trade, an honourable, high-minded man.
When the Emperor Maximilian died, and the imperial throne was vacant,
the Archbishop of Mayence was one of seven electors who had to choose a
new emperor.
There were two competitors--Francis the First and Maximilian's grandson,
afterwards the well-known Charles the Fifth.
Well, of the seven electors six were bribed. John Frederick of Saxony,
Luther's friend and protector, was the only one of the party who came
out of the business with clean hands.
But the Archbishop of Mayence took bribes six times alternately from
both the candidates. He took money as coolly as the most rascally
ten-pound householder in Yarmouth or Totnes, and finally drove a hard
bargain for his actual vote.
The grape does not grow upon the blackthorn; nor does healthy reform
come from high dignitaries like the Archbishop of Mayence.
The other aspect of the problem I shall consider in the following
Lectures.
LECTURE II.
In the year 1467--the year in which Charles the Bold became Duke of
Burgundy--four years before the great battle of Barnet, which
established our own fourth Edward on the English throne--about the time
when William Caxton was setting up his printing press at
Westminster--there was born at Rotterdam, on the 28th of October,
Desiderius Erasmus. His parents, who were middle-class people, were
well-to-do in the world. For some reason or other they were prevented
from marrying by the interference of relations. The father died soon
after in a cloister; the mother was left with her illegitimate infant,
whom she called first, after his father, Gerard; but afterwards, from
his beauty and grace, she changed his name--the words Desiderius
Erasmus, one with a Latin, the other with a Greek, derivation, meaning
the lovely or delightful one.
Not long after, the mother herself died also. The little Erasmus was the
heir of a moderate fortune; and his guardians, desiring to appropriate
it to themselves, endeavoured to force him into a convent at Brabant.
The thought of living and dying in a house of religion was dreadfully
unattractive; but an orphan boy's resistance was easily overcome. He was
bullied into yielding, and, when about twenty, took the vows.
The life of a monk, which was uninviting on the surface, was not more
lovely when seen from within.
'A monk's holy obedience,' Erasmus wrote afterwards, 'consists in--what?
In leading an honest, chaste, and sober life? Not the least. In
acquiring learning, in study, and industry? Still less. A monk may be a
glutton, a drunkard, a whoremonger, an ignorant, stupid, malignant,
envious brute, but he has broken no vow, he is within his holy
obedience. He has only to be the slave of a superior as good for nothing
as himself, and he is an excellent brother.'
The misfortune of his position did not check Erasmus's intellectual
growth. He was a brilliant, witty, sarcastic, mischievous youth. He did
not trouble himself to pine and mope; but, like a young thorough-bred in
a drove of asses, he used his heels pretty freely.
While he played practical jokes upon the unreverend fathers, he
distinguished himself equally by his appetite for knowledge. It was the
dawn of the Renaissance--the revival of learning. The discovery of
printing was reopening to modern Europe the great literature of Greece
and Rome, and the writings of the Christian fathers. For studies of this
kind, Erasmus, notwithstanding the disadvantages of cowl and frock,
displayed extraordinary aptitude. He taught himself Greek when Greek was
the language which, in the opinion of the monks, only the devils spoke
in the wrong place. His Latin was as polished as Cicero's; and at length
the Archbishop of Cambray heard of him, and sent him to the University
of Paris.
At Paris he found a world where life could be sufficiently pleasant, but
where his religious habit was every moment in his way. He was a priest,
and so far could not help himself. That ink-spot not all the waters of
the German Ocean could wash away. But he did not care for the low
debaucheries, where the frock and cowl were at home. His place was in
the society of cultivated men, who were glad to know him and to
patronise him; so he shook off his order, let his hair grow, and flung
away his livery.
The Archbishop's patronage was probably now withdrawn. Life in Paris was
expensive, and Erasmus had for several years to struggle with poverty.
We see him, however, for the most part--in his early letters--carrying a
bold front to fortune; desponding one moment, and larking the next with
a Paris grisette; making friends, enjoying good company, enjoying
especially good wine when he could get it; and, above all, satiating his
literary hunger at the library of the University.
In this condition, when about eight-and-twenty, he made acquaintance
with two young English noblemen who were travelling on the Continent,
Lord Mountjoy and one of the Greys.
Mountjoy, intensely attracted by his brilliance, took him for his tutor,
carried him over to England, and introduced him at the court of Henry
the Seventh. At once his fortune was made. He charmed every one, and in
turn he was himself delighted with the country and the people. English
character, English hospitality, English manners--everything English
except the beer--equally pleased him. In the young London men--the
lawyers, the noblemen, even in some of the clergy--he found his own
passion for learning. Sir Thomas More, who was a few years younger than
himself, became his dearest friend; and Warham, afterwards Archbishop of
Canterbury--Fisher, afterwards Bishop of Rochester--Colet, the famous
Dean of St. Paul's--the great Wolsey himself--recognised and welcomed
the rising star of European literature.
Money flowed in upon him. Warham gave him a benefice in Kent, which was
afterwards changed to a pension. Prince Henry, when he became King,
offered him--kings in those days were not bad friends to
literature--Henry offered him, if he would remain in England, a house
large enough to be called a palace, and a pension which, converted into
our money, would be a thousand pounds a year.
Erasmus, however, was a restless creature, and did not like to be caged
or tethered. He declined the King's terms, but Mountjoy settled a
pension on him instead. He had now a handsome income, and he understood
the art of enjoying it. He moved about as he pleased--now to Cambridge,
now to Oxford, and, as the humour took him, back again to Paris; now
staying with Sir Thomas More at Chelsea, now going a pilgrimage with
Dean Colet to Becket's tomb at Canterbury--but always studying, always
gathering knowledge, and throwing it out again, steeped in his own
mother wit, in shining Essays or Dialogues, which were the delight and
the despair of his contemporaries.
Everywhere, in his love of pleasure, in his habits of thought, in his
sarcastic scepticism, you see the healthy, clever, well-disposed,
tolerant, epicurean, intellectual man of the world.
He went, as I said, with Dean Colet to Becket's tomb. At a shrine about
Canterbury he was shown an old shoe which tradition called the Saint's.
At the tomb itself, the great sight was a handkerchief which a monk took
from among the relics, and offered it to the crowd to kiss. The
worshippers touched it in pious adoration, with clasped hands and
upturned eyes. If the thing was genuine, as Erasmus observed, it had but
served for the archbishop to wipe his nose with--and Dean Colet, a
puritan before his time, looked on with eyes flashing scorn, and
scarcely able to keep his hands off the exhibitors. But Erasmus smiled
kindly, reflecting that mankind were fools, and in some form or other
would remain fools. He took notice only of the pile of gold and jewels,
and concluded that so much wealth might prove dangerous to its
possessors.
The peculiarities of the English people interested and amused him. 'You
are going to England,' he wrote afterwards to a friend; 'you will not
fail to be pleased. You will find the great people there most agreeable
and gracious; only be careful not to presume upon their intimacy. They
will condescend to your level, but do not you therefore suppose that you
stand upon theirs. The noble lords are gods in their own eyes.'
'For the other classes, be courteous, give your right hand, do not take
the wall, do not push yourself. Smile on whom you please, but trust no
one that you do not know; above all, speak no evil of England to them.
They are proud of their country above all nations in the world, as they
have good reason to be.'
These directions might have been written yesterday. The manners of the
ladies have somewhat changed. 'English ladies,' says Erasmus, 'are
divinely pretty, and _too_ good-natured. They have an excellent custom
among them, that wherever you go the girls kiss you. They kiss you when
you come, they kiss you when you go, they kiss you at intervening
opportunities, and their lips are soft, warm, and delicious.' Pretty
well that, for a priest!
The custom, perhaps, was not quite so universal as Erasmus would have us
believe. His own coaxing ways may have had something to do with it. At
any rate, he found England a highly agreeable place of residence.
Meanwhile, his reputation as a writer spread over the world. Latin--the
language in which he wrote--was in universal use. It was the vernacular
of the best society in Europe, and no living man was so perfect a master
of it. His satire flashed about among all existing institutions,
scathing especially his old enemies the monks; while the great secular
clergy, who hated the religious orders, were delighted to see them
scourged, and themselves to have the reputation of being patrons of
toleration and reform.
Erasmus, as he felt his ground more sure under him, obtained from Julius
the Second a distinct release from his monastic vows; and, shortly
after, when the brilliant Leo succeeded to the tiara, and gathered about
him the magnificent cluster of artists who have made his era so
illustrious, the new Pope invited Erasmus to visit him at Rome, and
become another star in the constellation which surrounded the Papal
throne.
Erasmus was at this time forty years old--the age when ambition becomes
powerful in men, and takes the place of love of pleasure. He was
received at Rome with princely distinction, and he could have asked for
nothing--bishoprics, red hats, or red stockings--which would not have
been freely given to him if he would have consented to remain.
But he was too considerable a man to be tempted by finery; and the
Pope's livery, gorgeous though it might be, was but a livery after all.
Nothing which Leo the Tenth could do for Erasmus could add lustre to his
coronet. More money he might have had, but of money he had already
abundance, and outward dignity would have been dearly bought by gilded
chains. He resisted temptation; he preferred the northern air, where he
could breathe at liberty, and he returned to England, half inclined to
make his home there.
But his own sovereign laid claim to his services; the future emperor
recalled him to the Low Countries, settled a handsome salary upon him,
and established him at the University of Louvaine.
He was now in the zenith of his greatness. He had an income as large as
many an English nobleman. We find him corresponding with popes,
cardinals, kings, and statesmen; and as he grew older, his mind became
more fixed upon serious subjects. The ignorance and brutality of the
monks, the corruption of the spiritual courts, the absolute irreligion
in which the Church was steeped, gave him serious alarm. He had no
enthusiasms, no doctrinal fanaticisms, no sectarian beliefs or
superstitions. The breadth of his culture, his clear understanding, and
the worldly moderation of his temper, seemed to qualify him above living
men to conduct a temperate reform. He saw that the system around him was
pregnant with danger, and he resolved to devote what remained to him of
life to the introduction of a higher tone in the minds of the clergy.
The revival of learning had by this time alarmed the religious orders.
Literature and education, beyond the code of the theological text-books,
appeared simply devilish to them. When Erasmus returned to Louvaine, the
battle was raging over the north of Europe.
The Dominicans at once recognised in Erasmus their most dangerous enemy.
At first they tried to compel him to re-enter the order, but, strong in
the Pope's dispensation, he was so far able to defy them. They could
bark at his heels, but dared not come to closer quarters: and with his
temper slightly ruffled, but otherwise contented to despise them, he
took up boldly the task which he had set himself.
'We kiss the old shoes of the saints,' he said, 'but we never read their
works.' He undertook the enormous labour of editing and translating
selections from the writings of the Fathers. The New Testament was as
little known as the lost books of Tacitus--all that the people knew of
the Gospels and the Epistles were the passages on which theologians had
built up the Catholic formulas. Erasmus published the text, and with it,
and to make it intelligible, a series of paraphrases, which rent away
the veil of traditional and dogmatic interpretation, and brought the
teaching of Christ and the Apostles into their natural relation with
reason and conscience.
In all this, although the monks might curse, he had countenance and
encouragement from the great ecclesiastics in all parts of Europe--and
it is highly curious to see the extreme freedom with which they allowed
him to propose to them his plans for a Reformation--we seem to be
listening to the wisest of modern broad Churchmen.
To one of his correspondents, an archbishop, he writes:--
'Let us have done with theological refinements. There is an excuse for
the Fathers, because the heretics forced them to define particular
points; but every definition is a misfortune, and for us to persevere in
the same way is sheer folly. Is no man to be admitted to grace who does
not know how the Father differs from the Son, and both from the Spirit?
or how the nativity of the Son differs from the procession of the
Spirit? Unless I forgive my brother his sins against me, God will not
forgive me my sins. Unless I have a pure heart--unless I put away envy,
hate, pride, avarice, lust, I shall not see God. But a man is not damned
because he cannot tell whether the Spirit has one principle or two. Has
he the fruits of the Spirit? That is the question. Is he patient, kind,
good, gentle, modest, temperate, chaste? Enquire if you will, but do not
define. True religion is peace, and we cannot have peace unless we leave
the conscience unshackled on obscure points on which certainty is
impossible. We hear now of questions being referred to the next
OEcumenical Council--better a great deal refer them to doomsday. Time
was, when a man's faith was looked for in his life, not in the Articles
which he professed. Necessity first brought Articles upon us, and ever
since, we have refined and refined till Christianity has become a thing
of words and creeds. Articles increase--sincerity vanishes
away--contention grows hot, and charity grows cold. Then comes in the
civil power, with stake and gallows, and men are forced to profess what
they do not believe, to pretend to love what in fact they hate, and to
say that they understand what in fact has no meaning for them.'
Again, to the Archbishop of Mayence:--
'Reduce the dogmas necessary to be believed, to the smallest possible
number; you can do it without danger to the realities of Christianity.
On other points, either discourage enquiry, or leave everyone free to
believe what he pleases--then we shall have no more quarrels, and
religion will again take hold of life. When you have done this, you can
correct the abuses of which the world with good reason complains. The
unjust judge heard the widow's prayer. You should not shut your ears to
the cries of those for whom Christ died. He did not die for the great
only, but for the poor and for the lowly. There need be no tumult. Do
you only set human affections aside, and let kings and princes lend
themselves heartily to the public good. But observe that the monks and
friars be allowed no voice; with these gentlemen the world has borne too
long. They care only for their own vanity, their own stomachs, their own
power; and they believe that if the people are enlightened, their
kingdom cannot stand.'
Once more to the Pope himself:--
'Let each man amend first his own wicked life. When he has done that,
and will amend his neighbour, let him put on Christian charity, which is
severe enough when severity is needed. If your holiness give power to
men who neither believe in Christ nor care for you, but think only of
their own appetites, I fear there will be danger. We can trust your
holiness, but there are bad men who will use your virtues as a cloke for
their own malice.'
That the spiritual rulers of Europe should have allowed a man like
Erasmus to use language such as this to them is a fact of supreme
importance. It explains the feeling of Goethe, that the world would have
gone on better had there been no Luther, and that the revival of
theological fanaticism did more harm than good.
But the question of questions is, what all this latitudinarian
philosophising, this cultivated epicurean gracefulness would have come
to if left to itself; or rather, what was the effect which it was
inevitably producing? If you wish to remove an old building without
bringing it in ruins about your ears, you must begin at the top, remove
the stones gradually downwards, and touch the foundation last. But
latitudinarianism loosens the elementary principles of theology. It
destroys the premises on which the dogmatic system rests. It would beg
the question to say that this would in itself have been undesirable; but
the practical effect of it, as the world then stood, would have only
been to make the educated into infidels, and to leave the multitude to a
convenient but debasing superstition.
The monks said that Erasmus laid the egg, and Luther hatched a
cockatrice. Erasmus resented deeply such an account of his work; but it
was true after all. The sceptical philosophy is the most powerful of
solvents, but it has no principle of organic life in it; and what of
truth there was in Erasmus's teaching had to assume a far other form
before it was available for the reinvigoration of religion. He himself,
in his clearer moments, felt his own incapacity, and despaired of making
an impression on the mass of ignorance with which he saw himself
surrounded.
'The stupid monks,' he writes, 'say mass as a cobbler makes a shoe; they
come to the altar reeking from their filthy pleasures. Confession with
the monks is a cloke to steal the people's money, to rob girls of their
virtue, and commit other crimes too horrible to name! Yet these people
are the tyrants of Europe. The Pope himself is afraid of them.'
'Beware!' he says to an impetuous friend, 'beware how you offend the
monks. You have to do with an enemy that cannot be slain; an order never
dies, and they will not rest till they have destroyed you.'
The heads of the Church might listen politely, but Erasmus had no
confidence in them. 'Never,' he says, 'was there a time when divines
were greater fools, or popes and prelates more worldly.' Germany was
about to receive a signal illustration of the improvement which it was
to look for from liberalism and intellectual culture.
We are now on the edge of the great conflagration. Here we must leave
Erasmus for the present. I must carry you briefly over the history of
the other great person who was preparing to play his part on the stage.
You have seen something of what Erasmus was; you must turn next to the
companion picture of Martin Luther. You will observe in how many points
their early experiences touch, as if to show more vividly the contrast
between the two men.
Sixteen years after the birth of Erasmus, therefore in the year 1483,
Martin Luther came into the world in a peasant's cottage, at Eisleben,
in Saxony. By peasant, you need not understand a common boor. Hans
Luther, the father, was a thrifty, well-to-do man for his station in
life--adroit with his hands, and able to do many useful things, from
farm work to digging in the mines. The family life was strict and
stern--rather too stern, as Martin thought in later life.
'Be temperate with your children,' he said, long after, to a friend;
'punish them if they lie or steal, but be just in what you do. It is a
lighter sin to take pears and apples than to take money. I shudder when
I think of what I went through myself. My mother beat me about some nuts
once till the blood came. I had a terrible time of it, but she meant
well.'
At school, too, he fell into rough hands, and the recollection of his
sufferings made him tender ever after with young boys and girls.
'Never be hard with children,' he used to say. 'Many a fine character
has been ruined by the stupid brutality of pedagogues. The parts of
speech are a boy's pillory. I was myself flogged fifteen times in one
forenoon over the conjugation of a verb. Punish if you will, but be
kind too, and let the sugar-plum go with the rod.' This is not the
language of a demagogue or a fanatic; it is the wise thought of a
tender, human-hearted man.
At seventeen, he left school for the University at Erfurt. It was then
no shame for a poor scholar to maintain himself by alms. Young Martin
had a rich noble voice and a fine ear, and by singing ballads in the
streets he found ready friends and help. He was still uncertain with
what calling he should take up, when it happened that a young friend was
killed at his side by lightning.
Erasmus was a philosopher. A powder magazine was once blown up by
lightning in a town where Erasmus was staying, and a house of infamous
character was destroyed. The inhabitants saw in what had happened the
Divine anger against sin. Erasmus told them that if there was any anger
in the matter, it was anger merely with the folly which had stored
powder in an exposed situation.
Luther possessed no such premature intelligence. He was distinguished
from other boys only by the greater power of his feelings and the
vividness of his imagination. He saw in his friend's death the immediate
hand of the great Lord of the universe. His conscience was terrified. A
life-long penitence seemed necessary to atone for the faults of his
boyhood. He too, like Erasmus, became a monk, not forced into it--for
his father knew better what the holy men were like, and had no wish to
have son of his among them--but because the monk of Martin's imagination
spent his nights and days upon the stones in prayer; and Martin, in the
heat of his repentance, longed to be kneeling at his side.
In this mood he entered the Augustine monastery at Erfurt. He was full
of an overwhelming sense of his own wretchedness and sinfulness. Like
St. Paul, he was crying to be delivered from the body of death which he
carried about him. He practised all possible austerities. He, if no one
else, mortified his flesh with fasting. He passed nights in the chancel
before the altar, or on his knees on the floor of his cell. He weakened
his body till his mind wandered, and he saw ghosts and devils. Above
all, he saw the flaming image of his own supposed guilt. God required
that he should keep the law in all points. He had not so kept the
law--could not so keep the law--and therefore he believed that he was
damned. One morning, he was found senseless and seemingly dead; a
brother played to him on a flute, and soothed his senses back to
consciousness.
It was long since any such phenomenon had appeared among the rosy friars
of Erfurt. They could not tell what to make of him. Staupitz, the prior,
listened to his accusations of himself in confession. 'My good fellow,'
he said, 'don't be so uneasy; you have committed no sins of the least
consequence; you have not killed anybody, or committed adultery, or
things of that sort. If you sin to some purpose, it is right that you
should think about it, but don't make mountains out of trifles.'
Very curious: to the commonplace man the uncommonplace is for ever
unintelligible. What was the good of all that excitement--that agony of
self-reproach for little things? None at all, if the object is only to
be an ordinary good sort of man--if a decent fulfilment of the round of
common duties is the be-all and the end-all of human life on earth.
The plague came by-and-by into the town. The commonplace clergy ran
away--went to their country-houses, went to the hills, went
anywhere--and they wondered in the same way why Luther would not go with
them. They admired him and liked him. They told him his life was too
precious to be thrown away. He answered, quite simply, that his place
was with the sick and dying; a monk's life was no great matter. The sun
he did not doubt would continue to shine, whatever became of him. 'I am
no St. Paul,' he said; 'I am afraid of death; but there are things worse
than death, and if I die, I die.'
Even a Staupitz could not but feel that he had an extraordinary youth in
his charge. To divert his mind from feeding upon itself, he devised a
mission for him abroad, and brother Martin was despatched on business of
the convent to Rome.
Luther too, like Erasmus, was to see Rome; but how different the figures
of the two men there! Erasmus goes with servants and horses, the
polished, successful man of the world. Martin Luther trudges penniless
and barefoot across the Alps, helped to a meal and a night's rest at the
monasteries along the road, or begging, if the convents fail him, at the
farm-houses.
He was still young, and too much occupied with his own sins to know much
of the world outside him. Erasmus had no dreams. He knew the hard truth
on most things. But Rome, to Luther's eager hopes, was the city of the
saints, and the court and palace of the Pope fragrant with the odours of
Paradise. 'Blessed Rome,' he cried, as he entered the gate--'Blessed
Rome, sanctified with the blood of martyrs!'
Alas! the Rome of reality was very far from blessed. He remained long
enough to complete his disenchantment. The cardinals, with their gilded
chariots and their parasols of peacocks' plumes, were poor
representatives of the apostles. The gorgeous churches and more gorgeous
rituals, the pagan splendour of the paintings, the heathen gods still
almost worshipped in the adoration of the art which had formed them, to
Luther, whose heart was heavy with thoughts of man's depravity, were
utterly horrible. The name of religion was there: the thinnest veil was
scarcely spread over the utter disbelief with which God and Christ were
at heart regarded. Culture enough there was. It was the Rome of Raphael
and Michael Angelo, of Perugino, and Benvenuto; but to the poor German
monk, who had come there to find help for his suffering soul, what was
culture?
He fled at the first moment that he could. 'Adieu! Rome,' he said; 'let
all who would lead a holy life depart from Rome. Everything is permitted
in Rome except to be an honest man.' He had no thought of leaving the
Roman Church. To a poor monk like him, to talk of leaving the Church was
like talking of leaping off the planet. But perplexed and troubled he
returned to Saxony; and his friend Staupitz, seeing clearly that a
monastery was no place for him, recommended him to the Elector as
Professor of Philosophy at Wittenberg.
The senate of Wittenberg gave him the pulpit of the town church, and
there at once he had room to show what was in him. 'This monk,' said
some one who heard him, 'is a marvellous fellow. He has strange eyes,
and will give the doctors trouble by-and-by.'
He had read deeply, especially he had read that rare and almost unknown
book, the 'New Testament.' He was not cultivated like Erasmus. Erasmus
spoke the most polished Latin. Luther spoke and wrote his own vernacular
German. The latitudinarian philosophy, the analytical acuteness, the
sceptical toleration of Erasmus were alike strange and distasteful to
him. In all things he longed only to know the truth--to shake off and
hurl from him lies and humbug.
Superstitious he was. He believed in witches and devils and fairies--a
thousand things without basis in fact, which Erasmus passed by in
contemptuous indifference. But for things which were really true--true
as nothing else in this world, or any world, is true--the justice of
God, the infinite excellence of good, the infinite hatefulness of
evil--these things he believed and felt with a power of passionate
conviction to which the broader, feebler mind of the other was for ever
a stranger.
We come now to the memorable year 1517, when Luther was thirty-five
years old. A new cathedral was in progress at Rome. Michael Angelo had
furnished Leo the Tenth with the design of St. Peter's; and the question
of questions was to find money to complete the grandest structure which
had ever been erected by man.
Pope Leo was the most polished and cultivated of mankind. The work to be
done was to be the most splendid which art could produce. The means to
which the Pope had recourse will serve to show us how much all that
would have done for us.
You remember what I told you about indulgences. The notable device of
his Holiness was to send distinguished persons about Europe with sacks
of indulgences. Indulgences and dispensations! Dispensations to eat meat
on fast-days--dispensations to marry one's near relation--dispensations
for anything and everything which the faithful might wish to purchase
who desired forbidden pleasures. The dispensations were simply
scandalous. The indulgences--well, if a pious Catholic is asked nowadays
what they were, he will say that they were the remission of the penances
which the Church inflicts upon earth; but it is also certain that they
would have sold cheap if the people had thought that this was all that
they were to get by them. As the thing was represented by the spiritual
hawkers who disposed of these wares, they were letters of credit on
heaven. When the great book was opened, the people believed that these
papers would be found entire on the right side of the account.
Debtor--so many murders, so many robberies, lies, slanders, or
debaucheries. Creditor--the merits of the saints placed to the account
of the delinquent by the Pope's letters, in consideration of value
received.
This is the way in which the pardon system was practically worked. This
is the way in which it is worked still, where the same superstitions
remain.
If one had asked Pope Leo whether he really believed in these pardons of
his, he would have said officially that the Church had always held that
the Pope had power to grant them.
Had he told the truth, he would have added privately that if the people
chose to be fools, it was not for him to disappoint them.
The collection went on. The money of the faithful came in plentifully;
and the pedlars going their rounds appeared at last in Saxony.
The Pope had bought the support of the Archbishop of Mayence, Erasmus's
friend, by promising him half the spoil which was gathered in his
province. The agent was the Dominican monk Tetzel, whose name has
acquired a forlorn notoriety in European history.
His stores were opened in town after town. He entered in state. The
streets everywhere were hung with flags. Bells were pealed; nuns and
monks walked in procession before and after him, while he himself sate
in a chariot, with the Papal Bull on a velvet cushion in front of him.
The sale-rooms were the churches. The altars were decorated, the candles
lighted, the arms of St. Peter blazoned conspicuously on the roof.
Tetzel from the pulpit explained the efficacy of his medicines; and if
any profane person doubted their power, he was threatened with
excommunication.
Acolytes walked through the crowds, clinking their plates and crying,
'Buy! buy!' The business went as merry as a marriage bell till the
Dominican came near to Wittenberg.
Half a century before, such a spectacle would have excited no particular
attention. The few who saw through the imposition would have kept their
thoughts to themselves; the many would have paid their money, and in a
month all would have been forgotten.
But the fight between the men of letters and the monks, the writings of
Erasmus and Reuchlin, the satires of Ulric von Hutten, had created a
silent revolution in the minds of the younger laity.
A generation had grown to manhood of whom the Church authorities knew
nothing; and the whole air of Germany, unsuspected by pope or prelate,
was charged with electricity.
Had Luther stood alone, he, too, would probably have remained silent.
What was he, a poor, friendless, solitary monk, that he should set
himself against the majesty of the triple crown?
However hateful the walls of a dungeon, a man of sense confined alone
there does not dash his hands against the stones.
But Luther knew that his thoughts were the thoughts of thousands. Many
wrong things, as we all know, have to be endured in this world.
Authority is never very angelic; and moderate injustice, a moderate
quantity of lies, is more tolerable than anarchy.
But it is with human things as it is with the great icebergs which drift
southward out of the frozen seas. They swim two-thirds under water, and
one-third above; and so long as the equilibrium is sustained, you would
think that they were as stable as the rocks. But the sea-water is warmer
than the air. Hundreds of fathoms down, the tepid current washes the
base of the berg. Silently in those far deeps the centre of gravity is
changed; and then, in a moment, with one vast roll, the enormous mass
heaves over, and the crystal peaks which had been glancing so proudly in
the sunlight, are buried in the ocean for ever.
Such a process as this had been going on in Germany, and Luther knew it,
and knew that the time was come for him to speak. Fear had not kept him
back. The danger to himself would be none the less because he would have
the people at his side. The fiercer the thunderstorm, the greater peril
to the central figure who stands out above the rest exposed to it. But
he saw that there was hope at last of a change; and for himself--as he
said in the plague--if he died, he died.
Erasmus admitted frankly for himself that he did not like danger.
'As to me,' he wrote to Archbishop Warham, 'I have no inclination to
risk my life for truth. We have not all strength for martyrdom; and if
trouble come, I shall imitate St. Peter. Popes and emperors must settle
the creeds. If they settle them well, so much the better; if ill, I
shall keep on the safe side.'
That is to say, truth was not the first necessity to Erasmus. He would
prefer truth, if he could have it. If not, he could get on moderately
well upon falsehood. Luther could not. No matter what the danger to
himself, if he could smite a lie upon the head and kill it, he was
better pleased than by a thousand lives. We hear much of Luther's
doctrine about faith. Stripped of theological verbiage, that doctrine
means this.
Reason says that, on the whole, truth and justice are desirable things.
They make men happier in themselves, and make society more prosperous.
But there reason ends, and men will not die for principles of utility.
Faith says that between truth and lies, there is an infinite difference:
one is of God, the other of Satan; one is eternally to be loved, the
other eternally to be abhorred. It cannot say why, in language
intelligible to reason. It is the voice of the nobler nature in man
speaking out of his heart.
While Tetzel, with his bull and his gilt car, was coming to Wittenberg,
Luther, loyal still to authority while there was a hope that authority
would be on the side of right, wrote to the Archbishop of Mayence to
remonstrate.
The archbishop, as we know, was to have a share of Tetzel's spoils; and
what were the complaints of a poor insignificant monk to a supreme
archbishop who was in debt and wanted money?
The Archbishop of Mayence flung the letter into his waste-paper basket;
and Luther made his solemn appeal from earthly dignitaries to the
conscience of the German people. He set up his protest on the church
door at Wittenberg; and, in ninety-five propositions he challenged the
Catholic Church to defend Tetzel and his works.
The Pope's indulgences, he said, cannot take away sins. God alone remits
sins; and He pardons those who are penitent, without help from man's
absolutions.
The Church may remit penalties which the Church inflicts. But the
Church's power is in this world only, and does not reach to purgatory.
If God has thought fit to place a man in purgatory, who shall say that
it is good for him to be taken out of purgatory? who shall say that he
himself desires it?
True repentance does not shrink from chastisement. True repentance
rather loves chastisement.
The bishops are asleep. It is better to give to the poor than to buy
indulgences; and he who sees his neighbour in want, and instead of
helping his neighbour buys a pardon for himself, is doing what is
displeasing to God. Who is this man who dares to say that for so many
crowns the soul of a sinner can be made whole?
These, and like these, were Luther's propositions. Little guessed the
Catholic prelates the dimensions of the act which had been done. The
Pope, when he saw the theses, smiled in good-natured contempt. 'A
drunken German wrote them,' he said; 'when he has slept off his wine, he
will be of another mind.'
Tetzel bayed defiance; the Dominican friars took up the quarrel; and
Hochstrat of Cologne, Reuchlin's enemy, clamoured for fire and faggot.
Voice answered voice. The religious houses all Germany over were like
kennels of hounds howling to each other across the spiritual waste. If
souls could not be sung out of purgatory, their occupation was gone.
Luther wrote to Pope Leo to defend himself; Leo cited him to answer for
his audacity at Rome; while to the young laymen, to the noble spirits
all Europe over, Wittenberg became a beacon of light shining in the
universal darkness.
It was a trying time to Luther. Had he been a smaller man, he would have
been swept away by his sudden popularity--he would have placed himself
at the head of some great democratic movement, and in a few years his
name would have disappeared in the noise and smoke of anarchy.
But this was not his nature. His fellow-townsmen were heartily on his
side. He remained quietly at his post in the Augustine Church at
Wittenberg. If the powers of the world came down upon him and killed
him, he was ready to be killed. Of himself at all times he thought
infinitely little; and he believed that his death would be as
serviceable to truth as his life.
Killed undoubtedly he would have been if the clergy could have had their
way. It happened, however, that Saxony just then was governed by a
prince of no common order. Were all princes like the Elector Frederick,
we should have no need of democracy in this world--we should never have
heard of democracy. The clergy could not touch Luther against the will
of the Wittenberg senate, unless the Elector would help them; and, to
the astonishment of everybody, the Elector was disinclined to consent.
The Pope himself wrote to exhort him to his duties. The Elector still
hesitated. His professed creed was the creed in which the Church had
educated him; but he had a clear secular understanding outside his
formulas. When he read the propositions, they did not seem to him the
pernicious things which the monks said they were. 'There is much in the
Bible about Christ,' he said, 'but not much about Rome.' He sent for
Erasmus, and asked him what he thought about the matter.
The Elector knew to whom he was speaking. He wished for a direct answer,
and looked Erasmus full and broad in the face. Erasmus pinched his thin
lips together. 'Luther,' he said at length, 'has committed two sins: he
has touched the Pope's crown and the monks' bellies.'
He generously and strongly urged Frederick not to yield for the present
to Pope Leo's importunacy; and the Pope was obliged to try less hasty
and more formal methods.
He had wished Luther to be sent to him to Rome, where his process would
have had a rapid end. As this could not be, the case was transferred to
Augsburg, and a cardinal legate was sent from Italy to look into it.
There was no danger of violence at Augsburg. The townspeople there and
everywhere were on the side of freedom; and Luther went cheerfully to
defend himself. He walked from Wittenberg. You can fancy him still in
his monk's brown frock, with all his wardrobe on his back--an apostle of
the old sort. The citizens, high and low, attended him to the gates, and
followed him along the road, crying 'Luther for ever!' 'Nay,' he
answered, 'Christ for ever!'
The cardinal legate, being reduced to the necessity of politeness,
received him civilly. He told him, however, simply and briefly, that the
Pope insisted on his recantation, and would accept nothing else. Luther
requested the cardinal to point out to him where he was wrong. The
cardinal waived discussion. 'He was come to command,' he said, 'not to
argue.' And Luther had to tell him that it could not be.
Remonstrances, threats, entreaties, even bribes were tried. Hopes of
high distinction and reward were held out to him if he would only be
reasonable. To the amazement of the proud Italian, a poor peasant's
son--a miserable friar of a provincial German town--was prepared to defy
the power and resist the prayers of the Sovereign of Christendom.
'What!' said the cardinal at last to him, 'do you think the Pope cares
for the opinion of a German boor? The Pope's little finger is stronger
than all Germany. Do you expect your princes to take up arms to defend
_you_--_you_, a wretched worm like you? I tell you, No! and where will
you be then--where will you be then?'
Luther answered, 'Then, as now, in the hands of Almighty God.'
The Court dissolved. The cardinal carried back his report to his master.
The Pope, so defied, brought out his thunders; he excommunicated Luther;
he wrote again to the elector, entreating him not to soil his name and
lineage by becoming a protector of heretics; and he required him,
without further ceremony, to render up the criminal to justice.
The elector's power was limited. As yet, the quarrel was simply between
Luther and the Pope. The elector was by no means sure that his bold
subject was right--he was only not satisfied that he was wrong--and it
was a serious question with him how far he ought to go. The monk might
next be placed under the ban of the empire; and if he persisted in
protecting him afterwards, Saxony might have all the power of Germany
upon it. He did not venture any more to refuse absolutely. He temporised
and delayed; while Luther himself, probably at the elector's
instigation, made overtures for peace to the Pope. Saving his duty to
Christ, he promised to be for the future an obedient son of the Church,
and to say no more about indulgences if Tetzel ceased to defend them.
'My being such a small creature,' Luther said afterwards, 'was a
misfortune for the Pope. He despised me too much! What, he thought,
could a slave like me do to him--to him, who was the greatest man in all
the world. Had he accepted my proposal, he would have extinguished me.'
But the infallible Pope conducted himself like a proud, irascible,
exceedingly fallible mortal. To make terms with the town preacher of
Wittenberg was too preposterous.
Just then the imperial throne fell vacant; and the pretty scandal I told
you of, followed at the choice of his successor. Frederick of Saxony
might have been elected if he had liked--and it would have been better
for the world perhaps if Frederick had been more ambitious of high
dignities--but the Saxon Prince did not care to trouble himself with the
imperial sceptre. The election fell on Maximilian's grandson
Charles--grandson also of Ferdinand the Catholic--Sovereign of Spain;
Sovereign of Burgundy and the Low Countries; Sovereign of Naples and
Sicily; Sovereign, beyond the Atlantic, of the New Empire of the Indies.
No fitter man could have been found to do the business of the Pope. With
the empire of Germany added to his inherited dominions, who could resist
him?
To the new emperor, unless the elector yielded, Luther's case had now to
be referred.
The elector, if he had wished, could not interfere. Germany was
attentive, but motionless. The students, the artisans, the tradesmen,
were at heart with the Reformer; and their enthusiasm could not be
wholly repressed. The press grew fertile with pamphlets; and it was
noticed that all the printers and compositors went for Luther. The
Catholics could not get their books into type without sending them to
France or the Low Countries.
Yet none of the princes except the elector had as yet shown him favour.
The bishops were hostile to a man. The nobles had given no sign; and
their place would be naturally on the side of authority. They had no
love for bishops--there was hope in that; and they looked with no favour
on the huge estates of the religious orders. But no one could expect
that they would peril their lands and lives for an insignificant monk.
There was an interval of two years before the emperor was at leisure to
take up the question. The time was spent in angry altercation, boding no
good for the future.
The Pope issued a second bull condemning Luther and his works. Luther
replied by burning the bull in the great square at Wittenberg.
At length, in April 1521, the Diet of the Empire assembled at Worms, and
Luther was called to defend himself in the presence of Charles the
Fifth.
That it should have come to this at all, in days of such high-handed
authority, was sufficiently remarkable. It indicated something growing
in the minds of men, that the so-called Church was not to carry things
any longer in the old style. Popes and bishops might order, but the
laity intended for the future to have opinions of their own how far such
orders should be obeyed.
The Pope expected anyhow that the Diet, by fair means or foul, would
now rid him of his adversary. The elector, who knew the ecclesiastical
ways of handling such matters, made it a condition of his subject
appearing, that he should have a safe conduct, under the emperor's hand;
that Luther, if judgment went against him, should be free for the time
to return to the place from which he had come; and that he, the elector,
should determine afterwards what should be done with him.
When the interests of the Church were concerned, safe conducts, it was
too well known, were poor security. Pope Clement the Seventh, a little
after, when reproached for breaking a promise, replied with a smile,
'The Pope has power to bind and to loose.' Good, in the eyes of
ecclesiastical authorities, meant what was good for the Church; evil,
whatever was bad for the Church; and the highest moral obligation became
sin when it stood in St. Peter's way.
There had been an outburst of free thought in Bohemia a century and a
half before. John Huss, Luther's forerunner, came with a safe conduct to
the Council of Constance; but the bishops ruled that safe conducts could
not protect heretics. They burnt John Huss for all their promises, and
they hoped now that so good a Catholic as Charles would follow so
excellent a precedent. Pope Leo wrote himself to beg that Luther's safe
conduct should not be observed. The bishops and archbishops, when
Charles consulted them, took the same view as the Pope.
'There is something in the office of a bishop,' Luther said, a year or
two later, 'which is dreadfully demoralising. Even good men change their
natures at their consecration; Satan enters into them as he entered into
Judas, as soon as they have taken the sop.'
It was most seriously likely that, if Luther trusted himself at the Diet
on the faith of his safe conduct, he would never return alive. Rumours
of intended treachery were so strong, that if he refused to go, the
elector meant to stand by him at any cost. Should he appear, or not
appear? It was for himself to decide. If he stayed away, judgment would
go against him by default. Charles would call out the forces of the
empire, and Saxony would be invaded.
Civil war would follow, with insurrection all over Germany, with no
certain prospect except bloodshed and misery.
Luther was not a man to expose his country to peril that his own person
might escape. He had provoked the storm; and if blood was to be shed,
his blood ought at least to be the first. He went. On his way, a friend
came to warn him again that foul play was intended, that he was
condemned already, that his books had been burnt by the hangman, and
that he was a dead man if he proceeded.
Luther trembled--he owned it--but he answered, 'Go to Worms! I will go
if there are as many devils in Worms as there are tiles upon the roofs
of the houses.'
The roofs, when he came into the city, were crowded, not with devils,
but with the inhabitants, all collecting there to see him as he passed.
A nobleman gave him shelter for the night; the next day he was led to
the Town Hall.
No more notable spectacle had been witnessed in this planet for many a
century--not, perhaps, since a greater than Luther stood before the
Roman Procurator.
There on the raised dais sate the sovereign of half the world. There on
either side of him stood the archbishops, the ministers of state, the
princes of the empire, gathered together to hear and judge the son of a
poor miner, who had made the world ring with his name.
The body of the hall was thronged with knights and nobles--stern hard
men in dull gleaming armour. Luther, in his brown frock, was led forward
between their ranks. The looks which greeted him were not all
unfriendly. The first Article of a German credo was belief in _courage_.
Germany had had its feuds in times past with Popes of Rome, and they
were not without pride that a poor countryman of theirs should have
taken by the beard the great Italian priest. They had settled among
themselves that, come what would, there should be fair play; and they
looked on half admiring, and half in scorn.
As Luther passed up the hall, a steel baron touched him on the shoulder
with his gauntlet.
'Pluck up thy spirit, little monk;' he said, 'some of us here have seen
warm work in our time, but, by my troth, nor I nor any knight in this
company ever needed a stout heart more than thou needest it now. If thou
hast faith in these doctrines of thine, little monk, go on, in the name
of God.'
'Yes, in the name of God,' said Luther, throwing back his head, 'In the
name of God, forward!'
As at Augsburg, one only question was raised. Luther had broken the
laws of the Church. He had taught doctrines which the Pope had declared
to be false. Would he or would he not retract?
As at Augsburg, he replied briefly that he would retract when his
doctrines were not declared to be false merely, but were proved to be
false. Then, but not till then. That was his answer, and his last word.
There, as you understand, the heart of the matter indeed rested. In
those words lay the whole meaning of the Reformation. Were men to go on
for ever saying that this and that was true, because the Pope affirmed
it? Or were Popes' decrees thenceforward to be tried like the words of
other men--by the ordinary laws of evidence?
It required no great intellect to understand that a Pope's pardon, which
you could buy for five shillings, could not really get a soul out of
purgatory. It required a quality much rarer than intellect to look such
a doctrine in the face--sanctioned as it was by the credulity of ages,
and backed by the pomp and pageantry of earthly power--and say to it
openly, 'You are a lie.' Cleverness and culture could have given a
thousand reasons--they did then and they do now--why an indulgence
should be believed in; when honesty and common sense could give but one
reason for thinking otherwise. Cleverness and imposture get on
excellently well together--imposture and veracity, never.
Luther looked at those wares of Tetzel's, and said, 'Your pardons are no
pardons at all--no letters of credit on heaven, but flash notes of the
Bank of Humbug, and you know it.' They did know it. The conscience of
every man in Europe answered back, that what Luther said was true.
Bravery, honesty, veracity, these were the qualities which were
needed--which were needed then, and are needed always, as the root of
all real greatness in man.
The first missionaries of Christianity, when they came among the heathen
nations, and found them worshipping idols, did not care much to reason
that an image which man had made could not be God. The priests might
have been a match for them in reasoning. They walked up to the idol in
the presence of its votaries. They threw stones at it, spat upon it,
insulted it. 'See,' they said, 'I do this to your God. If he is God, let
him avenge himself.'
It was a simple argument; always effective; easy, and yet most
difficult. It required merely a readiness to be killed upon the spot by
the superstition which is outraged.
And so, and only so, can truth make its way for us in any such matters.
The form changes--the thing remains. Superstition, folly, and cunning
will go on to the end of time, spinning their poison webs around the
consciences of mankind. Courage and veracity--these qualities, and only
these, avail to defeat them.
From the moment that Luther left the emperor's presence a free man, the
spell of Absolutism was broken, and the victory of the Reformation
secured. The ban of the Pope had fallen; the secular arm had been called
to interfere; the machinery of authority strained as far as it would
bear. The emperor himself was an unconscious convert to the higher
creed. The Pope had urged him to break his word. The Pope had told him
that honour was nothing, and morality was nothing, where the interests
of orthodoxy were compromised. The emperor had refused to be tempted
into perjury; and, in refusing, had admitted that there was a spiritual
power upon the earth, above the Pope, and above him.
The party of the Church felt it so. A plot was formed to assassinate
Luther on his return to Saxony. The insulted majesty of Rome could be
vindicated at least by the dagger.
But this, too, failed. The elector heard what was intended. A party of
horse, disguised as banditti, waylaid the Reformer upon the road, and
carried him off to the castle of Wartburg, where he remained out of
harm's way till the general rising of Germany placed him beyond the
reach of danger.
At Wartburg for the present evening we leave him.
The Emperor Charles and Luther never met again. The monks of Yuste, who
watched on the deathbed of Charles, reported that at the last hour he
repented that he had kept his word, and reproached himself for having
allowed the arch-heretic to escape from his hands.
It is possible that, when the candle of life was burning low, and spirit
and flesh were failing together, and the air of the sick room was thick
and close with the presence of the angel of death, the nobler nature of
the emperor might have yielded to the influences which were around him.
His confessor might have thrust into his lips the words which he so
wished to hear.
But Charles the Fifth, though a Catholic always, was a Catholic of the
old grand type, to whom creed and dogmas were but the robe of a regal
humanity. Another story is told of Charles--an authentic story this
one--which makes me think that the monks of Yuste mistook or maligned
him. Six and twenty years after this scene at Worms, when the then
dawning heresy had become broad day; when Luther had gone to his
rest--and there had gathered about his name the hate which mean men feel
for an enemy who has proved too strong for them--a passing vicissitude
in the struggle brought the emperor at the head of his army to
Wittenberg.
The vengeance which the monks could not inflict upon him in life, they
proposed to wreak upon his bones.
The emperor desired to be conducted to Luther's tomb; and as he stood
gazing at it, full of many thoughts, some one suggested that the body
should be taken up and burnt at the stake in the Market Place.
There was nothing unusual in the proposal; it was the common practice of
the Catholic Church with the remains of heretics who were held unworthy
to be left in repose in hallowed ground. There was scarcely, perhaps,
another Catholic prince who would have hesitated to comply. But Charles
was one of nature's gentlemen; he answered, 'I war not with the dead.'
LECTURE III.
We have now entered upon the movement which broke the power of the
Papacy--which swept Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, England,
Scotland, into the stream of revolution, and gave a new direction to the
spiritual history of mankind.
You would not thank me if I were to take you out into that troubled
ocean. I confine myself, and I wish you to confine your attention, to
the two kinds of men who appear as leaders in times of change--of whom
Erasmus and Luther are respectively the types.
On one side there are the large-minded latitudinarian philosophers--men
who have no confidence in the people--who have no passionate
convictions; moderate men, tolerant men, who trust to education, to
general progress in knowledge and civilisation, to forbearance, to
endurance, to time--men who believe that all wholesome reforms proceed
downwards from the educated to the multitudes; who regard with contempt,
qualified by terror, appeals to the popular conscience or to popular
intelligence.
Opposite to these are the men of faith--and by faith I do not mean
belief in dogmas, but belief in goodness, belief in justice, in
righteousness, above all, belief in truth. Men of faith consider
conscience of more importance than knowledge--or rather as a first
condition--without which all the knowledge in the world is no use to a
man--if he wishes to be indeed a man in any high and noble sense of the
word. They are not contented with looking for what may be useful or
pleasant to themselves; they look by quite other methods for what is
honourable--for what is good--for what is just. They believe that if
they can find out that, then at all hazards, and in spite of all present
consequences to themselves, that is to be preferred. If, individually
and to themselves, no visible good ever came from it, in this world or
in any other, still they would say, 'Let us do that and nothing else.
Life will be of no value to us if we are to use it only for our own
gratification.'
The soldier before a battle knows that if he shirks and pretends to be
ill, he may escape danger and make sure of his life. There are very few
men, indeed, if it comes to that, who would not sooner die ten times
over than so dishonour themselves. Men of high moral nature carry out
the same principle into the details of their daily life; they do not
care to live unless they may live nobly. Like my uncle Toby, they have
but one fear--the fear of doing a wrong thing.
I call this faith, because there is no proof, such as will satisfy the
scientific enquirer, that there is any such thing as moral truth--any
such thing as absolute right and wrong at all. As the Scripture says,
'Verily, thou art a God that hidest thyself.' The forces of nature pay
no respect to what we call good and evil. Prosperity does not uniformly
follow virtue; nor are defeat and failure necessary consequences of
vice.
Certain virtues--temperance, industry, and things within reasonable
limits--command their reward. Sensuality, idleness, and waste, commonly
lead to ruin.
But prosperity is consistent with intense worldliness, intense
selfishness, intense hardness of heart; while the grander features of
human character--self-sacrifice, disregard of pleasure, patriotism, love
of knowledge, devotion to any great and good cause--these have no
tendency to bring men what is called fortune. They do not even
necessarily promote their happiness; for do what they will in this way,
the horizon of what they desire to do perpetually flies before them.
High hopes and enthusiasms are generally disappointed in results; and
the wrongs, the cruelties, the wretchednesses of all kinds which for
ever prevail among mankind--the shortcomings in himself of which he
becomes more conscious as he becomes really better--these things, you
may be sure, will prevent a noble-minded man from ever being
particularly happy.
If you see a man happy, as the world goes--contented with himself and
contented with what is round him--such a man may be, and probably is,
decent and respectable; but the highest is not in him, and the highest
will not come out of him.
Judging merely by outward phenomena--judging merely by what we call
reason--you cannot prove that there is any moral government in the world
at all, except what men, for their own convenience, introduce into it.
Right and wrong resolve themselves into principles of utility and social
convenience. Enlightened selfishness prescribes a decent rule of conduct
for common purposes; and virtue, by a large school of philosophy, is
completely resolved into that.
True, when nations go on long on the selfish hypothesis, they are apt to
find at last that they have been mistaken. They find it in bankruptcy of
honour and character--in social wreck and dissolution. All lies in
serious matters end at last, as Carlyle says, in broken heads. That is
the final issue which they are sure to come to in the long run. The
Maker of the world does not permit a society to continue which forgets
or denies the nobler principles of action.
But the end is often long in coming; and these nobler principles are
meanwhile _not_ provided for us by the inductive philosophy.
Patriotism, for instance, of which we used to think something--a
readiness to devote our energies while we live, to devote our lives, if
nothing else will serve, to what we call our country--what are we to say
of that?
I once asked a distinguished philosopher what he thought of patriotism.
He said he thought it was a compound of vanity and superstition; a bad
kind of prejudice, which would die out with the growth of reason. My
friend believed in the progress of humanity--he could not narrow his
sympathies to so small a thing as his own country. I could but say to
myself, 'Thank God, then, we are not yet a nation of philosophers.'
A man who takes up with philosophy like that, may write fine books, and
review articles and such like, but at the bottom of him he is a poor
caitiff, and there is no more to be said about him.
So when the air is heavy with imposture, and men live only to make
money, and the service of God is become a thing of words and ceremonies,
and the kingdom of heaven is bought and sold, and all that is high and
pure in man is smothered by corruption--fire of the same kind bursts out
in higher natures with a fierceness which cannot be controlled; and,
confident in truth and right, they call fearlessly on the seven
thousand in Israel who have not bowed the knee to Baal to rise and stand
by them.
They do not ask whether those whom they address have wide knowledge of
history, or science, or philosophy; they ask rather that they shall be
honest, that they shall be brave, that they shall be true to the common
light which God has given to all His children. They know well that
conscience is no exceptional privilege of the great or the cultivated,
that to be generous and unselfish is no prerogative of rank or
intellect.
Erasmus considered that, for the vulgar, a lie might be as good as
truth, and often better. A lie, ascertained to be a lie, to Luther was
deadly poison--poison to him, and poison to all who meddled with it. In
his own genuine greatness, he was too humble to draw insolent
distinctions in his own favour; or to believe that any one class on
earth is of more importance than another in the eyes of the Great Maker
of them all.
Well, then, you know what I mean by faith, and what I mean by intellect.
It was not that Luther was without intellect. He was less subtle, less
learned, than Erasmus; but in mother wit, in elasticity, in force, and
imaginative power, he was as able a man as ever lived. Luther created
the German language as an instrument of literature. His translation of
the Bible is as rich and grand as our own, and his table talk as full of
matter as Shakespeare's plays.
Again; you will mistake me if you think I represent Erasmus as a man
without conscience, or belief in God and goodness. But in Luther that
belief was a certainty; in Erasmus it was only a high probability--and
the difference between the two is not merely great, it is infinite. In
Luther, it was the root; in Erasmus, it was the flower. In Luther, it
was the first principle of life; in Erasmus, it was an inference which
might be taken away, and yet leave the world a very tolerable and
habitable place after all.
You see the contrast in their early lives. You see Erasmus--light,
bright, sarcastic, fond of pleasure, fond of society, fond of wine and
kisses, and intellectual talk and polished company. You see Luther
throwing himself into the cloister, that he might subdue his will to the
will of God; prostrate in prayer, in nights of agony, and distracting
his easy-going confessor with the exaggerated scruples of his
conscience.
You see it in the effects of their teaching. You see Erasmus addressing
himself with persuasive eloquence to kings, and popes, and prelates; and
for answer, you see Pope Leo sending Tetzel over Germany with his
carriage-load of indulgences. You see Erasmus's dearest friend, our own
gifted admirable Sir Thomas More, taking his seat beside the bishops and
sending poor Protestant artisans to the stake.
You see Luther, on the other side, standing out before the world, one
lone man, with all authority against him--taking lies by the throat, and
Europe thrilling at his words, and saying after him, 'The reign of
Imposture shall end.'
Let us follow the course of Erasmus after the tempest had broken.
He knew Luther to be right. Luther had but said what Erasmus had been
all his life convinced of, and Luther looked to see him come forward and
take his place at his side. Had Erasmus done so, the course of things
would have been far happier and better. His prodigious reputation would
have given the Reformers the influence with the educated which they had
won for themselves with the multitude, and the Pope would have been left
without a friend to the north of the Alps. But there would have been
some danger--danger to the leaders, if certainty of triumph to the
cause--and Erasmus had no gift for martyrdom.
His first impulse was generous. He encouraged the elector, as we have
seen, to protect Luther from the Pope. 'I looked on Luther,' he wrote to
Duke George of Saxe, 'as a necessary evil in the corruption of the
Church; a medicine, bitter and drastic, from which sounder health would
follow.'
And again, more boldly: 'Luther has taken up the cause of honesty and
good sense against abominations which are no longer tolerable. His
enemies are men under whose worthlessness the Christian world has
groaned too long.'
So to the heads of the Church he wrote, pressing them to be moderate and
careful:--
'I neither approve Luther nor condemn him,' he said to the Archbishop of
Mayence; 'if he is innocent, he ought not to be oppressed by the
factions of the wicked; if he is in error, he should be answered, not
destroyed. The theologians'--observe how true they remain to the
universal type in all times and in all countries--'the theologians do
not try to answer him. They do but raise an insane and senseless
clamour, and shriek and curse. Heresy, heretic, heresiarch, schismatic,
Antichrist--these are the words which are in the mouths of all of them;
and, of course, they condemn without reading. I warned them what they
were doing. I told them to scream less, and to think more. Luther's life
they admit to be innocent and blameless. Such a tragedy I never saw. The
most humane men are thirsting for his blood, and they would rather kill
him than mend him. The Dominicans are the worst, and are more knaves
than fools. In old times, even a heretic was quietly listened to. If he
recanted, he was absolved; if he persisted, he was at worst
excommunicated. Now they will have nothing but blood. Not to agree with
them is heresy. To know Greek is heresy. To speak good Latin is heresy.
Whatever they do not understand is heresy. Learning, they pretend, has
given birth to Luther, though Luther has but little of it. Luther thinks
more of the Gospel than of scholastic divinity, and that is his crime.
This is plain at least, that the best men everywhere are those who are
least offended with him.'
Even to Pope Leo, in the midst of his fury, Erasmus wrote bravely;
separating himself from Luther, yet deprecating violence. 'Nothing,' he
said, 'would so recommend the new teaching as the howling of fools:'
while to a member of Charles's council he insisted that 'severity had
been often tried in such cases and had always failed; unless Luther was
encountered calmly and reasonably, a tremendous convulsion was
inevitable.'
Wisely said all this, but it presumed that those whom he was addressing
were reasonable men; and high officials, touched in their pride, are a
class of persons of whom Solomon may have been thinking when he said,
'Let a bear robbed of her whelps meet a man rather than a fool in his
folly.'
So to Luther, so to the people, Erasmus preached moderation. It was like
preaching to the winds in a hurricane. The typhoon itself is not wilder
than human creatures when once their passions are stirred. You cannot
check them; but, if you are brave, you can guide them wisely. And this,
Erasmus had not the heart to do.
He said at the beginning, 'I will not countenance revolt against
authority. A bad government is better than none.' But he said at the
same time, 'You bishops, cease to be corrupt: you popes and cardinals,
reform your wicked courts: you monks, leave your scandalous lives, and
obey the rules of your order, so you may recover the respect of mankind,
and be obeyed and loved as before.'
When he found that the case was desperate; that his exhortations were
but words addressed to the winds; that corruption had tainted the blood;
that there was no hope except in revolution--as, indeed, in his heart he
knew from the first that there was none--then his place ought to have
been with Luther.
But Erasmus, as the tempest rose, could but stand still in feeble
uncertainty. The responsibilities of his reputation weighed him down.
The Lutherans said, 'You believe as we do.' The Catholics said, 'You are
a Lutheran at heart; if you are not, prove it by attacking Luther.'
He grew impatient. He told lies. He said he had not read Luther's books,
and had no time to read them. What was he, he said, that he should
meddle in such a quarrel. He was the vine and the fig tree of the Book
of Judges. The trees said to them, Rule over us. The vine and the fig
tree answered, they would not leave their sweetness for such a thankless
office. 'I am a poor actor,' he said; 'I prefer to be a spectator of the
play.'
But he was sore at heart, and bitter with disappointment. All had been
going on so smoothly--literature was reviving, art and science were
spreading, the mind of the world was being reformed in the best sense by
the classics of Greece and Rome, and now an apple of discord had been
flung out into Europe.
The monks who had fought against enlightenment could point to the
confusion as a fulfilment of their prophecies; and he, and all that he
had done, was brought to disrepute.
To protect himself from the Dominicans, he was forced to pretend to an
orthodoxy which he did not possess. Were all true which Luther had
written, he pretended that it ought not to have been said, or should
have been addressed in a learned language to the refined and educated.
He doubted whether it was not better on the whole to teach the people
lies for their good, when truth was beyond their comprehension. Yet he
could not for all that wish the Church to be successful.
'I fear for that miserable Luther,' he said; 'the popes and princes are
furious with him. His own destruction would be no great matter, but if
the monks triumph there will be no bearing them. They will never rest
till they have rooted learning out of the land. The Pope expects _me_ to
write against Luther. The orthodox, it appears, can call him names--call
him blockhead, fool, heretic, toadstool, schismatic, and Antichrist--but
they must come to me to answer his arguments.'
'Oh! that this had never been,' he wrote to our own Archbishop Warham.
'Now there is no hope for any good. It is all over with quiet learning,
thought, piety, and progress; violence is on one side and folly on the
other; and they accuse me of having caused it all. If I joined Luther I
could only perish with him, and I do not mean to run my neck into a
halter. Popes and emperors must decide matters. I will accept what is
good, and do as I can with the rest. Peace on any terms is better than
the justest war.'
Erasmus never stooped to real baseness. He was too clever, too
genuine--he had too great a contempt for worldly greatness. They offered
him a bishopric if he would attack Luther. He only laughed at them. What
was a bishopric to him? He preferred a quiet life among his books at
Louvaine.
But there was no more quiet for Erasmus at Louvaine or anywhere. Here is
a scene between him and the Prior of the Dominicans in the presence of
the Rector of the University.
The Dominican had preached at Erasmus in the University pulpit. Erasmus
complained to the rector, and the rector invited the Dominican to defend
himself. Erasmus tells the story.
'I sate on one side and the monk on the other, the rector between us to
prevent our scratching.
'The monk asked what the matter was, and said he had done no harm.
'I said he had told lies of me, and that was harm.
'It was after dinner. The holy man was flushed. He turned purple.
'"Why do you abuse monks in your books?" he said.
'"I spoke of your order," I answered. "I did not mention you. You
denounced me by name as a friend of Luther."
'He raged like a madman. "You are the cause of all this trouble," he
said; "you are a chameleon, you can twist everything."
'"You see what a fellow he is," said I, turning to the rector. "If it
comes to calling names, why I can do that too; but let us be
reasonable."
'He still roared and cursed; he vowed he would never rest till he had
destroyed Luther.
'I said he might curse Luther till he burst himself if he pleased. I
complained of his cursing me.
'He answered, that if I did not agree with Luther, I ought to say so,
and write against him.
'"Why should I?" urged I. "The quarrel is none of mine. Why should I
irritate Luther against me, when he has horns and knows how to use
them?"
'"Well, then," said he, "if you will not write, at least you can say
that we Dominicans have had the best of the argument."
'"How can I do that?" replied I. "You have burnt his books, but I never
heard that you had answered them."
'He almost spat upon me. I understand that there is to be a form of
prayer for the conversion of Erasmus and Luther.'
But Erasmus was not to escape so easily. Adrian the Sixth, who succeeded
Leo, was his old schoolfellow, and implored his assistance in terms
which made refusal impossible. Adrian wanted Erasmus to come to him to
Rome. He was too wary to walk into the wolf's den. But Adrian required
him to write, and reluctantly he felt that he must comply.
What was he to say?
'If his Holiness will set about reform in good earnest,' he wrote to the
Pope's secretary, 'and if he will not be too hard on Luther, I may,
perhaps, do good; but what Luther writes of the tyranny, the corruption,
the covetousness of the Roman court, would, my friend, that it was not
true.'
To Adrian himself, Erasmus addressed a letter really remarkable.
'I cannot go to your Holiness,' he said, 'King Calculus will not let me.
I have dreadful health, which this tornado has not improved. I, who was
the favourite of everybody, am now cursed by everybody--at Louvaine by
the monks; in Germany by the Lutherans. I have fallen into trouble in my
old age, like a mouse into a pot of pitch. You say, Come to Rome; you
might as well say to the crab, Fly. The crab says, Give me wings; I say,
Give me back my health and my youth. If I write calmly against Luther I
shall be called lukewarm; if I write as he does, I shall stir a hornet's
nest. People think he can be put down by force. The more force you try,
the stronger he will grow. Such disorders cannot be cured in that way.
The Wickliffites in England were put down, but the fire smouldered.
'If you mean to use violence you have no need of me; but mark this--if
monks and theologians think only of themselves, no good will come of it.
Look rather into the causes of all this confusion, and apply your
remedies there. Send for the best and wisest men from all parts of
Christendom and take their advice.'
Tell a crab to fly. Tell a pope to be reasonable. You must relieve him
of his infallibility if you want him to act like a sensible man. Adrian
could undertake no reforms, and still besought Erasmus to take arms for
him.
Erasmus determined to gratify Adrian with least danger to himself and
least injury to Luther.
'I remember Uzzah, and am afraid,' he said, in his quizzing way; 'it is
not everyone who is allowed to uphold the ark. Many a wise man has
attacked Luther, and what has been effected? The Pope curses, the
emperor threatens; there are prisons, confiscations, faggots; and all is
vain. What can a poor pigmy like me do?
* * * * *
'The world has been besotted with ceremonies. Miserable monks have ruled
all, entangling men's consciences for their own benefit. Dogma has been
heaped on dogma. The bishops have been tyrants, the Pope's commissaries
have been rascals. Luther has been an instrument of God's displeasure,
like Pharaoh or Nebuchadnezzar, or the Caesars, and I shall not attack
him on such grounds as these.'
Erasmus was too acute to defend against Luther the weak point of a bad
cause. He would not declare for him--but he would not go over to his
enemies. Yet, unless he quarrelled with Adrian, he could not be
absolutely silent; so he chose a subject to write upon on which all
schools of theology, Catholic or Protestant--all philosophers, all
thinkers of whatever kind, have been divided from the beginning of time:
fate and free will, predestination and the liberty of man--a problem
which has no solution--which may be argued even from eternity to
eternity.
The reason of the selection was obvious. Erasmus wished to please the
Pope and not exasperate Luther. Of course he pleased neither, and
offended both.
Luther, who did not comprehend his motive, was needlessly angry. Adrian
and the monks were openly contemptuous. Sick of them and their quarrels,
he grew weary of the world, and began to wish to be well out of it.
It is characteristic of Erasmus that, like many highly-gifted men, but
unlike all theologians, he expressed a hope for sudden death, and
declared it to be one of the greatest blessings which a human creature
can receive.
Do not suppose that he broke down or showed the white feather to
fortune's buffets. Through all storms he stuck bravely to his own proper
work; editing classics, editing the Fathers, writing paraphrases--still
doing for Europe what no other man could have done.
The Dominicans hunted him away from Louvaine. There was no living for
him in Germany for the Protestants. He suffered dreadfully from the
stone, too, and in all ways had a cruel time of it. Yet he continued,
for all that, to make life endurable.
He moved about in Switzerland and on the Upper Rhine. The lakes, the
mountains, the waterfalls, the villas on the hill slopes, delighted
Erasmus when few people else cared for such things. He was particular
about his wine. The vintage of Burgundy was as new blood in his veins,
and quickened his pen into brightness and life.
The German wines he liked worse--for this point among others, which is
curious to observe in those days. The great capitalist winegrowers,
anti-Reformers all of them, were people without conscience and humanity,
and adulterated their liquors. Of course they did. They believed in
nothing but money, and this was the way to make money.
'The water they mix with the wine,' Erasmus says, 'is the least part of
the mischief. They put in lime, and alum, and resin, and sulphur, and
salt--and then they say it is good enough for heretics.'
Observe the practical issue of religious corruption. Show me a people
where trade is dishonest, and I will show you a people where religion is
a sham.
'We hang men that steal money,' Erasmus exclaimed, writing doubtless
with the remembrance of a stomach-ache. 'These wretches steal our money
and our lives too, and get off scot free.'
He settled at last at Basle, which the storm had not yet reached, and
tried to bury himself among his books. The shrieks of the conflict,
however, still troubled his ears. He heard his own name still cursed,
and he could not bear it or sit quiet under it.
His correspondence was still enormous. The high powers still appealed to
him for advice and help: of open meddling he would have no more; he did
not care, he said, to make a post of himself for every dog of a
theologian to defile. Advice, however, he continued to give in the old
style.
'Put down the preachers on both sides. Fill the pulpits with men who
will kick controversy into the kennel, and preach piety and good
manners. Teach nothing in the schools but what bears upon life and duty.
Punish those who break the peace, and punish no one else; and when the
new opinions have taken root, allow liberty of conscience.'
Perfection of wisdom; but a wisdom which, unfortunately, was three
centuries at least out of date, which even now we have not grown big
enough to profit by. The Catholic princes and bishops were at work with
fire and faggot. The Protestants were pulling down monasteries, and
turning the monks and nuns out into the world. The Catholics declared
that Erasmus was as much to blame as Luther. The Protestants held him
responsible for the persecutions, and insisted, not without reason, that
if Erasmus had been true to his conscience, the whole Catholic world
must have accepted the Reformation.
He suffered bitterly under these attacks upon him. He loved quiet--and
his ears were deafened with clamour. He liked popularity--and he was the
best abused person in Europe. Others who suffered in the same way he
could advise to leave the black-coated jackdaws to their noise--but he
could not follow his own counsel. When the curs were at his heels, he
could not restrain himself from lashing out at them; and, from his
retreat at Basle, his sarcasms flashed out like jagged points of
lightning.
Describing an emeute, and the burning of an image of a saint, 'They
insulted the poor image so,' he said, 'it is a marvel there was no
miracle. The saint worked so many in the good old times.'
When Luther married an escaped nun, the Catholics exclaimed that
Antichrist would be born from such an incestuous intercourse. 'Nay,'
Erasmus said, 'if monk and nun produce Antichrist, there must have been
legions of Antichrists these many years.'
More than once he was tempted to go over openly to Luther--not from a
noble motive, but, as he confessed, 'to make those furies feel the
difference between him and them.'
He was past sixty, with broken health and failing strength. He thought
of going back to England, but England had by this time caught fire, and
Basle had caught fire. There was no peace on earth.
'The horse has his heels,' he said, when advised to be quiet, 'the dog
his teeth, the hedgehog his spines, the bee his sting. I myself have my
tongue and my pen, and why should I not use them?'
Yet to use them to any purpose now, he must take a side, and, sorely
tempted as he was, he could not.
With the negative part of the Protestant creed he sympathised heartily;
but he did not understand Luther's doctrine of faith, because he had
none of his own, and he disliked it as a new dogma.
He regarded Luther's movement as an outburst of commonplace revolution,
caused by the folly and wickedness of the authorities, but with no
organising vitality in itself; and his chief distress, as we gather from
his later letters, was at his own treatment. He had done his best for
both sides. He had failed, and was abused by everybody.
Thus passed away the last years of one of the most gifted men that
Europe has ever seen. I have quoted many of his letters. I will add one
more passage, written near the end of his life, very touching and
pathetic:--
'Hercules,' he said, 'could not fight two monsters at once; while I,
poor wretch, have lions, cerberuses, cancers, scorpions every day at my
sword's point; not to mention smaller vermin--rats, mosquitoes, bugs,
and fleas. My troops of friends are turned to enemies. At dinner-tables
or social gatherings, in churches and king's courts, in public carriage
or public flyboat, scandal pursues me, and calumny defiles my name.
Every goose now hisses at Erasmus; and it is worse than being stoned,
once for all, like Stephen, or shot with arrows like Sebastian.
'They attack me now even for my Latin style, and spatter me with
epigrams. Fame I would have parted with; but to be the sport of
blackguards--to be pelted with potsherds and dirt and ordure--is not
this worse than death?
'There is no rest for me in my age, unless I join Luther; and I cannot,
for I cannot accept his doctrines. Sometimes I am stung with a desire to
avenge my wrongs; but I say to myself, "Will you, to gratify your
spleen, raise your hand against your mother the Church, who begot you at
the font and fed you with the word of God?" I cannot do it. Yet I
understand now how Arius, and Tertullian, and Wickliff were driven into
schism. The theologians say I am their enemy. Why? Because I bade monks
remember their vows; because I told parsons to leave their wranglings
and read the Bible; because I told popes and cardinals to look at the
Apostles, and make themselves more like to them. If this is to be their
enemy, then indeed I have injured them.'
This was almost the last. The stone, advancing years, and incessant toil
had worn him to a shred. The clouds grew blacker. News came from England
that his dear friends More and Fisher had died upon the scaffold. He had
long ceased to care for life; and death, almost as sudden as he had
longed for, gave him peace at last.
So ended Desiderius Erasmus, the world's idol for so many years; and
dying heaped with undeserved but too intelligible anathemas, seeing all
that he had laboured for swept away by the whirlwind.
Do not let me lead you to undervalue him. Without Erasmus, Luther would
have been impossible; and Erasmus really succeeded--so much of him as
deserved to succeed--in Luther's victory.
He was brilliantly gifted. His industry never tired. His intellect was
true to itself; and no worldly motives ever tempted him into
insincerity. He was even far braver than he professed to be. Had he been
brought to the trial, he would have borne it better than many a man who
boasted louder of his courage.
And yet, in his special scheme for remodelling the mind of Europe, he
failed hopelessly--almost absurdly. He believed, himself, that his work
was spoilt by the Reformation; but, in fact, under no conditions could
any more have come of it.
Literature and cultivation will feed life when life exists already; and
toleration and latitudinarianism are well enough when mind and
conscience are awake and energetic of themselves.
When there is no spiritual life at all; when men live only for
themselves and for sensual pleasure; when religion is superstition, and
conscience a name, and God an idol half feared and half despised--then,
for the restoration of the higher nature in man, qualities are needed
different in kind from any which Erasmus possessed.
And now to go back to Luther. I cannot tell you all that Luther did; it
would be to tell you all the story of the German Reformation. I want you
rather to consider the kind of man that Luther was, and to see in his
character how he came to achieve what he did.
You remember that the Elector of Saxony, after the Diet of Worms, sent
him to the Castle of Wartburg, to prevent him from being murdered or
kidnapped. He remained there many months; and during that time the old
ecclesiastical institutions of Germany were burning like a North
American forest. The monasteries were broken up; the estates were
appropriated by the nobles; the monks were sent wandering into the
world. The bishops looked helplessly on while their ancient spiritual
dominion was torn to pieces and trodden under foot. The Elector of
Saxony, the Landgrave of Hesse, and several more of the princes,
declared for the Reformation. The Protestants had a majority in the
Diet, and controlled the force of the empire. Charles the Fifth, busy
with his French wars, and in want of money, dared not press questions to
a crisis which he had not power to cope with; and he was obliged for a
time to recognise what he could not prevent. You would have thought
Luther would have been well pleased to see the seed which he had sown
bear fruit so rapidly; yet it was exactly while all this was going on
that he experienced those temptations of the devil of which he has left
so wonderful an account.
We shall have our own opinions on the nature of these apparitions. But
Luther, it is quite certain, believed that Satan himself attacked him in
person. Satan, he tells us, came often to him, and said, 'See what you
have done. Behold this ancient Church--this mother of saints--polluted
and defiled by brutal violence. And it is you--you, a poor ignorant
monk, that have set the people on to their unholy work. Are you so much
wiser than the saints who approved the things which you have denounced?
Popes, bishops, clergy, kings, emperors--are none of these--are not all
these together--wiser than Martin Luther the monk?'
The devil, he says, caused him great agony by these suggestions. He fell
into deep fits of doubt and humiliation and despondency. And wherever
these thoughts came from, we can only say that they were very natural
thoughts--natural and right. He called them temptations; yet these were
temptations which would not have occurred to any but a high-minded man.
He had, however, done only what duty had forced him to do. His business
was to trust to God, who had begun the work and knew what He meant to
make of it. His doubts and misgivings, therefore, he ascribed to Satan,
and his enormous imaginative vigour gave body to the voice which was
speaking in him.
He tells many humorous stories--not always producible--of the means with
which he encountered his offensive visitor.
'The devil,' he says, 'is very proud, and what he least likes is to be
laughed at.' One night he was disturbed by something rattling in his
room; the modern unbeliever will suppose it was a mouse. He got up, lit
a candle, searched the apartment through, and could find nothing--the
Evil One was indisputably there.
'Oh!' he said, 'it is you, is it?' He returned to bed, and went to
sleep.
Think as you please about the cause of the noise, but remember that
Luther had not the least doubt that he was alone in the room with the
actual devil, who, if he could not overcome his soul, could at least
twist his neck in a moment--and then think what courage there must have
been in a man who could deliberately sleep in such a presence!
During his retirement he translated the Bible. The confusion at last
became so desperate that he could no longer be spared; and, believing
that he was certain to be destroyed, he left Wartburg and returned to
Wittenberg. Death was always before him as supremely imminent. He used
to say that it would be a great disgrace to the Pope if he died in his
bed. He was wanted once at Leipsic. His friends said if he went there
Duke George would kill him.
'Duke George!' he said; 'I would go to Leipsic if it rained Duke Georges
for nine days!'
No such cataclysm of Duke Georges happily took place. The single one
there was would have gladly been mischievous if he could; but Luther
outlived him--lived for twenty-four years after this, in continued toil,
re-shaping the German Church, and giving form to its new doctrine.
Sacerdotalism, properly so called, was utterly abolished. The
corruptions of the Church had all grown out of one root--the notion that
the Christian priesthood possesses mystical power, conferred through
episcopal ordination.
Religion, as Luther conceived it, did not consist in certain things done
to and for a man by a so-called priest. It was the devotion of each
individual soul to the service of God. Masses were nothing, and
absolution was nothing; and a clergyman differed only from a layman in
being set apart for the especial duties of teaching and preaching.
I am not concerned to defend Luther's view in this matter. It is a
matter of fact only, that in getting rid of episcopal ordination, he
dried up the fountain from which the mechanical and idolatrous
conceptions of religion had sprung; and, in consequence, the religious
life of Germany has expanded with the progress of knowledge, while
priesthoods everywhere cling to the formulas of the past, in which they
live, and move, and have their being.
Enough of this.
The peculiar doctrine which has passed into Europe under Luther's name
is known as Justification by Faith. Bandied about as a watchword of
party, it has by this time hardened into a formula, and has become
barren as the soil of a trodden footpath. As originally proclaimed by
Luther, it contained the deepest of moral truths. It expressed what was,
and is, and must be, in one language or another, to the end of time, the
conviction of every generous-minded man.
The service of God, as Luther learnt it from the monks, was a thing of
desert and reward. So many good works done, so much to the right page in
the great book; where the stock proved insufficient, there was the
reserve fund of the merits of the saints, which the Church dispensed for
money to those who needed.
'Merit!' Luther thought. 'What merit can there be in such a poor caitiff
as man? The better a man is--the more clearly he sees how little he is
good for, the greater mockery it seems to attribute to him the notion of
having deserved reward.'
'Miserable creatures that we are!' he said; 'we earn our bread in sin.
Till we are seven years old, we do nothing but eat and drink and sleep
and play; from seven to twenty-one we study four hours a day, the rest
of it we run about and amuse ourselves; then we work till fifty, and
then we grow again to be children. We sleep half our lives; we give God
a tenth of our time: and yet we think that with our good works we can
merit heaven. What have I been doing to-day? I have talked for two
hours; I have been at meals three hours; I have been idle four hours!
Ah, enter not into judgment with thy servant, O Lord!'
A perpetual struggle. For ever to be falling, yet to rise again and
stumble forward with eyes turned to heaven--this was the best which
would ever come of man. It was accepted in its imperfection by the
infinite grace of God, who pities mortal weakness, and accepts the
intention for the deed--who, when there is a sincere desire to serve
Him, overlooks the shortcomings of infirmity.
Do you say such teaching leads to disregard of duty? All doctrines, when
petrified into formulas, lead to that. But, as Luther said, 'where real
faith is, a good life follows, as light follows the sun; faint and
clouded, yet ever struggling to break through the mist which envelopes
it, and welcoming the roughest discipline which tends to clear and raise
it.
'The barley,' he says, in a homely but effective image--'the barley
which we brew, the flax of which we weave our garments, must be bruised
and torn ere they come to the use for which they are grown. So must
Christians suffer. The natural creature must be combed and threshed. The
old Adam must die, for the higher life to begin. If man is to rise to
nobleness, he must first be slain.'
In modern language, the poet Goethe tells us the same truth. 'The
natural man,' he says, 'is like the ore out of the iron mine. It is
smelted in the furnace; it is forged into bars upon the anvil. A new
nature is at last forced upon it, and it is made steel.'
It was this doctrine--it was this truth rather (the word doctrine
reminds one of quack medicines)--which, quickening in Luther's mind,
gave Europe its new life. It was the flame which, beginning with a small
spark, kindled the hearth-fires in every German household.
Luther's own life was a model of quiet simplicity. He remained poor. He
might have had money if he had wished; but he chose rather, amidst his
enormous labour, to work at a turning-lathe for his livelihood.
He was sociable, cheerful, fond of innocent amusements, and delighted to
encourage them. His table-talk, collected by his friends, makes one of
the most brilliant books in the world. He had no monkish theories about
the necessity of abstinence; but he was temperate from habit and
principle. A salt herring and a hunch of bread was his ordinary meal;
and he was once four days without food of any sort, having emptied his
larder among the poor.
All kinds of people thrust themselves on Luther for help. Flights of
nuns from the dissolved convents came to him to provide for them--naked,
shivering creatures, with scarce a rag to cover them. Eight florins were
wanted once to provide clothes for some of them. 'Eight florins!' he
said; 'and where am I to get eight florins?' Great people had made him
presents of plate: it all went to market to be turned into clothes and
food for the wretched.
Melancthon says that, unless provoked, he was usually very gentle and
tolerant. He recognised, and was almost alone in recognising, the
necessity of granting liberty of conscience. No one hated Popery more
than he did, yet he said:--
'The Papists must bear with us, and we with them. If they will not
follow us, we have no right to force them. Wherever they can, they will
hang, burn, behead, and strangle us. I shall be persecuted as long as I
live, and most likely killed. But it must come to this at last--every
man must be allowed to believe according to his conscience, and answer
for his belief to his Maker.'
Erasmus said of Luther that there were two natures in him: sometimes he
wrote like an apostle--sometimes like a raving ribald.
Doubtless, Luther could be impolite on occasions. When he was angry,
invectives rushed from him like boulder rocks down a mountain torrent
in flood. We need not admire all that; in quiet times it is hard to
understand it.
Here, for instance, is a specimen. Our Henry the Eighth, who began life
as a highly orthodox sovereign, broke a lance with Luther for the
Papacy.
Luther did not credit Henry with a composition which was probably his
own after all. He thought the king was put forward by some of the
English bishops--'Thomists' he calls them, as men who looked for the
beginning and end of wisdom to the writings of Thomas Aquinas.
'Courage,' he exclaimed to them, 'swine that you are! burn me then, if
you can and dare. Here I am; do your worst upon me. Scatter my ashes to
all the winds--spread them through all seas. My spirit shall pursue you
still. Living, I am the foe of the Papacy; and dead, I will be its foe
twice over. Hogs of Thomists! Luther shall be the bear in your way--the
lion in your path. Go where you will, Luther shall cross you. Luther
shall leave you neither peace nor rest till he has crushed in your brows
of brass and dashed out your iron brains.'
Strong expressions; but the times were not gentle. The prelates whom he
supposed himself to be addressing were the men who filled our Smithfield
with the reek of burning human flesh.
Men of Luther's stature are like the violent forces of Nature
herself--terrible when roused, and in repose, majestic and beautiful. Of
vanity he had not a trace. 'Do not call yourselves Lutherans,' he said;
'call yourselves Christians. Who and what is Luther? Has Luther been
crucified for the world?'
I mentioned his love of music. His songs and hymns were the expression
of the very inmost heart of the German people. 'Music' he called 'the
grandest and sweetest gift of God to man.' 'Satan hates music,' he said;
'he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us.'
He was extremely interested in all natural things. Before the science of
botany was dreamt of, Luther had divined the principle of vegetable
life. 'The principle of marriage runs through all creation,' he said;
'and flowers as well as animals are male and female.'
A garden called out bursts of eloquence from him; beautiful sometimes as
a finished piece of poetry.
One April day as he was watching the swelling buds, he exclaimed:--
'Praise be to God the Creator, who out of a dead world makes all alive
again. See those shoots how they burgeon and swell. Image of the
resurrection of the dead! Winter is death--summer is the resurrection.
Between them lie spring and autumn, as the period of uncertainty and
change. The proverb says--
Trust not a day
Ere birth of May.
Let us pray our Father in heaven to give us this day our daily bread.'
'We are in the dawn of a new era,' he said another time; 'we are
beginning to think something of the natural world which was ruined in
Adam's fall. We are learning to see all round us the greatness and glory
of the Creator. We can see the Almighty hand--the infinite goodness--in
the humblest flower. We praise Him--we thank Him--we glorify Him--we
recognise in creation the power of His word. He spoke and it was there.
The stone of the peach is hard; but the soft kernel swells and bursts it
when the time comes. An egg--what a thing is that! If an egg had never
been seen in Europe, and a traveller had brought one from Calcutta, how
would all the world have wondered!'
And again:--
'If a man could make a single rose, we should give him an empire; yet
roses, and flowers no less beautiful, are scattered in profusion over
the world, and no one regards them.'
There are infinite other things which I should like to tell you about
Luther, but time wears on. I must confine what more I have to say to a
single matter--for which more than any other he has been blamed--I mean
his marriage.
He himself, a monk and a priest, had taken a vow of celibacy. The person
whom he married had been a nun, and as such had taken a vow of celibacy
also.
The marriage was unquestionably no affair of passion. Luther had come to
middle age when it was brought about, when temptations of that kind lose
their power; and among the many accusations which have been brought
against his early life, no one has ventured to charge him with
incontinence. His taking a wife was a grave act deliberately performed;
and it was either meant as a public insult to established ecclesiastical
usage, or else he considered that the circumstances of the time required
it of him.
Let us see what those circumstances were. The enforcement of celibacy on
the clergy was, in Luther's opinion, both iniquitous in itself, and
productive of enormous immorality. The impurity of the religious orders
had been the jest of satirists for a hundred years. It had been the
distress and perplexity of pious and serious persons. Luther himself was
impressed with profound pity for the poor men, who were cut off from the
natural companionship which nature had provided for them--who were thus
exposed to temptations which they ought not to have been called upon to
resist.
The dissolution of the religious houses had enormously complicated the
problem. Germany was covered with friendless and homeless men and women
adrift upon the world. They came to Luther to tell them what to do; and
advice was of little service without example.
The world had grown accustomed to immorality in such persons. They might
have lived together in concubinage, and no one would have thought much
about it. Their marriage was regarded with a superstitious terror as a
kind of incest.
Luther, on the other hand, regarded marriage as the natural and healthy
state in which clergy as well as laity were intended to live. Immorality
was hateful to him as a degradation of a sacrament--impious, loathsome,
and dishonoured. Marriage was the condition in which humanity was at
once purest, best, and happiest.
For himself, he had become inured to a single life. He had borne the
injustice of his lot, when the burden had been really heavy. But time
and custom had lightened the load; and had there been nothing at issue
but his own personal happiness, he would not have given further occasion
to the malice of his enemies.
But tens of thousands of poor creatures were looking to him to guide
them--guide them by precept, or guide them by example. He had satisfied
himself that the vow of celibacy had been unlawfully imposed both on him
and them--that, as he would put it, it had been a snare devised by the
devil. He saw that all eyes were fixed on him--that it was no use to
tell others that they might marry, unless he himself led the way, and
married first. And it was characteristic of him that, having resolved to
do the thing, he did it in the way most likely to show the world his
full thought upon the matter.
That this was his motive, there is no kind of doubt whatever.
'We may be able to live unmarried,' he said; 'but in these days we must
protest in deed as well as word, against the doctrine of celibacy. It is
an invention of Satan. Before I took my wife, I had made up my mind that
I must marry some one: and had I been overtaken by illness, I should
have betrothed myself to some pious maiden.'
He asked nobody's advice. Had he let his intention be suspected, the
moderate respectable people--the people who thought like Erasmus--those
who wished well to what was good, but wished also to stand well with the
world's opinion--such persons as these would have overwhelmed him with
remonstrances. 'When you marry,' he said to a friend in a similar
situation, 'be quiet about it, or mountains will rise between you and
your wishes. If I had not been swift and secret, I should have had the
whole world in my way.'
Catherine Bora, the lady whom he chose for his wife, was a nun of good
family, left homeless and shelterless by the breaking-up of her convent.
She was an ordinary, unimaginative body--plain in person and plain in
mind, in no sense whatever a heroine of romance--but a decent, sensible,
commonplace Haus Frau.
The age of romance was over with both of them; yet, for all that, never
marriage brought a plainer blessing with it. They began with respect,
and ended with steady affection.
The happiest life on earth, Luther used to say, is with a pious, good
wife; in peace and quiet, contented with a little, and giving God
thanks.
He spoke from his own experience. His Katie, as he called her, was not
clever, and he had numerous stories to tell of the beginning of their
adventures together.
'The first year of married life is an odd business,' he says. 'At meals,
where you used to be alone, you are yourself and somebody else. When you
wake in the morning, there are a pair of tails close to you on the
pillow. My Katie used to sit with me when I was at work. She thought she
ought not to be silent. She did not know what to say, so she would ask
me.
'"Herr Doctor, is not the master of the ceremonies in Prussia the
brother of the Margrave?"'
She was an odd woman.
'Doctor,' she said to him one day, 'how is it that under Popery we
prayed so often and so earnestly, and now our prayers are cold and
seldom?'
Katie might have spoken for herself. Luther, to the last, spent hours of
every day in prayer. He advised her to read the Bible a little more. She
said she had read enough of it, and knew half of it by heart. 'Ah!' he
said, 'here begins weariness of the word of God. One day new lights will
rise up, and the Scriptures will be despised and be flung away into the
corner.'
His relations with his children were singularly beautiful. The
recollection of his own boyhood made him especially gentle with them,
and their fancies and imaginations delighted him.
Children, to him, were images of unfallen nature. 'Children,' he said,
'imagine heaven a place where rivers run with cream, and trees are hung
with cakes and plums. Do not blame them. They are but showing their
simple, natural, unquestioning, all-believing faith.'
One day, after dinner, when the fruit was on the table, the children
were watching it with longing eyes. 'That is the way,' he said, 'in
which we grown Christians ought to look for the Judgment Day.'
His daughter Magdalen died when she was fourteen. He speaks of his loss
with the unaffected simplicity of natural grief, yet with the faith of a
man who had not the slightest doubt into whose hands his treasure was
passing. Perfect nature and perfect piety. Neither one emotion nor the
other disguised or suppressed.
You will have gathered something, I hope, from these faint sketches, of
what Luther was; you will be able to see how far he deserves to be
called by our modern new lights, a Philistine or a heretic. We will now
return to the subject with which we began, and resume, in a general
conclusion, the argument of these Lectures.
In part, but not wholly, it can be done in Luther's words.
One regrets that Luther did not know Erasmus better, or knowing him,
should not have treated him with more forbearance.
Erasmus spoke of him for the most part with kindness. He interceded for
him, defended him, and only with the utmost reluctance was driven into
controversy with him.
Luther, on the other hand, saw in Erasmus a man who was false to his
convictions; who played with truth; who, in his cold, sarcastic
scepticism, believed in nothing--scarcely even in God. He was unaware of
his own obligations to him, for Erasmus was not a person who would
trumpet out his own good deeds.
Thus Luther says:--
'All you who honour Christ, I pray you hate Erasmus. He is a scoffer and
a mocker. He speaks in riddles; and jests at Popery and Gospel, and
Christ and God, with his uncertain speeches. He might have served the
Gospel if he would, but, like Judas, he has betrayed the Son of Man with
a kiss. He is not with us, and he is not with our foes; and I say with
Joshua, Choose whom ye will serve. He thinks we should trim to the
times, and hang our cloaks to the wind. He is himself his own first
object; and as he lived, he died.
'I take Erasmus to be the worst enemy that Christ has had for a thousand
years. Intellect does not understand religion, and when it comes to the
things of God, it laughs at them. He scoffs like Lucian, and by-and-by
he will say, Behold, how are these among the saints whose life we
counted for folly.
'I bid you, therefore, take heed of Erasmus. He treats theology as a
fool's jest, and the Gospel as a fable good for the ignorant to
believe.'
Of Erasmus personally, much of this was unjust and untrue. Erasmus knew
many things which it would have been well for Luther to have known; and,
as a man, he was better than his principles.
But if for the name of Erasmus we substitute the theory of human things
which Erasmus represented, between that creed and Luther there is, and
must be, an eternal antagonism.
If to be true in heart and just in act are the first qualities necessary
for the elevation of humanity--if without these all else is worthless,
intellectual culture cannot give what intellectual culture does not
require or imply. You cultivate the plant which has already life; you
will waste your labour in cultivating a stone. The moral life is the
counterpart of the natural, alike mysterious in its origin, and alike
visible only in its effects.
Intellectual gifts are like gifts of strength, or wealth, or rank, or
worldly power--splendid instruments if nobly used--but requiring
qualities to use them nobler and better than themselves.
The rich man may spend his wealth on vulgar luxury. The clever man may
live for intellectual enjoyment--refined enjoyment it may be--but
enjoyment still, and still centering in self.
If the spirit of Erasmus had prevailed, it would have been with modern
Europe as with the Roman Empire in its decay. The educated would have
been mere sceptics; the multitude would have been sunk in superstition.
In both alike all would have perished which deserves the name of
manliness.
And this leads me to the last observation that I have to make to you. In
the sciences, the philosopher leads; the rest of us take on trust what
he tells us. The spiritual progress of mankind has followed the opposite
course. Each forward step has been made first among the people, and the
last converts have been among the learned.
The explanation is not far to look for. In the sciences there is no
temptation of self-interest to mislead. In matters which affect life and
conduct, the interests and prejudices of the cultivated classes are
enlisted on the side of the existing order of things, and their better
trained faculties and larger acquirements serve only to find them
arguments for believing what they wish to believe.
Simpler men have less to lose; they come more in contact with the
realities of life, and they learn wisdom in the experience of suffering.
Thus it was that when the learned and the wise turned away from
Christianity, the fishermen of the Galilean lake listened, and a new
life began for mankind. A miner's son converted Germany to the
Reformation. The London artisans and the peasants of Buckinghamshire
went to the stake for doctrines which were accepted afterwards as a
second revelation.
So it has been; so it will be to the end. When a great teacher comes
again upon the earth, he will find his first disciples where Christ
found them and Luther found them. Had Luther written for the learned,
the words which changed the face of Europe would have slumbered in
impotence on the bookshelves.
In appealing to the German nation, you will agree, I think, with me,
that he did well and not ill; you will not sacrifice his great name to
the disdain of a shallow philosophy, or to the grimacing of a dead
superstition, whose ghost is struggling out of its grave.
THE INFLUENCE OF THE REFORMATION ON THE SCOTTISH CHARACTER:
A LECTURE DELIVERED AT EDINBURGH, NOVEMBER 1865.
I have undertaken to speak this evening on the effects of the
Reformation in Scotland, and I consider myself a very bold person to
have come here on any such undertaking. In the first place, the subject
is one with which it is presumptuous for a stranger to meddle. Great
national movements can only be understood properly by the people whose
disposition they represent. We say ourselves about our own history that
only Englishmen can properly comprehend it. The late Chevalier Bunsen
once said to me of our own Reformation in England, that, for his part,
he could not conceive how we had managed to come by such a thing. We
seemed to him to be an obdurate, impenetrable, stupid people, hide-bound
by tradition and precedent, and too self-satisfied to be either willing
or able to take in new ideas upon any theoretic subject whatever,
especially German ideas. That is to say, he could not get inside the
English mind. He did not know that some people go furthest and go
fastest when they look one way and row the other. It is the same with
every considerable nation. They work out their own political and
spiritual lives, through tempers, humours, and passions peculiar to
themselves; and the same disposition which produces the result is
required to interpret it afterwards. This is one reason why I should
feel diffident about what I have undertaken. Another is, that I do not
conceal from myself that the subject is an exceedingly delicate one. The
blazing passions of those stormy sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are
no longer, happily, at their old temperature. The story of those times
can now be told or listened to with something like impartiality. Yet, if
people no longer hate each other for such matters, the traditions of the
struggle survive in strong opinions and sentiments, which it is easy to
wound without intending it.
My own conviction with respect to all great social and religious
convulsions is the extremely commonplace one that much is to be said on
both sides. I believe that nowhere and at no time any such struggle can
take place on a large scale unless each party is contending for
something which has a great deal of truth in it. Where the right is
plain, honest, wise, and noble-minded men are all on one side; and only
rogues and fools are on the other. Where the wise and good are divided,
the truth is generally found to be divided also. But this is precisely
what cannot be admitted as long as the conflict continues. Men begin to
fight about things when reason and argument fail to convince them. They
make up in passion what is wanting in logic. Each side believes that all
the right is theirs--that their enemies have all the bad qualities which
their language contains names for; and even now, on the subject on which
I have to talk to-night, one has but to take up any magazine, review,
newspaper, or party organ of any kind which touches on it, to see that
opinion is still Whig or Tory, Cavalier or Roundhead, Protestant or
Catholic, as the case may be. The unfortunate person who is neither
wholly one nor wholly the other is in the position of Hamlet's 'baser
nature,' 'between the incensed points of mighty opposites.' He is the
Laodicean, neither cold nor hot, whom decent people consider bad
company. He pleases no one, and hurts the sensitiveness of all.
Here, then, are good reasons why I should have either not come here at
all, or else should have chosen some other matter to talk about. In
excuse for persisting, I can but say that the subject is one about which
I have been led by circumstances to read and think considerably; and
though, undoubtedly, each of us knows more about himself and his own
affairs than anyone else can possibly know, yet a stranger's eye will
sometimes see things which escape those more immediately interested; and
I allow myself to hope that I may have something to say not altogether
undeserving your attention. I shall touch as little as possible on
questions of opinion; and if I tread by accident on any sensitive
point, I must trust to your kindness to excuse my awkwardness.
Well, then, if we look back on Scotland as it stood in the first quarter
of the sixteenth century, we see a country in which the old feudal
organisation continued, so far as it generally affected the people, more
vigorous than in any other part of civilised Europe. Elsewhere, the
growth of trade and of large towns had created a middle class, with an
organisation of their own, independent of the lords. In Scotland, the
towns were still scanty and poor; such as they were, they were for the
most part under the control of the great nobleman who happened to live
nearest to them; and a people, as in any sense independent of lords,
knights, abbots, or prelates, under whose rule they were born, had as
yet no existence. The tillers of the soil (and the soil was very
miserably tilled) lived under the shadow of the castle or the monastery.
They followed their lord's fortunes, fought his battles, believed in his
politics, and supported him loyally in his sins or his good deeds, as
the case might be. There was much moral beauty in the life of those
times. The loyal attachment of man to man--of liege servant to liege
lord--of all forms under which human beings can live and work together,
has most of grace and humanity about it. It cannot go on without mutual
confidence and affection--mutual benefits given and received. The length
of time which the system lasted proves that in the main there must have
been a fine fidelity in the people--truth, justice, generosity in their
leaders. History brings down many bad stories to us out of those times;
just as in these islands nowadays you may find bad instances of the
abuses of rights of property. You may find stories--too many also--of
husbands ill-using their wives, and so on. Yet we do not therefore lay
the blame on marriage, or suppose that the institution of property on
the whole does more harm than good. I do not doubt that down in that
feudal system somewhere lie the roots of some of the finest qualities in
the European peoples.
So much for the temporal side of the matter; and the spiritual was not
very unlike it. As no one lived independently, in our modern sense of
the word, so no one thought independently. The minds of men were looked
after by a Church which, for a long time also, did, I suppose, very
largely fulfil the purpose for which it was intended. It kept alive and
active the belief that the world was created and governed by a just
Being, who hated sins and crimes, and steadily punished such things. It
taught men that they had immortal souls, and that this little bit of
life was an entirely insignificant portion of their real existence. It
taught these truths, indeed, along with a great deal which we now
consider to have been a mistake--a great many theories of earthly things
which have since passed away, and special opinions clothed in outward
forms and ritual observances which we here, most of us at least, do not
think essential for our soul's safety. But mistakes like these are
hurtful only when persisted in in the face of fuller truth, after truth
has been discovered. Only a very foolish man would now uphold the
Ptolemaic astronomy. But the Ptolemaic astronomy, when first invented,
was based on real if incomplete observations, and formed a groundwork
without which further progress in that science would have been probably
impossible. The theories and ceremonials of the Catholic Church suited
well with an age in which little was known and much was imagined: when
superstition was active and science was not yet born. When I am told
here or anywhere that the Middle Ages were times of mere spiritual
darkness and priestly oppression, with the other usual formulas, I say,
as I said before, if the Catholic Church, for those many centuries that
it reigned supreme over all men's consciences, was no better than the
thing which we see in the generation which immediately preceded the
Reformation, it could not have existed at all. You might as well argue
that the old fading tree could never have been green and young.
Institutions do not live on lies. They either live by the truth and
usefulness which there is in them, or they do not live at all.
So things went on for several hundred years. There were scandals enough,
and crimes enough, and feuds, and murders, and civil wars. Systems,
however good, cannot prevent evil. They can but compress it within
moderate and tolerable limits. I should conclude, however, that,
measuring by the average happiness of the masses of the people, the
mediaeval institutions were very well suited for the inhabitants of these
countries as they then were. Adam Smith and Bentham themselves could
hardly have mended them if they had tried.
But times change, and good things as well as bad grow old and have to
die. The heart of the matter which the Catholic Church had taught was
the fear of God; but the language of it and the formulas of it were made
up of human ideas and notions about things which the mere increase of
human knowledge gradually made incredible. To trace the reason of this
would lead us a long way. It is intelligible enough, but it would take
us into subjects better avoided here. It is enough to say that, while
the essence of religion remains the same, the mode in which it is
expressed changes and has changed--changes as living languages change
and become dead, as institutions change, as forms of government change,
as opinions on all things in heaven and earth change, as half the
theories held at this time among ourselves will probably change--that
is, the outward and mortal parts of them. Thus the Catholic formulas,
instead of living symbols, become dead and powerless cabalistic signs.
The religion lost its hold on the conscience and the intellect, and the
effect, singularly enough, appeared in the shepherds before it made
itself felt among the flocks. From the see of St. Peter to the far
monasteries in the Hebrides or the Isle of Arran, the laity were shocked
and scandalised at the outrageous doings of high cardinals, prelates,
priests, and monks. It was clear enough that these great personages
themselves did not believe what they taught; so why should the people
believe it? And serious men, to whom the fear of God was a living
reality, began to look into the matter for themselves. The first steps
everywhere were taken with extreme reluctance; and had the popes and
cardinals been wise, they would have taken the lead in the enquiry,
cleared their teaching of its lumber, and taken out a new lease of life
both for it and for themselves. An infallible pope and an infallible
council might have done something in this way, if good sense had been
among the attributes of their omniscience. What they did do was
something very different. It was as if, when the new astronomy began to
be taught, the professors of that science in all the universities of
Europe had met together and decided that Ptolemy's cycles and epicycles
were eternal verities; that the theory of the rotation of the earth was
and must be a damnable heresy; and had invited the civil authorities to
help them in putting down by force all doctrines but their own. This, or
something very like it, was the position taken up in theology by the
Council of Trent. The bishops assembled there did not reason. They
decided by vote that certain things were true, and were to be believed;
and the only arguments which they condescended to use were fire and
faggot, and so on. How it fared with them, and with this experiment of
theirs, we all know tolerably well.
The effect was very different in different countries. Here, in Scotland,
the failure was most marked and complete, but the way in which it came
about was in many ways peculiar. In Germany, Luther was supported by
princes and nobles. In England, the Reformation rapidly mixed itself up
with politics and questions of rival jurisdiction. Both in England and
Germany, the revolution, wherever it established itself, was accepted
early by the Crown or the Government, and by them legally recognised.
Here, it was far otherwise: the Protestantism of Scotland was the
creation of the commons, as in turn the commons may be said to have been
created by Protestantism. There were many young high-spirited men,
belonging to the noblest families in the country, who were among the
earliest to rally round the Reforming preachers; but authority, both in
Church and State, set the other way. The congregations who gathered in
the fields around Wishart and John Knox were, for the most part,
farmers, labourers, artisans, tradesmen, or the smaller gentry; and
thus, for the first time in Scotland, there was created an organisation
of men detached from the lords and from the Church--brave, noble,
resolute, daring people, bound together by a sacred cause, unrecognised
by the leaders whom they had followed hitherto with undoubting
allegiance. That spirit which grew in time to be the ruling power of
Scotland--that which formed eventually its laws and its creed, and
determined its after fortunes as a nation--had its first germ in these
half-outlawed wandering congregations. In this it was that the
Reformation in Scotland differed from the Reformation in any other part
of Europe. Elsewhere it found a middle class existing--created already
by trade or by other causes. It raised and elevated them, but it did not
materially affect their political condition. In Scotland, the commons,
as an organised body, were simply created by religion. Before the
Reformation they had no political existence; and therefore it has been
that the print of their origin has gone so deeply into their social
constitution. On them, and them only, the burden of the work of the
Reformation was eventually thrown; and when they triumphed at last, it
was inevitable that both they and it should react one upon the other.
How this came about I must endeavour to describe, although I can give
but a brief sketch of an exceedingly complicated matter. Everybody knows
the part played by the aristocracy of Scotland in the outward
revolution, when the Reformation first became the law of the land. It
would seem at first sight as if it had been the work of the whole
nation--as if it had been a thing on which high and low were heartily
united. Yet on the first glance below the surface you see that the
greater part of the noble lords concerned in that business cared nothing
about the Reformation at all; or, if they cared, they rather disliked it
than otherwise. How, then, did they come to act as they did? or, how
came they to permit a change of such magnitude when they had so little
sympathy with it? I must make a slight circuit to look for the
explanation.
The one essentially noble feature in the great families of Scotland was
their patriotism. They loved Scotland and Scotland's freedom with a
passion proportioned to the difficulty with which they had defended
their liberties; and yet the wisest of them had long seen that, sooner
or later, union with England was inevitable; and the question was, how
that union was to be brought about--how they were to make sure that,
when it came, they should take their place at England's side as equals,
and not as a dependency. It had been arranged that the little Mary
Stuart should marry our English Edward VI., and the difficulty was to be
settled so. They would have been contented, they said, if Scotland had
had the 'lad' and England the 'lass.' As it stood, they broke their
bargain, and married the little queen away into France, to prevent the
Protector Somerset from getting hold of her. Then, however, appeared an
opposite danger; the queen would become a Frenchwoman; her French mother
governed Scotland with French troops and French ministers; the country
would become a French province, and lose its freedom equally. Thus an
English party began again; and as England was then in the middle of her
great anti-Church revolution, so the Scottish nobles began to be
anti-Church. It was not for doctrines: neither they nor their brothers
in England cared much about doctrines; but in both countries the Church
was rich--much richer than there seemed any occasion for it to be. Harry
the Eighth had been sharing among the laity the spoils of the English
monasteries; the Scotch Lords saw in a similar process the probability
of a welcome addition to their own scanty incomes. Mary of Guise and the
French stood by the Church, and the Church stood by them; and so it came
about that the great families--even those who, like the Hamiltons, were
most closely connected with France--were tempted over by the bait to the
other side. They did not want reformed doctrines, but they wanted the
Church lands; and so they came to patronise, or endure, the Reformers,
because the Church hated them, and because they weakened the Church; and
thus for a time, and especially as long as Mary Stuart was Queen of
France, all classes in Scotland, high and low, seemed to fraternise in
favour of the revolution.
And it seemed as if the union of the realms could be effected at last,
at the same juncture, and in connexion with the same movement. Next in
succession to the Scotch crown, after Mary Stuart, was the house of
Hamilton. Elizabeth, who had just come to the English throne, was
supposed to be in want of a husband. The heir of the Hamiltons was of
her own age, and in years past had been thought of for her by her
father. What could be more fit than to make a match between those two?
Send a Scot south to be King of England, find or make some pretext to
shake off Mary Stuart, who had forsaken her native country, and so join
the crowns, the 'lass' and the 'lad' being now in the right relative
position. Scotland would thus annex her old oppressor, and give her a
new dynasty.
I seem to be straying from the point; but these political schemes had so
much to do with the actions of the leading men at that time, that the
story of the Reformation cannot be understood without them. It was thus,
and with these incongruous objects, that the combination was formed
which overturned the old Church of Scotland in 1559-60, confiscated its
possessions, destroyed its religious houses, and changed its creed. The
French were driven away from Leith by Elizabeth's troops; the Reformers
took possession of the churches; and the Parliament of 1560 met with a
clear stage to determine for themselves the future fate of the country.
Now, I think it certain that, if the Scotch nobility, having once
accepted the Reformation, had continued loyal to it--especially if
Elizabeth had met their wishes in the important point of the
marriage--the form of the Scotch Kirk would have been something
extremely different from what it in fact became. The people were
perfectly well inclined to follow their natural leaders if the matters
on which their hearts were set had received tolerable consideration from
them, and the democratic form of the ecclesiastical constitution would
have been inevitably modified. One of the conditions of the proposed
compact with England was the introduction of the English Liturgy and the
English Church constitution. This too, at the outset, and with fair
dealing, would not have been found impossible. But it soon became clear
that the religious interests of Scotland were the very last thing which
would receive consideration from any of the high political personages
concerned. John Knox had dreamt of a constitution like that which he had
seen working under Calvin at Geneva--a constitution in which the clergy
as ministers of God should rule all things--rule politically at the
council board, and rule in private at the fireside. It was soon made
plain to Knox that Scotland was not Geneva. 'Eh, mon,' said the younger
Maitland to him, 'then we may all bear the barrow now to build the House
of the Lord.' Not exactly. The churches were left to the ministers; the
worldly good things and worldly power remained with the laity; and as to
religion, circumstances would decide what they would do about that.
Again, I am not speaking of all the great men of those times. Glencairn,
Ruthven, young Argyll--above all, the Earl of Moray--really did in some
degree interest themselves in the Kirk. But what most of them felt was
perhaps rather broadly expressed by Maitland when he called religion 'a
bogle of the nursery.' That was the expression which a Scotch statesman
of those days actually ventured to use. Had Elizabeth been conformable,
no doubt they would in some sense or other have remained on the side of
the Reformation. But here, too, there was a serious hitch. Elizabeth
would not marry Arran. Elizabeth would be no party to any of their
intrigues. She detested Knox. She detested Protestantism entirely, in
all shapes in which Knox approved of it. She affronted the nobles on one
side, she affronted the people on another; and all idea of uniting the
two crowns after the fashion proposed by the Scotch Parliament she
utterly and entirely repudiated. She was right enough, perhaps, so far
as this was concerned; but she left the ruling families extremely
perplexed as to the course which they would follow. They had allowed the
country to be revolutionised in the teeth of their own sovereign, and
what to do next they did not very well know.
It was at this crisis that circumstances came in to their help. Francis
the Second died. Mary Stuart was left a childless widow. Her connexion
with the Crown of France was at an end, and all danger on that side to
the liberties of Scotland at an end also. The Arran scheme having
failed, she would be a second card as good as the first to play for the
English Crown--as good as he, or better, for she would have the English
Catholics on her side. So, careless how it would affect religion, and
making no condition at all about that, the same men who a year before
were ready to whistle Mary Stuart down the wind, now invited her back to
Scotland; the same men who had been the loudest friends of Elizabeth now
encouraged Mary Stuart to persist in the pretension to the Crown of
England, which had led to all the past trouble. While in France, she had
assumed the title of Queen of England. She had promised to abandon it,
but, finding her own people ready to support her in withdrawing her
promise, she stood out, insisting that at all events the English
Parliament should declare her next in the succession; and it was well
known that, as soon as the succession was made sure in her favour, some
rascal would be found to put a knife or a bullet into Elizabeth. The
object of the Scotch nobles was political, national, patriotic. For
religion it was no great matter either way; and as they had before acted
with the Protestants, so now they were ready to turn about, and openly
or tacitly act with the Catholics. Mary Stuart's friends in England and
on the Continent were Catholics, and therefore it would not do to offend
them. First, she was allowed to have mass at Holyrood; then there was a
move for a broader toleration. That one mass, Knox said, was more
terrible to him than ten thousand armed men landed in the country--and
he had perfectly good reason for saying so. He thoroughly understood
that it was the first step towards a counter-revolution which in time
would cover all Scotland and England, and carry them back to Popery. Yet
he preached to deaf ears. Even Murray was so bewitched with the notion
of the English succession, that for a year and a half he ceased to speak
to Knox; and as it was with Murray, so it was far more with all the
rest--their zeal for religion was gone no one knew where. Of course
Elizabeth would not give way. She might as well, she said, herself
prepare her shroud; and then conspiracies came, and under-ground
intrigues with the Romanist English noblemen. France and Spain were to
invade England, Scotland was to open its ports to their fleets, and its
soil to their armies, giving them a safe base from which to act, and a
dry road over the Marches to London. And if Scotland had remained
unchanged from what it had been--had the direction of its fortunes
remained with the prince and with the nobles, sooner or later it would
have come to this. But suddenly it appeared that there was a new power
in this country which no one suspected till it was felt.
The commons of Scotland had hitherto been the creatures of the nobles.
They had neither will nor opinion of their own. They thought and acted
in the spirit of their immediate allegiance. No one seems to have dreamt
that there would be any difficulty in dealing with them if once the
great families agreed upon a common course. Yet it appeared, when the
pressure came, that religion, which was the play-thing of the nobles,
was to the people a clear matter of life and death. They might love
their country: they might be proud of anything which would add lustre to
its crown; but if it was to bring back the Pope and Popery--if it
threatened to bring them back--if it looked that way--they would have
nothing to do with it; nor would they allow it to be done. Allegiance
was well enough; but there was a higher allegiance suddenly discovered
which superseded all earthly considerations. I know nothing finer in
Scottish history than the way in which the commons of the Lowlands took
their places by the side of Knox in the great convulsions which
followed. If all others forsook him, they at least would never forsake
him while tongue remained to speak and hand remained to strike. Broken
they might have been, trampled out as the Huguenots at last were
trampled out in France, had Mary Stuart been less than the most
imprudent or the most unlucky of sovereigns. But Providence, or the
folly of those with whom they had to deal, fought for them. I need not
follow the wild story of the crimes and catastrophes in which Mary
Stuart's short reign in Scotland closed. Neither is her own share, be it
great or small, or none at all, in those crimes of any moment to us
here. It is enough that, both before that strange business and after it,
when at Holyrood or across the Border, in Sheffield or Tutbury, her ever
favourite dream was still the English throne. Her road towards it was
through a Catholic revolution and the murder of Elizabeth. It is enough
that, both before and after, the aristocracy of Scotland, even those
among them who had seemed most zealous for the Reformation, were eager
to support her. John Knox alone, and the commons, whom Knox had raised
into a political power, remained true.
Much, indeed, is to be said for the Scotch nobles. In the first shock of
the business at Kirk-o'-Field, they forgot their politics in a sense of
national disgrace. They sent the queen to Loch Leven. They intended to
bring her to trial, and, if she was proved guilty, to expose and perhaps
punish her. All parties for a time agreed in this--even the Hamiltons
themselves; and had they been left alone they would have done it. But
they had a perverse neighbour in England, to whom crowned heads were
sacred. Elizabeth, it might have been thought, would have had no
particular objection; but Elizabeth had aims of her own which baffled
calculation. Elizabeth, the representative of revolution, yet detested
revolutionists. The Reformers in Scotland, the Huguenots in France, the
insurgents in the United Provinces, were the only friends she had in
Europe. For her own safety she was obliged to encourage them; yet she
hated them all, and would at any moment have abandoned them all, if, in
any other way, she could have secured herself. She might have conquered
her personal objection to Knox--she could not conquer her aversion to a
Church which rose out of revolt against authority, which was democratic
in constitution and republican in politics. When driven into alliance
with the Scotch Protestants, she angrily and passionately disclaimed any
community of creed with them; and for subjects to sit in judgment on
their prince was a precedent which she would not tolerate. Thus she
flung her mantle over Mary Stuart. She told the Scotch Council here in
Edinburgh that, if they hurt a hair of her head, she would harry their
country, and hang them all on the trees round the town, if she could
find any trees there for that purpose. She tempted the queen to England
with her fair promises after the battle of Langside, and then, to her
astonishment, imprisoned her. Yet she still shielded her reputation,
still fostered her party in Scotland, still incessantly threatened and
incessantly endeavoured to restore her. She kept her safe, because, in
her lucid intervals, her ministers showed her the madness of acting
otherwise. Yet for three years she kept her own people in a fever of
apprehension. She made a settled Government in Scotland impossible;
till, distracted and perplexed, the Scottish statesmen went back to
their first schemes. They assured themselves that in one way or other
the Queen of Scots would sooner or later come again among them. They,
and others besides them, believed that Elizabeth was cutting her own
throat, and that the best that they could do was to recover their own
queen's favour, and make the most of her and her titles; and so they
lent themselves again to the English Catholic conspiracies.
The Earl of Moray--the one supremely noble man then living in the
country--was put out of the way by an assassin. French and Spanish money
poured in, and French and Spanish armies were to be again invited over
to Scotland. This is the form in which the drama unfolds itself in the
correspondence of the time. Maitland, the soul and spirit of it all,
said, in scorn, that 'he would make the Queen of England sit upon her
tail and whine like a whipped dog.' The only powerful noblemen who
remained on the Protestant side were Lennox, Morton, and Mar. Lord
Lennox was a poor creature, and was soon dispatched; Mar was old and
weak; and Morton was an unprincipled scoundrel, who used the Reformation
only as a stalking-horse to cover the spoils which he had clutched in
the confusion, and was ready to desert the cause at any moment if the
balance of advantage shifted. Even the ministers of the Kirk were fooled
and flattered over. Maitland told Mary Stuart that he had gained them
all except one.
John Knox alone defied both his threats and his persuasions. Good reason
has Scotland to be proud of Knox. He only, in this wild crisis, saved
the Kirk which he had founded, and saved with it Scottish and English
freedom. But for Knox, and what he was able still to do, it is almost
certain that the Duke of Alva's army would have been landed on the
eastern coast. The conditions were drawn out and agreed upon for the
reception, the support, and the stay of the Spanish troops. Two-thirds
of the English peerage had bound themselves to rise against Elizabeth,
and Alva waited only till Scotland itself was quiet. Only that quiet
would not be. Instead of quiet came three dreadful years of civil war.
Scotland was split into factions, to which the mother and son gave
names. The queen's lords, as they were called, with unlimited money from
France and Flanders, held Edinburgh and Glasgow; all the border line was
theirs, and all the north and west. Elizabeth's Council, wiser than
their mistress, barely squeezed out of her reluctant parsimony enough to
keep Mar and Morton from making terms with the rest; but there her
assistance ended. She would still say nothing, promise nothing, bind
herself to nothing, and, so far as she was concerned, the war would have
been soon enough brought to a close. But away at St. Andrews, John Knox,
broken in body, and scarcely able to stagger up the pulpit stairs, still
thundered in the parish church; and his voice, it was said, was like ten
thousand trumpets braying in the ear of Scottish Protestantism. All the
Lowlands answered to his call. Our English Cromwell found in the man of
religion a match for the man of honour. Before Cromwell, all over the
Lothians, and across from St. Andrews to Stirling and Glasgow--through
farm, and town, and village--the words of Knox had struck the inmost
chords of the Scottish commons' hearts. Passing over knight and noble,
he had touched the farmer, the peasant, the petty tradesman, and the
artisan, and turned the men of clay into men of steel. The village
preacher, when he left his pulpit, doffed cap and cassock, and donned
morion and steel-coat. The Lothian yeoman's household became for the
nonce a band of troopers, who would cross swords with the night riders
of Buccleuch. It was a terrible time, a time rather of anarchy than of
defined war, for it was without form or shape. Yet the horror of it was
everywhere. Houses and villages were burned, and women and children
tossed on pike-point into the flames. Strings of poor men were dangled
day after day from the walls of Edinburgh Castle. A word any way from
Elizabeth would have ended it, but that word Elizabeth would never
speak; and, maddened with suffering, the people half believed that she
was feeding the fire for her own bad purposes, when it was only that she
would not make up her mind to allow a crowned princess to be dethroned.
No earthly influence could have held men true in such a trial. The noble
lords--the Earl of Morton and such-like--would have made their own
conditions, and gone with the rest; but the vital force of the Scotch
nation, showing itself where it was least looked for, would not have it
so.
A very remarkable account of the state of the Scotch commons at this
time is to be found in a letter of an English emissary, who had been
sent by Lord Burleigh to see how things were going there. It was not
merely a new creed that they had got; it was a new vital power. 'You
would be astonished to see how men are changed here,' this writer said.
'There is little of that submission to those above them which there used
to be. The poor think and act for themselves. They are growing strong,
confident, independent. The farms are better cultivated; the farmers are
growing rich. The merchants at Leith are thriving, and, notwithstanding
the pirates, they are increasing their ships and opening a brisk trade
with France.'
All this while civil war was raging, and the flag of Queen Mary was
still floating over Edinburgh Castle. It surprised the English; still
more it surprised the politicians. It was the one thing which
disconcerted, baffled, and finally ruined the schemes and the dreams of
Maitland. When he had gained the aristocracy, he thought that he had
gained everybody, and, as it turned out, he had all his work still to
do. The Spaniards did not come. The prudent Alva would not risk invasion
till Scotland at least was assured. As time passed on, the English
conspiracies were discovered and broken up. The Duke of Norfolk lost his
head; the Queen of Scots was found to have been mixed up with the plots
to murder Elizabeth; and Elizabeth at last took courage and recognised
James. Supplies of money ceased to come from abroad, and gradually the
tide turned. The Protestant cause once more grew towards the ascendant.
The great families one by one came round again; and, as the backward
movement began, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew gave it a fresh and
tremendous impulse. Even the avowed Catholics--the Hamiltons, the
Gordons, the Scotts, the Kers, the Maxwells--quailed before the wail of
rage and sorrow which at that great horror rose over their country. The
Queen's party dwindled away to a handful of desperate politicians, who
still clung to Edinburgh Castle. But Elizabeth's 'peace-makers,' as the
big English cannon were called, came round, at the Regent's request,
from Berwick; David's tower, as Knox had long ago foretold, 'ran down
over the cliff like a sandy brae;' and the cause of Mary Stuart in
Scotland was extinguished for ever. Poor Grange, who deserved a better
end, was hanged at the Market Cross. Secretary Maitland, the cause of
all the mischief--the cleverest man, as far as intellect went, in all
Britain--died (so later rumour said) by his own hand. A nobler version
of his end is probably a truer one: He had been long ill--so ill that
when the Castle cannon were fired, he had been carried into the cellars
as unable to bear the sound. The breaking down of his hopes finished
him. 'The secretary,' wrote some one from the spot to Cecil, 'is dead of
grief, being unable to endure the great hatred which all this people
bears towards him.' It would be well if some competent man would write a
life of Maitland, or at least edit his papers. They contain by far the
clearest account of the inward movements of the time; and he himself is
one of the most tragically interesting characters in the cycle of the
Reformation history.
With the fall of the Castle, then, but not till then, it became clear to
all men that the Reformation would hold its ground. It was the final
trampling out of the fire which for five years had threatened both
England and Scotland with flames and ruin. For five years--as late
certainly as the massacre of St. Bartholomew--those who understood best
the true state of things, felt the keenest misgivings how the event
would turn. That things ended as they did was due to the spirit of the
Scotch commons. There was a moment when, if they had given way, all
would have gone, perhaps even to Elizabeth's throne. They had passed for
nothing; they had proved to be everything; had proved--the ultimate test
in human things--to be the power which could hit the hardest blows, and
they took rank accordingly. The creed began now in good earnest to make
its way into hall and castle; but it kept the form which it assumed in
the first hours of its danger and trial, and never after lost it. Had
the aristocracy dealt sincerely with things in the earlier stages of the
business, again I say the democratic element in the Kirk might have been
softened or modified. But the Protestants had been trifled with by their
own natural leaders. Used and abused by Elizabeth, despised by the
worldly intelligence and power of the times--they triumphed after all,
and, as a natural consequence, they set their own mark and stamp upon
the fruits of the victory.
The question now is, what has the Kirk so established done for Scotland?
Has it justified its own existence? Briefly, we might say, it has
continued its first function as the guardian of Scottish freedom. But
that is a vague phrase, and there are special accusations against the
Kirk and its doctrines which imply that it has cared for other things
than freedom. Narrow, fanatical, dictatorial, intrusive, superstitious,
a spiritual despotism, the old priesthood over again with a new
face--these and other such epithets and expressions we have heard often
enough applied to it at more than one stage of its history. Well, I
suppose that neither the Kirk nor anything else of man's making is
altogether perfect. But let us look at the work which lay before it when
it had got over its first perils. Scotch patriotism succeeded at last in
the object it had so passionately set its heart upon. It sent a king at
last of the Scotch blood to England, and a new dynasty; and it never
knew peace or quiet after. The Kirk had stood between James Stuart and
his kingcraft. He hated it as heartily as did his mother; and, when he
got to England, he found people there who told him it would be easy to
destroy it, and he found the strength of a fresh empire to back him in
trying to do it. To have forced prelacy upon Scotland would have been to
destroy the life out of Scotland. Thrust upon them by force, it would
have been no more endurable than Popery. They would as soon, perhaps
sooner, have had what the Irish call the 'rale thing' back again. The
political freedom of the country was now wrapped up in the Kirk; and the
Stuarts were perfectly well aware of that, and for that very reason
began their crusade against it.
And now, suppose the Kirk had been the broad, liberal, philosophical,
intellectual thing which some people think it ought to have been, how
would it have fared in that crusade; how altogether would it have
encountered those surplices of Archbishop Laud or those dragoons of
Claverhouse? It is hard to lose one's life for a 'perhaps,' and
philosophical belief at the bottom means a 'perhaps' and nothing more.
For more than half the seventeenth century, the battle had to be fought
out in Scotland, which in reality was the battle between liberty and
despotism; and where, except in an intense, burning conviction that they
were maintaining God's cause against the devil, could the poor Scotch
people have found the strength for the unequal struggle which was forced
upon them? Toleration is a good thing in its place; but you cannot
tolerate what will not tolerate you, and is trying to cut your throat.
Enlightenment you cannot have enough of, but it must be true
enlightenment, which sees a thing in all its bearings. In these matters
the vital questions are not always those which appear on the surface;
and in the passion and resolution of brave and noble men there is often
an inarticulate intelligence deeper than what can be expressed in words.
Action sometimes will hit the mark, when the spoken word either misses
it or is but half the truth. On such subjects, and with common men,
latitude of mind means weakness of mind. There is but a certain quantity
of spiritual force in any man. Spread it over a broad surface, the
stream is shallow and languid; narrow the channel, and it becomes a
driving force. Each may be well at its own time. The mill-race which
drives the water-wheel is dispersed in rivulets over the meadow at its
foot. The Covenanters fought the fight and won the victory, and then,
and not till then, came the David Humes with their essays on miracles,
and the Adam Smiths with their political economies, and steam-engines,
and railroads, and philosophical institutions, and all the other blessed
or unblessed fruits of liberty.
But we may go further. Institutions exist for men, not men for
institutions; and the ultimate test of any system of politics, or body
of opinions, or form of belief, is the effect produced on the conduct
and condition of the people who live and die under them. Now, I am not
here to speak of Scotland of the present day. That, happily, is no
business of mine. We have to do here with Scotland before the march of
intellect; with Scotland of the last two centuries; with the three or
four hundred thousand families, who for half-a-score of generations
believed simply and firmly in the principles of the Reformation, and
walked in the ways of it.
Looked at broadly, one would say they had been an eminently pious
people. It is part of the complaint of modern philosophers about them,
that religion, or superstition, or whatever they please to call it, had
too much to do with their daily lives. So far as one can look into that
commonplace round of things which historians never tell us about, there
have rarely been seen in this world a set of people who have thought
more about right and wrong, and the judgment about them of the upper
powers. Long-headed, thrifty industry,--a sound hatred of waste,
imprudence, idleness, extravagance,--the feet planted firmly upon the
earth,--a conscientious sense that the worldly virtues are,
nevertheless, very necessary virtues, that without these, honesty for
one thing is not possible, and that without honesty no other excellence,
religious or moral, is worth anything at all--this is the stuff of which
Scotch life was made, and very good stuff it is. It has been called
gloomy, austere, harsh, and such other epithets. A gifted modern writer
has favoured us lately with long strings of extracts from the sermons of
Scotch divines of the last century, taking hard views of human
shortcomings and their probable consequences, and passing hard censures
upon the world and its amusements. Well, no doubt amusement is a very
good thing; but I should rather infer from the vehemence and frequency
of these denunciations that the people had not been in the habit of
denying themselves too immoderately; and, after all, it is no very hard
charge against those teachers that they thought more of duty than of
pleasure. Sermons always exaggerate the theoretic side of things; and
the most austere preacher, when he is out of the pulpit, and you meet
him at the dinner-table, becomes singularly like other people. We may
take courage, I think, we may believe safely that in those
minister-ridden days, men were not altogether so miserable; we may hope
that no large body of human beings have for any length of time been too
dangerously afraid of enjoyment. Among other good qualities, the Scots
have been distinguished for humour--not for venomous wit, but for
kindly, genial humour, which half loves what it laughs at--and this
alone shows clearly enough that those to whom it belongs have not looked
too exclusively on the gloomy side of the world. I should rather say
that the Scots had been an unusually happy people. Intelligent industry,
the honest doing of daily work, with a sense that it must be done well,
under penalties; the necessaries of life moderately provided for; and a
sensible content with the situation of life in which men are born--this
through the week, and at the end of it the 'Cottar's Saturday
Night'--the homely family, gathered reverently and peacefully together,
and irradiated with a sacred presence.--Happiness! such happiness as we
human creatures are likely to know upon this world, will be found there,
if anywhere.
The author of the 'History of Civilisation' makes a naive remark in
connexion with this subject. Speaking of the other country, which he
censures equally with Scotland for its slavery to superstition, he says
of the Spaniards that they are a well-natured, truthful, industrious,
temperate, pious people, innocent in their habits, affectionate in their
families, full of humour, vivacity, and shrewdness, yet that all this
'has availed them nothing'--'has availed them nothing,' that is his
expression--because they are loyal, because they are credulous, because
they are contented, because they have not apprehended the first
commandment of the new covenant: 'Thou shalt get on and make money, and
better thy condition in life;' because, therefore, they have added
nothing to the scientific knowledge, the wealth, and the progress of
mankind. Without these, it seems, the old-fashioned virtues avail
nothing. They avail a great deal to human happiness. Applied science,
and steam, and railroads, and machinery, enable an ever-increasing
number of people to live upon the earth; but the happiness of those
people remains, so far as I know, dependent very much on the old
conditions. I should be glad to believe that the new views of things
will produce effects upon the character in the long run half so
beautiful.
There is much more to say on this subject, were there time to say it,
but I will not trespass too far upon your patience; and I would gladly
have ended here, had not the mention of Spain suggested one other topic,
which I should not leave unnoticed. The Spain of Cervantes and Don
Quixote was the Spain of the Inquisition. The Scotland of Knox and
Melville was the Scotland of the witch trials and witch burnings. The
belief in witches was common to all the world. The prosecution and
punishment of the poor creatures was more conspicuous in Scotland when
the Kirk was most powerful; in England and New England, when Puritan
principles were also dominant there. It is easy to understand the
reasons. Evil of all kinds was supposed to be the work of a personal
devil; and in the general horror of evil, this particular form of it,
in which the devil was thought especially active, excited the most
passionate detestation. Thus, even the best men lent themselves
unconsciously to the most detestable cruelty. Knox himself is not free
from reproach. A poor woman was burned at St. Andrews when he was living
there, and when a word from him would have saved her. It remains a
lesson to all time, that goodness, though the indispensable adjunct to
knowledge, is no substitute for it; that when conscience undertakes to
dictate beyond its province, the result is only the more monstrous.
It is well that we should look this matter in the face; and as
particular stories leave more impression than general statements, I will
mention one, perfectly well authenticated, which I take from the
official report of the proceedings:--Towards the end of 1593 there was
trouble in the family of the Earl of Orkney. His brother laid a plot to
murder him, and was said to have sought the help of a 'notorious witch'
called Alison Balfour. When Alison Balfour's life was looked into, no
evidence could be found connecting her either with the particular
offence or with witchcraft in general; but it was enough in these
matters to be accused. She swore she was innocent; but her guilt was
only held to be aggravated by perjury. She was tortured again and again.
Her legs were put in the caschilaws--an iron frame which was gradually
heated till it burned into the flesh--but no confession could be wrung
from her. The caschilaws failed utterly, and something else had to be
tried. She had a husband, a son, and a daughter, a child seven years
old. As her own sufferings did not work upon her, she might be touched,
perhaps, by the sufferings of those who were dear to her. They were
brought into court, and placed at her side; and the husband first was
placed in the 'lang irons'--some accursed instrument; I know not what.
Still the devil did not yield. She bore this; and her son was next
operated on. The boy's legs were set in 'the boot,'--the iron boot you
may have heard of. The wedges were driven in, which, when forced home,
crushed the very bone and marrow. Fifty-seven mallet strokes were
delivered upon the wedges. Yet this, too, failed. There was no
confession yet. So, last of all, the little daughter was taken. There
was a machine called the piniwinkies--a kind of thumbscrew, which
brought blood from under the finger nails, with a pain successfully
terrible. These things were applied to the poor child's hands, and the
mother's constancy broke down, and she said she would admit anything
they wished. She confessed her witchcraft--so tried, she would have
confessed to the seven deadly sins--and then she was burned, recalling
her confession, and with her last breath protesting her innocence.
It is due to the intelligence of the time to admit that after this her
guilt was doubted, and such vicarious means of extorting confession do
not seem to have been tried again. Yet the men who inflicted these
tortures would have borne them all themselves sooner than have done any
act which they consciously knew to be wrong. They did not know that the
instincts of humanity were more sacred than the logic of theology, and
in fighting against the devil they were themselves doing the devil's
work. We should not attempt to apologise for these things, still less to
forget them. No martyrs ever suffered to instil into mankind a more
wholesome lesson--more wholesome, or one more hard to learn. The more
conscientious men are, the more difficult it is for them to understand
that in their most cherished convictions, when they pass beyond the
limits where the wise and good of all sorts agree, they may be the
victims of mere delusion. Yet, after all, and happily, such cases were
but few, and affected but lightly the general condition of the people.
The student running over the records of other times finds certain
salient things standing out in frightful prominence. He concludes that
the substance of those times was made up of the matters most dwelt on by
the annalist. He forgets that the things most noticed are not those of
every-day experience, but the abnormal, the extraordinary, the
monstrous. The exceptions are noted down, the common and usual is passed
over in silence. The philosophic historian, studying hereafter this
present age, in which we are ourselves living, may say that it was a
time of unexampled prosperity, luxury, and wealth; but catching at
certain horrible murders which have lately disgraced our civilisation,
may call us a nation of assassins. It is to invert the pyramid and stand
it on its point. The same system of belief which produced the tragedy
which I have described, in its proper province as the guide of ordinary
life, has been the immediate cause of all that is best and greatest in
Scottish character.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF CATHOLICISM.[C]
Not long ago I heard a living thinker of some eminence say that he
considered Christianity to have been a misfortune. Intellectually, he
said, it was absurd; and practically, it was an offence, over which he
stumbled. It would have been far better for mankind, he thought, if they
could have kept clear of superstition, and followed on upon the track of
the Grecian philosophy. So little do men care to understand the
conditions which have made them what they are, and which has created for
them that very wisdom in which they themselves are so contented. But it
is strange, indeed, that a person who could deliberately adopt such a
conclusion should trouble himself any more to look for truth. If a mere
absurdity could make its way out of a little fishing village in Galilee,
and spread through the whole civilised world; if men are so pitiably
silly, that in an age of great mental activity their strongest thinkers
should have sunk under an abortion of fear and folly, should have
allowed it to absorb into itself whatever of heroism, of devotion,
self-sacrifice, and moral nobleness there was among them; surely there
were nothing better for a wise man than to make the best of his time,
and to crowd what enjoyment he can find into it, sheltering himself in a
very disdainful Pyrrhonism from all care for mankind or for their
opinions. For what better test of truth have we than the ablest men's
acceptance of it? and if the ablest men eighteen centuries ago
deliberately accepted what is now too absurd to reason upon, what right
have we to hope that with the same natures, the same passions, the same
understandings, no better proof against deception, we, like they, are
not entangled in what, at the close of another era, shall seem again
ridiculous? The scoff of Cicero at the divinity of Liber and Ceres
(bread and wine) may be translated literally by the modern Protestant;
and the sarcasms which Clement and Tertullian flung at the Pagan creed,
the modern sceptic returns upon their own. Of what use is it to destroy
an idol, when another, or the same in another form, takes immediate
possession of the vacant pedestal?
I shall not argue with the extravagant hypothesis of my friend. In the
opinion even of Goethe, who was not troubled with credulity, the human
race can never attain to anything higher than Christianity--if we mean
by Christianity the religion which was revealed to the world in the
teaching and the life of its Founder. But even the more limited
reprobation by our own Reformers of the creed of mediaeval Europe is not
more just or philosophical.
Ptolemy was not perfect, but Newton had been a fool if he had scoffed at
Ptolemy. Newton could not have been without Ptolemy, nor Ptolemy without
the Chaldees; and as it is with the minor sciences, so far more is it
with the science of sciences--the science of life, which has grown
through all the ages from the beginning of time. We speak of the errors
of the past. We, with this glorious present which is opening on us, we
shall never enter on it, we shall never understand it, till we have
learnt to see in that past, not error, but instalment of truth,
hard-fought-for truth, wrung out with painful and heroic effort. The
promised land is smiling before us, but we may not pass over into the
possession of it while the bones of our fathers who laboured through the
wilderness lie bleaching on the sands, or a prey to the unclean birds.
We must gather their relics and bury them, and sum up their labours, and
inscribe the record of their actions on their tombs as an honourable
epitaph. If Catholicism really is passing away, if it has done its work,
and if what is left of it is now holding us back from better things, it
is not for our bitterness but for our affectionate acknowledgment, nor
for our heaping contempt on what it is, but for our reverend and patient
examination of what it has been, that it will be content to bid us
farewell, and give us God speed on our further journey.
In the Natural History of Religions, certain broad phenomena perpetually
repeat themselves; they rise in the highest thought extant at the time
of their origin; the conclusions of philosophy settle into a creed; art
ornaments it, devotion consecrates it, time elaborates it. It grows
through a long series of generations into the heart and habits of the
people; and so long as no disturbing cause interferes, or so long as the
idea at the centre of it survives, a healthy, vigorous, natural life
shoots beautifully up out of the intellectual root. But at last the idea
becomes obsolete; the numbing influence of habit petrifies the spirit in
the outside ceremonial, while new questions arise among the thinkers,
and ideas enter into new and unexplained relations. The old formula will
not serve; but new formulae are tardy in appearing; and habit and
superstition cling to the past, and policy vindicates it, and statecraft
upholds it forcibly as serviceable to order, till, from the combined
action of folly, and worldliness, and ignorance, the once beautiful
symbolism becomes at last no better than 'a whited sepulchre full of
dead men's bones and all uncleanness.' So it is now. So it was in the
era of the Caesars, out of which Christianity arose; and Christianity, in
the form which it assumed at the close of the Arian controversy, was the
deliberate solution which the most powerful intellects of that day could
offer of the questions which had grown with the growth of mankind, and
on which Paganism had suffered shipwreck.
Paganism, as a creed, was entirely physical. When Paganism rose, men had
not begun to reflect upon themselves, or the infirmities of their own
nature. The bad man was a bad man--the coward, a coward--the liar, a
liar--individually hateful and despicable: but in hating and despising
such unfortunates, the old Greeks were satisfied to have felt all that
it was necessary to feel about them; and how such a phenomenon as a bad
man came to exist in this world, they scarcely cared to enquire. There
is no evil spirit in the mythology as an antagonist of the gods. There
is the Erinnys as the avenger of monstrous villanies; there is a
Tartarus where the darkest criminals suffer eternal tortures. But
Tantalus and Ixion are suffering for enormous crimes, to which the small
wickedness of common men offers no analogy. Moreover, these and other
such stories are only curiously ornamented myths, representing physical
phenomena. But with Socrates a change came over philosophy; a
sign--perhaps a cause--of the decline of the existing religion. The
study of man superseded the study of nature: a purer Theism came in with
the higher ideal of perfection, and sin and depravity at once assumed an
importance, the intensity of which made every other question
insignificant. How man could know the good and yet choose the evil; how
God could be all pure and almighty, and yet evil have broken into his
creation--these were the questions which thenceforth were the perplexity
of philosophic speculation.
Whatever difficulty there might be in discovering how evil came to be,
the leaders of all the sects agreed at last upon the seat of it. Whether
_matter_ was eternal, as Aristotle thought, or created, as Plato
thought, both Plato and Aristotle were equally satisfied that the secret
of all the shortcomings in this world lay in the imperfection,
reluctancy, or inherent grossness of this impracticable substance. God
would have everything perfect, but the nature of the element in which He
worked in some way defeated his purpose. Death, disease, decay, clung
necessarily to everything which was created out of it; and pain, and
want, and hunger, and suffering. Worse than all, the spirit in its
material body was opposed and borne down, its aspirations crushed, its
purity tainted by the passions and appetites of its companion--the
fleshly lusts which waged perpetual war against the soul.
Matter was the cause of evil, and thenceforth the question was how to
conquer matter, or, at least, how to set free the spirit from its
control.
The Greek language and the Greek literature spread behind the march of
Alexander; but as his generals could only make their conquests permanent
by largely accepting the Eastern manners, so philosophy could only make
good its ground by becoming itself Orientalised. The one pure and holy
God whom Plato had painfully reasoned out for himself had existed from
immemorial time in the traditions of the Jews; while the Persians, who
had before taught the Jews at Babylon the existence of an independent
evil being, now had him to offer to the Greeks as their account of the
difficulties which had perplexed Socrates. Seven centuries of struggle,
and many hundred thousand folios, were the results of the remarkable
fusion which followed. Out of these elements, united in various
proportions, rose successively the Alexandrian philosophy, the
Hellenists, the Therapeutae, those strange Essene communists, with the
innumerable sects of Gnostic or Christian heretics. Finally, the battle
was limited to the two great rivals, under one or other of which the
best of the remainder had ranged themselves--Manicheism and Catholic
Christianity: Manicheism in which the Persian--Catholicism in which the
Jewish--element most preponderated. It did not end till the close of the
fifth century, and it ended then rather by arbitration than by a decided
victory which either side could claim. The Church has yet to acknowledge
how large a portion of its enemy's doctrines it incorporated through the
mediation of Augustine before the field was surrendered to it. Let us
trace something of the real bearings of this section of the world's
Oriental history, which to so many moderns seems no better than an idle
fighting over words and straws.
Facts witnessing so clearly that the especial strength of evil lay, as
the philosophers had seen, in _matter_, it was so far a conclusion which
both Jew and Persian were ready to accept; the naked Aristotelic view of
it being most acceptable to the Persian, the Platonic to the Hellenistic
Jew. But the purer theology of the Jew forced him to look for a solution
of the question which Plato had left doubtful, and to explain how evil
had crept into matter. He could not allow that what God had created
could be of its own nature imperfect. God made it very good; some other
cause had broken in to spoil it. Accordingly, as before he had reduced
the independent Arimanes, whose existence he had learnt at Babylon, into
a subordinate spirit; so now, not questioning the facts of disease, of
death, of pain, or of the infirmity of the flesh which the natural
strength of the spirit was unable to resist, he accounted for them under
the supposition that the first man had deliberately sinned, and by his
sin had brought a curse upon the whole material earth, and upon all
which was fashioned out of it. The earth was created pure and lovely--a
garden of delight, loading itself of its own free accord with fruit and
flower, and everything most exquisite and beautiful. No bird or beast of
prey broke the eternal peace which reigned over its hospitable surface.
In calm and quiet intercourse, the leopard lay down by the kid, the lion
browsed beside the ox, and the corporeal frame of man, knowing neither
decay nor death, nor unruly appetite, nor any change or infirmity, was
pure as the immortal substance of the unfallen angels.
But with the fatal apple all this fair scene passed away, and creation
as it seemed was hopelessly and irretrievably ruined. Adam sinned--no
matter how, he sinned; the sin was the one terrible fact: moral evil was
brought into the world by the only creature who was capable of
committing it. Sin entered in, and death by sin; death and disease,
storm and pestilence, earthquake and famine. The imprisoned passions of
the wild animals were let loose, and earth and air became full of
carnage: worst of all, man's animal nature came out in gigantic
strength--the carnal lusts, unruly appetites, jealousies, hatreds,
rapines, and murders; and then the law, and with it, of course, breaches
of the law, and sin on sin. The seed of Adam was infected in the animal
change which had passed over Adam's person, and every child, therefore,
thenceforth naturally engendered in his posterity, was infected with the
curse which he had incurred. Every material organisation thenceforward
contained in itself the elements of its own destruction, and the
philosophic conclusions of Aristotle were accepted and explained by
theology. Already, in the popular histories, those who were infected by
disease were said to be bound by Satan; madness was a 'possession' by
the Evil Spirit; and the whole creation, from Adam till Christ, groaned
and travailed under Satan's power. The nobler nature in man still made
itself felt; but it was a slave when it ought to command. It might will
to obey the higher law, but the law in the members was over-strong for
it and bore it down. This was the body of death which philosophy
detected but could not explain, and from which Catholicism now came
forward with its magnificent promise of deliverance.
The carnal doctrine of the sacraments, which Protestants are compelled
to acknowledge to have been taught as fully in the early Church as it is
now taught by the Roman Catholics, has long been the stumbling-block to
modern thought. It was the very essence of the original creed. Unless
the body could be purified, the soul could not be saved; because from
the beginning, soul and flesh were one man and inseparable. Without his
flesh, man was not, or would cease to be. But the natural organisation
of the flesh was infected with evil, and unless organisation could begin
again from a new original, no pure material substance could exist at
all. He, therefore, by whom God had first made the world, entered into
the womb of the Virgin in the form (if I may with reverence say so) of a
new organic cell; and around it, through the virtue of his creative
energy, a material body grew again of the substance of his mother, pure
of taint and clean as the first body of the first man was clean when it
passed out under his hand in the beginning of all things. In Him thus
wonderfully born was the virtue which was to restore the lost power of
mankind. He came to redeem man; and, therefore, He took a human body,
and He kept it pure through a human life, till the time came when it
could be applied to its marvellous purpose. He died, and then appeared
what was the nature of a material human body when freed from the
limitations of sin. The grave could not hold it, neither was it possible
that it should see corruption. It was real, for the disciples were
allowed to feel and handle it. He ate and drank with them to assure
their senses. But space had no power over it, nor any of the material
obstacles which limit an ordinary power. He willed, and his body obeyed.
He was here, He was there. He was visible, He was invisible. He was in
the midst of his disciples and they saw Him, and then he was gone
whither who could tell? At last He passed away to heaven; but while in
heaven, He was still on earth. His body became the body of his Church on
earth, not in metaphor, but in fact!--his very material body, in which
and by which the faithful would be saved. His flesh and blood were
thenceforth to be their food. They were to eat it as they would eat
ordinary meat. They were to take it into their system, a pure material
substance, to leaven the old natural substance and assimilate it to
itself. As they fed upon it it would grow into them, and it would become
their own real body. Flesh grown in the old way was the body of death,
but the flesh of Christ was the life of the world, over which death had
no power. Circumcision availed nothing, nor uncircumcision--but a _new
creature_--and this new creature, which the child first put on in
baptism, was born again into Christ of water and the Spirit. In the
Eucharist he was fed and sustained, and went on from strength to
strength; and ever as the nature of his body changed, being able to
render a more complete obedience, he would at last pass away to God
through the gate of the grave, and stand holy and perfect in the
presence of Christ. Christ had indeed been ever present with him; but
because while life lasted some particles of the old Adam would
necessarily cling to every man, the Christian's mortal eye on earth
could not see Him. Hedged in by 'his muddy vesture of decay,' his eyes,
like the eyes of the disciples of Emmaus, are holden, and only in faith
he feels Him. But death, which till Christ had died had been the last
victory of evil, in virtue of his submission to it, became its own
destroyer, for it had power only over the tainted particles of the old
substance, and there was nothing needed but that these should be washed
away, and the elect would stand out at once pure and holy, clothed in
immortal bodies, like refined gold, the redeemed of God.
The being who accomplished a work so vast--a work compared to which the
first creation appears but a trifling difficulty--what could He be but
God? God Himself! Who but God could have wrested his prize from a power
which half the thinking world believed to be his coequal and coeternal
adversary? He was God. He was man also, for He was the second Adam--the
second starting-point of human growth. He was virgin born, that no
original impurity might infect the substance which He assumed; and being
Himself sinless, He showed, in the nature of his person, after his
resurrection, what the material body would have been in all of us except
for sin, and what it will be when, after feeding on it in its purity,
the bodies of each of us are transfigured after its likeness. Here was
the secret of the spirit which set St. Simeon on his pillar and sent St.
Anthony to the tombs--of the night watches, the weary fasts, the
penitential scourgings, the life-long austerities which have been
alternately the glory and the reproach of the mediaeval saints. They
desired to overcome their animal bodies, and anticipate in life the work
of death in uniting themselves more completely to Christ by the
destruction of the flesh, which lay as a veil between themselves and
Him.
Such I believe to have been the central idea of the beautiful creed
which, for 1,500 years, tuned the heart and formed the mind of the
noblest of mankind. From this centre it radiated out and spread, as time
went on, into the full circle of human activity, flinging its own
philosophy and its own peculiar grace over the common details of the
common life of all of us. Like the seven lamps before the Throne of God,
the seven mighty angels, and the seven stars, the seven sacraments shed
over mankind a never-ceasing stream of blessed influences. The priests,
a holy order set apart and endowed with mysterious power, represented
Christ and administered his gifts. Christ, in his twelfth year, was
presented in the Temple, and first entered on his Father's business; and
the baptised child, when it has grown to an age to become conscious of
its vow and of its privilege, again renews it in full knowledge of what
it undertakes, and receives again sacramentally a fresh gift of grace to
assist it forward on its way. In maturity it seeks a companion to share
its pains and pleasures; and, again, Christ is present to consecrate the
union. Marriage, which, outside the Church, only serves to perpetuate
the curse and bring fresh inheritors of misery into the world, He made
holy by his presence at Cana, and chose it as the symbol to represent
his own mystic union with his Church. Even saints cannot live without at
times some spot adhering to them. The atmosphere in which we breathe and
move is soiled, and Christ has anticipated our wants. Christ did penance
forty days in the wilderness, not to subdue his own flesh--for that
which was already perfect did not need subduing--but to give to penance
a cleansing virtue to serve for our daily or our hourly ablution. Christ
consecrates our birth; Christ throws over us our baptismal robe of pure
unsullied innocence. He strengthens us as we go forward. He raises us
when we fall. He feeds us with the substance of his own most precious
body. In the person of his minister he does all this for us, in virtue
of that which in his own person He actually performed when a man living
on this earth. Last of all, when time is drawing to its close with
us--when life is past, when the work is done, and the dark gate is near,
beyond which the garden of an eternal home is waiting to receive us, his
tender care has not forsaken us. He has taken away the sting of death,
but its appearance is still terrible; and He will not leave us without
special help at our last need. He tried the agony of the moment; and He
sweetens the cup for us before we drink it. We are dismissed to the
grave with our bodies anointed with oil, which He made holy in his last
anointing before his passion, and then all is over. We lie down and seem
to decay--to decay--but not all. Our natural body decays, being the last
remains of the infected matter which we have inherited from Adam; but
the spiritual body, the glorified substance which has made our life, and
is our real body as we are in Christ, that can never decay, but passes
off into the kingdom which is prepared for it; that other world where
there is no sin, and God is all and in all!
FOOTNOTES:
[C] From the _Leader_, 1851.
A PLEA FOR THE FREE DISCUSSION OF THEOLOGICAL DIFFICULTIES.[D]
In the ordinary branches of human knowledge or enquiry, the judicious
questioning of received opinions has been regarded as the sign of
scientific vitality, the principle of scientific advancement, the very
source and root of healthy progress and growth. If medicine had been
regulated three hundred years ago by Act of Parliament; if there had
been Thirty-nine Articles of Physic, and every licensed practitioner had
been compelled, under pains and penalties, to compound his drugs by the
prescriptions of Henry the Eighth's physician, Doctor Butts, it is easy
to conjecture in what state of health the people of this country would
at present be found. Constitutions have changed with habits of life, and
the treatment of disorders has changed to meet the new conditions. New
diseases have shown themselves of which Doctor Butts had no cognizance;
new continents have given us plants with medicinal virtues previously
unknown; new sciences, and even the mere increase of recorded
experience, have added a thousand remedies to those known to the age of
the Tudors. If the College of Physicians had been organised into a board
of orthodoxy, and every novelty of treatment had been regarded as a
crime against society, which a law had been established to punish, the
hundreds who die annually from preventible causes would have been
thousands and tens of thousands.
Astronomy is the most perfect of the sciences. The accuracy of the
present theory of the planetary movements is tested daily and hourly by
the most delicate experiments, and the Legislature, if it so pleased,
might enact the first principles of these movements into a statute,
without danger of committing the law of England to falsehood. Yet, if
the Legislature were to venture on any such paternal procedure in a few
years gravitation itself would be called in question, and the whole
science would wither under the fatal shadow. There are many phenomena
still unexplained to give plausibility to scepticism; there are others
more easily formularised for working purposes in the language of
Hipparchus; and there would be reactionists who would invite us to
return to the safe convictions of our forefathers. What the world has
seen the world may see again; and were it once granted that astronomy
were something to be ruled by authority, new popes would imprison new
Galileos; the knowledge already acquired would be strangled in the cords
which were intended to keep it safe from harm, and, deprived of the free
air on which its life depends, it would dwindle and die.
A few years ago, an Inspector of Schools--a Mr. Jellinger
Symonds--opening, perhaps for the first time, an elementary book on
astronomy, came on something which he conceived to be a difficulty in
the theory of lunar motion. His objection was on the face of it
plausible. The true motions of the heavenly bodies are universally the
opposite of the apparent motions. Mr. Symonds conceived that the moon
could not revolve on its axis, because the same side of it was
continually turned towards the earth; and because if it were connected
with the earth by a rigid bar--which, as he thought, would deprive it of
power of rotation--the relative aspects of the two bodies would remain
unchanged. He sent his views to the 'Times.' He appealed to the common
sense of the world, and common sense seemed to be on his side. The men
of science were of course right; but a phenomenon, not entirely obvious,
had been hitherto explained in language which the general reader could
not readily comprehend. A few words of elucidation cleared up the
confusion. We do not recollect whether Mr. Symonds was satisfied or not;
but most of us who had before received what the men of science told us
with an unintelligent and languid assent, were set thinking for
ourselves, and, as a result of the discussion, exchanged a confused idea
for a clear one.
It was an excellent illustration of the true claims of authority and of
the value of open enquiry. The ignorant man has not as good a right to
his own opinion as the instructed man. The instructed man, however
right he may be, must not deliver his conclusions as axioms, and merely
insist that they are true. The one asks a question, the other answers
it, and all of us are the better for the business.
Now, let us suppose the same thing to have happened when the only reply
to a difficulty was an appeal to the Astronomer-Royal, where the
rotation of the moon was an article of salvation decreed by the law of
the land, and where all persons admitted to hold office under the State
were required to subscribe to it. The Astronomer-Royal--as it was, if we
remember right, he was a little cross at Mr. Symond's presumption--would
have brought an action against him in the Court of Arches; Mr. Symonds
would have been deprived of his inspectorship--for, of course, he would
have been obstinate in his heresy; the world outside would have had an
antecedent presumption that truth lay with the man who was making
sacrifices for it, and that there was little to be said in the way of
argument for what could not stand without the help of the law. Everybody
could understand the difficulty; not everybody would have taken the
trouble to attend to the answer. Mr. Symonds would have been a Colenso,
and a good many of us would have been convinced in our secret hearts
that the moon as little turned on its axis as the drawing-room table.
As it is in idea essential to a reverence for truth to believe in its
capacity for self-defence, so practically, in every subject except one,
errors are allowed free room to express themselves, and the liberty of
opinion which is the life of knowledge, as surely becomes the death of
falsehood. A method--the soundness of which is so evident that to argue
in favour of it is almost absurd--might be expected to have been
applied, as a matter of course, to the one subject where mistake is
supposed to be fatal,--where to come to wrong conclusions is held to be
a crime for which the Maker of the universe has neither pardon nor pity.
Yet many reasons, not difficult to understand, have long continued to
exclude theology from the region where free discussion is supposed to be
applicable. That so many persons have a personal interest in the
maintenance of particular views, would of itself be fatal to fair
argument. Though they know themselves to be right, yet right is not
enough for them unless there is might to support it, and those who talk
most of faith show least that they possess it. But there are deeper and
more subtle objections. The theologian requires absolute certainty, and
there are no absolute certainties in science. The conclusions of science
are never more than in a high degree probable; they are no more than the
best explanations of phenomena which are attainable in the existing
state of knowledge. The most elementary laws are called laws only in
courtesy. They are generalisations which are not considered likely to
require modification, but which no one pretends to be in the nature of
the cause exhaustively and ultimately true. As phenomena become more
complicated, and the data for the interpretation of them more
inadequate, the explanations offered are put forward hypothetically, and
are graduated by the nature of the evidence. Such modest hesitation is
altogether unsuited to the theologian, whose certainty increases with
the mystery and obscurity of his matter; his convictions admit of no
qualification; his truth is sure as the axioms of geometry; he knows
what he believes, for he has the evidence in his heart; if he enquire,
it is with a foregone conclusion, and serious doubt with him is sin. It
is in vain to point out to him the thousand forms of opinions for each
of which the same internal witness is affirmed. The Mayo peasant
crawling with bare knees over the splintered rocks on Croagh Patrick,
the nun prostrate before the image of St. Mary, the Methodist in the
spasmodic ecstasy of a revival, alike are conscious of emotions in
themselves which correspond to their creed: the more passionate, or--as
some would say--the more unreasoning the piety, the louder and more
clear is the voice within. But these varieties are no embarrassment to
the theologian. He finds no fault with the method which is identical in
them all. Whatever the party to which he himself belongs, he is equally
satisfied that he alone has the truth; the rest are under illusions of
Satan.
Again, we hear--or we used to hear when the High Church party were more
formidable than they are at present--much about 'the right of private
judgment.' 'Why,' the eloquent Protestant would say, 'should I pin my
faith upon the Church? the Church is but a congregation of fallible men,
no better able to judge than I am; I have a right to my own opinion.' It
sounds like a paradox to say that free discussion is interfered with by
a cause which, above all others, would have been expected to further it;
but this in fact has been the effect, because it tends to remove the
grounds of theological belief beyond the province of argument. No one
talks of 'a right of private judgment' in anything but religion; no one
but a fool insists on his 'right to his own opinion' with his lawyer or
his doctor. Able men who have given their time to special subjects, are
authorities upon those subjects to be listened to with deference, and
the ultimate authority at any given time is the collective general sense
of the wisest men living in the department to which they belong. The
utmost 'right of private judgment' which anybody claims in such cases,
is the choice of the physician to whom he will trust his body, or of the
counsel to whom he will commit the conduct of his cause. The expression,
as it is commonly used, implies a belief that, in matters of religion,
the criteria of truth are different in kind from what prevail elsewhere,
and the efforts which have been made to bring such a notion into harmony
with common sense and common subjects have not been the least
successful. The High Church party used to say, as a point against the
Evangelicals, that either 'the right of private judgment' meant nothing,
or it meant that a man had a right to be in the wrong. 'No,' said a
writer in the 'Edinburgh Review,' 'it means only that if a man chooses
to be in the wrong, no one else has a right to interfere with him. A man
has no right to get drunk in his own house, but the policeman may not
force a way into his house and prevent him.' The illustration fails of
its purpose.
In the first place, the Evangelicals never contemplated a wrong use of
the thing; they meant merely that they had a right to their own opinions
as against the Church. They did not indeed put forward their claim quite
so nakedly; they made it general, as sounding less invidious; but nobody
ever heard an Evangelical admit a High Churchman's right to be a High
Churchman, or a Catholic's right to be a Catholic.
But secondly, society has a most absolute right to prevent all manner of
evil--drunkenness, and the rest of it, if it can--only in doing so,
society must not use means which would create a greater evil than it
would remedy. As a man can by no possibility be doing anything but most
foul wrong to himself in getting drunk, society does him no wrong, but
rather does him the greatest benefit, if it can possibly keep him sober;
and in the same way, since a false belief in serious matters is among
the greatest of misfortunes, so to drive it out of man, by the whip, if
it cannot be managed by persuasion, is an act of brotherly love and
affection, provided the belief really and truly is false, and you have a
better to give him in the place of it. The question is not what to do,
but merely 'how to do it;' although Mr. Mill in his love of 'liberty,'
thinks otherwise. Mr. Mill demands for every man a right to say out his
convictions in plain language, whatever they may be; and so far as he
means that there should be no Act of Parliament to prevent him, he is
perfectly just in what he says. But when Mr. Mill goes from Parliament
to public opinion--when he lays down as a general principle that the
free play of thought is unwholesomely interfered with by society, he
would take away the sole protection which we possess from the inroads of
any kind of folly. His dread of tyranny is so great, that he thinks a
man better off with a false opinion of his own than with a right opinion
inflicted upon him from without; while, for our own part, we should be
grateful for tyranny or for anything else which would perform so useful
an office for us.
Public opinion may be unjust at particular times and on particular
subjects; we believe it to be both unjust and unwise on the matter of
which we are at present speaking: but, on the whole, it is like the
ventilation of a house, which keeps the air pure. Much in this world has
to be taken for granted, and we cannot be for ever arguing over our
first principles. If a man persists in talking of what he does not
understand, he is put down; if he sports loose views on morals at a
decent dinner party, the better sort of people fight shy of him, and he
is not invited again; if he profess himself a Buddhist or a Mahometan,
it is assumed that he has not adopted those beliefs on serious
conviction, but rather in wilful levity and eccentricity which does not
deserve to be tolerated. Men have no right to make themselves bores and
nuisances; and the common sense of mankind inflicts wholesome
inconveniences on those who carry their 'right of private judgment' to
any such extremities. It is a check, the same in kind as that which
operates so wholesomely in the sciences. Mere folly is extinguished in
contempt; objections reasonably urged obtain a hearing and are
reasonably met. New truths, after encountering sufficient opposition to
test their value, make their way into general reception.
A further cause which has operated to prevent theology from obtaining
the benefit of free discussion is the interpretation popularly placed
upon the constitution of the Church Establishment. For fifteen centuries
of its existence, the Christian Church was supposed to be under the
immediate guidance of the Holy Spirit, which miraculously controlled its
decisions, and precluded the possibility of error. This theory broke
down at the Reformation, but it left behind it a confused sense that
theological truth was in some way different from other truth; and,
partly on grounds of public policy, partly because it was supposed to
have succeeded to the obligations and the rights of the Papacy, the
State took upon itself to fix by statute the doctrines which should be
taught to the people. The distractions created by divided opinions were
then dangerous. Individuals did not hesitate to ascribe to themselves
the infallibility which they denied to the Church. Everybody was
intolerant upon principle, and was ready to cut the throat of an
opponent whom his arguments had failed to convince. The State, while it
made no pretensions to Divine guidance, was compelled to interfere in
self-protection; and to keep the peace of the realm, and to prevent the
nation from tearing itself in pieces, a body of formulas was enacted,
for the time broad and comprehensive, within which opinion might be
allowed convenient latitude, while forbidden to pass beyond the border.
It might have been thought that in abandoning for itself, and formally
denying to the Church its pretensions to immunity from error, the State
could not have intended to bind the conscience. When this or that law is
passed, the subject is required to obey it, but he is not required to
approve of the law as just. The Prayer-Book and the Thirty-nine
Articles, so far as they are made obligatory by Act of Parliament, are
as much laws as any other statute. They are a rule to conduct; it is not
easy to see why they should be more; it is not easy to see why they
should have been supposed to deprive clergymen of a right to their
opinions, or to forbid discussion of their contents. The judge is not
forbidden to ameliorate the law which he administers. If in discharge of
his duty he has to pronounce a sentence which he declares at the same
time that he thinks unjust, no indignant public accuses him of
dishonesty, or requires him to resign his office. The soldier is asked
no questions as to the legitimacy of the war on which he is sent to
fight; nor need he throw up his commission if he think the quarrel a bad
one. Doubtless, if a law was utterly iniquitous--if a war was
unmistakably wicked--honourable men might feel uncertain what to do, and
would seek some other profession rather than continue instruments of
evil. But within limits, and in questions of detail, where the service
is generally good and honourable, we leave opinion its free play, and
exaggerated scrupulousness would be folly or something worse. Somehow or
other, however, this wholesome freedom is not allowed to the clergyman.
The idea of absolute inward belief has been substituted for that of
obedience; and the man who, in taking orders, signs the Articles and
accepts the Prayer Book, does not merely undertake to use the services
in the one, and abstain from contradicting to his congregation the
doctrines contained in the other; but he is held to promise what no
honest man, without presumption, can undertake to promise--that he will
continue to think to the end of his life as he thinks when he makes his
engagement.
It is said that if his opinions change, he may resign, and retire into
lay communion. We are not prepared to say that either the Convocation of
1562, or the Parliament which afterwards endorsed its proceedings, knew
exactly what they meant, or did not mean; but it is quite clear that
they did not contemplate the alternative of a clergyman's retirement. If
they had, they would have provided means by which he could have
abandoned his orders, and not have remained committed for life to a
profession from which he could not escape. If the popular theory of
subscription be true, and the Articles are articles of belief, a
reasonable human being, when little more than a boy, pledges himself to
a long series of intricate and highly-difficult propositions of abstruse
divinity. He undertakes never to waver or doubt--never to allow his mind
to be shaken, whatever the weight of argument or evidence brought to
bear upon him. That is to say, he promises to do what no man living has
a right to promise to do. He is doing, on the authority of Parliament,
precisely what the Church of Rome required him to do on the authority of
a Council.
If a clergyman--in trouble amidst the abstruse subjects with which he
has to deal, or unable to reconcile some new-discovered truth of science
with the established formulas--puts forward his perplexities; if he
ventures a doubt of the omniscience of the statesmen and divines of the
sixteenth century, which they themselves disowned, there is an instant
cry to have him stifled, silenced, or trampled down; and if no longer
punished in life and limb, to have him deprived of the means on which
life and limb can be supported, while with ingenious tyranny he is
forbidden to maintain himself by any other occupation.
So far have we gone in this direction, that when the 'Essays and
Reviews' appeared, it was gravely said--and said by men who had no
professional antipathy to them--that the writers had broken their faith.
Laymen were free to say what they pleased on such subjects; clergymen
were the hired exponents of the established opinions, and were committed
to them in thought and word. It was one more anomaly where there were
enough already. To say that the clergy, who are set apart to study a
particular subject, are to be the only persons unpermitted to have an
independent opinion upon it, is like saying that lawyers must take no
part in the amendment of the statute-book; that engineers must be silent
upon mechanism; and if an improvement is wanted in the art of medicine,
physicians may have nothing to say to it.
These causes would, perhaps, have been insufficient to repress free
enquiry, if there had been on the part of the really able men among us a
determination to break the ice; in other words, if theology had
preserved the same commanding interest for the more powerful minds with
which it affected them three hundred years ago. But on the one hand, a
sense, half serious, half languid, of the hopelessness of the subject
has produced an indisposition to meddle with it; on the other, there has
been a creditable reluctance to disturb by discussion the minds of the
uneducated or half-educated, to whom the established religion is simply
an expression of the obedience which they owe to Almighty God, on the
details of which they think little, and are therefore unconscious of its
difficulties, while in general it is the source of all that is best and
noblest in their lives and actions.
This last motive no doubt deserves respect, but the force which it once
possessed it possesses no longer. The uncertainty which once affected
only the more instructed extends now to all classes of society. A
superficial crust of agreement, wearing thinner day by day, is
undermined everywhere by a vague misgiving; and there is an unrest
which will be satisfied only when the sources of it are probed to the
core. The Church authorities repeat a series of phrases which they are
pleased to call answers to objections; they treat the most serious
grounds of perplexity as if they were puerile and trifling; while it is
notorious that for a century past extremely able men have either not
known what to say about them, or have not said what they thought. On the
Continent the peculiar English view has scarcely a single educated
defender. Even in England the laity keep their judgment in suspense, or
remain warily silent.
'Of what religion are you, Mr. Rogers?' said a lady once.
'What religion, madam? I am of the religion of all sensible men.'
'And what is that?' she asked.
'All sensible men, madam, keep that to themselves.'
If Mr. Rogers had gone on to explain himself, he would have said,
perhaps, that where the opinions of those best able to judge are
divided, the questions at issue are doubtful. Reasonable men who are
unable to give them special attention withhold their judgment, while
those who are able, form their conclusions with diffidence and modesty.
But theologians will not tolerate diffidence; they demand absolute
assent, and will take nothing short of it; and they affect, therefore,
to drown in foolish ridicule whatever troubles or displeases them. The
Bishop of Oxford talks in the old style of punishment. The Archbishop of
Canterbury refers us to Usher as our guide in Hebrew chronology. The
objections of the present generation of 'infidels,' he says, are the
same which have been refuted again and again, and are such as a child
might answer. The young man just entering upon the possession of his
intellect, with a sense of responsibility for his belief, and more
anxious for truth than for success in life, finds, when he looks into
the matter, that the archbishop has altogether misrepresented it; that
in fact, like other official persons, he had been using merely a
stereotyped form of words, to which he attached no definite meaning. The
words are repeated year after year, but the enemies refuse to be
exorcised. They come and come again, from Spinoza and Lessing to Strauss
and Renan. The theologians have resolved no single difficulty; they
convince no one who is not convinced already; and a Colenso coming
fresh to the subject with no more than a year's study, throws the Church
of England into convulsions.
If there were any real danger that Christianity would cease to be
believed, it would be no more than a fulfilment of prophecy. The state
in which the Son of Man would find the world at his coming he did not
say would be a state of faith. But if that dark time is ever literally
to come upon the earth, there are no present signs of it. The creed of
eighteen centuries is not about to fade away like an exhalation, nor are
the new lights of science so exhilarating that serious persons can look
with comfort to exchanging one for the other. Christianity has abler
advocates than its professed defenders, in those many quiet and humble
men and women who in the light of it and the strength of it live holy,
beautiful, and self-denying lives. The God that answers by fire is the
God whom mankind will acknowledge; and so long as the fruits of the
Spirit continue to be visible in charity, in self-sacrifice, in those
graces which raise human creatures above themselves, and invest them
with that beauty of holiness which only religion confers, thoughtful
persons will remain convinced that with them in some form or other is
the secret of truth. The body will not thrive on poison, or the soul on
falsehood; and as the vital processes of health are too subtle for
science to follow; as we choose our food, not by the most careful
chemical analysis, but by the experience of its effects upon the system;
so when a particular belief is fruitful in nobleness of character, we
need trouble ourselves very little with scientific demonstrations that
it is false. The most deadly poison may be chemically undistinguishable
from substances which are perfectly innocent. Prussic acid, we are told,
is formed of the same elements, combined in the same proportions, as
gum-arabic.
What that belief is for which the fruits speak thus so positively, it is
less easy to define. Religion from the beginning of time has expanded
and changed with the growth of knowledge. The religion of the prophets
was not the religion which was adapted to the hardness of heart of the
Israelites of the Exodus. The Gospel set aside the Law; the creed of the
early Church was not the creed of the Middle Ages, any more than the
creed of Luther and Cranmer was the creed of St. Bernard and Aquinas.
Old things pass away, new things come in their place; and they in their
turn grow old, and give place to others; yet in each of the many forms
which Christianity has assumed in the world, holy men have lived and
died, and have had the witness of the Spirit that they were not far from
the truth. It may be that the faith which saves is the something held in
common by all sincere Christians, and by those as well who should come
from the east and the west, and sit down in the kingdom of God, when the
children of the covenant would be cast out. It may be that the true
teaching of our Lord is overlaid with doctrines; and theology, when
insisting on the reception of its huge catena of formulas, may be
binding a yoke upon our necks which neither we nor our fathers were able
to bear.
But it is not the object of this paper to put forward either this or any
other particular opinion. The writer is conscious only that he is
passing fast towards the dark gate which soon will close behind him. He
believes that some kind of sincere and firm conviction on these things
is of infinite moment to him, and, entirely diffident of his own power
to find his way towards such a conviction, he is both ready and anxious
to disclaim 'all right of private judgment' in the matter. He wishes
only to learn from those who are able to teach him. The learned prelates
talk of the presumptuousness of human reason; they tell us that doubts
arise from the consciousness of sin and the pride of the unregenerate
heart. The present writer, while he believes generally that reason,
however inadequate, is the best faculty to which we have to trust, yet
is most painfully conscious of the weakness of his own reason; and once
let the real judgment of the best and wisest men be declared--let those
who are most capable of forming a sound opinion, after reviewing the
whole relations of science, history, and what is now received as
revelation, tell us fairly how much of the doctrines popularly taught
they conceive to be adequately established, how much to be uncertain,
and how much, if anything, to be mistaken; there is scarcely, perhaps, a
single serious enquirer who would not submit with delight to a court
which is the highest on earth.
Mr. Mansell tells us that in the things of God reason is beyond its
depth, that the wise and the unwise are on the same level of incapacity,
and that we must accept what we find established, or we must believe
nothing. We presume that Mr. Mansell's dilemma itself is a conclusion
of reason. Do what we will, reason is and must be our ultimate
authority; and were the collective sense of mankind to declare Mr.
Mansell right, we should submit to that opinion as readily as to
another. But the collective sense of mankind is less acquiescent. He has
been compared to a man sitting on the end of a plank and deliberately
sawing off his seat. It seems never to have occurred to him that, if he
is right, he has no business to be a Protestant. What Mr. Mansell says
to Professor Jowett, Bishop Gardiner in effect replied to Frith and
Ridley. Frith and Ridley said that transubstantiation was unreasonable;
Gardiner answered that there was the letter of Scripture for it, and
that the human intellect was no measure of the power of God. Yet the
Reformers somehow believed, and Mr. Mansell by his place in the Church
of England seems to agree with them, that the human intellect was not so
wholly incompetent. It might be a weak guide, but it was better than
none; and they declared on grounds of mere reason, that Christ being in
heaven and not on earth, 'it was contrary to the truth for a natural
body to be in two places at once.' The common sense of the country was
of the same opinion, and the illusion was at an end.
There have been 'Aids to Faith' produced lately, and 'Replies to the
Seven Essayists,' 'Answers to Colenso,' and much else of the kind. We
regret to say that they have done little for us. The very life of our
souls is at issue in the questions which have been raised, and we are
fed with the professional commonplaces of the members of a close guild,
men holding high office in the Church, or expecting to hold high office
there; in either case with a strong temporal interest in the defence of
the institution which they represent. We desire to know what those of
the clergy think whose love of truth is unconnected with their prospects
in life; we desire to know what the educated laymen, the lawyers, the
historians, the men of science, the statesmen think; and these are for
the most part silent, or confess themselves modestly uncertain. The
professional theologians alone are loud and confident; but they speak in
the old angry tone which rarely accompanies deep and wise convictions.
They do not meet the real difficulties; they mistake them, misrepresent
them, claim victories over adversaries with whom they have never even
crossed swords, and leap to conclusions with a precipitancy at which we
can only smile. It has been the unhappy manner of their class from
immemorial time; they call it zeal for the Lord, as if it were beyond
all doubt that they were on God's side--as if serious enquiry after
truth was something which they were entitled to resent. They treat
intellectual difficulties as if they deserved rather to be condemned and
punished than considered and weighed, and rather stop their ears and run
with one accord upon anyone who disagrees with them than listen
patiently to what he has to say.
We do not propose to enter in detail upon the particular points which
demand re-discussion. It is enough that the more exact habit of thought
which science has engendered, and the closer knowledge of the value and
nature of evidence, has notoriously made it necessary that the grounds
should be reconsidered on which we are to believe that one country and
one people was governed for sixteen centuries on principles different
from those which we now find to prevail universally. One of many
questions, however, shall be briefly glanced at, on which the real issue
seems habitually to be evaded.
Much has been lately said and written on the authenticity of the
Pentateuch and the other historical books of the Old Testament. The
Bishop of Natal has thrown out in a crude form the critical results of
the enquiries of the Germans, coupled with certain arithmetical
calculations, for which he has a special aptitude. He supposes himself
to have proved that the first five books of the Bible are a compilation
of uncertain date, full of inconsistencies and impossibilities. The
apologists have replied that the objections are not absolutely
conclusive, that the events described in the Book of Exodus might
possibly, under certain combinations of circumstances, have actually
taken place; and they then pass to the assumption that because a story
is not necessarily false, therefore it is necessarily true. We have no
intention of vindicating Dr. Colenso. His theological training makes his
arguments very like those of his opponents, and he and Dr. M'Call may
settle their differences between themselves. The question is at once
wider and simpler than any which has been raised in that controversy.
Were it proved beyond possibility of error that the Pentateuch was
written by Moses, that those and all the books of the Old and New
Testaments were really the work of the writers whose names they bear;
were the Mosaic cosmogony in harmony with physical discoveries; and were
the supposed inconsistencies and contradictions shown to have no
existence except in Dr. Colenso's imagination--we should not have
advanced a single step towards making good the claim put forward for the
Bible, that it is absolutely and unexceptionably true in all its parts.
The 'genuineness and authenticity' argument is irrelevant and needless.
The clearest demonstration of the human authorship of the Pentateuch
proves nothing about its immunity from errors. If there are no mistakes
in it, it was not the workmanship of man; and if it was inspired by the
Holy Spirit, there is no occasion to show that the hand of Moses was the
instrument made use of. To the most excellent of contemporary histories,
to histories written by eye-witnesses of the facts which they describe,
we accord but a limited confidence. The highest intellectual competence,
the most admitted truthfulness, immunity from prejudice, and the absence
of temptation to misstate the truth; these things may secure great
credibility, but they are no guarantee for minute and circumstantial
exactness. Two historians, though with equal gifts and equal
opportunities, never describe events in exactly the same way. Two
witnesses in a court of law, while they agree in the main, invariably
differ in some particulars. It appears as if men could not relate facts
precisely as they saw or as they heard them. The different parts of a
story strike different imaginations unequally; and the mind, as the
circumstances pass through it, alters their proportions unconsciously,
or shifts the perspective. The credit which we give to the most
authentic work of a man has no resemblance to that universal acceptance
which is demanded for the Bible. It is not a difference of degree: it is
a difference in kind; and we desire to know on what ground this
infallibility, which we do not question, but which is not proved,
demands our belief. Very likely, the Bible is thus infallible. Unless it
is, there can be no moral obligation to accept the facts which it
records; and though there may be intellectual error in denying them,
there can be no moral sin. Facts may be better or worse authenticated;
but all the proofs in the world of the genuineness and authenticity of
the human handiwork cannot establish a claim upon the conscience. It
might be foolish to question Thucydides' account of Pericles, but no
one would call it sinful. Men part with all sobriety of judgment when
they come on ground of this kind. When Sir Henry Rawlinson read the name
of Sennacherib on the Assyrian marbles, and found allusions there to the
Israelites in Palestine, we were told that a triumphant answer had been
found to the cavils of sceptics, and a convincing proof of the inspired
truth of the Divine Oracles. Bad arguments in a good cause are a sure
way to bring distrust upon it. The Divine Oracles may be true, and may
be inspired; but the discoveries at Nineveh certainly do not prove them
so. No one supposes that the Books of Kings or the prophecies of Isaiah
and Ezekiel were the work of men who had no knowledge of Assyria or the
Assyrian Princes. It is possible that in the excavations at Carthage
some Punic inscription may be found confirming Livy's account of the
battle of Cannae; but we shall not be obliged to believe therefore in the
inspiration of Livy, or rather (for the argument comes to that) in the
inspiration of the whole Latin literature.
We are not questioning the fact that the Bible is infallible; we desire
only to be told on what evidence that great and awful fact concerning it
properly rests. It would seem, indeed, as if instinct had been wiser
than argument--as if it had been felt that nothing short of this literal
and close inspiration could preserve the facts on which Christianity
depends. The history of the early world is a history everywhere of
marvels. The legendary literature of every nation upon earth tells the
same stories of prodigies and wonders, of the appearances of the gods
upon earth, and of their intercourse with men. The lives of the saints
of the Catholic Church, from the time of the Apostles till the present
day, are a complete tissue of miracles resembling and rivalling those of
the Gospels. Some of these stories are romantic and imaginative; some
clear, literal, and prosaic; some rest on mere tradition; some on the
sworn testimony of eye-witnesses; some are obvious fables; some are as
well authenticated as facts of such a kind can be authenticated at all.
The Protestant Christian rejects every one of them--rejects them without
enquiry--involves those for which there is good authority and those for
which there is none or little in one absolute, contemptuous, and
sweeping denial. The Protestant Christian feels it more likely, in the
words of Hume, that men should deceive or be deceived, than that the
laws of nature should be violated. At this moment we are beset with
reports of conversations with spirits, of tables miraculously lifted, of
hands projected out of the world of shadows into this mortal life. An
unusually able, accomplished person, accustomed to deal with
common-sense facts, a celebrated political economist, and notorious for
business-like habits, assured this writer that a certain mesmerist, who
was my informant's intimate friend, had raised a dead girl to life. We
should believe the people who tell us these things in any ordinary
matter: they would be admitted in a court of justice as good witnesses
in a criminal case, and a jury would hang a man on their word. The
person just now alluded to is incapable of telling a wilful lie; yet our
experience of the regularity of nature on one side is so uniform, and
our experience of the capacities of human folly on the other is so
large, that when people tell us these wonderful stories, most of us are
contented to smile; and we do not care so much as to turn out of our way
to examine them.
The Bible is equally a record of miracles; but as from other histories
we reject miracles without hesitation, so of those in the Bible we
insist on the universal acceptance: the former are all false, the latter
are all true. It is evident that, in forming conclusions so sweeping as
these, we cannot even suppose that we are being guided by what is called
historical evidence. Were it admitted that, as a whole, the miracles of
the Bible are better authenticated than the miracles of the saints, we
should be far removed still from any large inference, that in the one
set there is no room for falsehood, in the other no room for truth. The
writer or writers of the Books of Kings are not known. The books
themselves are in fact confessedly taken from older writings which are
lost; and the accounts of the great prophets of Israel are a
counterpart, curiously like, of those of the mediaeval saints. In many
instances the authors of the lives of these saints were their companions
and friends. Why do we feel so sure that what we are told of Elijah or
Elisha took place exactly as we read it? Why do we reject the account of
St. Columba or St. Martin as a tissue of idle fable? Why should not God
give a power to the saint which He had given to the prophet? We can
produce no reason from the nature of things, for we know not what the
nature of things is; and if down to the death of the Apostles the
ministers of religion were allowed to prove their commission by working
miracles, what right have we, on grounds either of history or
philosophy, to draw a clear line at the death of St. John--to say that
before that time all such stories were true, and after it all were
false?
There is no point on which Protestant controversialists evade the real
question more habitually than on that of miracles. They accuse those who
withhold that unreserved and absolute belief which they require for all
which they accept themselves, of denying that miracles are possible.
They assume this to be the position taken up by the objector, and
proceed easily to argue that man is no judge of the power of God. Of
course he is not. No sane man ever raised his narrow understanding into
a measure of the possibilities of the universe; nor does any person with
any pretensions to religion disbelieve in miracles of some kind. To pray
is to expect a miracle. When we pray for the recovery of a sick friend,
for the gift of any blessing, or the removal of any calamity, we expect
that God will do something by an act of his personal will which
otherwise would not have been done--that he will suspend the ordinary
relations of natural cause and effect; and this is the very idea of a
miracle. The thing we pray for may be given us, and no miracle may have
taken place. It may be given to us by natural causes, and would have
occurred whether we had prayed or not. But prayer itself in its very
essence implies a belief in the possible intervention of a power which
is above nature. The question about miracles is simply one of
evidence--whether in any given case the proof is so strong that no room
is left for mistake, exaggeration, or illusion, while more evidence is
required to establish a fact antecedently improbable than is sufficient
for a common occurrence.
It has been said recently by 'A Layman,' in a letter to Mr. Maurice,
that the resurrection of our Lord is as well authenticated as the death
of Julius Caesar. It is far better authenticated, unless we are mistaken
in supposing the Bible inspired; or if we admit as evidence that inward
assurance of the Christian, which would make him rather die than
disbelieve a truth so dear to him. But if the layman meant that there
was as much proof of it, in the sense in which proof is understood in a
court of justice, he could scarcely have considered what he was saying.
Julius Caesar was killed in a public place, in the presence of friend
and foe, in a remarkable but still perfectly natural manner. The
circumstances were minutely known to all the world, and were never
denied or doubted by any one. Our Lord, on the other hand, seems
purposely to have withheld such public proof of his resurrection as
would have left no room for unbelief. He showed himself, 'not to all the
people'--not to his enemies, whom his appearance would have
overwhelmed--but 'to witnesses chosen before;' to the circle of his own
friends. There is no evidence which a jury could admit that he was ever
actually dead. So unusual was it for persons crucified to die so soon,
that Pilate, we are told, 'marvelled.' The subsequent appearances were
strange, and scarcely intelligible. Those who saw Him did not recognise
Him till He was made known to them in the breaking of bread. He was
visible and invisible. He was mistaken by those who were most intimate
with Him for another person; nor do the accounts agree which are given
by the different Evangelists. Of investigation in the modern sense
(except in the one instance of St. Thomas, and St. Thomas was rather
rebuked than praised) there was none, and could be none. The evidence
offered was different in kind, and the blessing was not to those who
satisfied themselves of the truth of the fact by a searching enquiry,
but who gave their assent with the unhesitating confidence of love.
St. Paul's account of his own conversion is an instance of the kind of
testimony which then worked the strongest conviction. St. Paul, a fiery
fanatic on a mission of persecution with the midday Syrian sun streaming
down upon his head, was struck to the ground, and saw in a vision our
Lord in the air. If such a thing were to occur at the present day, and
if a modern physician were consulted about it, he would say, without
hesitation, that it was an effect of an overheated brain and that there
was nothing in it extraordinary or unusual. If the impression left by
the appearance had been too strong for such an explanation to be
satisfactory, the person to whom it occurred, especially if he was a man
of St Paul's intellectual stature, would have at once examined into the
facts otherwise known, connected with the subject of what he had seen.
St. Paul had evidently before disbelieved our Lord's resurrection--had
disbelieved it fiercely and passionately; we should have expected that
he would at once have sought for those who could best have told him the
details of the truth. St. Paul, however, did nothing of the kind. He
went for a year into Arabia, and when at last he returned to Jerusalem,
he rather held aloof from those who had been our Lord's companions, and
who had witnessed his ascension. He saw Peter, he saw James; 'of the
rest of the apostles saw he none.' To him evidently the proof of the
resurrection was the vision which he had himself seen. It was to that
which he always referred when called on for a defence of his faith.
Of evidence for the resurrection, in the common sense of the word, there
may be enough to show that something extraordinary occurred; but not
enough, unless we assume the fact to be true on far other grounds, to
produce any absolute and unhesitating conviction; and inasmuch as the
resurrection is the keystone of Christianity, the belief in it must be
something far different from that suspended judgment in which history
alone would leave us.
Human testimony, we repeat, under the most favourable circumstances
imaginable, knows nothing of 'absolute certainty;' and if historical
facts are bound up with the creed, and if they are to be received with
the same completeness as the laws of conscience, they rest, and must
rest, either on the divine truth of Scripture, or on the divine witness
in ourselves. On human evidence the miracles of St. Teresa and St.
Francis of Assisi are as well established as those of the New Testament.
M. Ernest Renan has recently produced an account of the Gospel story
which, written as it is by a man of piety, intellect, and imagination,
is spreading rapidly through the educated world. Carrying out the
principles with which Protestants have swept modern history clear of
miracles to their natural conclusions, he dismisses all that is
miraculous from the life of our Lord, and endeavours to reproduce the
original Galilean youth who lived and taught, and died in Palestine
eighteen hundred years ago. We have no intention of reviewing M. Renan.
He will be read soon enough by many who would better consider their
peace of mind by leaving him alone. For ourselves, we are unable to see
by what right, if he rejects the miraculous part of the narrative, he
retains the rest; the imagination and the credulity which invent
extraordinary incidents, invent ordinary incidents also; and if the
divine element in the life is legendary, the human may be legendary
also. But there is one lucid passage in the introduction which we
commend to the perusal of controversial theologians:--
'No miracle such as those of which early histories are full has taken
place under conditions which science can accept. Experience shows,
without exception, that miracles occur only in times and in countries in
which miracles are believed in, and in the presence of persons who are
disposed to believe them. No miracle has ever been performed before an
assemblage of spectators capable of testing its reality. Neither
uneducated people, nor even men of the world, have the requisite
capacity; great precautions are needed, and a long habit of scientific
research. Have we not seen men of the world in our own time become the
dupes of the most childish and absurd illusions? And if it be certain
that no contemporary miracles will bear investigation, is it not
possible that the miracles of the past, were we able to examine into
them in detail, would be found equally to contain an element of error?
It is not in the name of this or that philosophy, it is in the name of
an experience which never varies, that we banish miracles from history.
We do not say a miracle is impossible--we say only that no miracle has
ever yet been proved. Let a worker of miracles come forward to-morrow
with pretensions serious enough to deserve examination. Let us suppose
him to announce that he is able to raise a dead man to life. What would
be done? A committee would be appointed, composed of physiologists,
physicians, chemists, and persons accustomed to exact investigation; a
body would then be selected which the committee would assure itself was
really dead; and a place would be chosen where the experiment was to
take place. Every precaution would be taken to leave no opening for
uncertainty; and if, under those conditions, the restoration to life was
effected, a probability would be arrived at which would be almost equal
to certainty. An experiment, however, should always admit of being
repeated. What a man has done once he should be able to do again; and in
miracles there can be no question of ease or difficulty. The performer
would be requested to repeat the operation under other circumstances
upon other bodies; and if he succeeded on every occasion, two points
would be established: first, that there may be in this world such things
as supernatural operations; and, secondly, that the power to perform
them is delegated to, or belongs to, particular persons. But who does
not perceive that no miracle was ever performed under such conditions as
these?'
We have quoted this passage because it expresses with extreme precision
and clearness the common-sense principle which we apply to all
supernatural stories of our own time, which Protestant theologians
employ against the whole cycle of Catholic miracles, and which M. Renan
is only carrying to its logical conclusions in applying to the history
of our Lord, if the Gospels are tried by the mere tests of historical
criticism. The Gospels themselves tell us why M. Renan's conditions were
never satisfied. Miracles were not displayed in the presence of sceptics
to establish scientific truths. When the adulterous generation sought
after a sign, the sign was not given; nay, it is even said that in the
presence of unbelief, our Lord was not able to work miracles. But
science has less respect for that undoubting and submissive willingness
to believe; and it is quite certain that if we attempt to establish the
truth of the New Testament on the principles of Paley--if with Professor
Jowett 'we interpret the Bible as any other book,' the element of
miracle which has evaporated from the entire surface of human history
will not maintain itself in the sacred ground of the Gospels, and the
facts of Christianity will melt in our hands like a snowball.
Nothing less than a miraculous history can sustain the credibility of
miracles, and nothing could be more likely, if revelation be a reality
and not a dream, than that the history containing it should be saved in
its composition from the intermixture of human infirmity. This is the
position in which instinct long ago taught Protestants to entrench
themselves, and where alone they can hope to hold their ground: once
established in these lines, they were safe and unassailable, unless it
could be demonstrated that any fact or facts related in the Bible were
certainly untrue.
Nor would it be necessary to say any more upon the subject. Those who
believed Christianity would admit the assumption; those who disbelieved
Christianity would repudiate it. The argument would be narrowed to that
plain and single issue, and the elaborate treatises upon external
evidence would cease to bring discredit upon the cause by their
feebleness. Unfortunately--and this is the true secret of our present
distractions--it seems certain that in some way or other this belief in
inspiration itself requires to be revised. We are compelled to examine
more precisely what we mean by the word. The account of the creation of
man and the world which is given in Genesis, and which is made by St.
Paul the basis of his theology, has not yet been reconciled with facts
which science knows to be true. Death was in the world before Adam's
sin, and unless Adam's age be thrust back to a distance which no
ingenuity can torture the letter of Scripture into recognising, men and
women lived and died upon the earth whole millenniums before the Eve of
Sacred History listened to the temptation of the snake. Neither has any
such deluge as that from which, according to the received
interpretation, the ark saved Noah, swept over the globe within the
human period. We are told that it was not God's purpose to anticipate
the natural course of discovery: as the story of the creation was
written in human language, so the details of it may have been adapted to
the existing state of human knowledge. The Bible, it is said, was not
intended to teach men science, but to teach them what was necessary for
the moral training of their souls. It may be that this is true.
Spiritual grace affects the moral character of men, but leaves their
intellect unimproved. The most religious men are as liable as atheists
to ignorance of ordinary facts, and inspiration may be only infallible
when it touches on truths necessary to salvation. But if it be so, there
are many things in the Bible which must become as uncertain as its
geology or its astronomy. There is the long secular history of the
Jewish people. Let it be once established that there is room for error
anywhere, and we have no security for the accuracy of this history. The
inspiration of the Bible is the foundation of our whole belief; and it
is a grave matter if we are uncertain to what extent it reaches, or how
much and what it guarantees to us as true. We cannot live on
probabilities. The faith in which we can live bravely and die in peace
must be a certainty, so far as it professes to be a faith at all, or it
is nothing. It may be that all intellectual efforts to arrive at it are
in vain; that it is given to those to whom it is given, and withheld
from those from whom it is withheld. It may be that the existing belief
is undergoing a silent modification, like those to which the
dispensations of religion have been successively subjected; or, again,
it may be that to the creed as it is already established there is
nothing to be added, and nothing any more to be taken from it. At this
moment, however, the most vigorous minds appear least to see their way
to a conclusion; and notwithstanding all the school and church building,
the extended episcopate, and the religious newspapers, a general doubt
is coming up like a thunderstorm against the wind, and blackening the
sky. Those who cling most tenaciously to the faith in which they were
educated, yet confess themselves perplexed. They know what they believe;
but why they believe it, or why they should require others to believe,
they cannot tell or cannot agree. Between the authority of the Church
and the authority of the Bible, the testimony of history and the
testimony of the Spirit, the ascertained facts of science and the
contradictory facts which seem to be revealed, the minds of men are
tossed to and fro, harassed by the changed attitude in which scientific
investigation has placed us all towards accounts of supernatural
occurrences. We thrust the subject aside; we take refuge in practical
work; we believe, perhaps, that the situation is desperate, and hopeless
of improvement; we refuse to let the question be disturbed. But we
cannot escape from our shadow, and the spirit of uncertainty will haunt
the world like an uneasy ghost, till we take it by the throat like men.
We return then to the point from which we set out. The time is past for
repression. Despotism has done its work; but the day of despotism is
gone, and the only remedy is a full and fair investigation. Things will
never right themselves if they are let alone. It is idle to say peace
when there is no peace; and the concealed imposthume is more dangerous
than an open wound. The law in this country has postponed our trial, but
cannot save us from it; and the questions which have agitated the
Continent are agitating us at last. The student who twenty years ago was
contented with the Greek and Latin fathers and the Anglican divines, now
reads Ewald and Renan. The Church authorities still refuse to look their
difficulties in the face: they prescribe for mental troubles the
established doses of Paley and Pearson; they refuse dangerous questions
as sinful, and tread the round of commonplace in placid comfort. But it
will not avail. Their pupils grow to manhood, and fight the battle for
themselves, unaided by those who ought to have stood by them in their
trial, and could not or would not; and the bitterness of those
conflicts, and the end of most of them in heart-broken uncertainty or
careless indifference, is too notorious to all who care to know about
such things.
We cannot afford year after year to be distracted with the tentative
scepticism of essayists and reviewers. In a healthy condition of public
opinion such a book as Bishop Colenso's would have passed unnoticed, or
rather would never have been written, for the difficulties with which it
deals would have been long ago met and disposed of. When questions rose
in the early and middle ages of the Church, they were decided by
councils of the wisest: those best able to judge met together, and
compared their thoughts, and conclusions were arrived at which
individuals could accept and act upon. At the beginning of the English
Reformation, when Protestant doctrine was struggling for reception, and
the old belief was merging in the new, the country was deliberately held
in formal suspense. Protestants and Catholics were set to preach on
alternate Sundays in the same pulpit; subjects were discussed freely in
the ears of the people; and at last, when all had been said on both
sides, Convocation and Parliament embodied the result in formulas.
Councils will no longer answer the purpose; the clergy have no longer a
superiority of intellect or cultivation; and a conference of prelates
from all parts of Christendom, or even from all departments of the
English Church, would not present an edifying spectacle. Parliament may
no longer meddle with opinions unless it be to untie the chains which it
forged three centuries ago. But better than councils, better than
sermons, better than Parliament, is that free discussion through a free
press which is the best instrument for the discovery of truth, and the
most effectual means for preserving it.
We shall be told, perhaps, that we are beating the air--that the press
is free, and that all men may and do write what they please. It is not
so. Discussion is not free so long as the clergy who take any side but
one are liable to be prosecuted and deprived of their means of living;
it is not free so long as the expression of doubt is considered as a sin
by public opinion and as a crime by the law. So far are we from free
discussion, that the world is not yet agreed that a free discussion is
desirable; and till it be so agreed, the substantial intellect of the
country will not throw itself into the question. The battle will
continue to be fought by outsiders, who suffice to disturb a repose
which they cannot restore; and that collective voice of the national
understanding, which alone can give back to us a peaceful and assured
conviction, will not be heard.
FOOTNOTES:
[D] _Fraser's Magazine_, 1863.
CRITICISM AND THE GOSPEL HISTORY.[E]
The spirit of criticism is not the spirit of religion. The spirit of
criticism is a questioning spirit; the spirit of religion is a spirit of
faith, of humility and submission. Other qualities may go to the
formation of a religious character in the highest and grandest sense of
the word; but the virtues which religious teachers most generally
approve, which make up the ideal of a Catholic saint, which the Catholic
and all other churches endeavour most to cultivate in their children,
are those of passive and loyal obedience, a devotion without reserve or
qualification; or to use the technical word, 'a spirit of
teachableness.' A religious education is most successful when it has
formed a mind to which difficulties are welcome as an opportunity for
the triumph of faith--which regards doubts as temptations to be resisted
like the suggestions of sensuality, and which alike in action or opinion
follows the path prescribed to it with affectionate and unhesitating
confidence.
To men or women of the tender and sensitive piety which is produced by
such a training, an enquiry into the grounds of its faith appears
shocking and profane. To demand an explanation of ambiguities or
mysteries of which they have been accustomed to think only upon their
knees, is as it were to challenge the Almighty to explain his ways to
his creatures, and to refuse obedience unless human presumption has been
first gratified.
Undoubtedly, not in religion only, but in any branch of human knowledge,
teachableness is the condition of growth. We augur ill for the future of
the youth who sets his own judgment against that of his instructors, and
refuses to believe what cannot be at once made plain to him. Yet again,
the wise instructor will not lightly discourage questions which are
prompted by an intelligent desire of knowledge. That an unenquiring
submission produces characters of great and varied beauty; that it has
inspired the most splendid acts of endurance which have given a lustre
to humanity, no one will venture to deny. A genial faith is one of that
group of qualities which commend themselves most to the young, the
generous, and the enthusiastic--to those whose native and original
nobleness has suffered least from contact with the world--which belong
rather to the imagination than the reason, and stand related to truth
through the emotions rather than through the sober calculations of
probability. It is akin to loyalty, to enthusiasm, to hero-worship, to
that deep affection to a person or a cause which can see no fault in
what it loves.
'Belief,' says Mr. Sewell, 'is a virtue; doubt is a sin.' Iago is
nothing if not critical; and the sceptical spirit--_der Geist der stets
verneint_--which is satisfied with nothing, which sees in everything
good the seed of evil, and the weak spot in every great cause or nature,
has been made the special characteristic--we all feel with justice--of
the devil.
And yet this devotedness or devotion, this reverence for authority, is
but one element of excellence. To reverence is good; but on the one
condition that the object of it be a thing which deserves reverence; and
the necessary complement, the security that we are not bestowing our
best affections where they should not be given, must be looked for in
some quality which, if less attractive, is no less essential for our
true welfare. To prove all things--to try the spirits whether they be of
God--is a duty laid upon us by the highest authority; and what is called
progress in human things--religious as well as material--has been due
uniformly to a dissatisfaction with them as they are. Every advance in
science, every improvement in the command of the mechanical forces of
nature, every step in political or social freedom, has risen in the
first instance from an act of scepticism, from an uncertainty whether
the formulas, or the opinions, or the government, or the received
practical theories were absolutely perfect; or whether beyond the circle
of received truths there might not lie something broader, deeper, truer,
and thus better deserving the acceptance of mankind.
Submissiveness, humility, obedience, produce if uncorrected, in politics
a nation of slaves, whose baseness becomes an incentive to tyranny; in
religion, they produce the consecration of falsehood, poperies,
immaculate conceptions, winking images, and the confessional. The spirit
of enquiry if left to itself becomes in like manner a disease of
uncertainty, and terminates in universal scepticism. It seems as if in a
healthy order of things, to the willingness to believe there should be
chained as its inseparable companion a jealousy of deception; and there
is no lesson more important for serious persons to impress upon
themselves than that each of these temperaments must learn to tolerate
the other; faith accepting from reason the sanction of its service, and
reason receiving in return the warm pulsations of life. The two
principles exist together in the highest natures; and the man who in the
best sense of the word is devout, is also the most cautious to whom or
to what he pays his devotion. Among the multitude, the units of which
are each inadequate and incomplete, the elements are disproportionately
mixed; some men are humble and diffident, some are sceptical and
enquiring; yet both are filling a place in the great intellectual
economy; both contribute to make up the sum and proportion of qualities
which are required to hold the balance even; and neither party is
entitled to say to the other, 'Stand by; I am holier than thou.'
And as it is with individuals, so is it also with whole periods and
cycles. For centuries together the believing spirit held undisputed
sovereignty; and these were what are called 'ages of faith;' ages, that
is, in which the highest business of the intellect was to pray rather
than to investigate; when for every unusual phenomenon a supernatural
cause was instinctively assumed; when wonders were credible in
proportion to their magnitude; and theologians, with easy command of
belief, added miracle to miracle and piled dogma upon dogma. Then the
tide changed; a fresh era opened, which in the eyes of those who
considered the old system the only right one, was the letting loose of
the impersonated spirit of evil; when profane eyes were looking their
idols in the face; when men were saying to the miraculous images, 'You
are but stone and wood,' and to the piece of bread, 'You are but dust as
I am dust;' and then the huge mediaeval fabric crumbled down in ruin.
All forms of thought, all objects of devotion, are made thus liable to
perpetual revision, if only that belief shall not petrify into habit,
but remain the reasonable conviction of a reasonable soul. The change of
times and the change of conditions change also the appearance of things
which in themselves are the same which they always were. Facts supposed
once to be as fixed as the stars melt into fiction. A closer
acquaintance with the phenomena of experience has revealed to us the
action of forces before undreamt of working throughout nature with
unerring uniformity; and to the mediaeval stories of magic, witchcraft,
or the miracles of saints, we are thus placed in a new relation. The
direct evidence on which such stories were received may remain
unimpaired, but it no longer produces the same conviction. Even in
ordinary human things where the evidence is lost--as in some of our own
State trials, and where we know only that it was such as brought
conviction to judges, juries, and parliaments--historians do not
hesitate to call their verdicts into question, thinking it more likely
that whole masses of men should have been led away by passion or fraud
or cowardice than that this or that particular crime should have been
committed. That we often go beyond our office and exaggerate the value
of our new criteria of truth may be possible enough; but it is no less
certain that this is the tendency of modern thought. Our own age, like
every age which has gone before it, judges the value of testimony, not
by itself merely, but by the degree to which it corresponds with our own
sense of the laws of probability; and we consider events probable or
improbable by the habit of mind which is the result of our general
knowledge and culture. To the Catholic of the middle ages a miracle was
more likely than not; and when he was told that a miracle had been
worked, he believed it as he would have believed had he been told that a
shower of rain had fallen, or that the night frost had killed the buds
upon his fruit trees. If his cattle died, he found the cause in the
malice of Satan or the evil eye of a witch; and if two or more witnesses
could have been found to swear that they had heard an old woman curse
him, she would have been burnt for a sorceress. The man of science, on
the other hand, knows nothing of witches and sorcerers; when he can find
a natural cause he refuses to entertain the possibility of the
intervention of a cause beyond nature; and thus that very element of
marvel which to the more superstitious temperament was an evidence of
truth, becomes to the better informed a cause of suspicion.
So it has been that throughout history, as between individuals among
ourselves, we trace two habits of thought, one of which has given us
churches, creeds, and the knowledge of God; the other has given us
freedom and science, has pruned the luxuriance of imaginative reverence,
and reminds piety of what it is too ready to forget--that God is truth.
Yet, essential as they are to one another, each keeps too absolutely to
the circle of its own convictions, and, but half able to recognise the
merit of principles which are alien to its own, regards the other as its
natural enemy.
To the warm and enthusiastic pietist the enquirer appears as a hater of
God, an inveterate blasphemer of holy things, soiling with rude and
insolent hands what ought only to be humbly adored. The saint when he
has the power calls the sword to his aid, and in his zeal for what he
calls the honour of God, makes war upon such people with steel and fire.
The innovator, on the other hand, knowing that he is not that evil
creature which his rival represents him as being, knowing that he too
desires only truth--first suffers, suffers in rough times at stake and
scaffold, suffers in our own later days in good name, in reputation, in
worldly fortune; and as the whirligig of time brings round his turn of
triumph, takes, in French revolutions and such other fits of madness,
his own period of wild revenge. The service of truth is made to appear
as one thing, the service of God as another; and in that fatal
separation religion dishonours itself with unavailing enmity to what
nevertheless it is compelled at last to accept in humiliation; and
science, welcoming the character which its adversary flings upon it,
turns away with answering hostility from doctrines without which its own
highest achievements are but pyramids of ashes.
Is this antagonism a law of humanity? As mankind move upwards through
the ascending circles of progress, is it for ever to be with them as
with the globe which they inhabit--of which one hemisphere is
perpetually dark? Have the lessons of the Reformation been thrown away?
Is knowledge always to advance under the ban of religion? Is faith
never to cease to dread investigation? Is science chiefly to value each
new discovery as a victory gained over its rival? Is the spiritual world
to revolve eternally upon an axis of which the two poles are materialism
and superstition, to be buried in their alternate occultations in
periods of utter darkness, or lifted into an icy light where there is
neither life nor warmth?
How it may be in the remote future it is idle to guess; for the present
the signs are not hopeful. We are arrived visibly at one of those
recurring times when the accounts are called in for audit; when the
title-deeds are to be looked through, and established opinions again
tested. It is a process which has been repeated more than once in the
world's history; the last occasion and greatest being the Reformation of
the sixteenth century; and the experience of that matter might have
satisfied the most timid that truth has nothing to fear; and that
religion emerges out of such trials stronger and brighter than before.
Yet Churchmen have not profited by the experience; the pulpits and the
religious press ring again with the old shrieks of sacrilege; the
machinery of the law courts is set creaking on its rusty hinges, and
denunciation and anathema in the old style take the place of reasoning.
It will not answer; and the worst danger to what is really true is the
want of wisdom in its defenders. The language which we sometimes hear
about these things seems to imply that while Christianity is
indisputably true, it cannot stand nevertheless without bolt and
shackle, as if the Author of our faith had left the evidence so weak
that an honest investigation would fail to find it.
Inevitably, the altered relation in which modern culture places the
minds of all of us towards the supernatural, will compel a
reconsideration of the grounds on which the acceptance of miracles is
required. If the English learned clergy had faith as a grain of mustard
seed, they would be the first to take possession of the field; they
would look the difficulty in the face fearlessly and frankly, and we
should not be tossing as we are now in an ocean of uncertainty, ignorant
whether, if things seem obscure to us, the fault is with our intellects
or our hearts.
It might have been that Providence, anticipating the effect produced on
dead testimony by time and change, had raised religion into a higher
sphere, and had appointed on earth a living and visible authority which
could not err--guided by the Holy Spirit into truth, and divinely
sustained in the possession of it. Such a body the Roman Catholic Church
conceives itself to be; but in breaking away from its communion,
Protestant Christians have declared their conviction that neither the
Church of Rome, nor they themselves, nor any other body of men on earth,
are exempt from a liability to error. It is no longer competent for the
Anglican communion to say that a doctrine or a fact is true because it
forms a part of their teaching, because it has come down to them from
antiquity, and because to deny it is sin. Transubstantiation came down
to the fathers of the Reformation from antiquity; it was received and
insisted upon by the Catholic Church of Christendom; yet nevertheless it
was flung out from among us as a lie and an offence. The theory of the
Divine authority of the Church was abandoned in the act of Protestantism
three centuries ago; it was the central principle of that great revolt
that the establishment of particular opinions was no guarantee for their
truth; and it becomes thus our duty as well as our right to examine
periodically our intellectual defences, to abandon positions which the
alteration of time makes untenable, and to admit and invite into the
service of the sanctuary the fullest light of advancing knowledge. Of
all positions the most fatally suicidal for Protestants to occupy is the
assumption, which it is competent for Roman Catholics to hold, but not
for them, that beliefs once sanctioned by the Church are sacred, and
that to impugn them is not error but crime.
With a hope, then, that this reproach may be taken away from us; that,
in this most wealthily-endowed Church of England, where so many of the
most gifted and most accomplished men among us are maintained in
well-paid leisure to attend to such things, we may not be left any
longer to grope our way in the dark, the present writer puts forward
some few perplexities of which it would be well if English divinity
contained a clearer solution than is found there. The laity, occupied in
other matters, regard the clergy as the trustees of their spiritual
interests; but inasmuch as the clergy tell them that the safety of their
souls depends on the correctness of their opinions, they dare not close
their eyes to the questions which are being asked in louder and even
louder tones; and they have a right to demand that they shall not be
left to their own unaided efforts to answer such questions. We go to our
appointed teachers as to our physicians; we say to them, 'We feel pain
here, and here, and here: we do not see our way, and we require you to
help us.'
Most of these perplexities are not new: they were felt with the first
beginnings of critical investigation; but the fact that they have been
so many years before the world without being satisfactorily encountered
makes the situation only the more serious. It is the more strange that
as time passes on, and divine after divine is raised to honour and
office for his theological services, we should find only when we turn to
their writings that loud promises end in no performance; that the chief
object which they set before themselves is to avoid difficult ground;
and that the points on which we most cry out for satisfaction are passed
over in silence, or are disposed of with ineffectual commonplaces.
With a temperament constitutionally religious, and with an instinctive
sense of the futility of theological controversies, the English people
have long kept the enemy at bay by passive repugnance. To the
well-conditioned English layman the religion in which he has been
educated is part of the law of the land; the truth of it is assumed in
the first principles of his personal and social existence; and attacks
on the credibility of his sacred books he has regarded with the same
impatience and disdain with which he treats speculations on the rights
of property or the common maxims of right and wrong. Thus, while the
inspiration of the Bible has been a subject of discussion for a century
in Germany, Holland, and France; while even in the desolate villages in
the heart of Spain the priests find it necessary to placard the church
walls with cautions against rationalism, England hitherto has escaped
the trial; and it is only within a very few years that the note of
speculation has compelled our deaf ears to listen. That it has come at
last is less a matter of surprise than that it should have been so long
delayed; and though slow to move, it is likely that so serious a people
will not now rest till they have settled the matter for themselves in
some practical way. We are assured that if the truth be, as we are told,
of vital moment--vital to all alike, wise and foolish, educated and
uneducated--the road to it cannot lie through any very profound
enquiries. We refuse to believe that every labourer or mechanic must
balance arduous historical probabilities and come to a just conclusion,
under pain of damnation. We are satisfied that these poor people are not
placed in so cruel a dilemma. Either these abstruse historical questions
are open questions, and we are not obliged under those penalties to hold
a definite opinion upon them, or else there must be some general
principle accessible and easily intelligible, by which the details can
be summarily disposed of.
We shall not be much mistaken, perhaps, if we say that the view of most
educated English laymen at present is something of this kind. They are
aware that many questions may be asked, difficult or impossible to
answer satisfactorily, about the creation of the world, the flood, and
generally on the historical portion of the Old Testament; but they
suppose that if the authority of the Gospel history can be well
ascertained, the rest may and must be taken for granted. If it be true
that of the miraculous birth, life, death, and resurrection of our Lord,
we have the evidence of two evangelists who were eye-witnesses of the
facts which they relate, and of two others who wrote under the direction
of, or upon the authority of, eye-witnesses, we can afford to dispense
with merely curious enquiries. The subordinate parts of a divine economy
which culminated in so stupendous a mystery may well be as marvellous as
itself; and it may be assumed, we think, with no great want of charity,
that those who doubt the truth of the Old Testament extend their
incredulity to the New; that the point of their disbelief, towards which
they are trenching their way through the weak places in the Pentateuch,
is the Gospel narrative itself.[F] Whatever difficulty there may be in
proving the ancient Hebrew books to be the work of the writers whose
names they bear, no one would have cared to challenge their genuineness
who was thoroughly convinced of the resurrection of our Lord. And the
real object of these speculations lies open before us in the now
notorious work of M. Renan, which is shooting through Europe with a
rapidity which recalls the era of Luther.
To the question of the authenticity of the Gospels, therefore, the
common sense of Englishmen has instinctively turned. If, as English
commentators confidently tell us, the Gospel of St. Matthew, such as we
now possess it, is undoubtedly the work of the publican who followed our
Lord from the receipt of custom, and remained with Him to be a witness
of His ascension; if St. John's Gospel was written by the beloved
disciple who lay on Jesus' breast at supper; if the other two were
indeed the composition of the companions of St. Peter and St. Paul; if
in these four Gospels we have independent accounts of our Lord's life
and passion, mutually confirming each other, and if it can be proved
that they existed and were received as authentic in the first century of
the Christian Church, a stronger man than M. Renan will fail to shake
the hold of Christianity in England.
We put the question hypothetically, not as meaning to suggest the fact
as uncertain, but being--as the matter is of infinite moment--being, as
it were, the hinge on which our faith depends, we are forced beyond our
office to trespass on ground which we leave usually to professional
theologians, and to tell them plainly that there are difficulties which
it is their business to clear up, but to which, with worse than
imprudence, they close their own eyes, and deliberately endeavour to
keep them from ours. Some of these it is the object of this paper to
point out, with an earnest hope that Dean Alford, or Dr. Ellicott, or
some other competent clergyman, may earn our gratitude by telling us
what to think about them. Setting aside their duty to us, they will find
frank dealing in the long run their wisest policy. The conservative
theologians of England have carried silence to the point of
indiscretion.
Looking, then, to the three first Gospels, usually called the
Synoptical, we are encountered immediately with a remarkable common
element which runs through them all--a resemblance too peculiar to be
the result of accident, and impossible to reconcile with the theory that
the writers were independent of each other. It is not that general
similarity which we should expect in different accounts of the same
scenes and events, but amidst many differences, a broad vein of
circumstantial identity extending both to substance and expression.
And the identity is of several kinds.
I. Although the three evangelists relate each of them some things
peculiar to themselves, and although between them there are some
striking divergencies--as, for instance, between the account of our
Lord's miraculous birth in St. Matthew and St. Luke, and in the absence
in St. Mark of any mention of the miraculous birth at all--nevertheless,
the body of the story is essentially the same. Out of those words and
actions--so many, that if all were related the world itself could not
contain the books that should be written--the three evangelists select
for the most part the same; the same parables, the same miracles, and,
more or less complete, the same addresses. When the material from which
to select was so abundant--how abundant we have but to turn to the
fourth evangelist to see--it is at least singular that three writers
should have made so nearly the same choice.
II. But this is not all. Not only are the things related the same, but
the language in which they are expressed is the same. Sometimes the
resemblance is such as would have arisen had the evangelists been
translating from a common document in another language. Sometimes, and
most frequently, there is an absolute verbal identity; sentences,
paragraphs, long passages, are word for word the very same; a few
expressions have been slightly varied, a particle transposed, a tense or
a case altered, but the differences being no greater than would arise if
a number of persons were to write from memory some common passages which
they knew almost by heart. That there should have been this identity in
the account of the _words_ used by our Lord seems at first sight no more
than we should expect. But it extends to the narrative as well; and with
respect to the parables and discourses, there is this extraordinary
feature, that whereas our Lord is supposed to have spoken in the
ordinary language of Palestine, the resemblance between the evangelists
is in the Greek translation of them; and how unlikely it is that a
number of persons in translating from one language into another should
hit by accident on the same expressions, the simplest experiment will
show.
Now, waiving for a moment the inspiration of the Gospels; interpreting
the Bible, to use Mr. Jowett's canon, as any other book, what are we to
conclude from phenomena of this kind? What in fact do we conclude when
we encounter them elsewhere? In the lives of the saints, in the monkish
histories, there are many parallel cases. A mediaeval chronicler, when he
found a story well told by his predecessor, seldom cared to recompose
it; he transcribed the words as they stood into his own narrative,
contented perhaps with making a few trifling changes to add a finish or
a polish. Sometimes two chroniclers borrow from a third. There is the
same identity in particular expressions, the same general resemblance,
the same divergence, as each improves his original from his independent
knowledge by addition or omission; but the process is so transparent,
that when the original is lost, the existence of it can be inferred with
certainty.
Or to take a more modern parallel--we must entreat our readers to pardon
any seeming irreverence which may appear in the comparison--if in the
letters of the correspondents of three different newspapers written from
America or Germany, we were to read the same incidents told in the same
language, surrounded it might be with much that was unlike, but
nevertheless in themselves identical, and related in words which, down
to unusual and remarkable terms of expression, were exactly the same,
what should we infer?
Suppose, for instance, the description of a battle; if we were to find
but a single paragraph in which two out of three correspondents agreed
verbally, we should regard it as a very strange coincidence. If all
three agreed verbally, we should feel certain it was more than accident.
If throughout their letters there was a recurring series of such
passages, no doubt would be left in the mind of any one that either the
three correspondents had seen each other's letters, or that each had had
before him some common narrative which he had incorporated in his own
account. It might be doubtful which of these two explanations was the
true one; but that one or other of them was true, unless we suppose a
miracle, is as certain as any conclusion in human things can be certain
at all. The sworn testimony of eye-witnesses who had seen the letters so
composed would add nothing to the weight of a proof which without their
evidence would be overwhelming; and were the writers themselves, with
their closest friends and companions, to swear that there had been no
intercommunication, and no story pre-existing of which they had made
use, and that each had written _bona fide_ from his own original
observation, an English jury would sooner believe the whole party
perjured than persuade themselves that so extraordinary a coincidence
would have occurred.
Nor would it be difficult to ascertain from internal evidence which of
the two possible interpretations was the real one. If the writers were
men of evident good faith; if their stories were in parts widely
different; if they made no allusion to each other, nor ever referred to
one another as authorities; finally, if neither of them, in giving a
different account of any matter from that given by his companions,
professed either to be supplying an omission or correcting a mistake,
then we should have little doubt that they had themselves not
communicated with each other, but were supplementing, each of them from
other sources of information, a central narrative which all alike had
before them.
How far may we apply the parallel to the Synoptical Gospels? In one
sense the inspiration lifts them above comparison, and disposes
summarily of critical perplexities; there is no difficulty which may not
be explained by a miracle; and in that aspect the points of disagreement
between these accounts are more surprising than the similarities. It is
on the disagreements in fact that the labours of commentators have
chiefly been expended. Yet it is a question whether, on the whole,
inspiration does not leave unaffected the ordinary human phenomena; and
it is hard to suppose that where the rules of judgment in ordinary
writings are so distinct, God would have thus purposely cast a
stumbling-block in our way, and contrived a snare into which our reason
should mislead us. That is hard to credit; yet that and nothing else we
must believe if we refuse to apply to the Gospel the same canons of
criticism which with other writings would be a guide so decisive. It may
be assumed that the facts connected with them admit a natural
explanation; and we arrive, therefore, at the same conclusion as before:
that either two of the evangelists borrowed from the third, or else that
there was some other Gospel besides those which are now extant; existing
perhaps both in Hebrew and Greek--existing certainly in Greek--the
fragments of which are scattered up and down through St. Mark, St.
Matthew, and St. Luke, in masses sufficiently large to be distinctly
recognisable.
That at an early period in the Christian Church many such Gospels
existed, we know certainly from the words of St. Luke. St. Paul alludes
to words used by our Lord which are not mentioned by the evangelists,
which he assumed nevertheless to be well known to his hearers. He
speaks, too, of an appearance of our Lord after His resurrection to five
hundred brethren; on which the four Gospels are also silent. It is
indisputable, therefore, that besides and antecedent to them there were
other accounts of our Lord's life in use in the Christian Church. And
indeed, what more natural, what more necessary, than that from the day
on which the apostles entered upon their public mission, some narrative
should have been drawn up of the facts which they were about to make
known? Then as little as now could the imagination of men be trusted to
relate accurately a story composed of stupendous miracles without
mistake or exaggeration; and their very first step would have been to
compose an account of what had passed, to which they could speak with
certainty, and which they could invest with authoritative sanction. Is
it not possible then that the identical passages in the Synoptical
Gospels are the remains of something of this kind, which the
evangelists, in their later, fuller, and more complete histories,
enlarged and expanded? The conjecture has been often made, and English
commentators have for the most part dismissed it slightingly; not
apparently being aware that in rejecting one hypothesis they were bound
to suggest another; or at least to admit that there was something which
required explanation, though this particular suggestion did not seem
satisfactory. Yet if it were so, the external testimony for the truth of
the Gospel history would be stronger than before. It would amount to the
collective view of the first congregation of Christians, who had all
immediate and personal knowledge of our Lord's miracles and death and
resurrection.
But perhaps the external history of the four Gospels may throw some
light upon the question, if indeed we can speak of light where all is a
cloud of uncertainty. It would seem as if the sources of Christianity,
like the roots of all other living things, were purposely buried in
mystery. There exist no ancient writings whatever of such vast moment to
mankind of which so little can be authentically known.
The four Gospels, in the form and under the names which they at present
bear, become visible only with distinctness towards the end of the
second century of the Christian era. Then it was that they assumed the
authoritative position which they have ever since maintained, and were
selected by the Church out of the many other then existing narratives
as the supreme and exclusive authorities for our Lord's life. Irenaeus is
the first of the Fathers in whom they are found attributed by name to
St. Matthew, St. Mark, St. Luke, and St. John. That there were four true
evangelists, and that there could be neither more nor less than four,
Irenaeus had persuaded himself because there were four winds or spirits,
and four divisions of the earth, for which the Church being universal
required four columns; because the cherubim had four faces, to each of
which an evangelist corresponded; because four covenants had been given
to mankind--one before the Deluge in Adam, one after the Deluge in Noah,
the third in Moses, the fourth and greatest in the New Testament; while
again the name of Adam was composed of four letters. It is not to be
supposed that the intellects of those great men who converted the world
to Christianity were satisfied with arguments so imaginative as these;
they must have had other closer and more accurate grounds for their
decision; but the mere employment of such figures as evidence in any
sense, shows the enormous difference between their modes of reasoning
and ours, and illustrates the difficulty of deciding at our present
distance from them how far their conclusions were satisfactory.
Of the Gospels separately the history is immediately lost in legend.
The first notice of a Gospel of St. Matthew is in the well-known words
of Papias, a writer who in early life might have seen St. John. The
works of Papias are lost--a misfortune the more to be regretted because
Eusebius speaks of him as a man of very limited understanding, [Greek:
panu smikros ton noun]. Understanding and folly are words of
undetermined meaning; and when language like that of Irenaeus could seem
profound it is quite possible that Papias might have possessed
commonplace faculties which would have been supremely useful to us. A
surviving fragment of him says that St. Matthew put together the
discourses of our Lord in Hebrew, and that every one interpreted them as
he could. Pantaenus, said by Eusebius to have been another contemporary
of the apostles, was reported to have gone to India, to have found there
a congregation of Christians which had been established by St.
Bartholomew, and to have seen in use among them this Hebrew Gospel.
Origen repeats the story, which in his time had become the universal
Catholic tradition, that St. Matthew's was the first Gospel, that it was
written in Hebrew, and that it was intended for the use of the Jewish
converts. Jerome adds that it was unknown when or by whom it was
rendered into a Greek version. That was all which the Church had to say;
and what had become of that Hebrew original no one could tell.
That there existed _a_ Hebrew Gospel in very early times is well
authenticated; there was a Gospel called the Gospel of the Ebionites or
Nazarenes, of which Origen possessed a copy, and which St. Jerome
thought it worth while to translate; this too is lost, and Jerome's
translation of it also; but the negative evidence seems conclusive that
it was not the lost Gospel of St. Matthew. Had it been so it could not
have failed to be recognised, although from such accounts of it as have
been preserved, it possessed some affinity with St. Matthew's Gospel. In
one instance, indeed, it gave the right reading of a text which has
perplexed orthodox commentators, and has induced others to suspect that
that Gospel in its present form could not have existed before the
destruction of Jerusalem. The Zachariah the son of Barachiah said by St.
Matthew to have been slain between the temple and the altar, is unknown
to Old Testament history, while during the siege of Jerusalem a
Zachariah the son of Barachiah actually was killed exactly in the manner
described. But in the Ebionite Gospel the same words are found with this
slight but important difference, that the Zachariah in question is there
called the son of Jehoiadah, and is at once identified with the person
whose murder is related in the Second Book of Chronicles. The later
translator of St. Matthew had probably confused the names.
Of St. Mark's Gospel the history is even more profoundly obscure.
Papias, again the highest discoverable link of the Church tradition,
says that St. Mark accompanied St. Peter to Rome as his interpreter; and
that while there he wrote down what St. Peter told him, or what he could
remember St. Peter to have said. Clement of Alexandria enlarges the
story. According to Clement, when St. Peter was preaching at Rome, the
Christian congregation there requested St. Mark to write a Gospel for
them; St. Mark complied without acquainting St. Peter, and St. Peter
when informed of it was uncertain whether to give or withhold his
sanction till his mind was set at rest by a vision.
Irenaeus, on the other hand, says that St. Mark's Gospel was not written
till after the death of St. Peter and St. Paul. St. Chrysostom says that
after it was written St. Mark went to Egypt and published it at
Alexandria; Epiphanius again, that the Egyptian expedition was
undertaken at the express direction of St. Peter himself.
Thus the Church tradition is inconsistent with itself, and in all
probability is nothing but a structure of air; it is bound up with the
presence of St. Peter at Rome; and the only ground for supposing that
St. Peter was ever at Rome at all is the passage at the close of St.
Peter's First Epistle, where it pleased the Fathers to assume that the
'Babylon' there spoken of must have been the city of the Caesars. This
passage alone, with the wild stories (now known to have originated in
the misreading of an inscription) of St. Peter's conflict with Simon
Magus in the presence of the emperor, form together the light and airy
arches on which the huge pretences of the Church of Rome have reared
themselves. If the Babylon of the Epistle was Babylon on the
Euphrates--and there is not the slightest historical reason to suppose
it to have been anything else--the story of the origin of St. Mark's
Gospel perishes with the legend to which it was inseparably attached by
Church tradition.
Of St. John's Gospel we do not propose to speak in this place; it forms
a subject by itself; and of that it is enough to say that the defects of
external evidence which undoubtedly exist seem overborne by the
overwhelming proofs of authenticity contained in the Gospel itself.
The faint traditionary traces which inform us that St. Matthew and St.
Mark were supposed to have written Gospels fail us with St. Luke. The
apostolic and the immediately post-apostolic Fathers never mention Luke
as having written a history of our Lord at all. There was indeed a
Gospel in use among the Marcionites which resembled that of St. Luke, as
the Gospel of the Ebionites resembled that of St. Matthew. In both the
one and the other there was no mention of our Lord's miraculous birth;
and later writers accused Marcion of having mutilated St. Luke. But
apparently their only reason for thinking so was that the two Gospels
were like each other; and for all that can be historically proved, the
Gospel of the Marcionites may have been the older of the two. What is
wanting externally, however, is supposed to be more than made up by the
language of St. Luke himself. The Gospel was evidently composed in its
present form by the same person who wrote the Acts of the Apostles. In
the latter part of the Acts of the Apostles the writer speaks in the
first person as the companion of St. Paul; and the date of this Gospel
seems to be thus conclusively fixed at an early period in the apostolic
age. There is at least a high probability that this reasoning is sound;
yet it has seemed strange that a convert so eminent as 'the most
excellent' Theophilus, to whom St. Luke addressed himself, should be
found impossible to identify. 'Most excellent' was a title given only to
persons of high rank; and it is singular that St. Paul himself should
never have mentioned so considerable a name. And again, there is
something peculiar in the language of the introduction to the Gospel
itself. Though St. Luke professes to be writing on the authority of
eye-witnesses, he does not say he had spoken with eye-witnesses; so far
from it, that the word translated in the English version 'delivered' is
literally 'handed down;' it is the verb which corresponds to the
technical expression for 'tradition;' and the words translated 'having
had perfect understanding of all things from the first,' might be
rendered more properly, 'having traced or followed up all things from
the beginning.' And again, as it is humanly speaking certain that in St.
Luke's Gospel there are passages, however they are to be explained,
which were embodied in it from some other source, so, though extremely
probable, it is not absolutely certain that those passages in the Acts
in which the writer speaks in the first person are by the same hand as
the body of the narrative. If St. Luke had anywhere directly introduced
himself--if he had said plainly that he, the writer who was addressing
Theophilus, had personally joined St. Paul, and in that part of his
story was relating what he had seen and heard, there would be no room
for uncertainty. But, so far as we know, there is no other instance in
literature of a change of person introduced abruptly without
explanation. The whole book is less a connected history than a series of
episodes and fragments of the proceedings of the apostles; and it is to
be noticed that the account of St. Paul's conversion, as given in its
place in the first part of the narrative, differs in one material point
from the second account given later in the part which was unquestionably
the work of one of St. Paul's companions. There is a possibility--it
amounts to no more, and the suggestion is thrown out for the
consideration of those who are better able than this writer to judge of
it--that in the Gospel and the Acts we have the work of a careful editor
of the second century. Towards the close of that century a prominent
actor in the great movement which gave their present authority to the
four Gospels was Theophilus, Bishop of Antioch; he it was who brought
them together, incorporated into a single work--_in unum opus_; and it
may be, after all, that in him we have the long-sought person to whom
St. Luke was writing; that the Gospel which we now possess was compiled
at his desire out of other imperfect Gospels in use in the different
Churches; and that it formed a part of his scheme to supersede them by
an account more exhaustive, complete, and satisfactory.
To this hypothesis indeed there is an answer which if valid at all is
absolutely fatal. We are told that although the names of the writers of
the Gospels may not be mentioned until a comparatively late period, yet
that the Gospels themselves can be shown to have existed, because they
are habitually quoted in the authentic writings of the earliest of the
Fathers. If this be so, the slightness of the historical thread is of
little moment, and we may rest safely on the solid ground of so
conclusive a fact. But is it so? That the early Fathers quoted some
accounts of our Lord's life is abundantly clear; but did they quote
these? We proceed to examine this question--again tentatively only--we
do but put forward certain considerations on which we ask for fuller
information.
If any one of the primitive Christian writers was likely to have been
acquainted with the authentic writings of the evangelists, that one was
indisputably Justin Martyr. Born in Palestine in the year 89, Justin
Martyr lived to the age of seventy-six; he travelled over the Roman
world as a missionary; and intellectually he was more than on a level
with most educated Oriental Christians. He was the first distinctly
controversial writer which the Church produced; and the great facts of
the Gospel history were obviously as well known to him as they are to
ourselves. There are no traces in his writings of an acquaintance with
anything peculiar either to St. John or St. Mark; but there are extracts
in abundance often identical with and generally nearly resembling
passages in St. Matthew and St. Luke. Thus at first sight it would be
difficult to doubt that with these two Gospels at least he was
intimately familiar. And yet in all his citations there is this
peculiarity, that Justin Martyr never speaks of either of the
evangelists by name; he quotes or seems to quote invariably from
something which he calls [Greek: apomnemoneumata ton Apostolon], or
'Memoirs of the Apostles.' It is no usual habit of his to describe his
authorities vaguely: when he quotes the Apocalypse he names St. John;
when he refers to a prophet he specifies Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Daniel.
Why, unless there was some particular reason for it, should he use so
singular an expression whenever he alludes to the sacred history of the
New Testament? why, if he knew the names of the evangelists, did he
never mention them even by accident? Nor is this the only singularity in
Justin Martyr's quotations. There are those slight differences between
them and the text of the Gospels which appear between the Gospels
themselves. When we compare an extract in Justin with the parallel
passage in St. Matthew, we find often that it differs from St. Matthew
just as St. Matthew differs from St. Luke, or both from St. Mark--great
verbal similarity--many paragraphs agreeing word for word--and then
other paragraphs where there is an alteration of expression, tense,
order, or arrangement.
Again, just as in the midst of the general resemblance between the
Synoptical Gospels, each evangelist has something of his own which is
not to be found in the others, so in these 'Memoirs of the Apostles'
there are facts unknown to either of the evangelists. In the account
extracted by Justin from 'the Memoirs,' of the baptism in the Jordan,
the words heard from heaven are not as St. Matthew gives them--'Thou art
my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased'--but the words of the psalm,
'Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten Thee;' a reading which,
singularly enough, was to be found in the Gospel of the Ebionites.
Another curious addition to the same scene is in the words [Greek: kai
pur anephthe en Iordane], 'and a fire was kindled in Jordan.'
Again, Justin Martyr speaks of our Lord having promised 'to clothe us
with garments made ready for us if we keep his commandments'--[Greek:
kai aionion basileian pronoesai]--whatever those words may precisely
mean.
These and other peculiarities in Justin may be explained if we suppose
him to have been quoting from memory. The evangelical text might not as
yet have acquired its verbal sanctity; and as a native of Palestine he
might well have been acquainted with other traditions which lay outside
the written word. The silence as to names, however, remains unexplained;
and as the facts actually stand there is the same kind of proof, and no
more, that Justin Martyr was acquainted with St. Matthew and St. Luke as
there is that one of these evangelists made extracts from the other, or
both from St. Mark. So long as one set of commentators decline to
recognise the truth of this relation between the Gospels, there will be
others who with as much justice will dispute the relation of Justin to
them. He too might have used another Gospel, which, though like them,
was not identical with them.
After Justin Martyr's death, about the year 170, appeared Tatian's
'Diatessaron,' a work which, as its title implies, was a harmony of four
Gospels, and most likely of _the_ four; yet again not exactly as we have
them. Tatian's harmony, like so many others of the early evangelical
histories, was silent on the miraculous birth, and commenced only with
the public ministration. The text was in other places different, so much
so that Theodoret accuses Tatian of having mutilated the Gospels; but of
this Theodoret had probably no better means of judging than we have. The
'Diatessaron' has been long lost, and the name is the only clue to its
composition.
Of far more importance than either Justin or Tatian are such writings as
remain of the immediate successors of the apostles--Barnabas, Clement of
Rome, Polycarp, and Ignatius: it is asserted confidently that in these
there are quotations from the Gospels so exact that they cannot be
mistaken.
We will examine them one by one.
In an epistle of Barnabas there is one passage--it is the only one of
the kind to be found in him--agreeing word for word with the Synoptical
Gospels, 'I came not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.'
It is one of the many passages in which the Greek of the three
evangelists is exactly the same; it was to be found also in Justin's
'Memoirs;' and there can be no doubt that Barnabas either knew those
Gospels or else the common source--if common source there was--from
which the evangelists borrowed. More than this such a quotation does not
enable us to say; and till some satisfactory explanation has been
offered of the agreement between the evangelists, the argument can
advance no further. On the other hand, Barnabas like St. Paul had other
sources from which he drew his knowledge of our Lord's words. He too
ascribes words to Him which are not recorded by the evangelists, [Greek:
houto phesin Iesous; hoi thelontes me idein kai hapsasthai mou tes
basileias opheilousi thlibentes kai pathontes labein me]. The thought is
everywhere in the Gospels, the words nowhere, nor anything like them.
Both Ignatius and Polycarp appear to quote the Gospels, yet with them
also there is the same uncertainty; while Ignatius quotes as genuine an
expression which, so far as we know, was peculiar to a translation of
the Gospel of the Ebionites--'Handle me and see, for I am not a spirit
without body,' [Greek: hoti ouk eimi daimonion asomaton].
Clement's quotations are still more free, for Clement nowhere quotes the
text of the evangelists exactly as it at present stands; often he
approaches it extremely close; at times the agreement is rather in
meaning than words, as if he were translating from another language. But
again Clement more noticeably than either of the other apostolic Fathers
cites expressions of our Lord of which the evangelists knew nothing.
For instance--
'The Lord saith, "If ye be with me gathered into my bosom, and do not
after my commandments, I will cast you off, and I will say unto you,
Depart from me, I know you not, ye workers of iniquity."'
And again:--
'The Lord said, "Ye shall be as sheep in the midst of wolves." Peter
answered and said unto Him, "Will the wolves then tear the sheep?" Jesus
said unto Peter, "The sheep need not fear the wolves after they (the
sheep) be dead: and fear not ye those who kill you and can do nothing to
you; but fear Him who after you be dead hath power over soul and body to
cast them into hell-fire."'
In these words we seem to have the lost link in a passage which appears
in a different connection in St. Matthew and St. Luke. It may be said,
as with Justin Martyr, that Clement was quoting from memory in the sense
rather than in the letter; although even so it is difficult to suppose
that he could have invented an interlocution of St. Peter. Yet no
hypothesis will explain the most strange words which follow:--
'The Lord being asked when His kingdom should come, said, "When two
shall be one, and that which is without as that which is within, and the
male with the female neither male nor female."'
It is needless to say how remote are such expressions as these from any
which have come down to us through the evangelists; but they were no
inventions of Clement. The passage reappears later in Clement of
Alexandria, who found it in something which he called the Gospel of the
Egyptians.
It will be urged that because Clement quoted other authorities beside
the evangelists, it does not follow that he did not know and quote from
them. If the citation of a passage which appears in almost the same
words in another book is not to be accepted as a proof of an
acquaintance with that book, we make it impossible, it may be said, to
prove from quotations at all the fact of any book's existence. But this
is not the case. If a Father, in relating an event which is told
variously in the Synoptical Gospels, had followed one of them minutely
in its verbal peculiarities, it would go far to prove that he was
acquainted with that one; if the same thing was observed in all his
quotations, the proof would amount to demonstration. If he agreed
minutely in one place with one Gospel, minutely in a second with
another, minutely in a third with another, there would be reason to
believe that he was acquainted with them all; but when he merely relates
what they also relate in language which approaches theirs and yet
differs from it, as they also resemble yet differ from one another, we
do not escape from the circle of uncertainty, and we conclude either
that the early Fathers made quotations with a looseness irreconcileable
with the idea that the language of the Gospels possessed any verbal
sacredness to them, or that there were in their times other narratives
of our Lord's life standing in the same relation to the three Gospels as
St. Matthew stands to St. Mark and St. Luke.
Thus the problem returns upon us; and it might almost seem as if the
explanation was laid purposely beyond our reach. We are driven back upon
internal criticism; and we have to ask again what account is to be given
of that element common to the Synoptical Gospels, common also to those
other Gospels of which we find traces so distinct--those verbal
resemblances, too close to be the effect of accident--those differences
which forbid the supposition that the evangelists copied one another. So
many are those common passages, that if all which is peculiar to each
evangelist by himself were dropped, if those words and those actions
only were retained which either all three or two at least share
together, the figure of our Lord from His baptism to His ascension would
remain with scarcely impaired majesty.
One hypothesis, and so far as we can see one only, would make the
mystery intelligible, that immediately on the close of our Lord's life
some original sketch of it was drawn up by the congregation, which
gradually grew and gathered round it whatever His mother, His relations,
or His disciples afterwards individually might contribute. This primary
history would thus not be the work of any one mind or man; it would be
the joint work of the Church, and thus might well be called 'Memoirs of
the Apostles;' and would naturally be quoted without the name of either
one of them being specially attached to it. As Christianity spread over
the world, and separate Churches were founded by particular apostles,
copies would be multiplied, and copies of those copies; and, unchecked
by the presence (before the invention of printing impossible) of any
authoritative text, changes would creep in--passages would be left out
which did not suit the peculiar views of this or that sect; others would
be added as this or that apostle recollected something which our Lord
had said that bore on questions raised in the development of the creed.
Two great divisions would form themselves between the Jewish and the
Gentile Churches; there would be a Hebrew Gospel and a Greek Gospel, and
the Hebrew would be translated into Greek, as Papias says St. Matthew's
Gospel was. Eventually the confusion would become intolerable; and among
the conflicting stories the Church would have been called on to make its
formal choice.
This fact at least is certain from St. Luke's words, that at the time
when he was writing many different narratives did actually exist. The
hypothesis of a common origin for them has as yet found little favour
with English theologians; yet rather perhaps because it would be
inconvenient for certain peculiar forms of English thought than because
it has not probability on its side. That the Synoptical Gospels should
have been a natural growth rather than the special and independent work
of three separate writers, would be unfavourable to a divinity which has
built itself up upon particular texts, and has been more concerned with
doctrinal polemics than with the broader basements of historic truth.
Yet the text theory suffers equally from the mode in which the first
Fathers treated the Gospels, if it were these Gospels indeed which they
used. They at least could have attributed no importance to words and
phrases; while again, as we said before, a narrative dating from the
cradle of Christianity, with the testimony in its favour of such broad
and deep reception, would, however wanting in some details, be an
evidence of the truth of the main facts of the Gospel history very much
stronger than that of three books composed we know not when, and the
origin of which it is impossible to trace, which it is impossible to
regard as independent, and the writers of which in any other view of
them must be assumed to have borrowed from each other.
But the object of this article is not to press either this or any other
theory; it is but to ask from those who are able to give it an answer to
the most serious of questions. The truth of the Gospel history is now
more widely doubted in Europe than at any time since the conversion of
Constantine. Every thinking person who has been brought up a Christian
and desires to remain a Christian, yet who knows anything of what is
passing in the world, is looking to be told on what evidence the New
Testament claims to be received. The state of opinion proves of itself
that the arguments hitherto offered produce no conviction. Every other
miraculous history is discredited as legend, however exalted the
authority on which it seems to be rested. We crave to have good reason
shown us for maintaining still the one great exception. Hard worked in
other professions, and snatching with difficulty sufficient leisure to
learn how complicated is the problem, the laity can but turn to those
for assistance who are set apart and maintained as their theological
trustees. We can but hope and pray that some one may be found to give us
an edition of the Gospels in which the difficulties will neither be
slurred over with convenient neglect or noticed with affected
indifference. It may or may not be a road to a bishopric; it may or may
not win the favour of the religious world; but it will earn at least the
respectful gratitude of those who cannot trifle with holy things, and
who believe that true religion is the service of truth.
The last words were scarcely written when an advertisement appeared, the
importance of which can scarcely be over-estimated. A commentary is
announced on the Old and New Testaments, to be composed with a view to
what are called the 'misrepresentations' of modern criticism. It is to
be brought out under the direction of the heads of the Church, and is
the nearest approach to an official act in these great matters which
they have ventured for two hundred years. It is not for us to anticipate
the result. The word 'misrepresentations' is unfortunate; we should have
augured better for the work if instead of it had been written 'the
sincere perplexities of honest minds.' But the execution may be better
than the promise. If these perplexities are encountered honourably and
successfully, the Church may recover its supremacy over the intellect of
the country; if otherwise, the archbishop who has taken the command will
have steered the vessel direct upon the rocks.
FOOTNOTES:
[E] _Fraser's Magazine_, 1864.
[F] I do not speak of individuals; I speak of _tendency_.
THE BOOK OF JOB.[G]
It will be matter some day of curious enquiry to ascertain why,
notwithstanding the high reverence with which the English people regard
the Bible, they have done so little in comparison with their continental
contemporaries towards arriving at a proper understanding of it. The
books named below[H] form but a section of a long list which has
appeared during the last few years in Germany on the Book of Job alone;
and this book has not received any larger share of attention than the
others, either of the Old or the New Testament. Whatever be the nature
or the origin of these books (and on this point there is much difference
of opinion among the Germans as among ourselves) they are all agreed,
orthodox and unorthodox, that at least we should endeavour to understand
them; and that no efforts can be too great, either of research or
criticism, to discover their history, or elucidate their meaning.
We shall assent, doubtless, eagerly, perhaps noisily and indignantly, to
so obvious a truism; but our own efforts in the same direction will not
bear us out. Able men in England employ themselves in matters of a more
practical character; and while we refuse to avail ourselves of what has
been done elsewhere, no book, or books, which we produce on the
interpretation of Scripture acquire more than a partial or an ephemeral
reputation. The most important contribution to our knowledge on this
subject which has been made in these recent years is the translation of
the 'Library of the Fathers,' by which it is about as rational to
suppose that the analytical criticism of modern times can be superseded,
as that the place of Herman and Dindorf could be supplied by an edition
of the old scholiasts.
It is, indeed, reasonable that as long as we are persuaded that our
English theory of the Bible, as a whole, is the right one, we should
shrink from contact with investigations which, however ingenious in
themselves, are based on what we know to be a false foundation. But
there are some learned Germans whose orthodoxy would pass examination at
Exeter Hall; and there are many subjects, such, for instance, as the
present, on which all their able men are agreed in conclusions that
cannot rationally give offence to any one. With the Book of Job,
analytical criticism has only served to clear up the uncertainties which
have hitherto always hung about it. It is now considered to be, beyond
all doubt, a genuine Hebrew original, completed by its writer almost in
the form in which it now remains to us. The questions on the
authenticity of the Prologue and Epilogue, which once were thought
important, have given way before a more sound conception of the dramatic
unity of the entire poem; and the volumes before us contain merely an
enquiry into its meaning, bringing, at the same time, all the resources
of modern scholarship and historical and mythological research to bear
upon the obscurity of separate passages. It is the most difficult of all
the Hebrew compositions--many words occurring in it, and many thoughts,
not to be found elsewhere in the Bible. How difficult our translators
found it may be seen by the number of words which they were obliged to
insert in italics, and the doubtful renderings which they have suggested
in the margin. One instance of this, in passing, we will notice in this
place--it will be familiar to every one as the passage quoted at the
opening of the English burial service, and adduced as one of the
doctrinal proofs of the resurrection of the body:--'I know that my
Redeemer liveth, and that He shall stand at the latter _day_ upon the
earth; and _though_, after my skin _worms_ destroy this _body_, yet in
my flesh I shall see God.' So this passage stands in the ordinary
version. But the words in italics have nothing answering to them in the
original--they were all added by the translators[I] to fill out their
interpretation; and for _in my flesh_, they tell us themselves in the
margin that we may read (and, in fact, we ought to read, and must read)
'_out of_,' or _'without' my flesh_. It is but to write out the verses,
omitting the conjectural additions, and making that one small but vital
correction, to see how frail a support is there for so large a
conclusion: 'I know that my Redeemer liveth, and shall stand at the
latter upon the earth; and after my skin destroy
this ; yet without my flesh I shall see God.' If there is any
doctrine of a resurrection here, it is a resurrection precisely _not_ of
the body, but of the spirit. And now let us only add, that the word
translated Redeemer is the technical expression for the 'avenger of
blood;' and that the second paragraph ought to be rendered--'and one to
come after me (my next of kin, to whom the avenging my injuries belongs)
shall stand upon my dust,' and we shall see how much was to be done
towards the mere exegesis of the text. This is an extreme instance, and
no one will question the general beauty and majesty of our translation;
but there are many mythical and physical allusions scattered over the
poem, which, in the sixteenth century, there were positively no means of
understanding; and perhaps, too, there were mental tendencies in the
translators themselves which prevented them from adequately apprehending
even the drift and spirit of the composition. The form of the story was
too stringent to allow such tendencies any latitude; but they appear,
from time to time, sufficiently to produce serious confusion. With these
recent assistances, therefore, we propose to say something of the nature
of this extraordinary book--a book of which it is to say little to call
it unequalled of its kind, and which will one day, perhaps, when it is
allowed to stand on its own merits, be seen towering up alone, far away
above all the poetry of the world. How it found its way into the canon,
smiting as it does through and through the most deeply-seated Jewish
prejudices, is the chief difficulty about it now; to be explained only
by a traditional acceptance among the sacred books, dating back from the
old times of the national greatness, when the minds of the people were
hewn in a larger type than was to be found among the Pharisees of the
great synagogue. But its authorship, its date, and its history, are
alike a mystery to us; it existed at the time when the canon was
composed; and this is all that we know beyond what we can gather out of
the language and contents of the poem itself.
Before going further, however, we must make room for a few remarks of a
very general kind. Let it have been written when it would, it marks a
period in which the religious convictions of thinking men were passing
through a vast crisis; and we shall not understand it without having
before us clearly something of the conditions which periods of such a
kind always and necessarily exhibit.
The history of religious speculation appears in extreme outline to have
been of the following character. We may conceive mankind to have been
originally launched into the universe with no knowledge either of
themselves or of the scene in which they were placed; with no actual
knowledge, but distinguished from the rest of the creation by a faculty
of gaining knowledge; and first unconsciously, and afterwards
consciously and laboriously, to have commenced that long series of
experience and observation which has accumulated in thousands of years
to what we now see around us. Limited on all sides by conditions which
they must have felt to be none of their own imposing, and finding
everywhere forces working, over which they had no control, the fear
which they would naturally entertain of these invisible and mighty
agents assumed, under the direction of an idea which we may perhaps call
inborn and inherent in human nature, a more generous character of
reverence and awe. The laws of the outer world, as they discovered them,
they regarded as the decrees, or as the immediate energies of personal
beings; and as knowledge grew up among them, they looked upon it, not as
knowledge of nature, but of God, or the gods. All early paganism
appears, on careful examination, to have arisen out of a consecration of
the first rudiments of physical or speculative science. The twelve
labours of Hercules are the labours of the sun, of which Hercules is an
old name, through the twelve signs. Chronos, or _time_, being measured
by the apparent motion of the heavens, is figured as their child; Time,
the universal parent, devours its own offspring, yet is again itself, in
the high faith of a human soul conscious of its power and its
endurance, supposed to be baffled and dethroned by Zeus, or _life_; and
so on through all the elaborate theogonies of Greece and Egypt. They are
no more than real insight into real phenomena, allegorised as time went
on, elaborated by fancy, or idealised by imagination, but never losing
their original character.
Thus paganism, in its very nature, was expansive, self-developing, and,
as Mr. Hume observed, tolerant; a new god was welcomed to the Pantheon
as a new scientific discovery is welcomed by the Royal Society; and the
various nations found no difficulty in interchanging their divinities--a
new god either representing a new power not hitherto discovered, or one
with which they were already familiar under a new name. With such a
power of adaptation and enlargement, if there had been nothing more in
it than this, such a system might have gone on accommodating itself to
the change of times, and keeping pace with the growth of human
character. Already in its later forms, as the unity of nature was more
clearly observed, and the identity of nature throughout the known world,
the separate powers were subordinating themselves to a single supreme
king; and, as the poets had originally personified the elemental forces,
the thinkers were reversing the earlier process, and discovering the law
under the person. Happily or unhappily, however, what they could do for
themselves they could not do for the multitude. Phoebus and Aphrodite
had been made too human to be allegorised. Humanised, and yet, we may
say, only half-humanised, retaining their purely physical nature, and
without any proper moral attribute at all, these gods and goddesses
remained to the many examples of sensuality made beautiful; and, as soon
as right and wrong came to have a meaning, it was impossible to worship
any more these idealised despisers of it. The human caprices and
passions which served at first to deepen the illusion, justly revenged
themselves; paganism became a lie, and perished.
In the meantime, the Jews (and perhaps some other nations, but the Jews
chiefly and principally) had been moving forward along a road wholly
different. Breaking early away from the gods of nature, they advanced
along the line of their moral consciousness; and leaving the nations to
study physics, philosophy, and art, they confined themselves to man and
to human life. Their theology grew up round the knowledge of good and
evil, and God, with them, was the supreme Lord of the world, who stood
towards man in the relation of a ruler and a judge. Holding such a
faith, to them the toleration of paganism was an impossibility; the laws
of nature might be many, but the law of conduct was one; there was one
law and one king; and the conditions under which he governed the world,
as embodied in the Decalogue or other similar code, were looked upon as
iron and inflexible certainties, unalterable revelations of the will of
an unalterable Being. So far there was little in common between this
process and the other; but it was identical with it in this one
important feature, that moral knowledge, like physical, admitted of
degrees; and the successive steps of it were only purchasable by
experience. The dispensation of the law, in the language of modern
theology, was not the dispensation of grace, and the nature of good and
evil disclosed itself slowly as men were able to comprehend it. Thus, no
system of law or articles of belief were or could be complete and
exhaustive for all time. Experience accumulates; new facts are observed,
new forces display themselves, and all such formulae must necessarily be
from period to period broken up and moulded afresh. And yet the steps
already gained are a treasure so sacred, so liable are they at all times
to be attacked by those lower and baser elements in our nature which it
is their business to hold in check, that the better part of mankind have
at all times practically regarded their creed as a sacred total to which
nothing may be added, and from which nothing may be taken away; the
suggestion of a new idea is resented as an encroachment, punished as an
insidious piece of treason, and resisted by the combined forces of all
common practical understandings, which know too well the value of what
they have, to risk the venture upon untried change. Periods of religious
transition, therefore, when the advance has been a real one, always have
been violent, and probably will always continue to be so. They to whom
the precious gift of fresh light has been given are called upon to
exhibit their credentials as teachers in suffering for it. They, and
those who oppose them, have alike a sacred cause; and the fearful
spectacle arises of earnest, vehement men contending against each other
as for their own souls, in fiery struggle. Persecutions come, and
martyrdoms, and religions wars; and, at last, the old faith, like the
phoenix, expires upon its altar, and the new rises out of the ashes.
Such, in briefest outline, has been the history of religions, natural
and moral; the first, indeed, being in no proper sense a religion at
all, as we understand religion; and only assuming the character of it in
the minds of great men whose moral sense had raised them beyond their
time and country, and who, feeling the necessity of a real creed, with
an effort and with indifferent success, endeavoured to express, under
the systems which they found, emotions which had no proper place in
them.
Of the transition periods which we have described as taking place under
the religion which we call moral, the first known to us is marked at its
opening by the appearance of the Book of Job, the first fierce collision
of the new fact with the formula which will not stretch to cover it.
The earliest phenomenon likely to be observed connected with the moral
government of the world is the general one, that on the whole, as things
are constituted, good men prosper and are happy, bad men fail and are
miserable. The cause of such a condition is no mystery, and lies very
near the surface. As soon as men combine in society, they are forced to
obey certain laws under which alone society is possible, and these laws,
even in their rudest form, approach the laws of conscience. To a certain
extent, every one is obliged to sacrifice his private inclinations; and
those who refuse to do so are punished, or are crushed. If society were
perfect, the imperfect tendency would carry itself out till the two sets
of laws were identical; but perfection so far has been only in Utopia,
and, as far as we can judge by experience hitherto, they have
approximated most nearly in the simplest and most rudimentary forms of
life. Under the systems which we call patriarchal, the modern
distinction between sins and crimes had no existence. All gross sins
were offences against society, as it then was constituted, and, wherever
it was possible, were punished as being so; chicanery and those subtle
advantages which the acute and unscrupulous can take over the simple,
without open breach of enacted statutes, became only possible under the
complications of more artificial polities; and the oppression or injury
of man by man was open, violent, obvious, and therefore easily
understood. Doubtless, therefore, in such a state of things it would,
on the whole, be true to experience that, judging merely by outward
prosperity or the reverse, good and bad men would be rewarded and
punished as such in this actual world; so far, that is, as the
administration of such rewards and punishments was left in the power of
mankind. But theology could not content itself with general tendencies.
Theological propositions then, as much as now, were held to be absolute,
universal, admitting of no exceptions, and explaining every phenomenon.
Superficial generalisations were construed into immutable decrees; the
God of this world was just and righteous, and temporal prosperity or
wretchedness were dealt out by Him immediately by His own will to His
subjects according to their behaviour. Thus the same disposition towards
completeness which was the ruin of paganism, here, too, was found
generating the same evils; the half truth rounding itself out with
falsehoods. Not only the consequences of ill actions which followed
through themselves, but the accidents, as we call them, of
nature--earthquakes, storms, and pestilences--were the ministers of
God's justice, and struck sinners only with discriminating accuracy.
That the sun should shine alike on the evil and the good was a creed too
high for the early divines, or that the victims of a fallen tower were
no greater offenders than their neighbours. The conceptions of such men
could not pass beyond the outward temporal consequence; and if God's
hand was not there it was nowhere. We might have expected that such a
theory of things could not long resist the accumulated contradictions of
experience; but the same experience shows also what a marvellous power
is in us of thrusting aside phenomena which interfere with our cherished
convictions; and when such convictions are consecrated into a creed
which it is a sacred duty to believe, experience is but like water
dropping upon a rock, which wears it away, indeed, at last, but only in
thousands of years. This theory was and is the central idea of the
Jewish polity, the obstinate toughness of which has been the perplexity
of Gentiles and Christians from the first dawn of its existence; it
lingers among ourselves in our Liturgy and in the popular belief; and in
spite of the emphatic censure of Him after whose name we call ourselves,
is still the instant interpreter for us of any unusual calamity, a
potato blight, a famine, or an epidemic: such vitality is there in a
moral faith, though now, at any rate, contradicted by the experience of
all mankind, and at issue even with Christianity itself.
At what period in the world's history misgivings about it began to show
themselves it is now impossible to say; it was at the close, probably,
of the patriarchal period, when men who really _thought_ must have found
the ground palpably shaking under them. Indications of such misgivings
are to be found in the Psalms, those especially passing under the name
of Asaph; and all through Ecclesiastes there breathes a spirit of
deepest and saddest scepticism. But Asaph thrusts his doubts aside, and
forces himself back into his old position; and the scepticism of
Ecclesiastes is confessedly that of a man who had gone wandering after
enjoyment; searching after pleasures--pleasures of sense and pleasures
of intellect--and who, at last, bears reluctant testimony that, by such
methods, no pleasures can be found which will endure; that he had
squandered the power which might have been used for better things, and
had only strength remaining to tell his own sad tale as a warning to
mankind. There is nothing in Ecclesiastes like the misgivings of a noble
nature. The writer's own personal happiness had been all for which he
had cared; he had failed, as all men gifted as he was gifted are sure to
fail, and the lights of heaven were extinguished by the disappointment
with which his own spirit had been clouded.
Utterly different from these, both in character and in the lesson which
it teaches, is the Book of Job. Of unknown date, as we said, and unknown
authorship, the language impregnated with strange idioms and strange
allusions, un-Jewish in form, and in fiercest hostility with Judaism, it
hovers like a meteor over the old Hebrew literature, in it, but not of
it, compelling the acknowledgment of itself by its own internal majesty,
yet exerting no influence over the minds of the people, never alluded
to, and scarcely ever quoted, till at last the light which it had
heralded rose up full over the world in Christianity.
The conjectures which have been formed upon the date of this book are so
various, that they show of themselves on how slight a foundation the
best of them must rest. The language is no guide, for although
unquestionably of Hebrew origin, the poem bears no analogy to any of the
other books in the Bible; while of its external history nothing is
known at all, except that it was received into the canon at the time of
the great synagogue. Ewald decides, with some confidence, that it
belongs to the great prophetic period, and that the writer was a
contemporary of Jeremiah. Ewald is a high authority in these matters,
and this opinion is the one which we believe is now commonly received
among biblical scholars. In the absence of proof, however (and the
reasons which he brings forward are really no more than conjectures),
these opposite considerations may be of moment. It is only natural that
at first thought we should ascribe the grandest poem in a literature to
the time at which the poetry of the nation to which it belongs was
generally at its best; but, on reflection, the time when the poetry of
prophecy is the richest, is not likely to be favourable to compositions
of another kind. The prophets wrote in an era of decrepitude,
dissolution, sin, and shame, when the glory of Israel was falling round
them into ruin, and their mission, glowing as they were with the ancient
spirit, was to rebuke, to warn, to threaten, and to promise. Finding
themselves too late to save, and only, like Cassandra, despised and
disregarded, their voices rise up singing the swan song of a dying
people, now falling away in the wild wailing of despondency over the
shameful and desperate present, now swelling in triumphant hope that God
will not leave them for ever, and in His own time will take His chosen
to Himself again. But such a period is an ill occasion for searching
into the broad problems of human destiny; the present is all-important
and all-absorbing; and such a book as that of Job could have arisen only
out of an isolation of mind, and life, and interest, which we cannot
conceive of as possible under such conditions.
The more it is studied, the more the conclusion forces itself upon us
that, let the writer have lived when he would, in his struggle with the
central falsehood of his own people's creed, he must have divorced
himself from them outwardly as well as inwardly; that he travelled away
into the world, and lived long, perhaps all his matured life, in exile.
Everything about the book speaks of a person who had broken free from
the narrow littleness of 'the peculiar people.' The language, as we
said, is full of strange words. The hero of the poem is of strange land
and parentage--a Gentile certainly, not a Jew. The life, the manners,
the customs are of all varieties and places--Egypt, with its river and
its pyramids, is there; the description of mining points to Phoenicia;
the settled life in cities, the nomad Arabs, the wandering caravans, the
heat of the tropics, and the ice of the north, all are foreign to
Canaan, speaking of foreign things and foreign people. No mention, or
hint of mention, is there throughout the poem of Jewish traditions or
Jewish certainties. We look to find the three friends vindicate
themselves, as they so well might have done, by appeals to the fertile
annals of Israel, to the Flood, to the cities of the plain, to the
plagues of Egypt, or the thunders of Sinai. But of all this there is not
a word; they are passed by as if they had no existence; and instead of
them, when witnesses are required for the power of God, we have strange
un-Hebrew stories of the eastern astronomic mythology, the old wars of
the giants, the imprisoned Orion, the wounded dragon, 'the sweet
influences of the seven stars,' and the glittering fragments of the
sea-snake Rahab[J] trailing across the northern sky. Again, God is not
the God of Israel, but the father of mankind; we hear nothing of a
chosen people, nothing of a special revelation, nothing of peculiar
privileges; and in the court of heaven there is a Satan, not the prince
of this world and the enemy of God, but the angel of judgment, the
accusing spirit whose mission was to walk to and fro over the earth, and
carry up to heaven an account of the sins of mankind. We cannot believe
that thoughts of this kind arose out of Jerusalem in the days of Josiah.
In this book, if anywhere, we have the record of some [Greek: aner
polutropos] who, like the old hero of Ithaca,
[Greek:
pollon anthropon iden astea kai noon egno,
polla d' hog' en ponto pathen algea hon kata thumon,
arnumenos psuchen.... ]
but the scenes, the names, and the incidents, are all contrived as if to
baffle curiosity--as if, in the very form of the poem, to teach us that
it is no story of a single thing which happened once, but that it
belongs to humanity itself, and is the drama of the trial of man, with
Almighty God and the angels as the spectators of it.
No reader can have failed to have been struck with the simplicity of
the opening. Still, calm, and most majestic, it tells us everything
which is necessary to be known in the fewest possible words. The history
of Job was probably a tradition in the East; his name, like that of
Priam in Greece, the symbol of fallen greatness, and his misfortunes the
problem of philosophers. In keeping with the current belief, he is
described as a model of excellence, the most perfect and upright man
upon the earth, 'and the same was the greatest man in all the east.' So
far, greatness and goodness had gone hand in hand together, as the
popular theory required. The details of his character are brought out in
the progress of the poem. He was 'the father of the oppressed, and of
those who had none to help them.' When he sat as a judge in the
market-places, 'righteousness clothed him' there, and 'his justice was a
robe and a diadem.' He 'broke the jaws of the wicked, and plucked the
spoil out of his teeth;' and, humble in the midst of his power, he 'did
not despise the cause of his manservant, or his maidservant, when they
contended with him,' knowing (and amidst those old people where the
multitude of mankind were regarded as the born slaves of the powerful,
to be carved into eunuchs or polluted into concubines at their master's
pleasure, it was no easy matter to know it)--knowing that 'He who had
made him had made them,' and _one_ 'had fashioned them both in the
womb.' Above all, he was the friend of the poor; 'the blessing of him
that was ready to perish came upon him,' and he 'made the widow's heart
to sing for joy.'
Setting these characteristics of his daily life by the side of his
unaffected piety, as it is described in the first chapter, we have a
picture of the best man who could then be conceived; not a hard ascetic,
living in haughty or cowardly isolation, but a warm figure of flesh and
blood, a man full of all human loveliness, and to whom, that no room
might be left for any possible Calvinistic falsehood, God Himself bears
the emphatic testimony, that 'there was none like him upon the earth, a
perfect and upright man, who feared God and eschewed evil.' If such a
person as this, therefore, could be made miserable, necessarily the
current belief of the Jews was false to the root; and tradition
furnished the fact that he had been visited by every worst calamity. How
was it then to be accounted for? Out of a thousand possible
explanations, the poet introduces a single one. He admits us behind the
veil which covers the ways of Providence, and we hear the accusing angel
charging Job with an interested piety, and of being obedient because it
was his policy. 'Job does not serve God for nought,' he says; 'strip him
of his splendour, and see if he will care for God then. Humble him into
poverty and wretchedness, so only we shall know what is in his heart.'
The cause thus introduced is itself a rebuke to the belief which, with
its 'rewards and punishments,' immediately fostered selfishness; and the
poem opens with a double action, on one side to try the question whether
it is possible for man to love God disinterestedly--the issue of which
trial is not foreseen or even foretold, and we watch the progress of it
with an anxious and fearful interest; on the other side, to bring out,
in contrast to the truth which we already know, the cruel falsehood of
the popular faith--to show how, instead of leading men to mercy and
affection, it hardens their heart, narrows their sympathies, and
enhances the trials of the sufferer, by refinements which even Satan had
not anticipated. The combination of evils, as blow falls on blow,
suddenly, swiftly, and terribly, has all the appearance of a purposed
visitation (as indeed it was); if ever outward incidents might with
justice be interpreted as the immediate action of Providence, those
which fell on Job might be so interpreted. The world turns disdainfully
from the fallen in the world's way; but far worse than this, his chosen
friends, wise, good, pious men, as wisdom and piety were then, without
one glimpse of the true cause of his sufferings, see in them a judgment
upon his secret sins. He becomes to them an illustration, and even (such
are the paralogisms of men of this description) a proof of their theory
that 'the prosperity of the wicked is but for a while;' and instead of
the comfort and help which they might have brought him, and which in the
end they were made to bring him, he is to them no more than a text for
the enunciation of solemn falsehood. And even worse again, the sufferer
himself had been educated in the same creed; he, too, had been taught to
see the hand of God in the outward dispensation; and feeling from the
bottom of his heart, that he, in his own case, was a sure contradiction
of what he had learnt to believe, he himself finds his very faith in God
shaken from its foundation. The worst evils which Satan had devised
were distanced far by those which had been created by human folly.
The creed in which Job had believed was tried and found wanting, and, as
it ever will be when the facts of experience come in contact with the
inadequate formula, the true is found so mingled with the false, that
they can hardly be disentangled, and are in danger of being swept away
together.
A studied respect is shown, however, to orthodoxy, even while it is
arraigned for judgment. It may be doubtful whether the writer purposely
intended it. He probably cared only to tell the real truth; to say for
the old theory the best which could be said, and to produce as its
defenders the best and wisest men whom in his experience he had known to
believe and defend it. At any rate, he represents the three friends, not
as a weaker person would have represented them, as foolish, obstinate
bigots, but as wise, humane, and almost great men, who, at the outset,
at least, are animated only by the kindest feelings, and speak what they
have to say with the most earnest conviction that it is true. Job is
vehement, desperate, reckless. His language is the wild, natural
outpouring of suffering. The friends, true to the eternal nature of man,
are grave, solemn, and indignant, preaching their half truth, and
mistaken only in supposing that it is the whole; speaking, as all such
persons would speak and still do speak, in defending what they consider
sacred truth against the assaults of folly and scepticism. How beautiful
is their first introduction:--
'Now when Job's three friends heard of all this evil which was come upon
him, they came every one from his own place; Eliphaz the Temanite, and
Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite: for they had made an
appointment together to come to mourn with him and to comfort him. And
when they lifted up their eyes afar off, and knew him not, they lifted
up their voice and wept, and they rent every one his mantle, and
sprinkled dust upon their heads towards heaven. So they sat down with
him upon the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spake a word
unto him, for they saw that his grief was very great.'
What a picture is there! What majestic tenderness! His wife had scoffed
at his faith, bidding him 'leave God and die.' 'His acquaintance had
turned from him.' He 'had called his servant, and he had given him no
answer.' Even the children, in their unconscious cruelty, had gathered
round and mocked him as he lay among the ashes. But 'his friends
sprinkle dust towards heaven, and sit silently by him, and weep for him
seven days and seven nights upon the ground.' That is, they were
true-hearted, truly loving, devout, religious men; and yet they, with
their religion, were to become the instruments of the most poignant
sufferings, the sharpest temptations, which he had to endure. So it was,
and is, and will be--of such materials is this human life of ours
composed.
And now, remembering the double action of the drama--the actual trial of
Job, the result of which is uncertain; and the delusion of these men,
which is, at the outset, certain--let us go rapidly through the
dialogue. Satan's share in the temptation had already been overcome.
Lying sick in the loathsome disease which had been sent upon him, his
wife, in Satan's own words, had tempted Job to say, 'Farewell to
God,'--think no more of God or goodness, since this was all which came
of it; and Job had told her that she spoke as one of the foolish women.
He 'had received good at the hand of the Lord, and should he not receive
evil?' But now, when real love and real affection appear, his heart
melts in him; he loses his forced self-composure, and bursts into a
passionate regret that he had ever been born. In the agony of his
sufferings, hope of better things had died away. He does not complain of
injustice; as yet, and before his friends have stung and wounded him, he
makes no questioning of Providence,--but why was life given to him at
all, if only for this? Sick in mind, and sick in body, but one wish
remains to him, that death will come quickly and end all. It is a cry
from the very depths of a single and simple heart. But for such
simplicity and singleness his friends could not give him credit;
possessed beforehand with their idea, they see in his misery only a
fatal witness against him; such calamities could not have befallen a
man, the justice of God would not have permitted it, unless they had
been deserved. Job had sinned and he had suffered, and this wild passion
was but impenitence and rebellion.
Being as certain that they were right in this opinion as they were that
God Himself existed, that they should speak what they felt was only
natural and necessary; and their language at the outset is, all which
would be dictated by the tenderest sympathy. Eliphaz opens, the oldest
and most important of the three, in a soft, subdued, suggestive strain,
contriving in every way to spare the feelings of the sufferer, to the
extreme to which his love will allow him. All is general, impersonal,
indirect,--the rule of the world, the order of Providence. He does not
accuse Job, but he describes his calamities, and leaves him to gather
for himself the occasion which had produced them; and then passes off,
as if further to soften the blow, to the mysterious vision in which the
infirmity of mortal nature had been revealed to him, the universal
weakness which involved both the certainty that Job had shared in it,
and the excuse for him, if he would confess and humble himself: the
blessed virtue of repentance follows, and the promise that all shall be
well.
This is the note on which each of the friends strikes successively, in
the first of the three divisions into which the dialogue divides itself,
but each with increasing peremptoriness and confidence, as Job, so far
from accepting their interpretation of what had befallen him, hurls it
from him in anger and disdain. Let us observe (and the Calvinists should
consider this), he will hear as little of the charges against mankind as
of charges against himself. He will not listen to the 'corruption of
humanity,' because in the consciousness of his own innocency, he knows
that it is not corrupt: he knows that he is himself just and good, and
we know it, the Divine sentence upon him having been already passed. He
will not acknowledge his sin, for he knows not of what to repent. If he
could have reflected calmly, he might have foreseen what they would say.
He knew all that as well as they: it was the old story which he had
learnt, and could repeat, if necessary, as well as anyone: and if it had
been no more than a philosophical discussion, touching himself no more
nearly than it touched his friends, he might have allowed for the
tenacity of opinion in such matters, and listened to it and replied to
it with equanimity. But, as the proverb says, 'It is ill talking between
a full man and a fasting:' and in Job such equanimity would have been
but Stoicism, or the affectation of it, and unreal as the others'
theories. Possessed with the certainty that he had not deserved what had
befallen him, harassed with doubt, and worn out with pain and
unkindness, he had assumed (and how natural that he should assume it)
that those who loved him should not have been hasty to believe evil of
him; he had spoken to them as he really felt, and he thought that he
might have looked to them for something warmer and more sympathising
than such dreary eloquence. So when the revelation comes upon him of
what was passing in them, he attributes it (and now he is unjust to
them) to a falsehood of heart, and not to a blindness of understanding.
Their sermons, so kindly intended, roll past him as a dismal mockery.
They had been shocked (and how true again is this to nature) at his
passionate cry for death. 'Do ye reprove words?' he says, 'and the
speeches of one that is desperate, which are as wind?' It was but poor
friendship and narrow wisdom. He had looked to them for pity, for
comfort, and love. He had longed for it as the parched caravans in the
desert for the water-streams, and 'his brethren had dealt deceitfully
with him.' The brooks, in the cool winter, roll in a full turbid
torrent; 'what time it waxes warm they vanish, when it is hot they are
consumed out of their place; the caravans of Tema looked for them, the
companies of Sheba waited for them; they were confounded because they
had hoped; they came thither, and there was nothing.' If for once these
poor men could have trusted their hearts, if for once they could have
believed that there might be 'more things in heaven and earth' than were
dreamt of in their philosophy--but this is the one thing which they
could not do, which the theologian proper never has done or will do. And
thus whatever of calmness or endurance Job alone, on his ash-heap, might
have conquered for himself, is all scattered away; and as the strong
gusts of passion sweep to and fro across his heart, he pours himself out
in wild fitful music, so beautiful because so true, not answering them
or their speeches, but now flinging them from him in scorn, now
appealing to their mercy, or turning indignantly to God; now praying for
death; now in perplexity doubting whether, in some mystic way which he
cannot understand, he may not, perhaps, after all, really have sinned,
and praying to be shown his fault; and then staggering further into the
darkness, and breaking out into upbraidings of the Power which has
become so dreadful an enigma to him. 'Thou enquirest after my iniquity,
thou searchest after my sin, and thou knowest that I am not wicked. Why
didst thou bring me forth out of the womb? Oh, that I had given up the
ghost, and no eye had seen me. Cease, let me alone. It is but a little
while that I have to live. Let me alone, that I may take comfort a
little before I go, whence I shall not return to the land of darkness
and the shadow of death.' In what other poem in the world is there
pathos deep as this? With experience so stern as his, it was not for Job
to be calm, and self-possessed, and delicate in his words. He speaks not
what he knows, but what he feels; and without fear the writer allows him
to throw out his passion all genuine as it rises, not overmuch caring
how nice ears might be offended, but contented to be true to the real
emotion of a genuine human heart. So the poem runs on to the end of the
first answer to Zophar.
But now, with admirable fitness, as the contest goes forward, the
relative position of the speakers begins to change. Hitherto, Job only
had been passionate; and his friends temperate and collected. Now,
becoming shocked at his obstinacy, and disappointed in the result of
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