UC-NRLF 
 
 TFAPH 
 
 1 UJr\ V* O 
 
 
 
WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 
 
WHAT DOES HISTORY 
 TEACH ? 
 
 TWO EDINBURGH LECTURES 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN STUART BLACKIE 
 
 Pontoon 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 1886 
 
Printed by R. & R. CLARK, Edinburgh. 
 
PREFATORY NOTE. 
 
 THE following Lectures were prepared 
 for the Philosophical Institution of Edin- 
 burgh, and were delivered, with the 
 exception of a few passages, before 
 audiences consisting of Members of that 
 Institution on th$ evenings of 8th and 
 nth December in the present year. 
 
 EDINBURGH, December 1885. 
 
 263257 
 
I. 
 
 THE STATE. 
 
 /cat yupivOlv vofjiov KOL SiK-rjs 
 
 ARISTOTLE. 
 
 HISTORY, whether Founded on reliable 
 record, or on monuments, or on the scien- 
 tific analysis of the great fossil tradition 
 called language, knows nothing of the 
 earliest beginnings. The seed of human 
 society, like the seed of the vegetable 
 growth, lies under ground in darkness, and 
 its earliest processes are invisible to the 
 outward eye. Speculations about the de- 
 scent of the primeval man from a monkey, 
 of the primeval monkey from an ascidian, 
 and of the primeval ascidian from a proto- 
 plastic bubble, though they may act as a 
 potent stimulus to the biological research 
 B. 
 
2 ' :WJFlAt- 'DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 of the hour, certainly never can form the 
 starting-point of a profitable philosophy of 
 history. 
 
 As revealed in history, man is an 
 animal, not only generically different from, 
 but characteristically antagonistic to the 
 brute. That which makes him a man is 
 precisely that which no brute possesses, or 
 can by any process of training be made to 
 possess. The man can no more be de- 
 veloped out of the brute than the purple 
 heather out of the granite rock which it 
 clothes. The relation of the one to the 
 other is a relation of mere outward attach- 
 ment or dependency like the relation 
 which exists between the painter's easel 
 and the picture which is painted on it. 
 The easel is essential to the picture, but it 
 did not make the picture, nor give even 
 the smallest hint towards the making of it. 
 So the monkey, as a basis, may be essential 
 to the man without being in any way 
 participant of the divine indwelling XOYO? 
 which makes a man a man. The two are 
 related only as all things are related, inas- 
 
i.] THE STATE. 3 
 
 much as they are all shot forth from the 
 great fountain-head of all vital forces, 
 whom we justly call GOD. 
 
 The distinctive character of man as 
 revealed in history is threefold. Man 
 is an inventive animal, and he does not 
 invent from a compulsion of nature, as 
 bees make cells or as swallows build nests. 
 These are all prescribed operations which 
 the animal must perform ; but the inventive 
 faculty in man is free, in such a manner 
 that the course of its action cannot be fore- 
 seen or calculated. It revels in variety, 
 and, above all things, shuns that uniform- 
 ity which is the servile province of brute 
 activity. A man may live in a hole like a 
 fox, but his proper humanity is shown by 
 building a house and inventing a style of 
 architecture. A man can sing like a bird, 
 but what the bird cannot do he can 
 make a harp or an organ. He can scrape 
 with his nails like a terrier, but, as a man 
 manifesting his proper manhood, he prefers 
 to make a shovel of wood and a hatchet of 
 stone or iron. The other animals, however 
 
4 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 cunning, and often wonderfully adaptable in 
 their instincts, are mere machines. Man 
 makes machines. In this respect he is 
 justly entitled to look upon himself as the 
 God to the lower animals, just as the 
 sheriff in the counties by delegated right 
 represents the supreme authority of the 
 Crown. But, above all things, man is a 
 progressive animal, not merely progres- 
 sive as the grass grows from root to- blade 
 and from blade to blossom to perfect its 
 individual type of vegetable life, but ad- 
 vancing from stage to stage and mounting 
 from platform to platform for the perfec- 
 tionation of the race ; nor even progressive 
 as plants and fruits are improved by culture 
 and favourable surroundings, and what is 
 called forcing, or as the breed of sheep and 
 cattle is improved by selection. No doubt 
 progress of this kind is made by man as 
 well as by plants and brutes ; but his most 
 distinctive human progress is made, not 
 by imposition from without, but by projec- 
 tion from within. These projections from 
 within are what in philosophical language 
 
I.] THE STATE. 5 
 
 is called the idea ; they proceed from the 
 essential nature of mind, whose imperial 
 function it is to dictate forms, as it is the 
 servile function of the senses to receive im- 
 pressions. These intelligent forms, coming 
 directly from the divine source of all 
 excellence, and projected from within with 
 sovereign authority to shape for themselves 
 an outward embodiment, constitute what in 
 art, in literature, in religion, and in social 
 organisms, is called the ideal ; and man may 
 accordingly be defined as an animal that 
 lives by the conception of ideals, and whose 
 destiny it is to spend his strength, and, if 
 need be, to lay down his life, for the realis- 
 ation of such ideals. The steps of this 
 realisation, often slow and painful, and 
 always difficult, are what we mean by 
 human progress ; and it is the dominant 
 characteristic of man, of which amongst the 
 lower animals there is not a vestige, neither 
 indeed could be ; for so long as they have 
 no ideas, neither reason nor the outward 
 expression of reason in language two 
 things so closely bound together that the 
 
6 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 wise Greeks expressed them both by one 
 word, ^0709 so long must it be ridiculous 
 to think of them shaping their career 
 according to an inborn type of progressive 
 excellence. To do so is exclusively human. 
 Hence our poems, our high art, our 
 churches, our legislations, our apostleships, 
 our philosophies, our social arrangements 
 and devices, our speculations and schemes 
 of all kinds, which, though they are some- 
 times foolish, and always more or less 
 inadequate, deliver the strongest possible 
 proof that man is an animal who will rather 
 die and embrace martyrdom than be con- 
 tent to live as the brutes do, neither 
 spurred with the hope of progress nor 
 borne aloft on the wings of the ideal. 
 
 Of the very earliest state of human 
 society, as we have already said, history 
 teaches nothing ; but, as man is a progres- 
 sive animal, and the plan of Providence 
 with regard to him seems plain to let him 
 shift for itself and learn to do right by 
 blundering, as children learn to walk by 
 tumbling, we may safely say that the easier, 
 
I.] THE STATE. 7 
 
 more obvious, and more rude forms of 
 living together must have preceded the 
 more difficult, the more complex, and the 
 more polished. And in perfect consistency 
 with this presumption, we find three social 
 platforms rising one above the other in 
 human value, duly accredited either by 
 monuments, by popular tradition, or by the 
 evidence of comparative philology. These 
 three are (i) The prehistoric or stone 
 period, from which such a rich store of 
 monuments has been set up in the Copen- 
 hagen Museum, and the existence of which 
 is indicated in Gen. iv. 22 as antecedent 
 to Tubal Cain, the instructor of every arti- 
 ficer in brass and iron. (2) The shepherd 
 or pastoral stage, represented by Abel 
 (Gen. iv. 2), in which men subsisted from 
 the easy dominance which they asserted 
 over wild animals, and from fruits of the 
 earth requiring no culture. (3) The agri- 
 cultural stage, when cereal crops were 
 systematically and scientifically cultivated, 
 which, of course, implied the limitation of 
 particular districts of ground to particular 
 
WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 proprietors, and those agrarian laws which 
 caused the Greek Demeter to be honoured 
 with the title of Oea-pofyopos, or lawgiver a 
 step of marked and decided advance, inso- 
 much that we may justly attribute to it the 
 redemption of society from the vagus con- 
 cubitus of the earliest times, and the firm 
 establishment of the family, with all its 
 sanctities and all its binding power, as the 
 prime social monad. To the priestess of 
 this goddess accordingly, amongst the 
 Greeks, was assigned the function of usher- 
 ing in the newly-married pair to the peculiar 
 duties of their new social relation. 1 
 
 The fact that the family is the great 
 social monad, as it is undoubtedly one of 
 the oldest and most accredited facts in 
 human tradition, so it presents to us per- 
 haps the most important of all the lessons 
 that history teaches a lesson as necessary 
 to be inculcated at the present hour as at 
 the earliest stages of social advance ; and 
 Aristotle certainly was never more in the 
 right than when he emphasised this truth 
 
 1 Plutarch conjugalia praecepta init. 
 
I.] THE STATE. 9 
 
 strongly in traversing Plato's fancy of 
 making the state the universal family, to 
 the utter absorption of all subordinated 
 family monads. Here, as in one or two 
 other matters, the great idealist would be 
 wiser than God ; and so his philosophy, so 
 far as that point was concerned, became 
 only a more sublime attitude of folly. The 
 importance of the family, as the divinely 
 instituted social monad, depends manifestly 
 on the happy combination and harmonious 
 blending of authority and love which grow 
 out of its constitution two elements with 
 the full development and true balance of 
 which the well-being and happiness of all 
 societies is intimately bound up. The fine 
 moral training which the family relation 
 alone can inspire we find not only at our 
 own door, in the fidelity and self-sacrificing 
 devotion of our noble Highlanders, who 
 derived their inspiration from the clan 
 system, of which the family love and re- 
 spect is the binding element, 1 as contrasted 
 
 1 The word clan is the familiar, well-known Celtic 
 word for children. 
 
IO WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 with the slavish system of vassalage, the 
 badge of feudalism ; but in the habits and 
 institutions of the three great ancient 
 peoples to whom modern Europe owes 
 its higher civilisation, Hebrews, Greeks, 
 and Romans, specially the last, 1 the great 
 masters of the difficult art of government, 
 who, to use Mommsen's phrase, carried 
 out the unity of the family through the 
 virtue of paternal authority "with an in- 
 exorable consistency/' the beneficial effect 
 of which could not fail to display itself in 
 social life far beyond the sphere from which 
 it originally emanated ; for obedience to 
 authority is the fundamental postulate of 
 all possible societies. With the family, if 
 not absolutely, certainly with the best and 
 normal state of it, most closely connected 
 is monogamy ; for, though instances of 
 bigamy and polygamy, from Lamech 
 downwards (Gen. iv. 19) to King David 
 and Solomon in the Old Testament history, 
 crop up here and there in the oldest times, 
 
 1 " Nulli alii sunt homines qui talem in liberos habeant 
 potestatem qualem nos habemus." Instititt. i. 9, 2. 
 
I.] THE STATE. II 
 
 and even in the post -Babylonian period, 
 without any formal mark of disapprobation, 
 yet it is quite certain that the Greeks and 
 Romans were guided by a sound social 
 instinct when they held the practice of 
 bigamy to be inconsistent with the proper 
 constitution of a family. What troubles 
 are apt to arise from a multiplication of 
 contending wives and ambitious mothers 
 the latter story of King David tells in 
 more unhappy episodes than one ; and 
 generally it may be laid down as one of 
 the great lessons of history that polygamy, 
 in every shape, is one of those acts of 
 Oriental self-indulgence which may be 
 sweet in the mouth but has a very 
 strong tendency to be bitter in the belly, 
 and therefore ought by all means to be 
 avoided. 
 
 By the instinct of aggregation, which 
 belongs to an essentially social animal, 
 families will club together into town- 
 ships or villages, and townships will be 
 centralised into states. Humanity with- 
 out townships would degenerate into 
 
'1 2 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 tigerhood, or whatever type of animal ex- 
 istence might express an essentially self- 
 contained, solitary, and selfish creature ; 
 townships without that sort of headship 
 which the word State implies, would make 
 society cry halt at a stage of loosely-con- 
 nected aggregates which would render 
 common action for any high human pur- 
 pose extremely difficult, and, in the 
 general case, as human beings are, im- 
 possible. Hence the centralisation of the 
 Attic townships at Athens in the legendary 
 traditions of the Athenians attributed to 
 Theseus ; x hence also the lax confedera- 
 tion of the earliest Latin states under the 
 headship of Albalonga ; and, after the 
 humiliation of that old stronghold, the more 
 closely cemented union of those states 
 under the hegemony of Rome. 2 What- 
 
 1 Thucyd. ii. 15. The Athenians went further, and 
 attributed to the son of ^Egeus the creation of their 
 democracy (Pausan., Att. iii.) ; but this, of course, 
 was only the popular instinct, everywhere active, which 
 loves to heap all graces upon the head of a favourite 
 hero. 
 
 2 See the words of the Latin league, Dionys. Hal. 
 vi. 95, contrasting strongly with the original collection of 
 
ij THE STATE. 13 
 
 ever may be the evils connected with the 
 growth of large towns, especially when, as 
 in modern times, they have been allowed 
 to swell to enormous magnitude without 
 regulation or control, it is one of the un- 
 doubted lessons of universal history that 
 the social stimulus necessary for the 
 creation of vigorous thought, no less than 
 the centralised force indispensable to great 
 achievement, is found only in the large 
 towns. The Christians were called Christ- 
 ians first at Antioch ; and, had there been 
 no Rome to unify a little Latium, there 
 would have been no great Roman Empire 
 to amalgamate the rude barbarians of the 
 North with the smooth civilisation of the 
 South by the force of a common law and 
 a common language. 1 
 
 The form of government natural to 
 
 autonomous villages described by Strabo, v. 229, Kara 
 
 1 The influence of the great city in centralising the 
 villages and making a state possible was in Greece 
 philologically stereotyped by the fact that for city and 
 state the language had only one word, TroAis. The city 
 was the state in the same sense that the head is the 
 body, for without the head no living body could be. 
 
14 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 such infant states as the expansion of 
 the original social monad, the FAMILY, is a 
 loose but not unkindly mixture of monarchy, 
 democracy, and aristocracy the aristocracy 
 being always the preponderating element. 
 In the single family, of course, we have 
 only the monarchical element in the father, 
 and the democratic element in the children ; 
 but, as families expand into townships, it 
 could not be but that the heads of the 
 families composing it, partly from their age 
 and experience, partly from the force of 
 individual character, should form a sort of 
 natural aristocracy, while the less notable 
 and less prominent members would form 
 the 77/^09, or great body of the con- 
 stantly increasing multitude of the asso- 
 ciated families. Below these three domin- 
 ant elements of the body social, there 
 would always be found a loose company of 
 dependents and onhangers the class called 
 fjres in Homer (Od., iv. 644), and in the 
 Solonian constitution who had no civic 
 rights any more than the serfs and vassals 
 of our medieval feudalism. The weakness 
 
i.] THE STATE. 15 
 
 of the monarchical and the strength of the 
 aristocratic elements in the early societies 
 arose from the original equality of the 
 heads of families, and from the jealousy 
 with which they would naturally look on 
 any functions of superiority exercised by 
 any of their order naturally no better than 
 themselves. The king, accordingly, like 
 Agamemnon in Homer, would claim the 
 homage which the title implies only for 
 purposes of common action ; and even in 
 such cases would always be kept in check 
 by a POV\TI, or council of the aristocracy, of 
 whose will properly he was only the execu- 
 tive hand ; while the great mass of the 
 people, occupied with the labours that 
 belong to an agricultural and pastoral 
 population, and unaccustomed to the large 
 views which statesmanship and generalship 
 require, would come together only<on rare 
 occasions of peculiar urgency. 
 
 The element in that loose triacTof social 
 forces that was first formulated into a more 
 distinct type, and endowed with more im- 
 perative efficiency, was the kingship. The 
 
1 6 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 power of the king was increased, which of 
 course implies that the power of the people, 
 and specially of the aristocracy, was dimin- 
 ished. And here let it be observed gener- 
 ally that the progress of civilisation in its 
 natural and healthy career is the progress 
 of limitation and the curtailment in various 
 ways of that freedom which originally 
 belonged to every member of the com- 
 munity. The tanned savage of the back- 
 woods is the freest man in existence ; next 
 to him, the nomad or the wandering gipsy, 
 such as may still be seen in their glory at 
 St. James' fair in Kelso, whose house is at 
 once his dwelling-place, his manufactory or 
 place of business, and his travelling car ; 
 least free is the civilised citizen hemmed 
 in on all sides by police-officers, soldiers, 
 sentinels, door-keepers, and game-keepers, 
 and the whole fraternity of dignified but 
 unpopular officials of various kinds whose 
 business it is to the general public to say 
 No ! This accretion of strength to the 
 king proceeded first from his mere personal 
 influence and the general deference paid 
 
I.] THE STATE. 1 7 
 
 to him during the continuance of a pro- 
 longed and easily-exercised^sovereignty ; all 
 classes, even the aristocracy, whose ambi- 
 tion is thus kept in check and their perilous 
 enmities softened, feel the benefit of a wise 
 head and a firm hand ; but the party 
 specially benefited by the kingship is the 
 demos ; for this body, from its position 
 peculiarly liable to be trampled on by an 
 insolent aristocracy, naturally looks up to 
 the king as the father of the whole family, 
 who, on his part, feels his position strength- 
 ened and his respect increased by perform- 
 ing with tact and firmness the delicate 
 functions of a mediator. But the great 
 social force which operates in giving 
 prominence and predominance to the 
 monarchy is WAR ; and, though war is un- 
 questionably an evil, it is an evil only as 
 death is, and a form of dying accompanied 
 not seldom with an exhibition of more man- 
 hood than the experience of many a peace- 
 ful deathbed can show. In fact, as stout old 
 Balmerino said on the scaffold in 1746, 
 " The man who is not ready to die is not fit 
 c 
 
1 8 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 to live ;" that is, we hold our life under the 
 condition that we may at any time be 
 called on to sacrifice it, whether for the 
 preservation of our own self-respect, or for 
 the integrity of the community of which 
 we are a member. All great nations, in 
 fact, have been cradled in war, the Hebrews 
 no less than the Greeks and Romans ; and 
 it is only an amiable sentimentalism, 
 pardonable in women, but inexcusable in 
 men, that, in contemplation of the hard 
 blows, red wounds, and gashed bodies with 
 which war is accompanied, will allow itself 
 to forget the hardihood, endurance, courage, 
 self-sacrifice, and devotion to public duty, 
 of which, under Providence, it has always 
 been the great training school. 1 There is 
 no profession that I know more favourable 
 to the growth of noble sentiment and manly 
 action than that of the soldier ; and to its 
 beneficial action in the formation of States 
 
 1 6 (TTpartcoTtKos /3ios TroAAa e^et ^pf] rrjs a/jer^s. 
 Aristot. Pol. ii. 9. St. Paul also frequently in the 
 Epistles, and Clemens Romanus (Oxon. 1633, p. 48) 
 refers to the military profession as a great school of 
 manly virtue. 
 
i.] THE STATE. 1 9 
 
 every page of history bears flaming testi- 
 mony. War, in fact, is the principal agent 
 in producing that unification so absolutely 
 necessary to social existence, but which is 
 lost so soon as the headship of the common 
 father of the expanded clan ceases to be 
 recognised. Thus it was under the com- 
 pulsion of war from their Lombardian 
 neighbours on the west and Sclavonians 
 on the east that the petty democratic com- 
 munities, which after the disruption of the 
 Roman Empire occupied the Venetian isles, 
 found themselves, in the year 697, obliged 
 to elect a king for life, wisely masking his 
 absolute authority under the name of Doge 
 or Duke. And in a similar fashion the situa- 
 tion of the Piedmontese, constantly forced 
 to defend themselves against Gallican and 
 Teutonic ambition, begot in them a stout- 
 ness of self-assertion and a general man- 
 hood of character which up to the present 
 hour has placed them in favourable con- 
 trast to the inhabitants of the southern half 
 of the peninsula ; and the manhood dis- 
 played by the Counts of Savoy in assert- 
 
20 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 ing their independence against great odds 
 was no doubt the cause why, in the Peace 
 of Utrecht in 1713, their lords were allowed 
 to assume and maintain the title of kings 
 a circumstance which gave rise to the say- 
 ing of Frederick the Great of Prussia, that 
 the lords of Savoy were kings by virtue 
 of their locality. 1 This is certainly true, 
 not only of Sardinia, but of all States that 
 ever rose above the loose aggregation of 
 the original townships. It was the neces- 
 sity of adjusting matters with troublesome 
 neighbours that caused a perpetual succes- 
 sion of petty wars ; and these could not be 
 conducted without a prolongation of the 
 power of the successful general, which acted 
 practically as a kingship. The successful 
 general in such times did not require to 
 usurp a title which the people were forward 
 to force upon him ; and only a few, we may 
 imagine, like Gideon (Judges viii. 22), had 
 virtue enough to remain contented with the 
 distinction belonging to a private station 
 when the grace of the crown and the 
 
 1 Spalding's Italy, ii. p. 284. 
 
I.] THE STATE. 21 
 
 authority of the sceptre were formally 
 pressed upon them by a grateful people. 
 So in Greece we find an early king- 
 ship signalised by the names of ./Egeus, 
 Theseus, and Codrus ; so in Rome a 
 succession of seven kings, more or less 
 distinctly outlined, the last of whom, 
 Tarquin the Proud, stands forward as 
 the head of the great Latin league, and 
 entering in this capacity into a formal 
 treaty with Carthage, the great commercial 
 State of the Mediterranean. Closely con- 
 nected with war, or, more properly, as the 
 natural development of it in its more ad- 
 vanced stages, we must mention CONQUEST ; 
 that is, the violent imposition of the 
 results of a foreign civilisation on the 
 native social foundations of any country. 
 Here, no doubt, there may often be on the 
 conquering side something very different 
 from a manly self-assertion viz. self- 
 aggrandisement at the expense of an inno- 
 cent neighbour, greed of territory, lust of 
 power, and the vanity of mere military 
 glory, which our brilliant neighbours the 
 
22 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 French were so fond to have in their 
 mouth. The virtue of war as a training 
 school of civic manhood does by no means 
 exclude the operation of many forces far 
 from admirable in their motive ; and it is 
 the presence of these unholy influences, no 
 doubt piously brooded over, that has gene- 
 rated in the breasts of our mild friends the 
 Quakers that anti-bellicose gospel which 
 they preach with such lovable persistency. 
 But whatever the motives of famous con- 
 querors have been, the results of their 
 achievements in the great history of society 
 have been most important. The imposition 
 of a foreign type on the peoples of Western 
 Asia by the brilliant conquests of Alexander 
 the Great, gave to the whole of that 
 valuable part of the world, along with the 
 rich coast of Northern Africa, a common 
 medium of culture of the utmost importance 
 to the future civilisation of the race. The 
 imposition of the Norman yoke 900 
 years ago on this island gave to the 
 contentious Saxon kingdoms, by a single 
 vigorous stroke from without, that social 
 
i.] THE STATE. 23 
 
 consistency which the bloody strife of 
 five centuries of petty kings and kinglets 
 among themselves had failed to produce ; 
 while in India the imposition of the 
 most highly advanced mercantile and 
 Christian civilisation of the West on crude 
 masses of an altogether diverse type of 
 Asiatic society, presents to the thoughtful 
 student of history a problem of assimilation 
 of an altogether unique character, the final 
 solution of which, under the action of many 
 complex forces, no most sagacious human 
 intellect at the present moment can divine. 
 On the other hand, it cannot be denied 
 that the blessings which conquest brings 
 with it, when vigorously managed and 
 wisely used, are lightly turned into a bane 
 whenever the power which has the force 
 to conquer has not the wisdom to ad- 
 minister ; of which unblissful lack of admin- 
 istrative capacity and assimilating genius 
 the conquests of the Turks in Europe, and 
 of the English in Ireland, present a most 
 instructive example. 
 
 The monarchies created in the above 
 
24 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 fashion, by the combination of old patri- 
 archal habits with military necessities, 
 however firmly rooted they may appear at 
 the start, carry with them a certain germ 
 of dissatisfaction, which, under the influ- 
 ence of popular irritability, seriously en- 
 dangers their permanence, and may at any 
 time break up their consistency. The 
 causes of such dissatisfaction are chiefly 
 the following : ( i ) The original motive for 
 creating a king, the pressure of foreign 
 war, as war cannot last for ever, in time of 
 peace will cease to operate, and the instinct 
 of individual liberty, which belongs to all 
 men, unless when violently stamped out, 
 will revive, and cause the subjection of all 
 men to the will of one to be looked on with 
 disfavour. (2) This feeling will be speci- 
 ally strong with the apia-roi, or natural 
 aristocracy, whose individual importance 
 must diminish as the power of the king 
 increases. (3) A great danger will arise 
 from the fixation of the order of succession 
 to the throne. The natural tendency will 
 be to follow the example of succession in 
 
i.] THE STATE. 25 
 
 private families, and recognise the right of 
 the son to walk into the public heritage of 
 his father ; but the additional influence 
 thus given to the king will have a tendency 
 to sharpen the jealousy of the nobles. 
 And, again, the son may be a weakling or 
 a fool, and utterly unfit to play the part of 
 a supreme ruler with that mixture of intelli- 
 gence, firmness, and tact which the royal 
 function for its fair and full action requires. 
 (4) And if, in order to avoid these evils, 
 the elective principle is maintained, either 
 absolutely or within certain limits, the 
 tendency to faction inherent in all aris- 
 tocracies, stimulated by the potent spur of 
 a competition for power, will be increased ; 
 and this factious yeast will work so potently 
 in the blood of the nobles that they will 
 either reduce the power of the king to a 
 mere name, and change the government 
 into an exclusive oligarchy, as in Venice, 
 or they will even go the length of calling 
 in foreign arbiters to heal their dissensions, 
 which, as in the case of Poland, will natur- 
 ally end in subjection to some foreign 
 
26 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 power ; or, lastly, they will dispense with 
 the kingship altogether, and return to their 
 original mixture of aristocracy and de- 
 mocracy with more firmly-defined functions 
 and more reliable guarantees. (5) This 
 result may be precipitated by some out- 
 break of that insolence which is so natur- 
 ally fostered by the possession of absolute 
 power ; the sacredness of personal property 
 and the reverence of ancestral possession 
 will not be respected by some Ahab of the 
 day; some young Tarquin or Hipparchus 
 may cast his lustful eye on the fair daughter 
 of an humble citizen ; and then will be 
 unsheathed the sword of a Brutus, and 
 then uprise the song of a Harmodius and 
 Aristogeiton, which will sound a long knell 
 to monarchy, during the manhood of a free, 
 an independent, a self-reliant, and a self- 
 governing people. 
 
 The system of self-government thus 
 introduced, as the natural fruit of the 
 elements out of which it arose, would be a 
 mixture of aristocracy and democracy, with 
 a decided predominance of the former ele- 
 
I.] THE STATE. 2 7 
 
 ment at starting, but with a gradually 
 increasing momentum on the side of the 
 inferior factor in proportion as the mass 
 of the people excluded from aristocratic 
 privileges by a necessary law of social 
 growth advanced in numbers and in social 
 importance. Greece and Rome, or rather 
 Athens and Rome, present to us here two 
 types from which important lessons may 
 be learned. In both the discarding of the 
 kings was the work of the aristocracy ; but, 
 while the germ of the democratic element 
 was equally strong in both, in Athens, 
 partly from the genius of the people, partly 
 from peculiar circumstances, this germ 
 blossomed into an earlier, a more marked, 
 and a more characteristic manhood ; 
 whereas in Rome, in the most brilliant 
 period of its political action, the form of 
 government might rather be defined as 
 a strong aristocracy limited by a strong 
 democracy than a pure democracy, to 
 which category Athens undoubtedly be- 
 longs. In both States the aristocratic 
 element did not submit to the necessary 
 
28 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 curtailment of its power without a struggle ; 
 but in Athens the names of Solon (600 B.C.), 
 Clisthenes, Aristides, and Pericles distinctly 
 marked the early formation of a democracy 
 almost totally purged from any remnant of 
 aristocratic influence, at an epoch in its 
 development corresponding to which we 
 find Rome pursuing her system of world- 
 wide conquest under a system of compro- 
 mise between the patrician and the plebeian 
 element, similar in some sort to what we 
 see before our eyes at the present moment 
 in our own country. To Athens, therefore, 
 we look, in the first place, for an answer to 
 the question, What does history teach in 
 regard to the virtue of a purely democratic 
 government ? And here we may safely 
 say that, under favourable circumstances, 
 there is no form of government which, 
 while it lasts, has such a virtue to give 
 scope to a vigorous growth and lux- 
 uriant fruitage of various manhood as 
 a pure democracy. Instead of choking 
 and strangling, or at least depressing, the 
 free self-assertion of the individual, by 
 
I.] THE STATE. 29 
 
 which alone he feels the full dignity of 
 manhood, such a democracy gives a free 
 career to talent and civic efficiency in the 
 greatest number of capable individuals ; 
 but it does not follow that, though in this 
 regard it has not been surpassed by any 
 other form of government, it is therefore 
 absolutely the best of all forms of govern- 
 ment. All that we are warranted to say is, 
 as Cornewall Lewis does, 1 that without a 
 strong admixture of the democratic spirit 
 humanity in its social form cannot achieve 
 its highest results ; of which truth, indeed, 
 we have the most striking proof before our 
 eyes in our own happy island, where, even 
 before the time which Mr. Green happily 
 designates as Puritan England, powerful 
 kings had received a lesson that as they 
 had been elected so they might be dis- 
 missed from office by the voice of London 
 burghers. Neither, on the other hand, 
 does it follow from the shortness of the 
 bright reign of Athenian democracy not 
 more than 200 years from Clisthenes to 
 
 1 On Method in Political Science. 
 
3O WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 the Macedonians that all democracies 
 are short-lived, and must pay, like dissi- 
 pated young gentlemen, with premature 
 decay for the feverish abuse of their vital 
 force. Possible no doubt it is that, if the 
 power of what we may call a sort of 
 Athenian Second Chamber, the Areio- 
 pagus, instead of being weakened as it 
 was by Aristides and Pericles, had been 
 built up according to the idea of ^Eschylus 
 and the intelligent aristocrats of his day, 
 such a body, armed, like our House of 
 Lords, with an effective negative on all 
 outbursts of popular rashness, might have 
 prevented the ambition of the Athenians 
 from launching on that famous Syracusan 
 expedition which exhausted their force and 
 maimed their action for the future. But 
 the lesson taught by the short-lived glory 
 of Athens, and its subjugation under the 
 rough foot of the astute Macedonian, is not 
 that democracies, under the influence of fac- 
 tion, and, it may be, not free from venality, 
 will sell their liberties to a strong neigh- 
 bour for aristocratic Poland did this in a 
 
ij THE STATE. 3! 
 
 much more blushless way than democratic 
 Greece but that any loose aggregate of 
 independent States, given more to quarrel 
 amongst themselves than to unite against 
 a common enemy, whether democratic, or 
 aristocratic, or monarchical in their form of 
 government, cannot in the long run main- 
 tain their ground against the firm policy and 
 the well-massed force of a strong monarchy. 
 Athens was blotted out from the map of 
 free peoples at Chaeronea, not because the 
 Athenian people had too much freedom, 
 but because the Greek States had too 
 little unity. They were used by Philip 
 exactly in the same way that Napoleon 
 used the German States at the commence- 
 ment of the present century. DIVIDE ET 
 INFERA is the politician's most familiar 
 maxim, which, when wisely and persist- 
 ently applied, whether by an ancient Mace- 
 donia or a modern Russia, will always 
 give a strong monarchy a decided advan- 
 tage over every other form of government. 
 Surround me with a belt of petty princi- 
 palities, says the despot, however highly 
 
32 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 civilised and however well governed, and 
 I shall know to make them play my game 
 and work themselves into confusion, till 
 the hour comes when I may appear as a 
 god to allay by my intervention the troubles 
 which I have fostered by my intrigues. 
 
 So much for Athens. Let us now see 
 what lessons are to be learned from ROME. 
 And here, on the threshold, it is quite plain 
 that the abolition of kingship goes in the 
 first place to strengthen the aristocracy, on 
 whom as a body the supreme functions ex- 
 ercised by the monarch naturally devolve. 
 The highly aristocratic type of the early 
 Roman republic, unlimited from above by 
 any superior power, and with only a slight 
 occasional check from a plebeian citizen- 
 ship in the tender bud, is universally ad- 
 mitted. Plainly enough also it stands 
 written on the face of the early history of 
 the Commonwealth that the administration 
 of the aristocracy was marked in no ordin- 
 ary degree by all that exclusiveness, in- 
 solence, selfishness, and rapacity, which 
 are the besetting sins of an order of men 
 
i.] THE STATE. 33 
 
 cradled in hereditary conceit, and eating the 
 bread not of labour, but of privilege, "das 
 unverbesserliche Junkerthum" as Mommsen 
 calls them. To such an extent did they 
 abuse the natural vantage ground of their 
 social position that, while the great body of 
 the substantial yeomanry, who shed their 
 blood in a constant succession of petty wars 
 for the safety of the State, were stinted of 
 their natural reward and degraded from 
 their rightful position, the insolent mono- 
 polisers of all dignities and privileges did 
 not blush to take from the people their 
 natural heritage in the public land, and, 
 for the enlargement of their own order, to 
 deprive the State of its stoutest citizens, 
 and the army of its most effective soldiers. 
 The irritation produced by this insolent 
 and anti-social procedure of the old Roman 
 landlords, by the law of reaction common 
 to all forces, produced as its natural con- 
 sequence a revolt ; for, as it has been truly 
 said that the blood of the martyrs is the 
 seed of the Church, no less true is it in all 
 history that the insolence of the aristocracy 
 
34 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 is the cradle of the democracy. That 
 happened accordingly in ancient Rome 
 which Sismondi prophesied might happen 
 in modern Scotland : " If the mighty thanes 
 who rule in those trans- Grampian regions 
 begin to think that they can do without 
 the people, the people may begin to think 
 they can do without them." 1 So at least 
 the Roman plebs thought when, in the 
 year of the city 259, they marched in a 
 body out to the Sacred Mount on the 
 banks of the Anio, and refused to return 
 to the city till their just claims had been 
 conceded and their wrongs redressed. 
 Their wrongs were redressed : conferences, 
 concessions, and compromises, in a hurried 
 and blundering sort of way, were made ; 
 tribunes of the plebs were appointed, with 
 the absolute power of stopping the whole 
 machinery of the State with a single 
 negation ; and thus was sown the seed of 
 a democracy destined to grow into mon- 
 strous proportions, and ripen into the 
 bloody blossom of a military despotism by 
 
 1 Sismondi, Etudes sur I 3 economic politique, Essai iv. 
 
i.] THE STATE. 35 
 
 the hands of the very class of persons who 
 were chiefly interested in preventing it. 
 
 The different stages of the battle be- 
 tween plebeians and patricians, or, as we 
 term it, Whig and Tory, as they evolved 
 themselves by a social necessity from time 
 to time, belong to the special history of 
 Rome, not to the general philosophy of 
 history with which we are here concerned. 
 The seed of democracy sown at the Sacred 
 Mount went on from one stage of expan- 
 sion to another, breaking down every 
 barrier of hereditary privilege between the 
 mass of the people and the old aristocracy, 
 till it ended in the Lex Hortensia, passed 
 B.C. 288, which gave to all ordinances 
 passed by the Comitia Tributa that is, 
 the people assembled in local tribes and 
 voting independently of all aristocratic 
 check or co-operation the full validity of 
 law. And in this progress of equalisation 
 between class and class in a community, the 
 Muse of history sees only a special illustra- 
 tion of a general law that every aristocracy 
 contending for the maintenance of exclusive 
 
36 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 privilege against natural right fights a 
 losing battle. But the necessity of the 
 adjustment of the opposing claims of a 
 conservative and a progressive body in the 
 State is a very different thing from the 
 fashion in which the adjustment may be 
 made, and from the consequences that 
 may grow out of the adjustment. Here 
 there is room for any amount of wisdom, 
 and unfortunately also for a large amount 
 of blundering. No man can say that the 
 Roman constitution as it stood, after the 
 plebeians had broken through all aristo- 
 cratic barriers, was a cunningly compacted 
 machine, or that it afforded any strong 
 guarantee against that degeneracy into 
 licence towards which all unreined de- 
 mocracies naturally tend. But one thing 
 certainly was achieved. Out of the 
 plebeian and patrician elements of the 
 body social, no longer arrayed in hostile 
 attitude, but fronting one another with 
 equal rights before the law, and adjusting 
 their forces in a fairly-balanced equilibrium, 
 there was formed a great political corpora- 
 
i.] THE STATE. 37 
 
 tion, deliberative and administrative, which 
 for independence, dignity, patriotism, and 
 sagacity, used its authority in such a masterly 
 style and to such world-wide issues that it 
 has earned from Mommsen the compli- 
 mentary acknowledgment of having been 
 " the first political corporation of all 
 times." 1 This corporation was the Roman 
 Senate, which ruled the policy of Rome for 
 a period of 200 years, from the passing of 
 the Hortensian Law through a long period 
 of African and Asiatic wars down to the 
 civil war of Sulla and Marius, 88 B.C. a 
 body of which we may perhaps best easily 
 understand the composition and the virtue 
 if we imagine the best elements of our 
 House of Commons and the best elements 
 of the House of Lords merged in one 
 Supreme Assembly of practical wisdom, to 
 the exclusion at once of the feverish 
 factiousness and multitudinous babble of 
 the one assembly, and the brainless ob- 
 structiveness and incurable blindness of 
 
 1 With which sentence Mr. Freeman agrees. Com- 
 parative Politics, Lecture iii. p. 78. 
 
38 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 hereditary class interests in the other. 
 But there was something else in the mixed 
 constitution of Rome besides the tried 
 wisdom and the great practical weight of 
 the Senate. What was that ? There was, 
 in the first place, the evil of an elective 
 kingship for the Consul was really an 
 annual king under a different name, as the 
 President of the United States is a quad- 
 riennial king, with greatly more power while 
 his kingship lasts than the Queen of Great 
 Britain ; and this implied an annual fit of 
 social fever, and the annual sowing of a 
 germ of faction ready to shoot into luxuri- 
 ance under the strong stimulant of the love 
 of power. Then, as in the natural growth 
 of society, a new aristocracy grew up, 
 formed by the addition of the wealthy 
 plebeian families to the old family aris- 
 tocracy, and along with it a new and 
 numerous plebeian body, practically though 
 not legally excluded from the privilege of 
 the optimates, the old antagonism of patri- 
 cian and plebeian would revive, and the 
 question arose, What machinery had the 
 
i.] THE STATE. 39 
 
 legislation of the previous centuries pro- 
 vided to prevent a collision and a rupture 
 between the antagonistic tendencies of the 
 democratic and oligarchic elements in the 
 State ? The answer is, None. The 
 authority of the Senate, great as it was 
 both morally and numerically, was antagon- 
 ised by the co-equal legislative authority 
 of the Comitia Tributa an assembly as 
 open to any agitator for factious or revolu- 
 tionary purposes as a meeting of a London 
 mob in Hyde Park, and composed of ele- 
 ments of the most motley and loose 
 description, ready at any moment to give 
 the solemn sanction of a national ordinance 
 to any act of hasty violence or calculated 
 party move which might flatter the vanity 
 or feed the craving of the masses. But 
 this was not all. The tribunate, originally 
 appointed simply for the protection of the 
 commonalty against the rude exercise of 
 patrician power, had now grown to such 
 formidable dimensions that the popular 
 tribune of the day might become the most 
 powerful man in the State, and only require 
 
40 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 re-election to constitute him into a king 
 whose decrees the consuls and the senators 
 must humiliate themselves to register. Here 
 was a machinery cunningly, one might 
 think, constructed for the purpose of work- 
 ing out its own disruption, even supposing 
 both the popular and aristocratic elements 
 had been composed of average good 
 materials. But they were not so. In the 
 age of the Gracchi, 133 B.C., the high 
 sense of honour, the proud inheritance of 
 an uncorrupted patrician body, and the 
 shrewd sense and sobriety of a sound- 
 hearted yeomanry, had equally disap- 
 peared. The aristocracy were corrupted 
 by the wealth which flowed in from the 
 spoils of conquest ; they had become 
 lovers of power rather than lovers of 
 Rome ; lords of the soil, not fathers of the 
 people ; banded together for the narrow 
 interests of their own order rather than for 
 the general well-being of the community. 
 The sturdy yeomanry again, of which the 
 mass of the original popular assemblies 
 had been composed, had partly dwindled 
 
i.] THE STATE. 41 
 
 away under maladministration of the public 
 lands, and partly were mixed up with 
 motley groups of citizens of no fixed re- 
 sidence, and of a town rabble who could 
 be induced to vote for anything by any 
 man who knew to win their favour by a 
 large distribution of Sicilian corn or the 
 exciting luxury of gladiatorial shows ; in a 
 word, the populus had become a plebs, or, 
 in our language, the people a populace. 
 Furthermore, let it be noted that this 
 people or populace, tied down to meet 
 only in Rome, as the high seat of Govern- 
 ment, was called upon to deal with the 
 administration of countries as far apart 
 and as diverse in character as Madrid and 
 Cairo, or Bagdad and Moscow are from 
 London. Think of a mob of London arti- 
 sans, on the motion of a Henry George, 
 or even a rational Radical like Mr. Cham- 
 berlain, drummed together to pass laws 
 on landed property and taxation through 
 all that vast domain ! But so it was ; and 
 most unfortunately also the original fathers 
 of the agitation which, at the time of the 
 
42 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 Gracchi, ranged the great rulers of the 
 world into two hostile factions, stabbing 
 one another in the back and cutting one 
 another's throats, and plotting and coun- 
 ter-plotting in every conceivable style of 
 baseness, after the fashion which is now 
 being exemplified before us in Ireland, 
 the authors of this agitation were not the 
 demagogues, but the aristocracy; as indeed 
 in all cases of general discontent, social 
 fret, and illegal violence, the parties who are 
 accused of stirring class against class are 
 not the agitators who appear on the scene, 
 but the maladministrators who made their 
 appearance necessary. Man is an animal 
 naturally inclined to obey and to take 
 things quietly; insurrection is too expen- 
 sive an affair to be indulged in by way of 
 recreation ; and there is no truth in the 
 philosophy of history more certain than 
 that whenever the multitude of the ruled 
 rebel against their rulers, the original fault 
 I do not say the whole blame, for as 
 things go on from bad to worse there 
 may be blame and blunders on both sides 
 
i.] THE STATE. 43 
 
 but the original fault and germinative 
 cause of discontent and revolt unquestion- 
 ably lies with the rulers. Whatever may be 
 said about Ireland and the Scottish High- 
 lands, there can be no doubt that in the 
 case of Rome the original cause of the 
 democratising of the old constitution and 
 the over -riding of senatorial authority 
 by tribunician ordinances was the senators 
 themselves, who, in direct contravention 
 of the public law of the State, with that 
 greed for more land which is the besetting 
 sin of every aristocracy, had quartered 
 themselves, after the fashion of colonial 
 squatters, on the public lands, arid refused 
 to surrender them to the State till com- 
 pelled by the cry of popular right against 
 might, raised by such patriotic and self- 
 sacrificing agitators as the Gracchi pat- 
 riotic men who attained their object at 
 last by the only means in their power, 
 but means so drastic that, like doctor's 
 drugs, they drave out one devil by bring- 
 ing in a score, and paid for the partial 
 healing of an incurable* disease by 
 
44 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 destroying for ever the balance of the 
 constitution, and inaugurating with their 
 own martyr blood one of the most woeful 
 epochs in human history an epoch varied 
 by periodical assassinations and consum- 
 mated by wholesale butcheries. 
 
 I said the Gracchi attained their object, 
 and that by appointing a Commission for 
 a distribution of the public lands, such as 
 the friends of the crofters in the Highlands 
 now propose for the repeopling of the old 
 depopulated homes of the clan. But I 
 said also that the disease under which 
 Rome laboured was incurable. How was 
 this ? Simply because, whatever might 
 have been the merits of the special Agrarian 
 Law carried by the Gracchi, the violent 
 steam by which the State machine was 
 moved remained the same, the clumsy 
 machine itself remained, and the materials 
 with which it had to deal in a long and 
 critical course of foreign conquest became 
 every year larger and more unmanageable. 
 It was not to be expected either, on the 
 one hand, that a strong and influential 
 
i.] THE STATE. 45 
 
 aristocracy should die with a single kick, 
 or, on the other, that a democracy, which 
 had once learned the power of a popular 
 flood to break down aristocratic dams, 
 would cease to exercise that power when 
 a convenient occasion offered. And so 
 the strife of oligarchic and plebeian fac- 
 tions continued. The political struggle, 
 as always happens in such cases, became 
 a struggle for personal supremacy ; the san- 
 guinary street battle between the younger 
 Gracchus and the Consul Opimius, though 
 followed by a lull for a season, was re- 
 newed after a few years in more startling 
 form and much bloodier issues, first 
 between Marius and Sulla, and finally 
 between Caesar and Pompey. Such a suc- 
 cession of embittered civil wars could end 
 only in exhaustion and submission ; and 
 this is the last emphatic lesson which the 
 history of Rome has taught to the gover- 
 nors of the people. Every constitution of 
 mixed aristocratic and democratic ele- 
 ments which fails by kindly control on 
 the one side, and reasonable demand on 
 
46 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 the other, to achieve that balance of those 
 antagonising forces which means good 
 government, must end in a military des- 
 potism. That which will not bridle 
 itself must be bridled ; and when con- 
 stant irritation, fretful jars, and cruel 
 collisions are the bloody fruit of un- 
 chastened liberty, slavery and stagna- 
 tion seem not too high a price to pay 
 for peace. 
 
 I have enlarged on the development 
 and decay of the Roman republic, not 
 only because in point of political achieve- 
 ment Rome is by far the most notable of 
 the great States of the world, but because 
 in the struggle between aristocracy and 
 democracy which was the salient feature 
 of its history from the expulsion of the 
 kings to the battle of Actium, it pre- 
 sents a very close and instructive parallel 
 to what has been going on amongst 
 ourselves from the revolution settlement 
 of 1688 to the present hour. If for 
 annual kings with large power we put 
 hereditary kings with small power, the 
 
i.] THE STATE. 47 
 
 parallel is complete. 1 Let us now cast 
 a glance, for time and space allow us 
 no more, over some modern develop- 
 ments. The modern States of Europe 
 have good reason, upon the whole, to think 
 themselves fortunate in their having re- 
 tained the kingship, which the Greeks and 
 Romans rejected, either as their original 
 type, or elevated and glorified from the 
 dukedoms, margravates, and electorates 
 with which they started. There cannot be 
 much doubt, I imagine, that, if the Romans 
 had retained their king in a hereditary or 
 nearly hereditary form, he might have 
 exercised a mediatorial function between 
 the contending parties that would have 
 prevented those bloody strifes and those 
 ugly civic wounds with which the record 
 of their political career stands now so 
 sorrowfully defaced. In the experience 
 of their own earliest story, Servius Tullius 
 had already shown them how a king in 
 the strife of classes might step in by a 
 
 1 This parallel has been noticed by the thoughtful 
 Germans ; see particularly Zacharia Sulla, i. 40. 
 
48 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 peaceful new model to open the ranks of 
 a close aristocracy with dignity and safety 
 to a rising democracy ; and in modern 
 times the case of Leopold II. of Tuscany 
 does not stand alone as an example of 
 what good service a wise king may do in 
 the adjustment of contending claims and 
 smoothing the march of necessary social 
 transitions. In fact, the most democratic 
 people amongst the ancients, in order to 
 effect such an adjustment in a peaceful 
 way, had been obliged to make Solon a 
 king for the nonce ; and the Romans, 
 urged by a like social pressure, named 
 their dictator, or re-elected their consuls 
 and their tribunes, in order to secure for 
 the need of the moment that unity of 
 counsel, energy of conduct, and moral 
 authority which is the grand recommenda- 
 tion of the kingship. No doubt kings in 
 modern as in ancient times have erred ; 
 they have not been able always to keep 
 themselves sober under the intoxicating 
 influence of absolute power, and they 
 have paid dearly for their errors ; but we 
 
i.] THE STATE. 49 
 
 were wise in this country, while behead- 
 ing one despot and banishing another, to 
 punish the offender without abolishing 
 the office. True, a thorough - going and 
 sternly - consistent republican may ask, 
 with an indignant sneer, What is the use 
 of a king, when we have shorn him of all 
 honours save the grace of a crown and the 
 bauble of a sceptre reduced him, in fact, to 
 a mere machine to register the decrees of 
 a democratic assembly ? But such persons 
 require to be reminded that there is nothing 
 more dangerous, not only in political, but 
 in all practical matters, than logical con- 
 sistency ; that the most narrow-minded 
 people are always the most consistent, and 
 this for the very obvious reason that they 
 have only room for one idea in their small 
 brain chambers, whereas God's world con- 
 tains many ideas, stiff ideas too, and given 
 to battle, which must be brought into 
 some friendly balance or compromise, or 
 set about throat-cutting on a large scale 
 a process to which consistent republicans 
 have never shown a less bloody inclination 
 E 
 
50 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 than consistent monarchists. They must 
 be reminded also that the person of the 
 monarch is an incarnated, visible, and 
 tangible symbol of the unity of the nation, 
 of which parties and factions are so apt to 
 be forgetful ; and if our logically-consistent 
 republican may look on this as a matter of 
 association and sentiment which he will 
 not acknowledge, he must simply be told 
 that the man who does not acknowledge 
 the important place played by associations 
 and sentiments in all matters of Church 
 and State knows nothing of human nature, 
 and is altogether unfit for meddling with 
 the difficult and dangerous art of politics. 
 He may write books, and lecture to coteries, 
 and harangue electoral meetings, and de- 
 light himself largely in the reverberation 
 of his own wisdom, but by all means let 
 him not be a prime minister. To what 
 ends logical consistency can lead a poli- 
 tician in high places Charles I. and Arch- 
 bishop Laud learned when it was too late ; 
 and the fate of these two high -perched 
 worthies stands as a speaking lesson to 
 
i.] THE STATE. 51 
 
 all politicians, whether of the democratic 
 or the monarchical type, how easy a thing 
 it is for a man to be a good Christian and 
 a consistent thinker, and yet on all political 
 matters a perfect fool. 
 
 Among the notable modern States three 
 stand before us with an exceptional pre- 
 ference for the democratic form of govern- 
 ment Switzerland, France, and the great 
 trans-Atlantic Republic. These must be 
 regarded with curious interest and kindly 
 human sympathy as great social experi- 
 ments, by no means to be prejudged and 
 denounced by any sweeping conclusions 
 made from the unfortunate breakdown of 
 the two celebrated ancient republics. The 
 experiment in these cases, as made in alto- 
 gether different circumstances and under 
 different conditions, cannot warrant any 
 such denunciations. The representative 
 system which now universally prevails, and 
 which enables a most widely-scattered and 
 diverse-minded population to vote with a 
 coolness and a precision and a large survey 
 of which the urban system of Greece and 
 
52 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? [LECT. 
 
 Rome never dreamed ; the general growth 
 of intelligence among all classes through 
 the action of cheap education and the 
 large circulation of cheap books ; the rapid 
 and ever more rapid travelling of con- 
 tagious thought from the centre to the 
 extreme limbs and flourishes of social 
 unities ; and, above all, let us hope the 
 improved tone of social feeling in all the 
 relations of man to man, which we owe to 
 the great Christian principle of living as 
 brother with brother, and sister wifh sister, 
 under a common heavenly fatherhood, 
 these are all forces largely operating 
 in the present day which justify us in 
 hoping that many a social experiment 
 which signally failed with the ancients may 
 be crowned in the centuries which are now 
 being inaugurated with encouraging suc- 
 cess. Of the three which we have named, 
 Switzerland is the country in which, from 
 topographical peculiarities, the interests of 
 jealous neighbours, and the traditional 
 habits of a peasant population well trained 
 to provincial self-government, the per- 
 
i.] THE STATE. 53 
 
 manence of a democratic federation may 
 be prophesied with the greatest safety, but 
 at the same time with the least interest to 
 the general march of humanity. Ancient 
 Rome, had it continued as compact and as 
 little disturbed by external forces and in- 
 ternal fermentations as modern Switzer- 
 land, might have remained during the 
 whole course of its career as sober-minded 
 and as stable as in the days of Cincinnatus, 
 and the yeomanry which were displaced 
 by huge absentee landlords, and Syrian or 
 Sicilian slaves. The case of France is 
 altogether different. A republic in an 
 over - civilised, highly - centralised, bureau- 
 cratically- governed country, with a re- 
 ligiously hollow, hasty, violent, excitable, 
 and explosive people, seems of all social 
 experiments the least hopeful : and that 
 is all that can wisely be said of it at 
 present. But the social conditions in 
 America are altogether different ; and the 
 experiment of a great democratic republic 
 for the first time in the history of the world 
 for Rome in its best times, as we have 
 
54 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 seen, was an aristocracy will be looked 
 on by all lovers of their species with the 
 most kindly curiosity and the most hope- 
 ful sympathy. Here we have the stout, 
 self- reliant, sober - minded Anglo - Saxon 
 stock, well trained in the process of the 
 ages to the difficult art of self-govern- 
 ment ; here we have a constitution framed 
 with the most cautious consideration, and 
 with the most effective checks against 
 the dangers of an over -riding democracy; 
 here also a people as free from any 
 imminent external danger as they have 
 unlimited scope for internal progress. 
 Under no circumstances could the experi- 
 ment of self-government, on a great scale, 
 have been made with a more promising 
 start. No doubt they have a difficult 
 and slippery problem to perform. The 
 frequent recurrence of elections to the 
 supreme magistracy has always been, and 
 ever must be, the breeder of faction, the 
 nurse of venality, and the spur of am- 
 bition. Once already has this Titanic 
 confederacy, though only a hundred years 
 
i.] ' THE STATE. 55 
 
 old, by going through a process of a long, 
 bitter, and bloody civil war, shown that 
 the unifying machinery so cunningly put 
 together by the conservative genius of a 
 Washington, an Adams, and a Madison, 
 was insufficient to hold in check the re- 
 bellious forces at war within its womb. 
 No doubt also it were in vain to speak 
 America free from those acts of gigantic 
 jobbing, blushless venality, and over-riding 
 of the masses in various ways, which were 
 working the ruin of Rome in the days of 
 Jugurtha. The aristocracy of gold and 
 the tyranny of capitalists in Christian New 
 York has shown itself no less able to 
 usurp the public land and defraud the 
 people of their share in the soil than the 
 lordly aristocracy and the slave-dealing mag- 
 nates of heathen Rome. Nevertheless we 
 need not despair. The sins of American 
 democracy may serve as a useful hint to us 
 not rashly to tinker our own mixed consti- 
 tution without waiting for a verdict on 
 issues, which, as Socrates wisely says, lie 
 with the gods ; nor, on the other hand, 
 
56 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 is there any wisdom in ascribing to the 
 American form of government evils which, 
 as belonging to human nature, crop up 
 with more or less abundance under all forms 
 of government, and which may be specially 
 rife among ourselves. We also have our 
 Glasgow banks, our bubble companies of 
 all kinds, our heady speculations, our hot 
 competitions, our over - productions, our 
 haste to be rich, our idol worship of mere 
 material magnificence, these are evils, and 
 the root of all evil, with the production of 
 which no form of government has anything 
 to do, and against which every form of 
 government will be in vain invoked to 
 contend. 
 
 In conclusion, we must bear in mind 
 that democracy or social self-government 
 is the most difficult of all human problems, 
 and must be approached, not with inflated 
 hopes and rosy imaginations, but with so- 
 briety and caution and a sound mind, and 
 at critical moments not without prayer and 
 fasting. Before entering on any scheme 
 for rebuilding our social edifice on a demo- 
 
i.] THE STATE. 57 
 
 cratic model, we should consider seriously 
 what a democracy really implies, and what 
 we may reasonably promise ourselves from 
 its possible success. Of the two rallying 
 cries which have made it a favourite with 
 persons given to change, equality and 
 liberty, the one is no more true than that 
 all the mountains in the Highlands are as 
 high as Ben Nevis, and can only mean at 
 the best that all men have an equal right 
 to be called men and to be treated as men, 
 while the other is only true so far as con- 
 cerns the removal of all artificial barriers 
 to the free exercise of each man's function, 
 according to his capacity and opportunities. 
 But this is a mere starting-point in the social 
 life of a great people. When the bird is 
 out of the cage, which it must be in order 
 to be a perfect bird, the more serious ques- 
 tion emerges, what use it shall make of its 
 newly -acquired liberty. Here certainly to 
 men, as to birds, there are great dangers to 
 be faced ; and with nations the progress of 
 society, as already remarked, is measured 
 to a much larger extent by the increase of 
 
58 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 limitations than by the extension of liberties. 
 Then, again, the fundamental postulate of 
 extreme democracy that the majority have 
 everywhere a right to govern is manifestly 
 false. No man as a member of society has 
 a natural right to govern : he has a right 
 to be governed, and well governed ; and 
 that can only be when the government is 
 conducted by the wisest and best men who 
 compose the society. If the numerical 
 majority is composed of sober-minded, 
 sensible, and intelligent persons who will 
 either govern wisely themselves or choose 
 persons who will do so, then democracy is 
 justified by its deeds ; but if it is otherwise, 
 and if, when an appeal is made to the 
 multitude, they will choose the most daring, 
 the most ambitious, and the most unscrup- 
 ulous, rather than the most sensible, the 
 most moderate, and the most conscientious, 
 then democracy is a bad thing, at least 
 nothing better than the other ocracies 
 which it supplants. It is manifest, there- 
 fore, that of all forms of government de- 
 mocracy is that which imperatively requires 
 
i.] THE STATE. 59 
 
 the greatest amount of intelligence and 
 moderation among the great mass of the 
 people, especially amongst the lower classes, 
 who have always been the most numerous ; 
 and, as history can point to no quarter of 
 the world where such a happy condition of 
 the numerical intelligence has been realised, 
 it cannot look with any favour on schemes 
 of universal suffrage, even when qualified 
 with a stout array of effective checks. 
 The system, indeed, of representing every 
 man individually, and giving every member 
 of a society a capitation vote, as they have 
 a capitation tax in Turkey, however 
 popular with the advocates of extreme 
 democracy, seems quite unreasonable. 
 What requires to be represented in a 
 reasonable representative system is not so 
 much individuals as qualities, capacities, 
 interests, and types. Every class should 
 be represented, rather than every man in a 
 class. Besides, the equality of votes 
 which democracy demands, on the principle 
 that I am as good as you and perhaps a 
 little better, is utterly false, and tends to 
 
60 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 nourish conceit and impertinence, to banish 
 all reverence, and to ignore all distinctions 
 in society. Anyhow, there can be no 
 doubt that great masses of men acting 
 together on exciting occasions are pecu- 
 liarly liable to hasty resolutions and violent 
 opinions ; all democracies, therefore, are 
 unsafe which are unprovided with checks 
 in the form of an upper chamber composed 
 of more cool materials, and planted firmly 
 in a position that makes them independent 
 of the fever and faction of the hour. A 
 strong democracy stands as much in need 
 of an aristocratic rein as a strong aris- 
 tocracy does of a democratic spur. And 
 let it never be forgotten what democracies 
 are far too apt to forget that minorities 
 have rights as well as majorities ; nay, that 
 one of the great ends to be achieved by a 
 good government is to protect the few 
 against the natural insolence of a majority 
 glorying in its numbers, and hurried on by 
 the spring-tide of a popular contagion. A 
 state of society is not at all inconceivable 
 in which the many shall make all the laws 
 
i.] THE STATE. 6 1 
 
 and monopolise all the offices of a fussy 
 bureaucracy, while the few are burdened 
 with all the taxes. Never too frequently 
 can we repeat, in reference to all public 
 acts, no less than to the conduct of indi- 
 viduals in private life, the great Aristotelian 
 maxim that ALL EXTREMES ARE WRONG; 
 that every force when in full action tends to 
 an excess which for its own salvation must 
 be met by a counterpoising force ; that alb 
 good government, as all healthy existence, 
 is the balance of opposites and the marriage 
 of contraries ; and that the more mettle- 
 some the charger the more need of a firm 
 rein and a cautious rider. He who over- 
 looks this prime postulate of all sane 
 action in this complex world may pile 
 his democratic house tier above tier and 
 enjoy his green conceit for a season ; but 
 the day of sore trial and civic storm is not 
 far, when the rain shall descend, and the 
 floods come, and the winds blow and beat 
 upon that house, and it will fall, because 
 it was founded upon a dream. 
 
II. 
 
 THE CHURCH. 
 
 Ov Tras o Aeyooi/ pot, Kv/ue, Kv/ote, etcreAeixrerat 
 / /^acrtAei'av TWV OTj/oavwv dAA' 6 Trotwv TO 
 //,ov rov ev rots pvpavots. 'O 2I2THP. 
 
 MAN is characteristically a religious ani- 
 mal ; in fact, as Socrates teaches, the only 
 religious animal ; 1 for, though a dog has 
 no doubt reverential emotions, it cannot be 
 said with any propriety that he has reli- 
 gious ideas or ecclesiastical institutions, for 
 a very good reason, because he has no 
 ideas at all : observation he has very 
 keen, and memory also wonderfully reten- 
 tive ; instincts also, like all primal vital 
 forces, divine and miraculous ; but ideas 
 
 yap a\\ov (ov ^v\r) TT/DCOTOI /xev $o>i/ rwv 
 TO, //-eywrra /cat KaAAtcrra (rwra^avTcov rjarOrjTai on ctcrt : 
 TL 8e (f>v\ov aAAo rj avOpwiroi ^eovs OepaTrtvovo-i. Xen. 
 Mem. i. 4. 
 
64 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 certainly none, for ideas mean knowledge ; 
 and brutes that have no language properly 
 so called that is a system of significant 
 vocal signs expressive of ideas, but only 
 cries, gesticulations, and visible or audible 
 signs expressive of sensations and feelings, 
 can by no law of natural analogy be 
 credited with the possession of a faculty 
 of which they give no manifestation. 
 Language is the outward body and form 
 of which thought and reason and know- 
 ledge and ideas are the inward soul and 
 force ; and hence the wise Greeks, unlike 
 our modern scientists, who delight in con- 
 founding man with the monkey, expressed 
 language and reason with one word Xoyo?, 
 while what we dignify with the name of 
 language in birds and other animals was 
 simply (pwvtf, or significant voice. If, there- 
 fore, there is any thing most human that 
 history has to teach, it must be about reli- 
 gion. All the great nations whose names 
 mark the march of human fates have been 
 religious nations. A people without reli- 
 gion does not exist, or, if it does exist, it 
 
ii.] THE CHURCH. 65 
 
 exists only as an abnormal and deficient 
 specimen of the genus to which it belongs, 
 which is of no more account in the just 
 estimate of the type than a fox without 
 a tail, or a lawyer without a tongue ; and 
 as for individual atheists, who have been 
 talked about in ancient times, and specially 
 in these latter days, they are either philo- 
 sophers like Spinoza, the most pious of men, 
 falsely baptized with an odious title from 
 the stupidity, prejudice, or malice of the 
 community, or, if they really are atheists, 
 they are monsters which a man may stare 
 at as at an ass with three heads or with no 
 head at all in a show. 
 
 The form in which religion generally 
 presents itself in early history is what we 
 commonly call Polytheism, though it is 
 quite possible a matter about which I am 
 not careful curiously to dogmatise that 
 there may have been in some places an 
 original Dualism, like the ancient Persian, 
 or even a Monotheism, out of which the 
 Polytheism was developed. For there 
 cannot be the slightest doubt that, what- 
 F 
 
66 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 ever may have been the starting-point, 
 there lay in the popular theology a tend- 
 ency to multiply and to reproduce itself 
 in kindred but not always easily recognis- 
 able forms, like the children of a family or 
 the cousinship of a clan. But, taking Poly- 
 theism as the type under which history 
 presents the objects of religious faith in 
 the earliest times, we have to remark that 
 under this common name, as in the case of 
 Christianity, the greatest contrasts, both in 
 speculative idea and in social efficiency, 
 stare us everywhere in the face. In the 
 eye of the Christian or the monotheistic 
 devotee the worships of Aphrodite and of 
 Pallas Athene are equally idolatrous ; but, 
 allowing that these anthropomorphic forms 
 of divine forces and functions of the 
 universe are equally destitute of a founda- 
 tion in fact or reason, the reverence paid 
 to them by a devout people might be as 
 different as passion is from thought, and 
 sense from spirit. As the ideal of wisdom 
 in counsel and in action, the Athenian 
 Pallas no doubt exercised as beneficent a 
 
ii.] THE CHURCH. 67 
 
 sway over her Hellenic worshippers as the 
 ideal of Christian womanhood, in the 
 person of the Virgin Mary, does at the 
 present day over millions of Christian 
 worshippers. It is only when the cosmic 
 function impersonated in the polytheistic 
 god, being of an inferior order, leaps from 
 its proper position of subordination and 
 usurps the controlling and regulating 
 action belonging to the superior function, 
 that polytheistic idolatry becomes im- 
 moral ; though, of course, the very facility 
 of this usurpation, and the stamp of a 
 pseudo divinity that may thereby be given 
 to beastly vice, is a sufficient reason for 
 the denunciations of the heathen idolatries 
 so frequent in the Old Testament, which 
 ultimately ripened into the spiritual apostle- 
 ship and monotheistic aggression of St. 
 Paul. One other striking feature of all 
 polytheistic religions may not be omitted. 
 They are naturally complete more 
 catholic, more sympathetic with universal 
 nature and universal life than monotheistic 
 religions ; if they make a philosophical 
 
68 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 mistake in worshipping many gods, they 
 do not make a moral mistake in excluding 
 any of his attributes. With the polytheistic 
 worshipper everything is sacred : the sun 
 and the sea and the sky, dark earth and 
 awful night, excite in him an emotion of 
 reverence. If the Greek polytheist was 
 devout at all, he was devout everywhere ; 
 whereas, under monotheistic influences, 
 there is a danger that devout feelings may 
 respond exclusively to the stern decrees of 
 an absolute lawgiver and the awful threat- 
 enings of a violated law. Polytheistic 
 piety, whatever its defects, was always 
 ready to add a grace to every innocent 
 enjoyment ; monotheistic religiousness, as 
 we see its severe features in some modern 
 churches, contents itself with adding a 
 solemn sanction to the moral law a 
 severity which here and there has not been 
 able to keep itself free from the unlovely 
 phase of regarding the innocent enjoy- 
 ments and the graceful pleasantries of life 
 as a sin. 
 
 So much for the soul of the business ; 
 
ir.] THE CHURCH. 69 
 
 the body is what we call the Church. 
 And here the very word is significant. 
 In one sense, as a separate ethical corpor- 
 ation, the ancients had no Church. Why ? 
 Because Church and State were one ; or, if 
 they were two, they were too like the 
 famous Siamese twins that used to be 
 carried about the country as a show, two so 
 closely connected that they could no more 
 be torn from one another and live than the 
 limpet can be separated from the rock to 
 which it clings. With the peoples of the 
 ancient world the State was the Church 
 and the Church was the State ; the priest 
 was a magistrate and the magistrate was a 
 priest. This identity of two things, or loose 
 intercommunion and fusion of two things 
 in modern association so instinctively kept 
 apart, arose from the common germ out of 
 which both Church and State grew viz., 
 as we saw in the previous lecture, the 
 FAMILY. Every father of a family, in the 
 normal and healthy state of society, is his 
 own priest as well as his own king. In 
 religion and morals, as well as in all 
 
7O WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 domestic ordinances, he is absolute and su- 
 preme ; and the functions which necessarily 
 belonged to him as supreme administrator 
 in his own family would, under the influ- 
 ence of family feelings, naturally be con- 
 ceded to him when the family grew to a 
 clan, and the clan to a kingdom. And 
 this is the state of things which we 
 meet with in the Book of Genesis, long 
 before the promulgation of the Mosaic 
 law, where we read (xiv. 18) that Mel- 
 chizedek, king of Salem, went out to 
 bless Abraham, and he was priest of the 
 Most High God ; the distinction between 
 priest and layman, to which our ears are 
 so familiar, being in this, as in a thousand 
 other well - known instances, altogether 
 ignored. Not only in Homer, where we 
 find Agamemnon, the king of men, per- 
 forming sacrificial functions without even 
 the presence of a priest, 1 but in the sober 
 historical age we find the King of Sparta 
 performing all the public sacrifices being, 
 in fact, in virtue of his office, high priest of 
 
 1 Iliad, iii. 271 ; and compare Virgil, jEneid, iii. 80. 
 
II.] THE CHURCH. 71 
 
 Jove. 1 So closely indeed was the State 
 religion identified with the person of the 
 supreme magistrate that, when the kingship 
 was abolished in Greece, and three principal 
 archons and seven secondary ones shared 
 his functions, one still retained the title of 
 fta(ri,\vs, king, and had the supervision, or, 
 as we would say, supreme episcopacy and 
 overseership of all matters pertaining to 
 religion. 2 The same thing took place in 
 Rome, where the name of king was even 
 more odious than in Greece ; but never- 
 theless a rex sacrificulus, or king-sacrificer, 
 with his regina or queen, took rank in all 
 the public pontifical dinners above the 
 pontifex maximus himself. The college of 
 pontiffs in Rome, which had the supreme 
 direction of all religious matters, was not 
 a board of priests, but of laymen or at 
 least of laymen who, without any quali- 
 fication but some inaugurating ceremony, 
 might be assumed into the pontifical 
 college ; whence the title of pontifex maxi- 
 
 1 Xen., Rep. Lac.^ i. 15 ; Herod, vi. 56. 
 2 Pollux, viii. 90. 
 
72 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 s, which the emperors assumed, was no 
 more of the nature of a usurpation than the 
 title of imperator, which belonged to them 
 as supreme commanders of the army. Who, 
 then, were the priests, and what need of 
 them, at all if the laity might legally per- 
 form all their functions ? The answer is 
 simple. Both in Greece and Rome there 
 were priests and priestly families, as the 
 Eumolpidce in Eleusis, specially dedicated 
 to the service of certain local gods ; but 
 there was no order, class, or body of 
 persons having the exclusive right to 
 officiate in sacred matters over the whole 
 community. No doubt the social position 
 of priests in democratic Greece and mon- 
 archical Egypt was extremely different, 
 but in one respect they were identical : 
 in Athens Church and State were one as 
 much as in Memphis. In Egypt there 
 was a remarkably strong body or clan of 
 priests enjoying the highest dignities and 
 immunities ; but there is no proof that 
 they were a caste, in the strict sense of the 
 word ; and their virtues were so far from be- 
 
ii.] THE CHURCH. 73 
 
 ing incommunicable that, when the Pharaoh 
 did not happen to be a born priest, but of 
 the military class, he was obliged to be 
 made a priest before he could be a king ; 
 and when once king he became ipso 
 facto the high priest of the nation, and 
 took precedence of all priests in all great 
 public acts of religious ceremonial. It 
 must not be supposed, however, that, 
 though he was supreme in all sacred 
 matters and the actual head of the Church, 
 to use our language, he could set himself, 
 like our Henry VIII., to carve creeds for 
 the people, and imprison or burn devout 
 persons for refusing to acknowledge his 
 arbitrary decrees. The exercise of sacred 
 functions in the hands of the masterful 
 Tudor and his Machiavelian minister was 
 a usurpation tolerated by a loyal people as 
 their readiest and most effective way of 
 getting rid of the masterdom of the Roman 
 Pope, which in those days pressed like 
 an incubus on the European conscience ; 
 it was invoking one devil to turn out 
 another, and was successful, as such opera- 
 
74 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 tions are wont to be, in a blundering sort of 
 way. But the worshipful "Sons of the 
 Sun" for so they were betitled on the 
 banks of the sweet- watered Nile, had no 
 monstrous pretension of this kind, and 
 could not even have dreamt of it. They 
 did not sit on the throne to reform religion, 
 but to maintain it. Neither in -Egypt nor 
 in Greece in those days was any such thing 
 known as the rights of the individual con- 
 science ; but both kings and people re- 
 ceived religious laws and consuetudes as 
 we do Magna Charta ; reasonable people, 
 in the long course of the centuries before 
 Christ, would no more dream of disturbing 
 the ancestral belief about the gods than 
 they would think of influencing the settled 
 courses of the stars. It was their very 
 deep-rooted permanency, in the midst of 
 the startling mutabilities to which human 
 affairs are liable, that made the fundamental 
 truths of religion so valuable to their souls ; 
 and as to the particular forms under which 
 these fundamental truths might have been 
 symbolised by venerable tradition, the 
 
IL] THE CHURCH. 75 
 
 people were not given to form themselves 
 into hostile camps on the ground of any 
 local difference, as we do in Scotland about 
 ecclesiastical conceits and crotchets ; and 
 every devout Egyptian allowed his neigh- 
 bour without offence to pay sacred honours 
 to a crocodile or a cat, convinced that 
 these honours were equally legitimate and 
 equally beneficial whenever the sacred 
 symbolism peculiar to the worship was 
 wisely understood. Collisions, therefore, 
 between Church and State, or between 
 priesthood and kingship, such as signalised 
 the medieval struggles of the Popes and 
 Emperors, and the convulsions of our in- 
 fant Protestant freedom in England, could 
 not take place amongst the ancient poly- 
 theists. A wise Socrates was equally 
 willing with the most superstitious de- 
 votee, when pious gratitude called, to 
 sacrifice a cock to ^Esculapius ; and 
 the vofjito 7roXect)9, by the custom of 
 the State, was the direction which he 
 gave to all who inquired of him by 
 what rites they ought to worship the 
 
76 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 gods. 1 Only amongst the Hebrews, as a 
 people in whose religious habitude poly- 
 theistic and monotheistic tendencies had 
 never come to any decisive settlement of 
 their inherent antagonism, do I find a 
 record of a very serious collision between 
 Church and State, after the fashion of our 
 German Henries and Transalpine Hilde- 
 brands in the days of Papal aggression. 
 Scotsmen familiar with their Bibles will 
 easily see that I allude to the case of Uzziah, 
 as recorded in 2 Chron. xxvi. 16-20: " But 
 when he was strong, his heart was lifted 
 up to his destruction : for he transgressed 
 against the Lord his God, and went into 
 the temple of the Lord to burn incense 
 upon the altar of incense. And Azariah 
 the priest went in after him, and with 
 him fourscore priests of the Lord, that 
 were valiant men : And they withstood 
 Uzziah the king, and said unto him, It 
 appertaineth not unto thee, Uzziah, to burn 
 incense unto the Lord, but to the priests 
 the sons of Aaron, that are consecrated to 
 
 1 Xen., Mem. i. 3. 
 
ii.] THE CHURCH. 77 
 
 burn incense : go out of the sanctuary ; for 
 thou hast trespassed ; neither shall it be 
 for thine honour from the Lord God. Then 
 Uzziah was wroth, and had a censer in his 
 hand to burn incense : and while he was 
 wroth with the priests, the leprosy even 
 rose up in his forehead before the priests 
 in the house of the Lord, from beside the 
 incense altar. And Azariah the chief 
 priest, and all the priests, looked upon 
 him, and, behold, he was leprous in his 
 forehead, and they thrust him out from 
 thence ; yea, himself hasted also to go out, 
 because the Lord had smitten him." 
 
 So much for Polytheism. That it 
 should have served the spiritual needs 
 of the human heart so long five thousand 
 years at least, from the first Pharaoh that 
 looked down from his Memphian pyramid 
 on the mystic form of the Sphinx, to the 
 last Roman Emperor that sacrificed white 
 bulls from Clitumnus at the altar of the 
 Capitoline Jove is proof sufficient that, 
 with all its faults, it was made of very 
 serviceable stuff ; but creeds and kingdoms, 
 
78 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 like individuals, must die. At the com- 
 mencement of the eighth century of the 
 Roman Republic heathenism was doomed 
 in all Romanised Europe, in all Northern 
 Africa, and in Western Asia, and that for 
 four reasons. The polytheistic religions 
 of the Old World, created as they were 
 in the infancy of society, no doubt under 
 the guidance of a healthy instinct of de- 
 pendence on the ruling power of the uni- 
 verse, but in the main inspired by the 
 emotions and formulated by the imagination, 
 without the regulating control of reason, 
 could not hope to hold their ground per- 
 manently in the face of that rich growth 
 of individual speculation which, from the 
 sixth century before Christ, spread with 
 such ample ramification from Asiatic and 
 European Greece over the greater part of 
 the civilised world. If it was a necessity 
 of human beings at all times to have a re- 
 ligion, it was a no less urgent problem, as 
 the range of vision enlarged with the pro- 
 cess of the ages, to harmonise their theo- 
 logy with their thinking. And if, on 
 
ii.] THE CHURCH. 79 
 
 the intellectual side, the polytheistic re- 
 ligions of that cultivated age were threat- 
 ened with a collapse, the sensuous element, 
 always strongly represented in emotional 
 faiths, was in constant danger of being 
 dragged down into a disturbing and 
 degrading sensuality. Then, again, when 
 the Roman Republic, in the age of 
 Augustus Caesar, had completed the range 
 of its world -wide conquests, two social 
 forces, unknown in the best ages of Greece 
 and Rome, viz., wealth and luxury, added 
 their perilous momentum to the corrupting 
 elements which were already at work in 
 the bosom of the polytheistic system. And 
 in what a hot-bed of fermenting putridity 
 these evil leavens had resulted at this period, 
 the pages of Suetonius and many chapters 
 in St. Paul are witnesses equally credible 
 and equally tragic. Add to all this the 
 fact that the motley intermixture of ideas 
 and the inorganic confusion and forced 
 assimilation of creeds which, accompanied 
 the universal march of Roman polity, 
 brought about a vague desire for some 
 
8o WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 sort of religious unity which might run 
 parallel with the political unity under which 
 men lived ; and this desire could be grati- 
 fied only by placing in the foreground the 
 great truth of the unity of the Supreme 
 Being, which to vindicate in pre-Christian 
 ages had been the special mission of the 
 Hebrew race, and which the Greeks them- 
 selves had not indistinctly indicated by 
 placing the moral government of the 
 world and the issues of peace and war in 
 the hands of an omnipotent, all -wise, all- 
 beneficent, and absolute Jove. These and 
 the like considerations will lead the thought- 
 ful student of history easily to understand 
 how the appearance of such an extra- 
 ordinary moral force as Christianity was 
 imperatively called for at the period when 
 our Saviour, with His divine mission to a 
 fallen race, began His preaching on the 
 shores of a lonely Galilean lake ; and the 
 most superficial glance at the contents of 
 His preaching, as contrasted with the 
 heathenism which it replaced, will show 
 how wonderful was the new start which 
 
ii.] THE CHURCH. 8 1 
 
 it gave to the moral life of the world, and 
 how effective the spur which it applied to 
 the march of the ages a spur so potent 
 that we may, without the slightest ex- 
 aggeration, say that to Christianity we 
 owe almost exclusively whatever mild 
 agencies tempered the harshness and sweet- 
 ened the sourness of crude government in 
 the Middle Ages ; and no less, whatever 
 hopeful elements are at the present moment 
 working among ourselves to save the British 
 people, at a critical stage of their social 
 development, from the decadence and the 
 degradation that overtook the Romans 
 after their great military mission had been 
 fulfilled. Let us look articulately at the 
 main constituents of that new leaven where- 
 with Christianity was equipped to re- 
 generate the world. These I find to be 
 (i.) By asserting in the strongest way 
 the unity of God, it at once cut the root of 
 the tendency in human nature to create 
 arbitrary objects of worship according to 
 the lust or fancy of the worshipper, and 
 accustomed the popular intelligence to a 
 
82 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 harmonised view of the various forces at 
 work in the constitution of a world so 
 various and so complex as to a superficial 
 view readily to appear contradictory and 
 irreconcilable. 
 
 (2.) By preaching the unity of God, 
 not as an abstract metaphysical idea, but 
 as what it really is, a divine fatherhood, 
 Christianity at one stroke bound all men 
 together as brethren and members of a 
 common family; and in this way, while in 
 the relation of nation to nation it substi- 
 tuted apostleships of love for wars of sub- 
 jugation, in the relation of class to class it 
 established a sort of spiritual democracy, 
 in which the implied equality of all men as 
 men gradually led to the abolition of the 
 abnormal institution of slavery, on which 
 all ancient society rested. 
 
 (3.) Christianity, by starting religion as 
 an independent moral association alto- 
 gether separate from the State, at once 
 purified the sphere of the Church from 
 corrupting elements, and confined the 
 State within those bounds which the 
 
ii. 1 THE CHURCH. 83 
 
 nature of a civic administration furnishes. 
 Religion in this way was purified and 
 elevated, because in its nicely segregated 
 sphere no secular considerations of any 
 kind could interfere to tone down its 
 ideal, direct its current, or lame its effi- 
 ciency; while the State, on the other hand, 
 was saved from the folly of intermeddling 
 with matters which it did not understand, 
 and professing principles which it did not 
 believe. 
 
 (4.) Christianity, by planting itself em- 
 phatically at the very first start, as one 
 may see in the Sermon on the Mount, in 
 direct antagonism to ritualism, ceremonial- 
 ism, and every variety of externalism, and 
 placing the essence of all true religion in 
 regeneration, or, as St. Paul has it, a new 
 creature i.e. the legitimate practical domi- 
 nance of the spiritual and ethical above 
 the sensual and carnal part of our nature 
 broke down the middle wall of partition 
 which had so often divided piety from 
 morality ; so that now a man of culture 
 might consistently give his right hand to 
 
84 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 religion and his left hand to philosophy, 
 an attitude which, so long as Homer was 
 all that the Greeks had for a bible, no 
 devout Hellenist could assume. 
 
 (5.) By placing a firm belief in a future 
 life as a guiding prospect in the foreground, 
 the religion of Christ gave the highest 
 possible value to human life, and the 
 strongest possible spur to perseverance in 
 a virtuous career. 
 
 (6.) By appealing directly to the indi- 
 vidual conscience, and making religion a 
 matter of personal concern and of moral 
 conviction, it raised the value of each 
 individual as a responsible moral agent, 
 and placed the dignity of every man as 
 a social monad on the firmest possible 
 pedestal. 
 
 (7.) By making love its chief motive 
 power, it supplied both the steam and the 
 oil of the social machine with a continuity 
 of moral force never dreamt of in any of 
 the ancient societies a force which no 
 mere socialistic schemes for organising 
 labour, no boards of health, no political 
 
ii.] THE CHURCH. 85 
 
 economy, no mathematical abstractions, no 
 curiosities of physical science, no demo- 
 cratic suffrages, and no school inspector- 
 ships, though multiplied a thousand times, 
 apart from this divine agency, can ever 
 hope to achieve. 
 
 Thus equipped with a moral armature 
 such as the world had never yet seen, it 
 might have been expected that the triumph 
 of Christianity over the ruins of heathen- 
 ism would have been as complete and as 
 pure from all admixture of evil as it appears 
 in the great evangelical manifesto com- 
 monly called the Sermon on the Mount. 
 But it was not to be so ; nor, indeed, created 
 as human nature is, could possibly be. 
 The miraculous virtue of the seed could 
 not change the nature of the soil, and the 
 sweet new wine put into old bottles could 
 not fail to catch a taint from the acid 
 incrustations of the original liquor. Cor- 
 ruptia optimi pessima is the great lesson 
 which history everywhere teaches, and 
 nowhere with a more tragic impressiveness 
 than in the history of the Christian Church. 
 
86 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 What a rank crop of old wives* fables, 
 endless genealogies, ceremonial observ- 
 ances, worship of the letter, voluntary 
 humilities, and disputations of science, 
 falsely so called, started into fretful array 
 before the spiritual swordsmanship of St. 
 Paul, no reader of the grandest correspond- 
 ence in the world need be told ; but it was 
 not so much from Jewish drivel, Attic 
 subtlety, or Corinthian sensualism, that the 
 corrupting forces were to proceed which 
 in the post- Apostolic age insinuated them- 
 selves like a poison into the pure blood of 
 the Church. It is from within that, in 
 moral matters, our great danger flows : if 
 the kingdom of heaven is there, the king- 
 dom* of hell is there no less distinctly. 
 The doctrine of Aristotle, and the teaching 
 of history that ALL EXTREMES ARE WRONG, 
 is ever and ever repeated to passion- 
 spurred mortals, and ever and ever for- 
 gotten. In the green ardour of our wor- 
 ship we make an idol of our virtue ; the 
 strong lines of the particular excellence 
 which we admire are stretched into a 
 
ii.] THE CHURCH. 87 
 
 caricature ; our sublime, severed from all 
 root of soundness, reels over into the 
 ridiculous ; we revel and riot and get into 
 an intoxicated excitement with the fruit of 
 our own fancy ; and work ourselves from 
 one stage of inflammation to another, till, 
 as our great dramatist says, 
 
 " Goodness, grown to a pleurisy, 
 Dies of its own too much." 
 
 The excess into which Christianity at 
 its first start most naturally fell was ultra- 
 spiritualism, asceticism, or by whatever 
 name we may choose to characterise that 
 high-flying system in morals which, not 
 content with the regulation and subordina- 
 tion, aims at the violent subjugation and, as 
 much as may be, the total suppression of 
 the physical element in man. How near 
 this abuse lay is evident, not only from the 
 general tendency of every man to make an 
 idol of his distinctive virtue, and of every sect 
 to delight in the exaggeration of its most 
 characteristic feature, but there are not a 
 few passages of the New Testament which 
 plainly show that the masculine Christianity 
 
88 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 of St. Paul had not more occasion to pro- 
 test against those Greek libertines who 
 turned the grace of God into licentiousness, 
 than against those offshoots of the Jewish 
 Essenes who professed a self-imposed arbi- 
 trary religiosity (Col. ii. 18, 23), even for- 
 bidding to marry and commanding to abstain 
 from meats ( i Tim. iv. 3). 1 There is, indeed, 
 something very seductive in these attempts 
 to acquire a superhuman virtue, whether 
 they be made by a poet casting off the 
 vulgar bonds that bind him to his fellows, 
 like Percy Bysshe Shelley, that he may feed 
 upon sun-dews and get drunk on transcen- 
 dental imaginations, or by a religious 
 person, that he may devote himself to 
 spiritual exercises, free from the disturbing 
 influence of earthly passions. Such a re- 
 nunciation of the flesh gratifies his pride, 
 and has, in fact, the aspect of a heroic 
 virtue in a special line ; while, at the same 
 
 1 From the otSa^ TWI/ aTroa-roAwv, or Early Teaching 
 of the Apostles, lately discovered, ch. viii., we learn 
 that it was the custom of the early Christians to observe 
 two days of fasting in the week Wednesday and Friday. 
 Edit. Oxford Parker, 1885. 
 
ii.] THE CHURCH. 89 
 
 time, it is with some persons more con- 
 venient, inasmuch as when the resolution 
 is once formed and a decided start made, 
 it is always easier to abstain than to be 
 moderate. Nevertheless, all such ambitious 
 schemes to ignore the body and to cut 
 short the natural rights of our physical 
 nature must fail. It never can be the 
 virtue of a man to wish to be more than 
 man ; and every religion which sets a stamp 
 of special approval on superhuman, and 
 therefore unhuman, virtue, erects a wall of 
 separation between the gospel which it 
 preaches and the world which it should 
 convert. In fact, it rather gives up the 
 world in despair, and institutes an artificial 
 school for the practice of certain select 
 virtues, which only a few will practise, and 
 which, when practised, can only make 
 those few unfit for the social position 
 which Providence meant them to occupy. 
 
 The second excess into which Christ- 
 ianity, under the action of frail human 
 nature, easily ran was intolerance. This 
 intolerance, as in the previous case, is 
 
9O WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 only a virtue run to seed ; for, as all 
 asceticism is merely a misapplication or 
 an exaggeration of the virtue of self-denial 
 and self-control, so all intolerance, or defect 
 of kindly regard to the contrary in opinion 
 or conduct, is merely a crude or an im- 
 politic extension of the imperative OUGHT 
 which lies at the root of all moral truth, 
 and specially of all monotheistic religions. 
 There is, indeed, a certain intolerance in 
 truth which will not allow it to hold 
 parley with error ; and every new religion 
 with a lofty inspiration, conscious of a 
 divine mission, is necessarily aggressive : 
 it delights to pluck the beard of ancestral 
 authority, and marches right into the pres- 
 ence of hoary absurdity and consecrated 
 stupidity. No doubt there is a boundary 
 here which the divine wisdom of the Son 
 of God pointed at emphatically enough 
 when he was asked to bring down fire 
 from heaven on those who taught or did 
 otherwise ; but the evil spirit of self-im- 
 portance which prompted this request was 
 too deeply engrained in human nature to 
 
ii.] THE CHURCH. 9 1 
 
 be eradicated by a single warning of the 
 great teacher. This spirit of arrogant 
 individualism asserted itself at an early 
 period in the disorderly Corinthian Church 
 very much in the same way as it does 
 amongst ourselves, specially in Scotland, 
 at the present moment viz. by the 
 multiplication of sects, the exaggeration 
 of petty distinctions, and the fomenting 
 of petty rivalries, " Now this I say, 
 that every one of you saith, I am of 
 Paul ; and I of Apollos ; and I of Cephas ; 
 and I of Christ" (i Cor. i. 12), a spirit 
 which the apostle most strongly denounces 
 as proceeding manifestly from the over- 
 rated importance of some secondary speci- 
 alty, or some accessory condition, of the 
 body of believers, who thus clubbed them- 
 selves into a denomination, and resulting 
 in an unkindly divergence from the common 
 highway of evangelic life, and an intolerant 
 desire to override one Christian brother 
 with the private shibboleth of another, and 
 to stamp him with the seal of their own 
 conceit. The field in which this intolerant 
 
92 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 spirit displayed itself was of course dif- 
 ferent, according to the influences at work 
 at the time ; but there is one field which, 
 if church history is to teach us anything, 
 we are bound to emphasise strongly, that 
 is the field of dogma ; for, if there be any 
 influence that has worked more powerfully 
 to discredit Christianity than even the 
 immoral lives and selfish maxims of pro- 
 fessing Christians, it is the fixation and 
 glorification and idol-worship of the dogma. 
 No doubt Christianity is far from being 
 that system, or rather no system, of vague 
 and cloudy sentiment to which some per- 
 sons would reduce it : it has bones, and a 
 firm framework ; it stands upon facts, and 
 is not without doctrines, but it does not 
 make a parade of doctrines ; and the faith 
 which it enjoins, as is manifest from the 
 definition and historical examples in 
 Hebrews xi., is not an intellectual faith in 
 the doctrines of a metaphysical theology, 
 but a living faith in the moral government 
 of the world and a heroic conduct in life, 
 as the necessary expression of such faith. 
 
ii.] THE CHURCH. 93 
 
 The mere intellectual orthodoxy on which 
 the Christian Church has, by the tradition 
 of centuries, placed such a high value, is, 
 in the apostolical estimate, plainly worth 
 nothing ; for the devils also believe and 
 tremble, as St. James has it, or as our Lord 
 himself said in the striking summation to 
 the Sermon on the Mount, " Not they who 
 call me Lord, Lord, shall enter into the 
 kingdom, but they who do the will of my 
 Father who is in heaven. By their works, 
 not by their creed, ye shall know them/' 1 
 Nevertheless, the exaltation of the dogma 
 has always been a favourite tendency of 
 the Church, and the besetting sin of the 
 clergy. With the mass of the people, to 
 swear to a curious creed is always more 
 easy than to lead a noble life ; while to 
 the clerical intellect it must always give a 
 secret satisfaction to think that the science 
 of theology, which is the furthest removed 
 
 1 In the SiSa^ TOOV aTrocrroAcov there is absolutely 
 no dogma. It is all practice, and this is quite in har- 
 mony with the use of StSctx^ by St. Paul (i Tim. i. 10), 
 and indeed with the whole tone of these two admirable 
 epistles. 
 
94 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 from the handling of the great mass of 
 men, has in their hands assumed a well- 
 defined shape, of which the articulations 
 are as subtle and as necessary as the steps 
 of solution in a difficult algebraic problem. 
 The late Baron Bunsen, for many years 
 Prussian ambassador in London, one of 
 the most large-minded and large-hearted 
 of Christian men, in the preface to his 
 great Bibel werk, devotes a special chapter 
 to Dogmatism as a vice of the clerical 
 mind leading to false views of Scripture ; 
 over and above what he calls the modern 
 revival of scholastic theology in Ger- 
 many, he enumerates four dominant epochs 
 of ecclesiastical life in which this anti- evan- 
 gelical tendency has prominently asserted 
 itself. These are (i) the dogmatism of 
 the great Church councils in the reigns of 
 Constantine, Theodosius, and Justinian ; 
 (2) the medieval scholasticism of the 
 Western Church ; (3) the Protestant 
 scholasticism of the sixteenth and seven- 
 teenth centuries ; (4) the dogmatism of the 
 Jesuits, Perron, Bossuet, and others. Had 
 
ii.] THE CHURCH. 95 
 
 this dogmatic tendency of the Church 
 contented itself with tabulating a curious 
 scheme of divine mysteries, though it 
 might justly have been deemed imperti- 
 nent, and here and there a little presump- 
 tuous, yet it might have been condoned 
 lightly as a sort of clerical recreation in 
 hours which might have been worse em- 
 ployed ; but it could not be content with 
 this : it passed at once into action, and in 
 this guise prevailed to deface the fair front 
 of the Church with gashes of more bloody 
 and barbarous inhumanity than ever marked 
 the altars of the Baals and Molochs of the 
 most savage heathen superstitions. 
 
 Another monstrous abuse born out of 
 the bosom of the Church, though not so 
 directly, is Sacerdotalism. I say not so 
 directly, because the genius of Christ- 
 ianity is so distinctly negative of all 
 priesthood that, had there been even an 
 express prohibition of it, its contradiction 
 to the whole tone of the New Testament 
 could not have been more apparent. Not 
 more certainly are the sacrifices of the 
 
96 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 Jewish law abolished in the sacrifice of 
 Christ, according to the Pauline theology, 
 than the Levitical priesthood stands abol- 
 ished in the priesthood of Christ and in 
 the priesthood of the individual members 
 of his spiritual body (2 Peter v. g). 1 
 Whence, then, came our Christian priest- 
 hood ? Partly, I suspect, as the Jewish 
 Sabbath was interpolated into the Christ- 
 ian Lord's Day, from the nearness and 
 external similitude of the two things the 
 presbyter being to the outward eye pretty 
 much the same as the priest was to the 
 Jewish worshippers ; partly from the self- 
 importance which is the besetting sin of all 
 bodies of men prominently planted in the 
 social platform, and which induces them to 
 magnify their vocation, and in doing so stilt 
 their professional pride up into the attitude 
 of a very stately and a very reputable virtue. 
 The proper functions of the office-bearers 
 
 1 In the SiSaxij TWV aTrocrroAwv, c. xiii., the "pro- 
 phets" are said to be to Christians what the "high 
 priests " were to the Jews, a phraseology which could 
 not possibly have been used had any priesthood, in the 
 Hebrew sense, existed in the early Church. 
 
n.j THE CHURCH. 97 
 
 of the early Christian Church, call them 
 overseers, bishops, or what you will, were 
 so honourable and so beneficent that, 
 especially with an unlearned and un- 
 thinking people, the reverential respect 
 due to the actors might easily pass into a 
 superstitious belief in the mystical virtue 
 of the operations of which they were 
 the conductors ; and this ready submission 
 on the part of the people, holding out a 
 willing hand to the natural self-import- 
 ance and potentiated self-estimate of the 
 clerical body, resulted in a four - square 
 system of sacerdotal control, sacerdotal 
 virtue, and sacerdotal influence, to which 
 we shall search for a parallel in vain 
 through all the annals of Asiatic and 
 African heathenism. Nay, I can readily 
 believe that those who can find a priest- 
 hood in the genius of the gospel and the 
 apostolic institution of the Christian 
 Church, will naturally be inclined to main- 
 tain that the superior power of the 
 Gregories, Bonifaces, and Innocents of the 
 medieval Church, as contrasted with any- 
 H 
 
98 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 thing that we read or know of the Egyptian, 
 Hebrew, and Roman pontiffs, is the natural 
 and necessary outcome of the superior ex- 
 cellence of the Christian religion ; and 
 this, no doubt, is the only comfortable belief 
 on which all forms of Christian sacerdot- 
 alism can repose. 
 
 So much for the corruptions of the 
 Christian religion proceeding from what, 
 in theological language, might be called 
 the indwelling sin of the Church, un- 
 stimulated by any strong external seduc- 
 tion. But this seduction came. After 
 three centuries of hardship, manfully 
 endured in the school of adversity, the 
 more severe trial of prosperity had to be 
 gone through. The Church, which had 
 been declared to be not of this world, and 
 had stood face to face with the greatest 
 political power the world ever knew in a 
 position of sublime moral isolation, was 
 now adopted by the State, and formed a 
 bond of the most intimate connection 
 with its hereditary persecutors. The start- 
 ing-point of the oldest heathen social atti- 
 
ii.] THE CHURCH. 99 
 
 tude, the identity of Church and State, 
 seemed to be recalled ; and a Justinian on 
 the shores of the Bosphorus seemed as 
 really a head of the Church as a Menes 
 or an Amenophis on the banks of the Nile. 
 But under the outward likeness a radical 
 difference lay concealed. As an essen- 
 tially ethical society, with its own special 
 credentials, its separate history, and its 
 independent triumph, the Christian Church 
 might form an alliance with a purely 
 secular institution like the State, but it 
 could not be absorbed or identified with 
 it. That alliance might be made bene- 
 ficially in various ways and on various 
 terms ; the civil magistrate might be 
 proud to be called the friend and the 
 brother of the Christian bishop, or he 
 might humble himself to be its servant, 
 but he never could be its master. The 
 alliance therefore was, as it ought to be, 
 all in favour of the spiritual body ; the 
 Church gained the civil power to execute 
 its decrees and to patronise its missions ; 
 but a Christian State could never gain 
 
IOO WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 the right to dictate the creed or perform 
 the functions of the Church. The idea 
 that there is anything absolutely sinful, or 
 necessarily pernicious, in the conception of 
 an alliance between the Church and the 
 State, is one of those hyperconscientious 
 crotchets of modern British sectarianism 
 at which the Muse of history can only 
 smile. There can be no greater sin in an 
 Established Church than in an Established 
 University or an Established Royal Aca- 
 demy. Religion and Science and Art have 
 their separate and well-marked provinces, 
 in the administration of which they may 
 wisely seek for the co-operation, though 
 they will always jealously avoid the dicta- 
 tion, of the State. But, though there 
 could be no sin in the Church receiving the 
 right hand of fellowship from the State, 
 there might be danger, and that of a 
 very serious description. Nothing strikes 
 a man so much in the reading of the New 
 Testament as the little respect which it 
 pays to riches and the pomp and pride 
 of life, and worldly honours and dignities 
 
ii.] THE CHV-RCI-J. 'K>; 
 
 of all kinds. "How can ye believe who 
 receive honour one from another?" is a 
 sentence that cuts very deep into the con- 
 nection between the Church and State, 
 which might readily mean the alliance of a 
 secular institution, delighting in pomp and 
 parade and glittering show, with a religion 
 of which, like the philosophy of the porch, 
 the most prominent feature was unworld- 
 liness, humility, and spirituality. Here un- 
 questionably was danger : an alliance in 
 which, as in an ill-consorted marriage, the 
 lower element was as likely to drag down 
 the higher as the higher to lift up the 
 lower. And so it actually happened. The 
 Church was secularised. Alongside of the 
 hundred and one monkeries of stolid 
 asceticism and the hundred and one mum- 
 meries of sacerdotal ceremonialism, there 
 grew up in the process of the ages a con- 
 solidated hierarchy of such concentrated, 
 secular, and sacred potency that the loftiest 
 crowned heads of Europe ducked beneath 
 its shadow and quailed beneath its ban. To 
 understand this, we must take note of the 
 
FO2 ', WH AT .D.OES* -HISTORY TEACH? [LECT. 
 
 change by which the scattered presbyters 
 of the primitive Church were gradually 
 massed into a strong aristocracy, which in 
 due season, after the fashion of the State, 
 found its key-stone in an ecclesiastical 
 monarch. It was the wisdom of the 
 founders of the Christian Church not to 
 lay down any fixed norm of official ad- 
 ministration, but to leave all the external 
 machinery of a purely spiritual institution 
 free to adapt itself to the existing forms 
 of society as time and circumstance and 
 national genius might demand. The form 
 of government natural to the Church in its 
 earliest stages was democratic, with a 
 certain loose, ill-defined element of pre- 
 sidential aristocracy. But in an age which 
 had bidden a long farewell both to the 
 spirit and the form of democracy in civil 
 administration, such a form of government 
 in the Church could not hope to maintain 
 itself. Under the influence of the magnifi- 
 cent autocracy of Rome in its decadence, 
 the simple overseer or superintendent (eW- 
 of a remote provincial congregation 
 
ii.] THE CHURCH. 1 03 
 
 of believers gradually grew into a metro- 
 politan dignitary, and culminated in the 
 wielder of a secular sovereignty sitting in 
 council with the most influential monarchs 
 of Europe. The epiphany of an absolute 
 monarch with a triple tiara on his head 
 when contrasted with the simplicity and un- 
 worldliness of the primitive bishops wears 
 such a strange look that it has been judged, 
 especially in Protestant countries, with a 
 more sweeping severity than it deserved. 
 As a mere form of government, no man can 
 give any good reason why the Church 
 should not be governed by a monarch as 
 well as the State ; the bishop of Rome, as 
 supreme head of the body of bishops all 
 over Christendom, and guided by them as 
 his habitual advisers, was at least as natural 
 and as reasonable a guide for the direction 
 of the conscience of Christendom in the 
 Middle Ages as the Council of Protestants 
 who at Dort, in the year 1618, condemned 
 the greatest theologian and jurist of the 
 day to pine in a Dutch prison, or the 
 Assembly of Divines in Westminster who 
 
IO4 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 empowered the supreme magistrate to sup- 
 press the right of free thought in the 
 breasts of all persons who were not pre- 
 pared to set their seal to the damnatory 
 dogmas of extreme Calvinism. Nay, so 
 far from there being anything anti-Christian 
 or anti-social in the Popedom as a form of 
 Church government, we may safely say 
 that in ages of general turmoil, confusion, 
 and violence, the admitted supremacy of 
 the visible head of a church founded on 
 principles of peace and conciliation could 
 not act otherwise than beneficially. But 
 when the person in whom this moral 
 supremacy was vested became the acknow- 
 ledged head of a secular princedom, the 
 case was altered. It was an unhappy day 
 for the Christian Church, the most unhappy 
 day perhaps in its whole eventful history, 
 when Pepin, the ambitious minister of the 
 last of the Merovingian kings, in the year 
 75 1, contrived to get out of Pope Zachary a 
 spiritual sanction for his usurption of his 
 master's throne. From that moment the 
 Church was doomed toa blazingand brilliant, 
 
ii.] THE CHURCH. 105 
 
 but a sure career of downfall. The spiritual 
 abetter of a secular crime had to be re- 
 warded for his pious subserviency : he re- 
 ceived the exarchate of Ravenna, and became 
 a temporal prince. From that time forward 
 the head of the Christian Church, who 
 ought to have stood before the world as a 
 model of all purity, truthfulness, peaceful- 
 ness, and ethical nobility, was condemned to 
 serve two masters, God and Mammon, un- 
 worldly morality and worldly power, which 
 was impossible. From this time forward 
 there was not a single court intrigue in 
 Europe, nor a single plot of any knot of 
 conspirators, into whose counsels the 
 supreme bishop of the gospel of peace 
 might not be dragged, or, what is worse, 
 into whose lawless and ungodly machina- 
 tions he might not be officially thrusting 
 himself, in order to preserve some acces- 
 sory interest or gain some paltry advantage 
 altogether unconnected with his spiritual 
 function. If there is any one element, 
 always of course excepting the element 
 of gross sensuality and absolute villainy, 
 
106 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 which more than another is adverse to the 
 spirit of Evangelical Christianity, it is the 
 element of court intrigue, political con- 
 tention, and party feuds. In this region 
 love, which is the life of the regenerate 
 soul, cannot breathe ; truth is put under 
 ban ; lies flourish; conscience is smothered; 
 and low expediency everywhere takes the 
 place of lofty principle. So it fared not 
 seldom with the Popes ; and much worse in 
 the last degree ; for wickedness, like every- 
 thing that lives, must live by growing, and 
 the seed of secular ambition which was 
 sown in lies, will grow to robbery, blossom 
 in lust, and ripen into murder. This 
 anywhere, but specially in Italy, where 
 from the time of the patrician Scipio, who 
 suppressed the elder Gracchus, the hot 
 contenders for absolute power, in the 
 eager pursuit of their object, have never 
 shrank from the free use of the assassin's 
 dagger and the poisoner's bowl. In 
 fact, if the love of mere animal pleasure 
 makes a man a beast, it is the love 
 of power that translates him into a 
 
ii.] THE CHURCH. IO7 
 
 fiend ; and of this sort of human fiends 
 Italian history presents as appalling a 
 register as can be found anywhere in the 
 annals of our race ; and at the top of this 
 register stand some of the Popes, whose 
 names are as prominent in the story of 
 ecclesiastical Rome as those of Nero, 
 Domitianus, and Heliogabalus are in the 
 story of the imperial decadence. When 
 we cast a rapid glance for it deserves 
 nothing more on the revolting record of 
 the Roman Popes in the age immediately 
 preceding the Reformation, we hear the 
 solemn voice of history repeating again 
 the maxim above quoted corruptio optimi 
 pessima : when priests are bad, they are 
 very bad ; when the salt of the gospel, 
 which was meant to preserve the moral 
 life of society from putrescence, has lost 
 its savour, if not cast out, it is worse than 
 useless it becomes a poison. 
 
 Before proceeding to the modern history 
 of the Church, we ought to emphasise in a 
 special paragraph the fact that one un- 
 fortunate result of the incorporation of the 
 
IO8 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? [LECT. 
 
 Church with the State was that the 
 Church was now in a position to request 
 the State to lend its potent aid in estab- 
 lishing the true doctrine of the gospel and 
 suppressing all heresies. That the State 
 had a right to do so no man doubted ; 
 even in democratic Greece free -thinking 
 philosophers, such as Anaxagoras, Diogenes, 
 and Socrates, were banished or suffered 
 death on charges of impiety ; and though, 
 no doubt, political elements, as in the 
 case of the Arminians in Holland, worked 
 along with the strictly religious feeling to 
 set the brand of atheism on those men, 
 there cannot be any doubt that where the 
 State and the Church were so essentially 
 one, persecutions for unauthorised religious 
 observances were perfectly legitimate, as 
 indeed the memorable case of the forcible 
 suppression of the Dionysiac mysteries, 
 more than two hundred years before the 
 earliest of the Christian martyrdoms in 
 Rome, abundantly testifies. But there was 
 a double horror in the religious persecution, 
 after the establishment of Christianity, now 
 
ii.] THE CHURCH. 
 
 inaugurated for the first time the horror 
 of a conduct so diametrically opposed to 
 the spirit and the express injunction of the 
 Founder of the Gospel, in whose defence 
 it was practised, and the horror also that 
 what was now violently suppressed was 
 not, as in the case of the Dionysiac 
 mysteries, rather immoral practices than 
 erroneous beliefs, but simply and nakedly 
 metaphysical objections against meta- 
 physical propositions in theology, which, 
 whether true or false, could not be made 
 the subject of State action, or, in my 
 opinion at least, of ecclesiastical censure, 
 without a flagrant violation of that law of 
 charity which a large philosophy and a 
 catholic Christianity equally enjoin. The 
 banishment of Arius to Illyria, as the 
 civil consequence of the formal signature 
 of the Trinitarian creed by the decision of 
 the Council of Nice in the year 325, though 
 it made no small noise in the world in those 
 days, was a very innocent overture to the 
 barbarous dramas of fire and blood that 
 were in after ages to be enacted on this 
 
T1O WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? [LECT. 
 
 evil precedent. There are many grand 
 places rich with historical lessons in London, 
 and not a few sad ones ; but the saddest of 
 all is Smithfield. I can never pace the 
 stones of this memorable site, where our 
 noblest Scot, Sir William Wallace, was 
 disembowelled and quartered to gratify the 
 vengeance of an imperious Norman, with- 
 out thinking of the sad fate of the young 
 and beautiful Anne Askew. This lady, 
 the daughter of a knight of good family in 
 Lincolnshire, under some of those stimu- 
 lants of thought which were stirring up the 
 stagnant traditions of medieval piety, had 
 been led to conceive serious doubts with 
 regard to the Scripture authority for some 
 of the most universally received doctrines 
 of the Roman Church. This pious scep- 
 ticism coming to the ears of certain lead- 
 ing persons in Church and State, who, after 
 the example of the Nicean doctors, con- 
 sidered it a sacred duty in matters pertain- 
 ing to religion to tolerate no contradic- 
 tion, first brought this . lady before the 
 Lord Chancellor, who tore her limb from 
 
ii.] THE CHURCH. I I I 
 
 limb on the rack, because she would not 
 say that she believed what she could not 
 believe without denying her senses, and 
 then dragged her to the blood-stained pave- 
 ment of Smithfield, where she was girt 
 with gunpowder bags and fenced with 
 faggots, to be burnt to death, as if the God 
 of Christians were a second and enlarged 
 edition of the old Moloch of Palestine. 
 And what was her offence beautiful, 
 young, pure, and truthful woman, not more 
 than twenty-five years of age that she 
 should be treated in this worse than can- 
 nibalic style in the name of the gospel of 
 Jesus Christ? Simply that Henry VIII., 
 in that style of insolent masterdom which 
 he showed so royally, and conceiting him- 
 self, like a Scotch fool who came after him, 
 to be a considerable theologian, assumed 
 the right to put the stamp of absolute king- 
 ship on the doctrine of the Church that a 
 piece of bread, over which a priestly bene- 
 diction had been pronounced by a priest, 
 was by the mystical virtue of this bene- 
 diction changed into flesh, while the fair 
 
I I 2 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 young lady persisted in seeing nothing but 
 bread. Let it be granted that the lady 
 was in the wrong and the churchly tradi- 
 tion right, it never could be right to tear 
 her flesh to shreds and to burn her bones to 
 ashes because she held an opinion which, 
 to say the least of it, looked as like the 
 truth as its opposite. How sad, how sorrow- 
 fully sad, and what a commentary on what 
 we are ever and anon tempted to call poor, 
 pitiful, prideful, and presumptuous human 
 nature, that Christianity had at that time 
 been more than fifteen hundred years in the 
 world, sitting in high places, and walking 
 with triumphal banners over the earth, 
 and yet neither the princes of the earth 
 nor the rulers of the Church should have 
 retained even a slight echo of that reproof 
 from a mild Master to a zealous disciple, 
 to the effect that no man who knew the 
 spirit of the divine religion which He 
 taught, would ever propose to bring fire 
 down from heaven or up from hell to 
 consume the unbeliever. 
 
 Such enormities in the doctrine and 
 
ii.] THE CHURCH. I 13 
 
 practice of the Church, as we have indicated 
 rather than described, could lead to only 
 one of two issues Reform or Revolution. 
 The change brought about, though con- 
 tenting itself with the milder name, was 
 in fact the more drastic procedure. The 
 European reformation of Martin Luther 
 in 1517 was a revolution in the Church, 
 much more radical and much more worthy 
 of so strong a designation than the political 
 revolution of 1688 in Great Britain. It is 
 needless to recapitulate the causes of 
 offence ; they were only too patent inso- 
 lence, secularity, sensuality, venality, idle- 
 ness, vice, and worthlessness of every kind 
 in the Church ; but there were two causes 
 which, in addition to corruption from within, 
 tended to open the ears of Christendom 
 largely to the cry for Church reform. 
 These were the stir in the intellectual 
 movement from the days of the author of 
 the Divine Comedy downwards, enforced 
 by the invention of printing in the middle 
 of the fifteenth century, which was amply 
 sufficient to become a danger to even a 
 i 
 
114 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? [LECT. 
 
 much less vulnerable creed than that which 
 had satisfied the crude demands of medi- 
 eval intelligence ; and, in the second 
 place, the hostility which the insolence and 
 ambition of Churchmen had roused in the 
 secular magistracy that is, not only the 
 monarch and his official ministers, but the 
 great body of the higher nobility who 
 found themselves ousted from their place 
 in the familiar counsels of the monarch by 
 the advocates and ambassadors of a foreign 
 potentate. Thus the two best friends of 
 every Established Church in its normal 
 state were converted into enemies ; and 
 the natural indignation of the common 
 people at the licentious lives and gross 
 venality of the clergy was stimulated into 
 an explosion by the desire of the secular 
 dignities to curb the pride of the clergy, 
 and, it might lightly happen also, to rob 
 them of part of their overgrown wealth, 
 nominally for the public good, really for 
 the aggrandisement of the Crown and the 
 nobility. The shameless nepotism of Pope 
 Sixtus IV., the flagitious lives and abhor- 
 
ii.] THE CHURCH. 115 
 
 rent practices of the Borgias, more fit for 
 a sensational melodrama in the lowest 
 Parisian theatre than for the home of a 
 Christian bishop ; the military rage of a 
 Julius, who turned the Church of Christ 
 into a travelling camp and the bishop's 
 crozier into a soldier's sword ; the literary 
 dilettantism of the Court of Leo X., more 
 eager to distinguish itself by the elegant 
 trimming of Latin versicles than by apos- 
 tolic zeal and Christian purity, all this, 
 so long as it disported itself on Italian 
 ground, the aristocracy of England and 
 Scotland might have continued to look on 
 with indifference ; but that the son of any- 
 body or nobody, in a county of unvalued 
 clodhoppers, should jostle them in the 
 antechamber of the monarch, and claim 
 precedence in the hall of audience, simply 
 because he was the supple instrument of 
 an insolent Italian priest, this was not to 
 be borne ; and so the Reformation came, 
 with the mob of the lowest classes, the 
 mass of the respectable middle classes, the 
 most influential of the nobility, and the 
 
Il6 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? [LECT. 
 
 power of the Crown, all in full cry against 
 the ecclesiastical fox. The revolution thus 
 volcanically effected, and known in history 
 under the name of Protestantism, meant 
 simply the right of every individual mem- 
 ber of the Christian Church to take the 
 principles and the practice of his Church 
 directly from the original records of the 
 Church, without the intervention of any 
 body of authorised interpreters ; and the 
 necessary product of this right when exer- 
 cised was first to declare certain practices 
 and doctrines that had grown up in the 
 Church through long centuries to be un- 
 authorised departures from the original 
 simplicity and purity of the gospel ; and, 
 further, to deny that there existed in the 
 Christian Church, as originally constituted, 
 any class or caste of men enjoying the 
 exclusive privilege to perform sacred 
 functions, and endowed with a divine 
 virtue to perform sacramental miracles by 
 their consecrating touch, in a word, that 
 there was no priesthood, properly so called, 
 in the Reformed Christian Church. Nor is 
 
ii.] THE CHURCH. 117 
 
 this doctrine, as some may think, the teach- 
 ing only of the Helvetic confession, what cer- 
 tain persons have been fond to call extreme 
 Protestantism ; for, though the word priest 
 has been retained in the English prayer- 
 book as a minister in sacred things of a 
 particular grade and exercising a particular 
 function, the attempt made by Archbishop 
 Laud and the Romanising party in the 
 Reformed Church of England to retain in 
 the bosom of the Anglican Church the 
 ideas which the ancient Jews and the 
 Romish Christians attached to the word 
 priest, proved a signal failure ; and for the 
 sacerdotal despotism which it implied, as 
 well as for the secular despotism which the 
 priest advised and encouraged the unfortu- 
 nate king to assert, the adviser and the 
 advised justly lost their heads. Of all the 
 teachings of Church history, from the 
 Waldenses in the twelfth century down to 
 the present hour, there is nothing more 
 certain than this, that between Popery and 
 Protestantism there is no middle term 
 possible. They may agree, in fact they 
 
I 1 8 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? [LECT. 
 
 do agree, in many essential things, and in 
 a few accidental ; but in the fundamental 
 principle of Church administration they are 
 diametrically opposed. The principle of 
 the one is sacerdotal authority, absolute 
 and unqualified ; the principle of the other 
 is individual and congregational liberty. 
 The one form of polity is a close oligarchy, 
 the other either a free democracy or an 
 aristocracy more or less penetrated by a 
 democratic spirit. 
 
 The practical outcome of this great Pro- 
 testant movement, in the midst of which 
 we live, cannot fail to a reasonable eye to 
 appear in the highest degree satisfactory. 
 Never was the life of the Christian Church 
 at once more intensely earnest and more 
 expansively distributive than at the pre- 
 sent moment. On the one hand, the 
 Roman Church, wisely taught by the ex- 
 perience of the past, though obstinately 
 cleaving to that stout conservatism of 
 doctrine and ritual inherent in the very 
 bones of all sacerdotal religions, has been, 
 in the main, studious to avoid those 
 
ii.] THE CHURCH. lig 
 
 causes of offence from which the great 
 rupture proceeded. On the other hand, 
 the Protestant Churches, shaken free from 
 the distracting influence of sacerdotal as- 
 sumption and secular ambition, have found 
 themselves in a condition to permeate all 
 classes of society with a moral virtue, 
 of whose regenerative action Plato and 
 Socrates, in their best hours, could not 
 have dreamed. Some people, while gladly 
 admitting the immense amount of social 
 good that is done by the various sections 
 of the Protestant Church, never cease to 
 sigh for a lost ecclesiastical unity, and to 
 lament the unseemly strifes that arise 
 among those that should be possessed by 
 one spirit and strive together for a com- 
 mon end. But the persons who speak 
 thus are either sentimental weaklings, being 
 Protestants, or are Romanists and sacer- 
 dotalists in their heart. Variety is the law 
 of nature in the moral no less than in the 
 physical world ; and the absorption of all 
 sects into one results in a stagnation which 
 will never be found amongst moral beings, 
 
I2O WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? [LECT. 
 
 unless when produced by weakness of 
 vital force from within, or unnatural sup- 
 pression from above. The two dominant 
 types of church polity recognised in this 
 country since the Reformation the 
 Episcopal and the Presbyterian of 
 which the one boasts a more aristocratic 
 intellectual culture, and the other a more 
 fervid and forcible popular action, may 
 well be allowed to exist together on a 
 mutual understanding of giving and taking 
 whatever is best in each, and thus, in 
 apostolic language, provoking one an- 
 other to love and to good works. Com- 
 petition is for the public benefit as much 
 in churches as in trades. Dissent from 
 any dominant body, even though it may 
 proceed from the exaggerated importance 
 given to a secondary matter, will always 
 produce the good result that the dominant 
 body will thereby be stirred to greater 
 activity and greater watchfulness ; so that, 
 in this view, we may lay it down as one of 
 the great lessons of history that the best 
 form of church government is a strong 
 
IT.] THE CHURCH. 121 
 
 establishment qualified by a strong dis- 
 sent. As to the proposals which have 
 in recent times been made for the formal 
 separation of Church and State, they bear 
 on their face more of a political than of a 
 religious significance. Impartial history 
 offers no countenance to the notion that 
 Established Churches, when well flanked 
 by dissent, and in an age when the spirit- 
 ual ruler has ceased to make the arm of 
 the State the tool of intolerance, are con- 
 trary either to piety or to policy ; and in 
 the desire so loudly expressed at election 
 contests to lay violent hands on the valu- 
 able organism of church agency existing 
 in this country, the venerated inheritance 
 of many ages of patriotic struggle, the 
 student of history, with a charitable allow- 
 ance for the best motives in not a few, 
 feels himself constrained to suspect in all 
 such movements no small admixture of 
 sectarian jealousy, fussy religiosity, and 
 domineering 'democracy. Christianity, of 
 course, stands in no need of an Established 
 Church ; religion existed for three hundred 
 
122 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? [LECT. 
 
 years in the church without any State con- 
 nection, and may exist again ; but Christian- 
 ity does, above all things, abhor the stirring 
 up of strife betwixt Church and Church 
 from motives of jealousy, envy, or greed ; 
 and, along with the highest philosophy 
 and the most far-sighted political wisdom, 
 must protest in the strongest terms against 
 the abolishing of a useful ethical institu- 
 tion to gratify the insane lust of levelling 
 in a mere numerical majority. 
 
 The Church of the future, whether 
 established or disestablished, or, as I 
 think best, both together, provoking one 
 another to love and to good works, has a 
 great mission before it, if it keep sharply 
 in view the two lessons which the teaching 
 of eighteen centuries so eloquently en- 
 forces. Our evangelists must remove 
 from the van of their evangelic force all 
 that sharp fence of metaphysical subtlety 
 and scholastic dogma, which, being osten- 
 tatiously paraded in creeds and catechisms, 
 has given more just offence to those 
 without than edification to those within 
 
IT.] THE CHURCH. 123 
 
 the Church ; the gospel must be presented 
 to the world with all that catholic breadth, 
 kindly humanity, and popular directness 
 which were its boast before it was laced 
 and screwed into artificial shapes by the 
 decrees of intolerent councils, and the 
 subtleties of ingenious schoolmen. And, 
 again, they must not allow the gospel to 
 be handled, what is too often the case, as 
 a mere message of hope and comfort in 
 view of a future world ; but they must 
 make it walk directly into the complex rela- 
 tions of modern society, and think that it 
 has done nothing till the ideal of sentiment 
 and conduct which it preached on Sunday 
 has been more or less practised on Mon- 
 day. In fact, there ought to be less vague 
 preaching on Sunday, and more specific 
 and direct application through the week 
 of gospel principle in various spheres of 
 the intellectual and moral life of the 
 community. If, in addition to this, our 
 prophets of the pulpit take care to 
 keep abreast of the intellectual move- 
 ment of the age, so as not only to stir 
 
124 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? [LECT. n. 
 
 the world in sermons, but to guide them 
 in the wisdom of daily life, they have no- 
 thing to fear from all the windy artillery 
 that the speculations of a soulless physical 
 science, the imaginations of a dreamy 
 socialism, or the dogmatism of a cold philo- 
 sophical formalism, can bring to bear upon 
 them. Let them grapple bravely with all 
 social problems, and prove whether Christ- 
 ianity, which has done so much to purify 
 the motives of individuals, may not be 
 able also to put a more effective steam 
 into the machinery of society. If they 
 shall fail here, they will fail gloriously, hav- 
 ing done their best. It is not given to 
 any people, however great, to solve all 
 problems. When Great Britain shall have 
 played out her part, there will be scope 
 enough in the process of the ages for 
 another stout social worker to place the 
 cornice on the edifice of which she was 
 privileged to raise the pillars. 
 
 Printed by R. & R. CLARK, Edinburgh. 
 
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