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 CIVILIZATION 
 BEFORE AND AFTER CHRISTIANITY.
 
 CIVILIZATION 
 
 BEFORE AND AFTER CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 TWO LECTURES DELIVERED IN 
 
 ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL, 
 
 AT THE TUESDAY EVENING SERVICES, 
 
 Janumy 23^ .Sr^ 30///, 1872. 
 
 BY 
 
 R. W. CHURCH, M.A., 
 
 DEAN OF ST. PAUL'S. 
 
 3r0nb0n : 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO. 
 
 1872. 
 
 \Thc Right of Translation and Reproduction is reserved.\
 
 LONDON : 
 CI-AY, SONS, AND TAYLOR, PRINTERS, 
 BRKAU STREET HILL,
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 The two following Lectures are part of an un- 
 finished series which was begun in St. Paul's on 
 Tuesday evenings during the present winter, and 
 which the preparations in the Cathedral for the 
 Queen's visit to return thanks for the recovery 
 of the Prince of Wales made it necessary to 
 discontinue. The Lectures were an experiment, 
 arising out of the desire of my devoted and enter- 
 prising colleagues to turn to greater account the 
 opportunities of usefulness which we possess in 
 St. Paul's, and determined upon before I had 
 the honour of belonging to their body. They 
 wished to make the Cathedral of service to the 
 large body of intelligent young men who follow 
 their business around it, by treating, in a spirit 
 not unbecoming the place and its purpose, sub-
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 jects of interest and importance which are often 
 assumed to be out of place in the pulpit. The 
 first set was delivered by Mr. Gregory, in answer 
 to the question, " Are we better than our 
 Fathers ? " and in them he considered the com- 
 parative distribution of wealth among different 
 ranks of English society, now and in the seven- 
 teenth century, the relative positions of rich and 
 poor, and the ties by which various classes of 
 the community are bound together, at the 
 two eras.* In the next course. Dr. Liddon 
 examined the assumption, often boldly made, 
 that Christianity is on the decline, in its political, 
 intellectual, social, and moral aspects. The third 
 was by Bishop Claughton, on the Ethics of 
 Mahomedanism and Buddhism, as compared with 
 the Ethics of Christianity. My interrupted set 
 came next, and Professor Lightfoot was to have 
 finished the series by some lectures on early 
 Christian life. The attempt was thought by many 
 
 * Published by J. Parker & Co., Oxford and London. 

 
 PREFACE. 
 
 an over-bold one. It certainly met with a cordial 
 response from those for whom it was undertaken ; 
 and the lectures, which were intended to be 
 given in a small side chapel, had to be delivered 
 to large audiences under the dome. I have re- 
 printed these two Lectures as a remembrance 
 of an occasion of great interest to us at St. 
 Paul's ; I have no other justification for pub- 
 lishing them. 
 
 R. W. C. 
 
 February 1872.
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 ROMAN CIVILIZATION. 
 
 I PROPOSE to bring before your thoughts, in ful- 
 filment of my part in this series of lectures, the 
 subject of Civilization — first, as it was, in probably 
 its highest form before Christian times, in the 
 Roman State ; and next, as it has been since Chris- 
 tianity has influenced the course of history and the 
 conditions of human life. In doing this, I have to 
 remember several things. I have to remember the 
 vastness of the field before us, the huge mass of 
 materials, the number, difhculty, and importance of 
 the questions which arise out of the subject, or 
 hang on it. I have to remember that civilization is 
 a thing of more or less, and that general statements 
 about it are ever liable to be misunderstood or 
 excepted to, because the speaker is thinking of 
 
 B
 
 ROMAN CIVILIZA TIQN. 
 
 one phase or degree of it, and the listener and 
 critic is thinking of another. One may have 
 his thoughts full of its triumphs, and the other 
 of its failures and shameful blots. I have to 
 remember that it is a subject which has tasked 
 the powers and filled the volumes of learned, 
 able, and copious writers — Montesquieu, Guizot, 
 Buckle, to name only these, who have made it 
 their special theme — and that they have left much 
 unsaid, much unsettled, about it. And I have to 
 remember that I have only two short lectures — 
 circumstances have made this necessary — to say 
 what I can say about it. Perhaps for what I 
 have to say it is enough. But, with such a subject, 
 I should gladly have had more time both for 
 preparation and for discourse. 
 
 We who pursue our business in this great city, 
 we who come to hear or to worship in this great 
 cathedral, have continually before our eyes, in 
 some of its most striking and characteristic forms, 
 a very complex but very distinctive fact in the
 
 ROMAN CIVILIZATION. 
 
 conditions of human existence — the vast complex 
 fact to which we give the name of civilization. 
 It is, we all know, a vague and elastic word, and 
 I am not going to be so venturous as here to 
 analyse it and define even its outlines : but it 
 expresses a substantial idea, it marks a rcr.I 
 difference in what men are and can be ; and if 
 loose and idle thinkers throw it about as if it 
 was a glittering counter, it is so real, and so 
 important in its meaning, that the most accurate 
 ones cannot dispense with the use of it. The 
 distinction between man in the barbarian state, artd 
 man in the state of civil life and civil society, 
 is no imaginary one, though civilized life may 
 be penetrated and disgraced with elements of 
 barbarism, and gleams of civihzation may be 
 discerned far back in times which are rightly 
 called barbarous. A cloudy sky and a bright sky 
 are different things, though one may be brighten- 
 ing, and the other darkening, into its opposite ; 
 though there may be uncertainty about their 
 
 B 2
 
 ROMAN CIVILIZATION, 
 
 confines ; though clouds may be prominent in 
 the clear, and though there be light breaking 
 through the dulness and gloom. Civilization is 
 a sufficiently definite and a sufficiently interesting 
 thing to speak about, even though we find, as we 
 must if we think at all, how much of the subject 
 eludes our grasp, and how idle it is, on an occasion 
 like the present, to attempt to work upon it, except 
 in the way of rough and imperfect sketching. 
 
 I include under the word Civilization all that 
 man does, all that he discovers, all that he 
 becomes, to fit himself most suitably for the life 
 in which he finds himself here. It is obviously 
 possible, for the fact stares us in the face, now 
 as at all times, that this moral being, endowed 
 with conscience and yearning after good, whom 
 tve believe to be here only in an early and most 
 imperfect stage of his existence, may yet live, 
 and feel, and act, as if all that he was made for 
 was completed here. He may also, with the 
 full assurance of immortality, ^yet see, in this
 
 ROMAN CIVILIZATION. 
 
 present state, a scene and stage of real life, in 
 which that life is intended to be developed to 
 the full perfection of which it is capable ; — a 
 scene, intended, though temporary only, and only 
 a training place, to call forth his serious and 
 unsparing efforts after improvement ; just as at a 
 school, in play-time as well as in work, we expect 
 as much thought, as much purpose, as much 
 effort, proportionate of course to the time, as we 
 expect in grown-up life. There is, I need not say, 
 a further question — whether this life can become 
 all that it is capable of becoming, without refer- 
 ence to something beyond and above it : that, of 
 course, is the question of questions of all ages, and 
 emphatically of our own. But into that I am not 
 now entering. All that I want to insist upon, is 
 that there is such a thing as making this present 
 life as perfect as it can be made for its own sake ; 
 improving, inventing, adjusting, correcting, strictly 
 examining into detail, sowing seeds and launching 
 deeply-laid plans of policy, facing the present and
 
 ROMAN CIVILIZA TION. 
 
 realizing the future, for the sake of what happens 
 and must happen in time, under the known condi- 
 tions of our experience here. To all such attempts 
 to raise the level of human life, to all such en- 
 deavours to expand human capacity and elevate 
 human character, to all that has in view the bettering 
 of our social conditions, in all the manifold forms 
 and diversified relations of the society in which 
 we grow up and live, till our senses come to an 
 end in death ; to all that in the sphere, which is 
 bounded to our eyes by the grave, tends to make 
 life more beautiful, more reasonable, more pure, 
 more rich both in achievement and felicity, up to 
 the point when pain, and sorrow, and death claim 
 their dread rights over it, and that, even in tlie 
 presence of pain and death, imparts to life dignity, 
 self-command, nobleness — to all this I should give 
 the name of civilization. 
 
 I do not, therefore, take civilization to consist 
 in the mere development, and extension, and 
 perfection, either of the intellectual faculties, or
 
 ROMAN CIVILIZATION. 
 
 of the arts which minister to the uses and conve- 
 niences, or even the embelhshment of hfe. The 
 intellectual faculties, some of 'them at least, may 
 be strong and keen in what I should still call a 
 low stage of civilization, as hitherto in India. 
 I cannot call the stage to which man has reached 
 in Egypt, in China, or Japan, a high one, though 
 there he has been singularly ingenious, singularly 
 industrious, and in many ways eminently successful 
 in bringing nature under his control. The fifteenth 
 and sixteenth centuries in Italy were brilliant 
 centuries : they witnessed a burst of genius in art, 
 which was absolutely without its match. It was 
 civilization, I cannot deny it. But I cannot call 
 tJiat other than a corrupt and base one, of which 
 the theory was expounded, with infinite ability, by 
 Macchiavelli, and the history told by Guicciardini. 
 I do not call it a true civilization, where men do 
 not attempt to discharge their duties as vieii in 
 society. Not even the presence of Leonardo, 
 Michael Angelo, and Raffaelle can persuade me to
 
 ROMAN CIVILIZATION. 
 
 rank it high, as a form of civilization, in which life, 
 amid all its splendours, was so precarious and so 
 misguided, in which all the relations and rights of 
 society were so frightfully confused, and in which 
 the powers of government were systematically 
 carried on by unlimited perfidy, by the poison 
 bowl and the dagger. I should not consent to call 
 the railway, or the telegraph, or even the news- 
 paper of our own age, a final test of civilization 
 till I knew better how the facilities of intercourse 
 were employed, — what was flashed along the wires 
 or written in the columns ; nor, again, the wonderful 
 and intricate machinery of our manufactures and 
 trade, till I knev/ how the wealth produced by 
 it was used. Civilization, the form, as perfect as 
 man can make it, of his life here, needs these 
 apphances, welcomes them, multiplies them; man 
 needs all the powers that he can get for help 
 for remedy, for the elevation of his state. But the 
 true subject of civilization is the maji himself^ 
 and not the circumstances, the jnstruments, the
 
 ROMAN CIVILIZATION. 
 
 inventions round him. "A man's life consisteth 
 not in the abundance of the things which he 
 possesseth." The degree of civilization in a 
 society, high or low, rising or going back, depends, 
 it seems to me, on the actual facts of civil life, 
 political, social, domestic, not on the machinery of 
 outward things of which men can dispose ; on 
 what men try to be one to another; on what they 
 try to make of themselves^ not of their goods and 
 powers ; on the words which they speak, really 
 speak from their hearts, not imitate or feign ; on 
 the indications of will and purpose, of habits of 
 life, of self-government or indulgence — in a word, 
 of cJiaracter. The degree of civilization depends a 
 great deal more on whether they are manly, honest, 
 just, public-spirited, generous, able to work to- 
 gether in life, than on whether they are rich, or 
 hard working, or cunning of hand, or subtle of 
 thought, or delicate of taste, or keen searchers into 
 nature and discoverers of its secrets. All these 
 things are sure to belong to civilization as it
 
 lo ROMAN CIVILIZATION. 
 
 advances ; and as it advances it needs them, and 
 can turn them to account, more and more. All I 
 say is, that they are not civilization itself, as I 
 understand it. 
 
 Our own civilization, it is not denied, has been 
 greatly influenced by religion, and by the Christian 
 religion ; by the close connection of this present 
 life with a life beyond it, and by what Christianity 
 teaches of our relations to the unseen. But civil 
 life of a high character has undoubtedly existed 
 at any rate, for a time, without such connection. 
 I will venture this evening to put before you the 
 hasty sketch of such a civilization, and follow it to 
 its fate. 
 
 In the ancient world, as we call it, two great 
 forms of civilization appear, with which we must 
 always have the liveliest sympathy. They have 
 deeply influenced our own : and we must become 
 quite other men from what we are when we forget 
 them. The civilization of Greece, with Athens for 
 its standard, and in a main degree its source, still
 
 ROMAN CIVILIZATION. 
 
 lives in our civil and political, as well as in our 
 intellectual life. The great idea of citizenship, with 
 all that flows from it of duty and ennobling service 
 and cherished ties, found there its clear and com- 
 plete expression in real fact and spontaneous 
 action, before it was portrayed and analysed by 
 writers of extraordinary force and subtlety, and of 
 matchless eloquence, who are our masters still. But 
 the civilization of Athens, though not too precocious 
 for its place in the world's history, was too pre- 
 cocious for its own chance of life. On that little 
 stage, and surrounded by the am.bitions and fierce 
 energies of a world of conquest, — in its first moment 
 of w^eakness and mistake, it was oppressed and 
 crushed. It lasted long enough to plant a new 
 conception of human society among men, to dis- 
 engage and start upon its road a new and inextin- 
 guishable power, destined to pursue its way with 
 the most momentous results, through all the times 
 to come. It did not last long enough to work out 
 in any proportionate way a histor}^ for itself.
 
 12 ROMAN CIVILIZATION. 
 
 It is to civilization as exhibited in the Roman State 
 that I invite your attention. There you have the 
 power of growth, of change, and yet of stabihty and 
 persistent endurance. There you have an ideal of 
 social and civil life, a complex and not always a 
 consistent one, yet in its central elements very 
 strongly defined ; keeping its hold on a great people 
 with singular tenacity through the centuries, amid 
 all their varying fortunes ; undergoing great trans- 
 formations in the vicissitudes of good and evil days, 
 yet at the bottom unchanged, and frequently re- 
 asserting its unimpaired vitality at moments when 
 we least expect it. It grew to impress itself on 
 mankind as the power which had a unique right to 
 command their obedience and to order their affairs ; 
 it made its possessors, and it made the nations 
 round, feel that Romans were, in a very real sense, 
 the " Lords of the human race." To our eyes, as 
 we look back upon it, it represents, as nothing else 
 does, the civilization of the tJien world. 
 
 Why does it deserve this character } What in it
 
 ROMAN CIVILIZATION. 13 
 
 specially has a claim on our interest ? The Romans, 
 we know, left their mark on the world; much of what 
 they did is still with us, defying all our centuries of 
 change. We live in the cities which they founded : 
 here, at St. Paul's, one of their great roads runs past 
 our doors. But I do not dwell on Roman civiliza- 
 tion, because they were builders who built as if with 
 the infinite idea of the future before them ; because 
 they covered the face of the earth with famous and 
 enduring cities ; because their engineers excavated 
 harbours, drained marshes, and brought the waters 
 of the hills along miles of stupendous aqueducts ; 
 because they bound together their empire with a 
 network of roads and postal services ; because they 
 were the masters of organized and scientific war ; 
 because they were great colonial administrators, 
 subduing the earth, to subdue its rudeness, and 
 plant in it the arts of life. Not for all this ; but be- 
 cause, in spite of the crimes, which come back to our 
 minds when we name the Romans, they were yet 
 keenly alive to what men, as men, ought to be, —
 
 14 ROMAN CIVILIZATION. 
 
 men, as men, not for what they had, but for what 
 they were — not as rich, or clever, or high in dignity, 
 or even as wielding power, but as citizens of a great 
 commonwealth and city, the Mother and Lady of 
 them all. Not because they possessed in large 
 measure the arts and the expedients by wdiich the 
 social machine is made to move more easily, much 
 less for the pride and sensuality which squandered 
 these arts In ostentation and fabulous luxury ; but 
 because, amid all the dark tragedies which fill their 
 history, in spite of the matchless perfidy and the 
 matchless cruelty which contradicted their own 
 ideals, and seem to silence us when we talk of 
 Roman virtue, it is yet true that deep in the minds 
 of the most faithless, the most selfish, the most 
 ruthless, was the knowledge that justice and public 
 spirit were things to which a Roman, by the nobility 
 of his birth, was obliged ; because the traditional, 
 accepted popular morality of Rome placed among 
 its first articles, however they were violated in 
 practice, that fortitude, honesty,^ devotion, energy
 
 ROMAN CIVILIZATION. 15 
 
 in service, were essential things in a society of men ; 
 because popular opinion, loose as the term may be, 
 had the sentiment of honour, and owned the bond 
 of duty, even to death; because Romans recognized 
 a serious use of life, in doing, and doing for the 
 common weal — not merely in learning, or acquiring, 
 or enjoying for themselves alone. 
 
 Now, immediately that I have said all this, the 
 picture of Roman history rises up before our 
 thoughts, as it is painted in Gibbon, or Milman, 
 or Merivale. We remember the hard and rapa- 
 cious times of the Republic, with their resoluie 
 and unflinching vindictiveness, their insolent 
 affectations and hypocrisies of moderation and 
 right. We are met by the enormous corruption 
 and monstrous profligacy of the statesmen of 
 the age of transition ; and under the Empire 
 we find a system fruitful, normally fruitful, of a 
 succession of beings, the most degraded, the most 
 detestable, the most horrible, of all that ever 
 bore the name of man. Is it worth while to talk
 
 i6 ROMAN CIVILIZATION. 
 
 in Christian days of a civilization with such fruits 
 as these? 
 
 I venture to submit that it is — that the subject 
 is most interesting and instructive, and that it is 
 our own fault if, in spite of the evil, we are not 
 taught and braced by so much that is strong and 
 so much that is noble. We pass backwards and 
 forwards from admiration to horror and disgust 
 as we read the story in Gibbon, who, in his taste 
 for majesty and pomp, his moral unscrupulousness, 
 and his scepticism, reflected the genius of the 
 Empire of which he recounted the fortunes ; but 
 who in his genuine admiration of public spirit and 
 duty, and in his general inclination to be just to 
 all, except only to the Christian name, reflects 
 another and better side of Roman character. For 
 there was this better side. Roman civilization 
 produced not only great men, but good men of 
 high stamp and mark ; men with great and high 
 views of human life, and human responsibility, — 
 with a high standard of what meh ought to aim at,
 
 ROMAN CIVILIZA TION. 1 7 
 
 with a high behef of what they could do. And 
 it not only produced individuals ; it produced 
 a strong and permanent force of sentiment ; it 
 produced a character shared very unequally 
 among the people, but powerful enough to de- 
 termine the course of history, in the way which 
 suited it. I think it may be said with truth that 
 the high ideal of Roman civilization explains its 
 final and complete collapse. A people with a 
 high standard, acted on by the best, recognized 
 by all, cannot be untrue to the standard with 
 impunity ; it not only falls, but falls to a depth 
 proportionate to the height which it once was 
 seeking ; it is stricken with the penalty which 
 follows on hollow words and untrue feelings, — on 
 the desertion of light and a high purpose, on the 
 contradiction between law and life. A civilization 
 like that of China, undisturbed by romantic views 
 of man's nature, and content with a low estimate 
 of his life, may flow on, like one of its great 
 rivers, steady, powerful, useful ; unchanged for 
 
 C
 
 1 8 ROMAN CI VI LIZA TION. 
 
 centuries, and unagitated by that which, more than 
 wars and ambition, is the breaker up of societies, 
 — the power of new ideas, of new hopes and aims. 
 But because Roman civihzation became false to 
 its principles, there was no reversing its doom. 
 
 The reason why I put Roman civilization so 
 high and in so unique a place is, that it grew out 
 of and cherished, age after age, with singular 
 distinctiveness and tenacity, two great principles. 
 One of these was that the work of the com- 
 munity should be governed by law ; the other, 
 that public interest and public claims were 
 paramount to all others. 
 
 Where you have in a society a strong and last- 
 ing tendency to bring public and private affairs 
 under the control of fixed general rules, to which 
 individual wills are expected and are trained to 
 submit ; where these rules are found to be grounded, 
 instinctively perhaps at first, methodically after- 
 wards, on definite principles of right, fitness, and 
 sound reason ; — where people's^ habitual impulse
 
 ROMAN CIVILIZATION. 
 
 and natural disposition is to believe in laws, and 
 to trust them, and it is accepted as the part 
 of common sense, duty, and honour to obey them : 
 — where these characteristics, of respect for law as 
 an authority, of resort to it as an expedient and 
 remedy, are found to follow the progress of a great 
 national history even from its beginnings, it can- 
 not be denied that there you have an essential 
 feature of high civilization. They, of whom this 
 may be said, have seen truly, in one most im- 
 portant point, how to order human life. And Law, 
 in that sense in which we know it, and are living 
 under it, in its strength, in its majesty, in its sta- 
 bility, in its practical, business-like character, may, I 
 suppose, be said to have been born at Rome. And 
 it was born very early ; very different, of course, in 
 its rude beginnings, from what it grew to be after- 
 wards, but showing, from the first, the serious, 
 resolute struggles of the community to escape from 
 the mischiefs of self-will and random living, without 
 understood order and accepted rules. The political 
 
 C 2
 
 ROMAN CIVILIZATION. 
 
 conflicts of which Roman history is full, centred, 
 in its best days at least, round laws : they assumed 
 a state of law, they attempted to change it ; — the 
 result, if result there was, was expressed in a law : 
 violent and extreme measures might be resorted 
 to, and not seldom, in those fierce days, some- 
 thing worse ; but it was presupposed by public 
 opinion, whatever violent men might dare, that 
 law was to continue and to be obeyed, till it was 
 changed, and that it would only be changed by 
 lawful authority and by lawful processes, Roman 
 law was no collection of a certain number of vague 
 constitutional articles ; it was no cast-iron code of 
 unchanging rules : but it was a real, living, expan- 
 sive system, developing vigorously as the nation 
 grew, co-extensive with the nation's wants in its 
 range and applicability, searching and self-enforcing 
 in its work, a system which the people used and 
 relied upon in their private as much as in their 
 public affairs. And so grew up, slowly and naturally, 
 through many centuries, in the Vay fam.iHar to us
 
 ROMAN CIVILIZATION. 21 
 
 in our law, the imposing and elaborate system of 
 scientific jurisprudence, which the Romans, when 
 they passed away, bequeathed to the coming 
 world : the great collections of Theodosius and 
 Justinian, in which are gathered the experiences of 
 many ages of Roman society, played upon, illu- 
 minated, analysed, arranged, by a succession of 
 judicial intellects of vast power and consummate 
 accomplishment : that as yet unequalled monument 
 of legal learning, comprehensive method, and 
 fruitfulness in practical utility, which, under the 
 name of Civil Law, has been the great example to 
 the world of what law may be, which has governed 
 the jurisprudence of great part of Europe, which 
 has influenced in no slight degree our own jealous 
 and hostile English traditions, and will probably 
 influence them still more. " The education of the 
 world in the principles of a sound jurisprudence," 
 says Dean Merivale, "was the most wonderful work 
 of the Roman conquerors. It was complete ; it 
 was universal : and in permanence it has far out-
 
 ROMAN CIVILIZATION. 
 
 lasted, at least in its distinct results, the duration 
 of the Empire itself." A civilization which, without 
 precedent and unaided, out of its own resources 
 and contact with life, produced such a proof of its 
 idea and estimate of law, must, whatever be its 
 defects, be placed very high. 
 
 Again, when, with this strong and clear and 
 permanent sense of law, you also ha.ve in a 
 society, among its best men a strong force of public 
 spirit, and among all a recognition that in this 
 the best reflect the temper and expectations of 
 the whole, its civilization has reached a high level. 
 It is the civilization of those who have discerned 
 very distinctly the great object and leading obli- 
 gation of man's fellowship in a state — of his life 
 as a citizen. And certainly in no people which 
 the world has ever seen has the sense of public 
 duty been keener and stronger than in Rome, or 
 lived on with unimpaired vitality through great 
 changes for a longer time. Amid the accumula- 
 tion of repulsive and dark elehients in Roman
 
 ROMAN CIVILIZATION. 23 
 
 character, amid the harshness and pride and fe- 
 rocity, often joined with lower vices, meanness, 
 perfidy, greed, sensuality, there is one that again 
 and again extorts a respect that even courage and 
 high ability cannot, — a high, undeniable public 
 spirit. Not always disinterested, any more than 
 in some great men in our own history, but without 
 question for all that, thoroughly and seriously 
 genuine. It was a tradition of the race. Its 
 early legends dwelt upon the strange and ter- 
 rible sacrifices which this supreme loyalty to the 
 commonwealth had exacted, and obtained without 
 a murmur, from her sons. They told of a magis- 
 trate and a father, the founder of Roman freedom, 
 dooming his two young sons to the axe for having 
 tampered with conspiracy against the State ; of 
 great men, resigning high of^ce because they bore 
 a dangerous name, or pulling down their own 
 houses because too great for citizens ; of soldiers 
 to whose death fate had bound victory, solemnly 
 devoting themselves to die, or leaping into the
 
 24 ROMAN CI VI LIZ A TION. 
 
 gulf which would only close on a living victim ; 
 of a great family purchasing peace in civil troubles 
 by leaving the city, and turning their energy into 
 a foreign war, in which they perished ; of the 
 captive general who advised his countrymen to. 
 send him back to certain torture and death, rather 
 than grant the terms he was commissioned to 
 propose as the price of his release. Whatever 
 we may think of these stories, they show wdiat 
 was in the mind of those who told and repeated 
 them : and they continued to be the accredited 
 types and models of Roman conduct throughout 
 Roman history. Even in its bad days, even at 
 its close, the temper was there, the sense of public 
 interest, the fire of public duty, the public spirit 
 which accepted without complaint, trouble and 
 sacrifice. It produced, at a time when hope 
 seemed gone, a succession of noble and high- 
 souled rulers, whose government gave for a mo- 
 ment the fallacious promise of happiness to the 
 world. It produced a race of iiow nameless and
 
 ROMAN CIVILIZATION. 25 
 
 unremembered men, who, while they probably 
 forgot many other duties, forgot not their duty to 
 the public, of which they were the servants. 
 
 " The history of the Csesars," writes Dean Meri- 
 vale, " presents to us a constant succession of brave, 
 patient, resolute, and faithful soldiers, men deeply 
 impressed with a sense of duty, superior to vanity, 
 despisers of boasting, content to toil in obscurity, 
 and shed their blood at the frontiers of the 
 Empire, unrepining at the cold mistrust of their 
 masters, not clamorous for the honours so sparingly 
 awarded to them, but satisfied with the daily 
 work of their hands, and full of faith in the 
 national destiny, which they were daily accom- 
 pHshing. If such humble instruments of society 
 are not to be compared, for the importance of 
 their mission, with the votaries of speculative 
 wisdom, who protested in their lives and in their 
 deaths against the crimes of their generation, 
 there is still something touching in the simple 
 heroism of these chiefs of the legions. . . . Here
 
 26 ROMAN CIVILIZATION. 
 
 are virtues not to be named indeed with the zeal 
 of missionaries and the devotion of martyrs, but 
 worthy nevertheless of a high place in the esteem 
 of all who reverence human nature." 
 
 For these reasons, and more might be added — 
 among them, the real reverence with which these 
 fierce and successful soldiers regarded the arts, 
 the pursuits, the dress of peace, and readily 
 and willingly returned to them, — we may look 
 back to the civilization of Rome with an interest 
 which we might not give to its buildings, its 
 wealth, or its organization of empire. It was a 
 signal and impressive proof of what men might 
 rise to be ; of the height, too, to which the spirit 
 of a nation might rise. The world is not rich 
 enough in greatness to afford to forget men 
 who, with so much that was evil and hateful about 
 them, yet made the idea of law a common thing, 
 and impressed on the world so memorably the 
 obligations of public duty and the sanctions of a 
 public trust. ^
 
 ROMAN CIVILIZATION. 27 
 
 How did such a civilization come to nought ? 
 It is wonderful that it should have arisen ; but 
 it is more wonderful that, having arisen, it should 
 have failed to sustain itself. How did a civiliza- 
 tion so robust, aiming at and creating, not the 
 ornamental and the pleasurable, but the solid 
 and laborious, a character so serious and manly, 
 austerely simple and energetic in men, pure and 
 noble in women — how did it fail and perish ? 
 What was the root of bitterness which sprung 
 up amid its strength, and brought it, through the 
 most horrible epochs the world ever saw, of terror 
 and tyranny, and the foulest and most insane 
 licentiousness — epochs which St. Paul's words in 
 his Epistle to the Romans are hardly strong 
 enough to describe — to the most absolute and 
 ignoble ruin ? Of course there was evil mixed 
 with it from the first ; but evil is mixed with 
 all human things, and evil was mixed to the full 
 with the life and institutions out of which the 
 best days of Christian civilization have come,
 
 28 ROMAN CIVILIZATION. 
 
 whether you put these days in what are called 
 the ages of Faith, or the age of the Reformation, 
 or the ages of civil liberty. Pride and selfish 
 greed, hypocrisy, corruption, profligacy, fraud, 
 cruelty, have been as abundant in the centuries 
 after Christ as they were in those before. But 
 the civilization of Europe is not ruined, in spite of 
 its immense dangers ; I see no reason to think 
 that it will be ; — why was that of Rome } 
 
 To answer this question duly would be to go 
 through the Roman history. I must content my- 
 self with one general statement. Roman civili- 
 zation was only great as long as men were true to 
 their principles ; but it had no root beyond their 
 personal characters and traditions and customary 
 life; and when these failed, it had nothing else 
 to appeal to — it had no power and spring of re- 
 covery. These traditions, these customs of life, 
 this inherited character, did keep up a stout and 
 prolonged struggle against the shocks of changed 
 circumstances, against the restless and unscrupu-
 
 ROMAN CI VI LIZ A TION. 29 
 
 lous cravings of individual selfishness. But they 
 played a losing game. Each shock, each fresh 
 blow, found them weaker after the last ; and no 
 favouring respite was allowed them to regain 
 and fortify the strength they had lost. The high 
 instincts of the race wore out : bad men had 
 nothing to do but to deny that these instincts 
 were theirs. The powers of evil and of dark- 
 ness mounted higher and higher, turning great 
 professions into audacious hypocrisies, great 
 institutions into lifeless and mischievous forms, 
 great principles into absurd self-contradictions. 
 Had there been anything to fall back upon, 
 there were often men to do it ; but what 
 was there, but the memories and examples of 
 past greatness .^ Religion had once played a 
 great part in what had given elevation to Roman 
 civil life. It had had much to do with law, with 
 political development, with Roman sense of public 
 duty and Roman reverence for the State. But, 
 of course, a religion of farmers and yeomen, a
 
 30 ROMAN CIVILIZATION. 
 
 religion of clannish etiquettes and family pride 
 and ancestral jealousies, could not long stand the 
 competition of the Eastern faiths, or the scepticism 
 of the cultivated classes. It went ; and there 
 was nothing to supply its place but a Philosophy, 
 often very noble and true in its language, able, 
 I doubt not, in evil days to elevate, and comfort, 
 and often purify its better disciples — but unable 
 to overawe, to heal, to charm a diseased society : 
 which never could breathe life and energy into 
 words for the people : which wanted that voice 
 of power which could quicken the dead letter, 
 and command attention, where the destinies of 
 the world were decided. I know nothing more 
 strange and sorrowful in Roman history than 
 to observe the absolute impotence of what 
 must have been popular conscience, on the 
 crimes of statesmen and the bestial infamy of 
 Emperors. There were plenty of men to revile 
 them ; there were men to brand them in immortal 
 epigrams ; there were men to kill. But there
 
 ROMAN CIVILIZATION. 31 
 
 was no man to make his voice heard and be re- 
 spected, about righteousness, and temperance, and 
 judgment to come. 
 
 And so Roman civiHzation fell ; — fell, before even 
 the eager troops of barbarians rushed in among its 
 wrecks ; — fell because it had no salt in it, no whole- 
 some and reviving leaven, no power of recovery. 
 Society could not bear its own greatness, its own 
 immense possessions and powers, its own success 
 and achievements. It fell, and great was the fall 
 thereof The world had never seen anything like 
 Rome and its civilization. It seemed the finish 
 and perfection of all things, beyond which human 
 prospects could not go. The citizens and states- 
 men who were proud of it, the peoples who reposed 
 under its shadow, the early Christians who hated it 
 as the rival of the Kingdom of God, the men of the 
 Middle Ages who looked on it as the earthly coun- 
 terpart and bulwark of that kingdom, and insisted 
 on believing that it was still alive in the world, — 
 Augustine who contrasted it with the city of God,
 
 ROMAN CIVILIZATION. 
 
 Dante who trusted in it as God's predestined 
 minister of truth and righteousness where the 
 Church had failed,— all looked on it as something 
 so consummate and unique in its kind, that 
 nothing could be conceived or hoped for which 
 could take its place. Before the tremendous de- 
 structions in which it perished the lights of man's 
 heaven, of all human society, seemed to disappear. 
 Cicero had likened the overthrow and extinction 
 of a city and polity, once created among men, 
 to the ruin and passing away of the solid earth. 
 When the elder civilization of Rome went to 
 pieces, rotten within and battered by the storms 
 without, it was a portent and calamity which the 
 human imagination had almost refused to believe 
 possible. It was indeed the foundering of a world. 
 How this lost civilization was recovered, renewed, 
 and filled with fresh and hopeful life, we may try 
 to see in the next lecture.
 
 LECTURE II. 
 
 CIVILIZATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 The failure of Roman civilization, its wreck and 
 dissolution in the barbarian storms, was the most 
 astonishing catastrophe the world had yet seen 
 in its history ; and those who beheld the empire 
 breaking up, as blow after blow was struck more, 
 home, ceased to look forward to any future for 
 society. In this strange collapse of the strongest, 
 in this incredible and inconceivable shaking of the 
 foundations of what was assumed to be eternal, 
 the end seemed come; and as no one could imagine 
 a new and different order, men thought it useless 
 to hope anything more for the world. It is 
 not wonderful, — but they were too despairing. 
 It is not wonderful, — for they had no example 
 
 D
 
 34 CIVILIZATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 within their knowledge of the great Hghts of human 
 life, which seemed destined to shine for ever, being 
 violently extinguished, and then being rekindled, 
 and conquering once more in heightened splendour 
 the gloom and confusion. They had seen empires 
 perish, but never before the defeat of a matchless 
 structure of law and administration without ex- 
 ample in history, which was to provide security 
 for empire. But they were too despairing. They 
 thought too little of new powers and principles 
 new in the world, to which many of them trusted 
 much, both in life and in death, but of which no 
 one then living knew the strength or suspected the 
 working. They guessed not how that while the 
 barbarian deluge was wasting and sweeping away 
 the w^orks of men, God was pouring new life into 
 the world. They guessed not that in that Gospel, 
 which consoled so many of them in the miseries of 
 this sinful world, which to so many seemed but one 
 superstition the more, to which so many traced all 
 their disasters, there lay the seeds of a social and
 
 CIVILIZATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY. 35 
 
 civil revival, compared with which the familiar 
 refinement and extolled civilization of Rome would 
 one day come to seem little better than an instance 
 of the rudeness of antiquity. 
 
 The decay and fall of the old Roman civilization, 
 and the growth out of its ruins of a new one, 
 infinitely more vigorous and elastic, steady in its 
 long course, patient of defeat and delay, but with 
 century after century witnessing, on one point or 
 another, to its unrelaxed advance, — the giving way 
 of one great system and the replacing it by 
 another, — form a great historical phenomenon, as. 
 vast as it is unique and without parallel, and to 
 practical people not less full of warning than it 
 is of hope. 
 
 Let us cast a hasty glance upon it, — it can be 
 but a most hasty and superficial one. What was 
 the change, what was the new force, or element, or 
 aspect of the world, or assemblage of ideas, which 
 proved able to make of society what Roman 
 loftiness of heart, Roman sagacity, Roman patience, 
 P 2
 
 36 CIVILIZATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 Roman strength had failed to make of it ? What 
 power was it which took up the discredited and 
 hopeless work, and, infusing new energies and new 
 hopes into men, has made the long history of the 
 Western nations different in kind from any other 
 period of the history of mankind ; different in this* 
 that though its march has been often very dark 
 and very weary, often arrested and often retarded, 
 chequered with terrible reverses, and stained by the 
 most flagrant crimes, it has never been, definitely 
 and for good, beaten back ; the movement, as we 
 can see when we review it, has been on the whole a 
 uniform one, and has ever been tending onwards ; 
 it has never surrendered, and has never had reason 
 to surrender, the hope of improvement, even 
 though improvement might be remote and difficult. 
 We are told sometimes that it was the power 
 of race, of the new nations which came on the 
 scene : and I do not deny it. But the power of 
 race seems like the special powers of a particular 
 soil, in which certain seeds germinate and thrive
 
 CIVILIZATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY. 37 
 
 with exceptional vigour, but for which you must 
 have the seed, and sow it, before the soil will 
 display its properties. It is very important, but 
 it is not enough to say that Teutons took the 
 place of Latins ; indeed, it is not wholly true. 
 But what planted among Teutons and Latins the 
 seeds and possibilities of a renewed civilization 
 was the power of a new morality. It is a matter 
 of historical fact, that in the closing days of Rome 
 an entirely new set of moral ideas and moral 
 purposes, of deep significance, fruitful in conse- 
 quences, and of a strength and intensity unknown 
 before, were making their way in society, and 
 establishing themselves in it. It is to the awaken- 
 ing of this new morality, which has never per- 
 ished out of the hearts of men from that day to 
 this, that the efforts and the successes of modern 
 civilization are mainly due ; it is on the perma- 
 nence of these moral convictions that it rests. 
 What the origin and root of this morality really 
 are, you will not suppose that in this place I
 
 38 CIVILIZATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY. , 
 
 affect to make a question ; but the matter I am 
 now dwelling on is the morality itself, not on its 
 connection with the Christian creed. And it is 
 as clear and certain a fact of history that the 
 coming in of Christianity was accompanied by 
 new moral elements in society, inextinguishable, 
 widely operative, never destroyed, though appa- 
 rently at times crushed and paralysed, — as it is 
 certain that Christian nations have made on the 
 whole more progress in the wise ordering of 
 human life than was made in the most advanced 
 civilization of the times before Christianity. 
 
 Roman belief in right and law had ended in 
 scepticism, whether there Avas such a thing as 
 goodness and virtue : Roman public spirit had 
 given place, under the disheartening Impression 
 of continual mistakes and disappointments, to a 
 selfish indifference to public scandals and public 
 mischiefs. The great principles of human action 
 were hopelessly confused : enthusiasm for them 
 was dead. This made vain the efforts of rulers
 
 CIVILIZATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY. 39 
 
 like Trajan and the Antonines, of scientific legis- 
 lators like Justinian, of heroes like Belisarius : they 
 could not save a society i\\ which, with so much 
 outward show, the moral tone was so fatally 
 decayed and enfeebled. But over this dreary 
 waste of helplessness and despondency, over these 
 mud-banks and shallows, the tide was coming in 
 and mounting. Slowly, variably, in imperceptible 
 pulsations, or in strange, wild rushes, the great 
 wave was flowing. There had come into the world 
 an enthusiasm, popular, wide-spread, serious, of a 
 new kind ; not for conquest, or knowledge, of 
 riches, but for real, solid goodness. It seems to 
 me that the exultation apparent in early Christian 
 literature, beginning with the Apostolic Epistles, 
 at the prospect now at length disclosed within 
 the bounds of a sober hope, of a great moral 
 revolution in human life, — that the rapturous con- 
 fidence which pervades these Christian ages, that 
 at last the routine of vice and sin has met its 
 match, that a new and astonishing possibility has
 
 40 CIVILIZATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 come within view, that men, not here and there, 
 but on a large scale, might attain to that hitherto 
 hopeless thing to the multitudes, goodness, — is 
 one of the most singular and solemn things in 
 history. The enthusiasm of the Crusades, the 
 enthusiasm of Puritanism, the enthusiasm of the 
 Jacobins — of course, I am speaking only of strength 
 and depth of feeling — were not its equal. We can, 
 I suppose, have but a dim idea of the strange and 
 ravishing novelty with which the appearance of 
 Divine and unearthly Goodness, in real human 
 form, burst upon eyes accustomed, as to an order 
 of nature, to the unbroken monotony of deepening 
 debasement, wearied out with the unchanging spec- 
 tacle of irremediable sin. The visitation and pre- 
 sence of that High Goodness, making Himself like 
 men, calling men to be like Him, had altered the 
 possibilities of human nature ; it was mirrored 
 more or less perfectly in a thousand lives ; it had 
 broken the spell and custom of evil which seemed 
 to bind human society; it had ^brought goodness,
 
 CIVILIZATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY. 41 
 
 real, inward, energetic goodness of the soul within 
 the reach of those who seemed most beyond it — 
 the crowds, the dregs, the lost. That well-known 
 world, the scene of man's triumphs and his untold 
 sorrows, but not of his goodness, was really a place 
 where righteousness and love and purity should 
 have a visible seat and home, and might wield the 
 power which sin had wielded over the purposes 
 and wills of men. To men on whom this great 
 surprise had come, who were in the vortex of this 
 great change, all things looked new. Apart from 
 the infinite seriousness given to human life by the 
 cross of Christ, from the infinite value and dig- 
 nity given to it by the revelation of resurrection 
 and immortality, an awful rejoicing transport filled 
 their souls, as they saw that there was the 
 chance, — more than the chance, — the plain fore- 
 running signs, of human nature becoming here, 
 what none had ever dared it would become, morally 
 better. When they speak of this new thing in the 
 earth, the proved reality of conversion from sin to
 
 42 CIVILIZA TION AFTER CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 righteousness, of the fruits of repentance, of the 
 supplanting of vice by yet mightier influences of 
 purity, of the opening and boundless prospects 
 of moral improvement and elevation, — their hearts 
 swell, their tone is exalted, their accent becomes 
 passionate and strong. It was surely the noblest 
 enthusiasm — if it was but rooted in lasting and 
 trustworthy influences — which the world had ever 
 seen. It was no wonder that this supreme interest 
 eclipsed all other interests. It is no wonder that 
 for this glorious faith men gladly died. 
 
 This second spring-tide of the world, this fresh 
 start of mankind in the career of their eventful 
 destiny, was the beginning of many things : but 
 what I observe on now is that it was the beginning 
 of new chances, new impulses, and new guarantees 
 for civilized hfe, in the truest and worthiest sense 
 of the words. It was this, by bringing into 
 society a morality which was serious and powerful, 
 and a morality which would wear and last ; one 
 which could stand the shocks df human passion.
 
 CIVILIZA TION AFTER CHRISTIANITY. 43 
 
 the desolating spectacle of successful wickedness, 
 the insidious waste of unconscious degeneracy, — 
 one which could go back to its sacred springs and 
 repair its fire and its strength. Such a morality, 
 as Roman greatness was passing away, took pos- 
 session of the ground. Its beginnings were 
 scarcely felt, scarcely known of, in the vast move- 
 ment of affairs in the greatest of empires. By and 
 by, its presence, strangely austere, strangely gentle, 
 strangely tender, strangely inflexible, began to be 
 noticed. But its work was long only a work of 
 indirect preparation. Those whom it charmed, 
 those whom it opposed, those whom it tamed, knew 
 not what was being done for the generations which 
 were to follow them. They knew not, while they 
 heard of the household of God, and the universal 
 brotherhood of man, that the most ancient and 
 most familiar institution of their society, one with- 
 out which they could not conceive its going on, — 
 slavery, — was receiving the fatal wound of which, 
 though late, too late, it was at last to die. They
 
 44 CIVILIZATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 knew not, when they were touched by the new 
 teaching about forgiveness and mercy, that a new 
 value was being insensibly set on human life, new 
 care and sympathy planted in society for human 
 suffering, a new horror awakened at human blood- 
 shed. They knew not, while they looked on men 
 dying, not for glory or even country, but for con- 
 victions and an invisible truth, that a new idea 
 was springing up of the sacredness of conscience, 
 a new reverence beginning for veracity and faith- 
 fulness. They knew not that a new measure was 
 being established of the comparative value of 
 riches and all earthly things, while they saw, some- 
 times with amazement, sometimes with incon- 
 siderate imitativeness, the numbers who gave up 
 the world, and all that was best as well as worst in 
 it, for love of the eternal heritage — in order to 
 keep themselves pure. They knew not of the 
 great foundations laid for public duty and public 
 spirit, in the obligations of Christian membership, 
 in the responsibilities of the Christian clergy, in
 
 CIVILIZATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY. 45 
 
 the never-forgotten example of One whose life had 
 been a perpetual service, and who had laid it down 
 as the most obvious of claims, for those to whom 
 He had bound Himself. They little thought of 
 what was in store for civil and secular society, 
 as they beheld a number of humble men, many 
 of them foreigners, plying their novel trade of 
 preachers and missionaries, announcing an eternal 
 kingdom of righteousness, welcoming the slave 
 and the outcast as a brother, — a brother of the 
 Highest, — offering hope and change to the degraded 
 sinner, stammering of Christ and redemption to 
 the wild barbarian, worshipping in the catacombs, 
 and meekly burying their dead, perhaps their 
 wronged and murdered dead, in the sure hope 
 of everlasting peace. Slowly, obscurely, imper- 
 fectly, most imperfectly, these seeds of blessing 
 for society began to ripen, to take shape, to gain 
 power. The time was still dark and wintry and 
 tempestuous, and the night was long in going. 
 It is hard even now to discern there the promise
 
 46 CIVILIZATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 of what our eyes have seen. I suppose it was 
 impossible then. It rather seemed as if the world 
 was driving rapidly to its end, not that it was on 
 the eve of its most amazing and hopeful trans- 
 formation. But in that unhappy and desponding 
 and unhonoured time, borne in the bosom of that 
 institution and society which the world knew and 
 knows as the Christian Church, there were present 
 the necessary and manifold conditions of the most 
 forward civilization ; of its noblest features, of its 
 substantial good, of its justice, its order, Its 
 humanity, its hopefulness, its zeal for improve- 
 ment : — 
 
 *' There is a day in spring 
 When under all the earth the secret germs 
 Begin to stir and glow before they bud. 
 The wealth and festal pomps of midsummer 
 Lie in the heart of that inglorious hour 
 Which no man names with blessing, though its work 
 Is blessed by all the world. Such days there are 
 In the slow story of the growth of souls." ^ 
 
 And such a day there was in the " slow story " 
 
 ^ Story of Queen Isabel, By Miss Smedley.
 
 CIVILIZATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY. 47 
 
 of the improvement and progress of civilized 
 Christendom. 
 
 The point I wish to insist on is, that with 
 Christianity, as long as there is Christianity, there 
 comes a moral spring and vitality and force, a 
 part and consequence of its influence, which did 
 not and could not exist before it. You cannot 
 conceive of Christianity except as a moral religion, 
 requiring, inspiring morality ; and it was just this 
 spring, this force of morality, which was wanting, 
 and which could not be, in Roman civilization. 
 Morality there was, often in a high degree: but 
 it came and went with men or with generations, 
 and there was nothing to keep it alive, nothing 
 to rekindle it when extinct, nothing to suggest 
 and nourish its steady improvement. At any 
 rate there was not enough, if, when we remem- 
 ber the influence of great examples and great 
 writers, it is too sweeping to say there was 
 nothing. But with Christianity the condition was 
 changed. I am sure I am not unmindful of what
 
 48 CIVILIZATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 shortcomings, what shames and sins, what dark 
 infamies, blot the history of Christian society. I 
 do not forget that Christian morality has been a 
 thing of degrees and impulses, rising and falling ; 
 that it has been at times impracticably extreme, 
 and at times scandalously lax; that there have 
 been periods when it seemed lost : that in 
 some of its best days it has been unaccountably 
 blind and perversely stupid and powerless, con- 
 niving at gross and undeniable inconsistencies, 
 condoning flagrant wrong. This is true. Yet look 
 through all the centuries since it appeared, and 
 see if ever, in the worst and darkest of them, it 
 was not there, as it never was in Rome, for hope, if 
 not for present help and remedy. There was an 
 undying voice, even if it came from the lips of 
 hypocrites, which witnessed perpetually of mercy, 
 justice, and peace. There was a seriousness given 
 to human life, by a death everywhere died in the 
 prospect of the judgment. I am putting things at 
 the worst. Christian morality lived even in the
 
 CIVILIZATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY. 49 
 
 tenth century ; even in the times of the Borgias 
 and Medici. The wicked passed — the wicked age, 
 the wicked men ; passed, with the evil they had 
 done, with the good which they had frustrated, 
 with the righteous whom they had silenced or 
 slain. And when they were gone, "when the 
 tyranny was overpast," the unforgotten law of 
 right, the inextinguishable power of conscience, 
 were found to have survived unweakened through 
 the hour of darkness, ready to reassert and to ex- 
 tend their empire. Great as have been the disasters 
 and failures of Christian society, I think we have . 
 not yet seen the kind of hopeless collapse in which 
 Roman civilization ended. Feeble and poor as the 
 spring of morality might be in this or that people, 
 there has hitherto been something to appeal to, 
 and to hope from, which was not to be found in 
 the days of the Antonines, the most peaceful and 
 felicitous of Roman times. 
 
 In this great restoration of civilization, which is 
 due mainly to the impulse and the power of 
 
 E
 
 50 CIVILIZATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 Christian morality, a great place must be given to 
 the direct influence of Christian aspects of life and 
 ideas of duty. Christian ideas of purity acted 
 directly on all that was connected with family and 
 domestic life. They forbade, with intense and 
 terrible severity, before which even passion quailed, 
 the frightful liberty in the relations of the sexes 
 which in Greece, and at last in Rome, had been 
 thought so natural. Here was one great point 
 fixed : the purification of the home, the sanctity 
 thrown round the wife and the mother, the 
 rescuing of the unmarried from the assumed 
 licence of nature, the protection given to the 
 honour of the female slave and then of the 
 female servant, were social victories well worth 
 the unrelenting and often extravagant asceticism 
 which was, perhaps, their inevitable price at 
 first. They were the immediate effects of a 
 belief in the Sermon on the Mount; and where 
 that belief was held, they would more or less con- 
 sistently follow. So with the ^fiercer tempers and
 
 CIVILIZATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY. 51 
 
 habits of men: against cruelty, against high- 
 handed oppression and abuse of strength, there 
 was a constant, unyielding protest in the Christian 
 law of justice and charity, continually unheeded, 
 never unfelt : even war and vengeance were uneasy 
 under the unceasing though unavailing rebuke of 
 the Gospel law, and made concessions to it, though 
 too strong, too fatally necessary, to submit to it. 
 Further, under the influence of Christian morality, 
 later civilization showed a power of appropriating 
 and assimilating all that was noble and salutary in 
 its older forms. It appropriated the Roman idea 
 of law, and gave it a larger and more 'equitable 
 scope, and a more definite consecration to the ends 
 of justice and the common good. It invested the 
 ancient idea of citizenship and patriotism with 
 simpler and more generous feelings, and with yet 
 holier sanctions. It accepted from the ancient 
 thinkers their philosophic temper and open spirit 
 of inquiry, and listened reverentially to their les- 
 sons of wisdom. It reinforced the Roman idea, a
 
 53 CIVILIZATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 confused and inconsistent though a growing one, 
 of the unity of the human race ; and though the 
 victory over custom and appearances is hardly yet 
 won, the tendency to recognize that unity can 
 never fail, while the belief prevails that Christ died 
 for the world. And once more, it is not easy to 
 say what Christian belief. Christian life. Christian 
 literature have done to make the greatest thoughts 
 of the ancient world " come home to men's busi- 
 ness and bosoms." No one can read the wonderful 
 sayings of Seneca, Epictetus, or Marcus Aurelius, 
 without being impressed, abashed perhaps, by their 
 grandeur. No one can read them without won- 
 dering the next moment why they fell so dead — 
 how little response they seem to have awakened 
 round them. What was then but the word of the 
 solitary thinker has now become the possession, 
 if they will, of the multitude. The letter of great 
 maxims has been filled with a vivifying spirit. 
 Their truths have been quickened into new mean- 
 ing by the new morality in which they have found
 
 CIVILIZATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY. 53 
 
 a place, by the more general and keener conscience 
 which has owned them. 
 
 The direct effects of Christian morality on 
 modern civilization would be allowed by most 
 people to be manifest and great. I wish to call 
 attention to one or two points of its indirect in- 
 fluence. Civilization, the ordering with the utmost 
 attainable success, of civil and secular life, is one 
 thing ; and Christian religion is another. They 
 are two currents, meeting from time to time, 
 inosculating, sometimes confused, at other times 
 divergent and possibly flowing different ways : but, 
 anyhow, they are two currents. Take such a 
 picture of real daily human interests and human 
 activity as is presented to us in so wonderful, so 
 overwhelming, though so familiar a shape, in the 
 columns, and quite as much in the advertisements, 
 of a great newspaper ; or again, when we thread 
 the streets and crowds of a great city, and try to 
 imagine the infinite aims and divisions of its busi- 
 ness. There is the domain of civilization, its works,
 
 54 CIVILIZATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY, 
 
 its triumphs, its failures and blots : and its main 
 scope is this life, whatever be the affinities and 
 relations, by which it has to do with what concerns 
 man's other life. But the point that seems to me 
 worth notice is this : the way in which the Christian 
 current of thought, of aim, of conscience, of life, 
 has affected the other current, even where separated 
 and remote from it. We are told that the presence 
 of electrical force in one body induces a corre- 
 sponding force in another not in contact with the 
 first, but adjacent to it ; that one set of forces 
 is raised to greater than their normal power 
 and intensity by the neighbourhood of another ; 
 that currents passing in a given direction com- 
 municate, as long as they continue, new properties 
 to a body round which they circulate : the neutral 
 iron becomes a magnet, attracting, vibrating, able 
 to hold up weights, as long as it is encircled 
 by a galvanic circuit, which does not touch or 
 traverse it. So the presence of Christian forces 
 acted, by a remote and indirect sympathy, even
 
 CI VI LIZ A TION AFTER CHRISTI4NIT Y. 5 5 
 
 where they did not mingle and penetrate in their 
 proper shape. Much of civiHzation has always been 
 outside of Christianity, and its leaders and agents 
 have often not thought of Christianity in their 
 work. But they worked in its neighbourhood, 
 among those who owned it, among those who saw^ 
 it, among those who lived by it : and the con- 
 scientiousness, the zeal, the single-mindedness, the 
 spirit of improvement, the readiness for labour and 
 trouble, the considerateness and sympathy, the 
 manly modesty, which are wherever Christianity 
 has "had its perfect work," have developed and 
 sustained kindred tempers, where aims and pursuits, 
 and the belief in which a man habitually lives, 
 have been in a region far away from religion. 
 Take the administration of justice. It has been, 
 it must be, in society, whether there is religion or 
 not. It was found in Roman times, up to a certain 
 point, in a very remarkable degree of perfection. 
 It has been, it may still be, in Christian times, 
 carried on, and admirably carried on, by men who
 
 56 CIVILIZATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY, 
 
 do not care for Christianity. I am very far, indeed, 
 from saying that in these times it has always been 
 worthy either of Christianity or civilization. But 
 I suppose we may safely say that it has been 
 distinctly improving through the Christian cen- 
 turies. We may safely say that in its best and 
 most improved stages it is an admirable exhi- 
 bition of some of the noblest qualities of human 
 character ; honesty, strength without show, in- 
 corruptness, scrupulous care, unwearied patience, 
 desire for right and for truth, and laborious quest 
 of them, public feeling, humanity, compassion even 
 when it was a duty to be stern. There were great 
 and upright Roman magistrates ; but whatever 
 Roman jurisprudence attained to, there was no such 
 administration of justice, where men thought and 
 felt right, and did right, as a matter of course. 
 And is it too much to say that the growing and 
 gathering power of ideas of duty, right, and mercy, 
 derived from Christianity, have wrought and have 
 conquered, even when their source was not formally
 
 CIVILIZATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY. 57 
 
 acknowledged, even when it was kept at a distance ; 
 and that they have given a security for one of the 
 first essentials of civilization, which is distinctly 
 due to their perhaps circuitous and remote in- 
 fluence ? 
 
 But, after all, it may not unreasonably occur to 
 you that I am claiming too much for the civiliza- 
 tion of Christian times ; that my account of it is 
 one-sided and unfairly favourable. Putting aside 
 the earlier centuries of confusion and struggle, 
 when it might be urged that real tendencies had 
 not yet time to work themselves clear, what is 
 there to choose, it may be said, between the worst 
 Roman days and many periods of later history, 
 long after Christianity had made good its footing 
 in society ? What do we say to the dislocation, 
 almost the dissolution, of society in great wars, — 
 the English Invasion, the Wars of the League in 
 France, our own civil wars, the municipal feuds in 
 Italy, the Thirty Years' War in Germany ? What 
 to the civilization of the ages like those of
 
 58 CIVILIZATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 Louis XIV. and Louis XV., full of brilliancy, 
 full of most loathsome unrighteousness and 
 corruption, gilded by the profoundest outward 
 honour for religion t What shall we say of In- 
 quisitions, and Penal Laws, and here, in our own 
 England, of a criminal code which, up to the end 
 of the last century, hanged mere children for a 
 trifling theft } What shall we say of the huge 
 commercial dishonesties of our own age, of our 
 pauperism, of our terrible inequalities and con- 
 trasts of wealth and life } What shall we say of a 
 great nation almost going to pieces before our 
 eyes, and even now moving anxiously to a future 
 which no one pretends to foresee 1 What advan- 
 tage have we, how is civilization the better for the 
 influence on it of Christianity, if this, and much 
 more like this, is what is shown by the history and 
 the facts of the modern world t 
 
 It will at once suggest itself to you that when 
 we speak of civilization we speak of a thing of 
 infinite degrees and variety. Every man in this
 
 CIVILIZATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY. 59 
 
 congregation stands, probably, at a different point 
 from all his neighbours in the success with which, 
 if I may use the words, he has made himself a 
 man : has developed the capacities and gifts which 
 are in him, has fulfilled the purpose and done the 
 work for which he was made to live, has reached 
 " the measure of the fulness of that stature " which 
 he might and was intended to attain. And so 
 with societies, and different times in the history of 
 a society. There have been in Christian times 
 poor and feeble forms of civilization, there have 
 been degenerate ones, as there have been strong 
 ones ; and in the same society there have been 
 monstrous and flagrant inconsistencies, things left 
 undone, unrighted, unnoticed, the neglect of which 
 seems unaccountable, things quietly taken for 
 granted which it is amazing that a Christian con- 
 science could tolerate. Think how long and how 
 patiently good men accepted negro slavery, who 
 would have set the world in flame rather than 
 endure slavery at home. Human nature is way-
 
 6o CIVILIZATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 ward and strange in the proportion which it keeps 
 in its perceptions of duty, in its efforts and achieve- 
 ments. But for all this it seems to me idle to 
 deny that men in Christian times have reached a 
 higher level, and have kept it, in social and civil 
 life, than they ever reached before, and that this is 
 distinctly to be traced to the presence and action 
 in society of Christian morality. 
 
 But this is not what I wanted specially to say. 
 What I want you to notice, as new, since Chris- 
 tianity began to act on society, as unprecedented, 
 as characteristic, is the power of recovery which 
 appears in society in the Christian centuries. What 
 is the whole history of modern Europe but the 
 history of such recoveries t And what is there like 
 it to be found in the ancient world } Dark days 
 have been, indeed, in Christendom, Society 
 seemed to be breaking up, as it did at last at 
 Rome. But wait awhile, and you saw that which 
 you looked for in vain at Rome. The tide began 
 to turn ; the energy, the indigfiation, the resolute,
 
 CIVILIZATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY. 6i 
 
 unflinching purpose of reformation began to show 
 
 itself; and whether wise or not, whether in its 
 
 special and definite work a failure or even a 
 
 mischief, it was at least enough to rouse society, to 
 
 set it on a new course, to disturb that lethargy of 
 
 custom which is so fatal, to make men believe that 
 
 it was not a law of nature or of fate, that " as 
 
 things had been, things must be." That terrible 
 
 disease of public and stagnant despair which killed 
 
 Roman society has not had the mastery yet in 
 
 Christian ; in evil days, sooner or later, there have 
 
 been men to believe that they could improve . 
 
 things, even if, in fact, they could not. And for 
 
 that power of hope, often, it may be, chimerical 
 
 and hazardous, but hope which has done so much 
 
 for the improvement of social life, the world is 
 
 indebted to Christianity. It was part of the 
 
 very essence of Christianity not to let evil alone. 
 
 It was bound, it was its instinct, to attack it. 
 
 Christian men have often, no doubt, mistaken the 
 
 evil which they attacked: but their acquiescence
 
 62 CIVILIZA TION AFTER CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 in supposed evil, and their hopelessness of a victory 
 for good, would have been worse for the world 
 than their mistakes. The great reforms in 
 Christian days have been very mixed ones ; but 
 they have been reforms, an uninterrupted series 
 of attempts at better things ; for society, for 
 civilization, successive and real, though partial 
 recoveries. The monastic life, which was, besides 
 its other aspects, the great civilizing agent in the 
 rural populations ; the varied and turbulent muni- 
 cipal life in the cities ; the institutions in the 
 Middle Ages, on a broad and grand scale, for 
 teaching, for study, for preaching, for the reforma- 
 tion of manners ; the determined and sanguine 
 ventures of heroic enthusiasts, like St. Bernard, 
 Savonarola, or Luther, or of gentler, but not less 
 resolute reformers, like Erasmus and our own 
 Dean Colet ; the varied schemes for human 
 improvement, so varied, so opposed, so incom- 
 patible, yet in purpose one, of Jesuits, of Puritans, 
 of the great Frenchmen of Port Royal, — all witness
 
 CIVILIZATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY. 63 
 
 to the undying, unwearied temper which had been 
 kindled in society, and which ensured it from the 
 mere ruin of helplessness and despair. They were 
 all mistakes, you will say perhaps, or full of 
 mistakes. Yes, but we all do our work through 
 mistakes, and the boldest and most successful 
 of us perhaps make the most. They failed in 
 the ambitious completeness, the real one-sidedness 
 and narrowness, of their aim : but they left their 
 mark, if only in this — that they exhibited men 
 in the struggle with evil and the effort after 
 improvement, refusing to give up, refusing to b.e 
 beaten. But indeed they were more than this. 
 There are none, I suppose, of these great stirrings 
 of society, however little we may sympathise with 
 them, which have not contributed something for 
 which those who come after are the better. The 
 wilder or the feebler ones were an earnest of 
 something more reasonable and serious. They 
 mark and secure, for some important principle 
 or idea, a step which cannot easily be put back.
 
 64 CIVILIZATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 They show, as the vdiole history of Christendom, 
 with all its dismal tracts of darkness and blood, 
 seems to me to show, that society in Christian 
 times has somehow or other possessed a security, 
 a charm against utter ruin, which society before 
 them had not ; that it has been able to go through 
 the most desperate crises, and at length throw 
 off the evil, and continue on its path not perhaps 
 unharmed, yet v/ith a new chance of life : that 
 following its course from first to last, we find in 
 it a tough, indestructible force of resistance to 
 decay, a continual, unworn-out spring of revival, 
 renovation, restoration, recovery, and augmented 
 strength, which, wherever it comes from, is most 
 marked and surprising, and which forms an 
 essential difference between Christian society and 
 the conditions of society, before and beyond 
 Christian influences. 
 
 I must bring to an end what I have to say. 
 I know quite well that the subject is not finished. 
 But there are various reasons why at present I am
 
 CIVILIZATION AFTER CHRISTIANITY. 65 
 
 unable to finish it. Yet I hope I shall not have 
 quite wasted your time if I have said anything 
 to make you wish to inquire and to think about this 
 supreme question; the relations of our modern 
 civilization, not only so refined, and so full of arts 
 and appliances and great organizations, but so 
 serious, to those eternal truths which lead up our 
 thoughts to the ultimate destinies of man, to the 
 Throne of the Most High and the Most Holy. 
 Society is debating whether it shall remain Christian 
 or not. I hope that all who hear me, the majority 
 of whom twenty years hence, when I and my 
 contemporaries shall have passed from the scene, 
 will belong to the grown-up generation which then 
 will have the fate of English society in their hands, 
 will learn to reflect on that question with the 
 seriousness which it deserves.
 
 LONDON 
 
 R. CLAY, SONS, AND TAYLOK, PRINTERS, 
 
 BREAD STREET HILL.
 
 
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